Research Summary
Flores Island, Clayoquot Sound, British Columbia, Canada — Grey whales were the first great whales to be removed from the endangered species list, but their future is by no means certain. They typically spend their summers feeding in the plankton-rich waters of the Bering and Chuckchi Seas in Canada and their winters off the coast of Baja California, Mexico, where their calves are born. But recent evidence suggests that some of these whales are feeding in the winter and mating in the fall, challenging the assumptions underlying grey whale conservation plans. Dr. William Megill, Dr. Lei Lani Stelle, Dr. David Duffus, and colleagues are taking a new look at how much grey whales are eating at each end of the migration, and what impact varying prey abundance will have on the whales. You can join them in Canada this summer to help their efforts to improve the conservation of this unique cetacean.
Meet the Scientists
Dr. William Megill
University of Bath;
Coastal Ecosystems Research Foundation
Dr. Megill is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Centre for Space, Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences at the University of Bath in England, as well as Research Director of Coastal Ecosystems and Research Foundation (CERF). A Canadian from Montreal who completed his B.Sc. in Physics at McGill University, he spent three years working on the biology and ecology of fin, humpback and blue whales in eastern Quebec before moving to Canada’s west coast to study ecology at the University of British Columbia. He founded CERF in 1993 to fund research on grey whales and coastal ecology, and has directed it ever since, overseeing its growth from a single-boat operation to the multi-institutional collaboration it is today. Alongside CERF, he completed a Ph.D. on the mechanics of swimming in jellyfish, then followed that with a post-doctoral fellowship in Australia on breast tissue, bra design and artificial muscles. He was appointed at Bath in September 2003, and now divides his time between marine engineering, particularly of submersibles and underwater sensor systems, and ocean ecology in the North Pacific. This father of two is interested primarily in how to map the biodiversity of the coastal ecosystem, and what role the whales play in structuring it.
Dr. Lei Lani Stelle
University of Redlands;
Coastal Ecosystems Research Foundation
Dr. Stelle is an Assistant Professor at the University of Redlands, returning to grey whales and their prey after spending the last few years as an Assistant Professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), focused instead on river otters. A Californian born in Hawai’i, she completed her B.Sc. in Marine Biology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, then earned an M.Sc. in Zoology on the swimming biomechanics of Steller sea lions at the University of British Columbia. She joined CERF in 1997 and completed her Ph.D. at UCLA on the ecological interactions between gray whales and mysid shrimp. Her interest is in the population dynamics of mysid shrimp, and the effect of gray whale predation on them.
Dr. David Duffus
Whale Research Lab, University of Victoria