According to whale researchers, killer whales known as exotic or outer-coastal orcas that were rarely seen in the Pacific Northwest have been seen in big numbers this fall in Washington State's inland waters and British Columbia.

According to the Seattle Times, the outer-coastal orcas eat other mammals and have been spotted mostly close to Vancouver Island, B. C., and the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

"The exotics have not been spotted in Puget Sound, where the resident orcas are mainly salmon-eaters", the Times reported.

Wildlife biologist Brad Hanson said the whales could be there because they have had a population boom or there is possibility that they could be chasing a boom in the population of 'seals and sea lions the whales prey upon'.

According to Hanson, the salmon-eating orcas are usually found in the region and do not interbreed with the exotics. The exotics do not pose a risk to the resident whales but the population of resident orcas has decreased for other reasons.

Mark Malleson, of the Victoria-based Prince of Whales Whale Watching, told the Times that he has seen the outer-coastal orcas five times since September. It has more than he has ever seen in his 18 years in the business.

Hanson said that they are not aware that what's drawing the animals in. They even don't know about the movement of these whales on the outer coast.

Malleson carried out whale surveys for the Canadian government and he knows most of the local orcas by seen. He also knows some of the transients who frequently cruise through the region, so he rapidly recognized the strangers. While transient whales are growing off the coast, Puget Sound's resident orcas continue to decrease.

Ken Balcomb, of the Center for Whale Research on San Juan Island, said that this year's census of 78 animals is the lowest in 30 years.

From: http://frenchtribune.com/

A rare video has captured the moment a beluga whale gave birth to her calf in an aquarium in south-central China.

The footage captured at Changsha Underwater World in Hunan Province shows eight-year-old white whale Zhuo Ya birthing her calf while a number of spectators look on, the Telegraph reported.

The whale can be seen swimming around her tank with the tail of her baby emerging from her body.

The baby quickly swims off and is later seen going to the surface of the water to take its first breaths

When the calf fully emerges following a five-hour labour, gasps can be heard from excited onlookers

The beluga whale was brought to China from Russia in 2010.

She will be given a two-year break from performing for visitors so she can properly care for her baby.

Staff will also monitor the baby whale's progress, including when it starts to take breast milk.

But scientists aren’t taking pictures just because they look nice. The images contain detailed information that scientists can use to monitor the health of individual killer whales and of their population as a whole.

To get these photos, scientists from NOAA Fisheries teamed up with colleagues at the Vancouver Aquarium. The animals they studied are the Northern Resident killer whales of British Columbia, a population that’s listed as threatened under Canada’s Species At Risk Act, and the pilots were trained and operating under permits issued by the Canadian Government. Like the endangered Southern Residents that spend summers near Seattle, these whales eat salmon—mainly Chinook salmon—and some of the salmon runs they rely on are much smaller than they used to be. In fact, several Chinook runs are themselves endangered, and scientists are concerned that a lack of prey may be limiting the whale populations.

The main question scientists are trying to answer is: Are the whales getting enough to eat? To find out, they fly the hexacopter at an altitude of more than 100 feet, high enough that the whales don’t notice it, but near enough to get photographs that are incredibly revealing. Scientists have previously taken aerial photographs of killer whales from a helicopter, but those photos are taken from a much higher altitude, and the cost can be prohibitive

Péos, Mininos, Cécil, Teha, and Amtan are performing dolphins at the Planète Sauvage dolphinarium in Port-Saint-Père, France. Every day, as music and sounds of the sea play in the background, they show off their swimming, jumping, and ball-catching skills for an adoring audience and squawk and whistle just like dolphins should. But at night, they make strange noises that researchers believe are imitations of humpback whale songs included in the performance soundtrack. If so, the identification of this unexpected repertoire would mark the first time that dolphins have been heard to rehearse new sounds hours after hearing them rather than right away, providing insights into how they store and process memories.

Researchers discovered the dolphins' midnight melodies by accident. Ethologist Martine Hausberger of the University of Rennes 1 in France and her colleagues had hung underwater microphones in the tank because little is known about what dolphins sound like at night. One night, they suddenly heard 25 new sounds (see below) that the dolphins had never made before, although they weren't sure which of the five animals was talking. Because dolphins are known for mimicry, the researchers examined their complex daytime environment to determine where the noises might be coming from. They finally zeroed in on the new soundtrack that Planète Sauvage was playing during performances, which included music, sea gulls' calls, the dolphins' own whistles, and humpback whale calls.

When the researchers used a computer program to compare auditory recordings of the whale calls with the mysterious nighttime noises, it showed that the two sounds were very similar. And because the dolphins had been captive their entire lives, they couldn't have picked them up from real whales.

To get a second opinion, the team asked 20 human volunteers to listen to humpback whale sounds and wild dolphin sounds. Then the researchers played the nighttime vocalizations and asked the volunteers whether the sounds came from a whale or a dolphin. About 76% of the time, the volunteers classified the imitations as sounds from real whales, the researchers reported online in December in Frontiers in Comparative Psychology. Until now, dolphins have been known to mimic sounds (including whale sounds) only right after hearing them. Because the dolphins didn't make these noises during the show, the finding suggests that they waited to practice the sounds hours later.

So why would dolphins want to mimic whales? Hausberger believes that it might be because the shows prime the animals to learn and remember information. "The shows are a really special time in the day," she says, because the dolphins get rewards for performing well. During the rest of the day, the park is open and people can view the tank, chatter, and applaud. "There are lots of things they could mimic but don't. ... It's really remarkable the only mimicry [we] found was this one." She wants to find out whether the dolphins are asleep and dreaming when they mimic, which might mean that dreams help dolphins etch new information into their memories, just like in humans. She plans to capture electroencephalogram recordings of the dolphins' brains at night, which would show whether this is the case.

Peter Tyack, a biologist at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom who studies animal vocalization, says that the idea that dolphins might delay their rehearsals for hours is intriguing. But he isn't convinced from the small number of recordings that the researchers obtained that the dolphins were imitating whales. "I have heard sounds in the field that sound quite a bit like the [whalelike sounds]," he says. In addition, he says, dolphins make so many different sounds that it's difficult to pin down one as an imitation of a particular source. But songbirds rehearse their imitations of other noises at night, so he thinks it's not unlikely that dolphins might do the same.

Two years ago, scientists showed that dolphins imitate the sounds of whales. Now, it seems, whales have returned the favor. Researchers analyzed the vocal repertoires of 10 captive orcas (Orcinus orca), three of which lived with bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) and the rest with their own kind. Of the 1551 vocalizations these seven latter orcas made, more than 95% were the typical pulsed calls of killer whales. In contrast, the three orcas that had only dolphins as pals busily whistled and emitted dolphinlike click trains and terminal buzzes, the scientists report in the October issue of The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. (Watch a video as bioacoustician and co-author Ann Bowles describes the difference between killer whale and orca whistles.) The findings make orcas one of the few species of animals that, like humans, is capable of vocal learning—a talent considered a key underpinning of language.