Earlier this year, MUCRU commenced research on the poorly understood Australian snubfin and Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins in the Kimberley region of northwest Australia. Here, MUCRU Phd candidate Alex Brown reports on an exciting second trip to the Cygnet Bay study site in September 2012.
WA Winter Wanderers
Where do adult male dolphins go during winter off Bunbury, Western Australia? We hypothesise that they move offshore, helping to explain their larger home ranges. Here, Kate Sprogis reports on her winter field season.
A challenging month on the Cambridge Gulf
In the middle of May, MUCRU’s Kimberley inshore dolphin team left the blue waters of the Dampier Peninsula to travel deep into the eastern Kimberley. With sealed road access to the coast entirely absent for over 900 km east of Derby, our options for launching a vessel in this area were somewhat limited. So we chose Wyndham [...]
A productive month on the Dampier Peninsula
After a month of work at Cygnet Bay on the Dampier Peninsula, our team has now completed the first of four field trips to this area over the next two years. This is towards a project which aims to investigate the abundance, local movements and gene flow of inshore dolphins at several locations across Australia’s remote [...]
Update from Bunbury: male dolphins, lots of calves and hammerhead sharks
It has been over a year since Kate began her PhD project as part of the South West Marine Research Program. Her project is investigating the habitat use and population dynamics of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins in Bunbury. Here are some of the recent highlights.
Bunbury summer dolphin transects complete
Summer season field work complete Over the summer season (December- February) we encountered 62 dolphin groups. We were on the boat for 25 days (> 144 hours), completing: Six replicates of each of the Inshore, Backbeach and Buffalo Beach transects; and Three replicates of the Busselton, Backbeach offshore and Buffalo Beach offshore transects (see study [...]
The dolphin population inhabiting the Swan-Canning Estuary
The new finbook provides community members the ability to recognise individual dolphins and contribute information to help monitor the dolphin population of Perth’s rivers.
Investigating Marine Mammal Health
In our first blog from the field, we would like to take the time to introduce ourselves and give you an idea of what we do.
First surveys in Perth metropolitan waters
Every season, we aim to survey the Perth metropolitan waters 5 to 6 times. However, our field work is dependent of the weather conditions.
Back in Hawaii for another field season
Today , I have returned from Perth to start another six-month field season off the Big Island of Hawaii.
