David Cade: Insights into rorqual lunge-feeding behavior gleaned from new video and accelerometry tags

For nearly all of human existence on the sea, our understanding of whales has been limited to what we can observe at the surface. For fully aquatic animals such as these, however, time spent on the surface is really a tiny fraction of the life cycle of these largest predators on the planet. Basic questions about feeding behavior and ecology have only begun to be answered in the last fifteen years with the advent of animal-borne sensors capable of logging cetacean behavior underwater. Only in the last two years have sensors that measure orientation and motion been combined with high-quality video cameras to provide us with a whale’s eye view of the feeding events that are so critical to overall population recovery from 20th century lows. Please join us as we explore new insights into the feeding behavior of humpback whales from five oceans, fin whales from the Atlantic and blue whales from right here in California.

American Cetacean Society
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