Find content specifically related to marine mammals of the Puget Sound and Salish Sea ecosystems. For checklists and descriptive accounts of individual species, visit our species library's marine mammals page.
Marine mammals
Related Articles
The Salish Sea may be a giant ‘practice room’ for humpback whales as they get ready to sing in their winter breeding grounds in Hawaii and Mexico. A network of hydrophones is recording it all.
Many types of computer models are helping researchers study the health of Puget Sound. Bayesian network models are used to examine the probabilities that certain actions will take place within the ecosystem.
A paper presented at the European Wave and Tidal Energy Conference in Aalborg, Denmark describes the potential effects of a tidal turbine strike on an endangered Southern Resident Killer Whale in Puget Sound (SRKW). A tidal turbine is proposed for deployment in Admiralty Inlet in Island County.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 10 and the National Marine Fisheries Service Northwest Region have released a report describing results from a series of technical workgroups about the potential effects of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) on Puget Sound and Southern Resident killer whales.
A new paper by Puget Sound area scientists from the SeaDoc Society and their collaborators represents the most complete summary to date of killer whale (Orcinus orca) strandings in the North Pacific. The authors analyzed stranding records dating back to 1925, obtained from scientists worldwide, finding that very few whales are stranded (an average of ten a year over the last twenty years). However, most of those strandings result in death. Only 12% of stranded whales survive.
Necropsy of stranded whales can provide important information about life history, health, genetics, and causes of death, but few of the stranded carcasses
This 2004 report looks at the status of Washington's four killer whale populations.