Projekt Blåhval - Project Blue whale

11/12/2024

One of Project Blue whales founders, Research professor Marianne H. Rasmussen from Rannsóknasetur Háskóla Íslands á Húsavík / Húsavík Research Centre was in Danish national TV last night talking about whales, dolphins and boat noise in the Arctic.

Unfortunately, its all in Danish but the Danish speakers can enjoy :-)

Its at time 34:20 in the link below 🐬🐋🐳🌊
https://play.tv2.dk/.../et-menneskeligt-slagtehus...

22/12/2023

Happy holidays ⛄🎍❤️🐳🐋

14/02/2023

New project, where project blue whale participates :-)

Combining environmental DNA sampling, whale watching and citizen science for stakeholder-driven marine biodiversity protection in the North-East Atlantic and the Mediterranean

05/11/2022

A new study estimates that blue whales consume 10 million pieces of microplastics though their diet of krill every day and that humpbacks, who feed on mostly fish, ingests 200.000 pieces.

Combining microplastic data from the California Current Ecosystem with high-resolution foraging measurements from 191 tag deployments on blue, fin and humpback whales, this study quantifies plastic ingestion rates and routes of exposure risk in filter-feeding megafauna.

06/07/2021

A new species of whale has been described.

28/11/2019

Dear Everybody,

We are sorry for the sparse updates. Things are slow due to disease and childbirth 🙏

Instead I thought that this very cool reserach from Goldbogen lab might interest you. They recorded a blue whales heart beat for the first time and it turns out that their heart beat at depth are as low as two beats per minute.

Enjoy!

The world's largest animal has a heart that might sit near the limit of what's possible.

02/05/2018

There might be something learned about the blues in Iceland watching this amazing documentary :-)

15/03/2017

One female and three male blue whales trying to impress. The high speed chase is termed a 'race' often with the female in front and males following behind.

Unfortunately, we have never filmed this in Skjalfandí Bay, but we have seen this behaviour a few times :-) The movie beneath is borrowed from Youtube and was filmed in the Pacific.

Last week (September 1, 2011) we saw the most amazing and rare to be seen behaviour by Blue Whales. They were breaching and exceptionally active, apparently ...

10/08/2016

Dear Everybody,

We are about to finalize our blue whale catalog for 16 years and will in relation to this compare blue whale pictures with other areas in The North Atlantic: Iceland, Norway, Azores, Greenland etc. So if you have any blue whale pictures from these areas incl. Skjalfandi Bay and Iceland, we are very interested in receiving them for comparison :)

We will let you know if 'your whales' have been seen before...

We will in the end cooperate with other researchers compare to their catalogues in the NA, but for now we conduct our own investigations.

Please help if you ;-)

All the very best Maria
[email protected]

20/06/2016

The blues are back - two individuals were spotted in Skjalfandi Bay yesterday :-) Wonder if they are known to us :-)

Other news, Project blue whales to bachelor students, Maria S. Jørgensen og Josefine S. Jakobsen are going to their exams in the Natural History Museum of Denmark. They have worked with photo-id and the catalogue now sums 172 individuals! That's many thinking of the population estimate on 979 individual plus minus standard diviations

Blåhvalerne er tilbage :-) Der blev set to individer i går... vi ved stadig ikke om det er nogen vi kender. Dog har den samme hval været set først på året og her i Juni igen. Dejligt med nogle kendte hvaler :-)

Andet Nyt: Projekt Blåhvals to bachelor studerende, Josefine Sennels Jacobsenog Maria Stein Jørgensen skal til eksamen i deres fotoidentifikations projekt imorgen - de har fundet at vi nu har set 172 forskellige blåhvaler i Skjalfandi bugten :-) Det er 17.5% af den estimerede populations størrelse på 979 dyr :-)