Meet the people
Dr Bruce Mate is director of the MMI and a world authority on threatened and endangered whale species. He is also a professor of Fisheries & Wildlife and Oceanography at Oregon State University. Dr Mate’s research began in 1967; he pioneered the development of satellite-monitored radio tags for whales, so we can follow the journeys of humpbacks and other species in unprecedented detail. Find out more about Dr Mate's amazing career.

Joel G Ortega-Ortiz is a research associate at the MMI where he plans and conducts fieldwork, analyses data and writes scientific papers. He has a PhD in Wildlife and Fisheries, has been studying cetaceans for 16 years, and was leader of the Antarctic expedition that tagged humpbacks for love earth.

Craig Hayslip is a research assistant at the MMI, has a degree in zoology, and specialises in the photographic documentation of large whales. The photos are used to evaluate the tagging efforts and identify whales as part of a global matching network. Craig also prepares expedition logistics, helps construct the satellite tags and supports and archives the MMI video assets.

What does the organisation do?
The Institute’s mission is to understand marine mammal ecology (how they fit into their physical and biological environment). The aim of much of the research is to improve the conservation and management of marine mammals, identify conflicts with human activities, and provide research-based solutions to aid the recovery of depleted populations.

'Our goal is to identify the critical habitats of endangered species and reduce the impact of human activities in these regions to facilitate their recovery.' Dr Bruce Mate 

For endangered whales, the MMI identifies their critical habitats (where they breed, feed, calve and migrate) to understand how they interact with the environment and human activities that may affect them. Because the fishing, shipping and extraction industries can be a threat to the animals, Dr Mate and his colleagues work with them to find better ways of doing business with less impact.

It’s an exciting time for the MMI, which is currently raising funds so that it can grow from 20 people to a multi-disciplinary group of 80, further building on the decades of success driven by the passion and commitment of Dr Mate and others like him.

What is it doing for love earth?
In February 2007, a team from the MMI fitted satellite-monitored tags to humpback whales off the western coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. This is the whales’ summer feeding grounds, which has recently been linked by photo identification of a few individuals to a calving area off Costa Rica.

Although some Antarctic humpbacks have been tagged by others before, the whales have never been tracked to their winter destinations to determine the route, rate of speed, or timing of their migration. When and how would they get to their breeding areas, and might there be other destinations? These are mysteries even to Dr Mate.

Facts, figures, photos and locations for six whales can be found on this website, bringing real science and real animals to your desktop. And, with Dr Mate on board, love earth has the best possible guide to the world of the humpback whale.

Why track humpbacks?
Humpbacks have been protected since the 1960s, but that doesn’t mean they are safe. The species is recovering from extensive historic exploitation. Last century, 200,000 were slaughtered in the Southern Hemisphere alone. Today, there are around 30,000 humpbacks throughout the world’s oceans. Worryingly, whalers have proposed hunting Antarctic humpbacks in the near future, maybe even in 2008.

Other risks include entanglement in fishing gear, ship strikes and possibly oil and gas development issues along the coastal margins. An issue of great interest recently is whether or not man-made noise might result in too little undisturbed physical space.

To date, the migration routes and timing of the humpbacks off the Antarctic Peninsula has been unknown. If we don’t know where they go, we don’t know what risks they face and can’t take steps to protect these critical areas if they need it.