Join Casey Mclean for a behind-the-scenes look at Sealife Response, Rehabilitation and Research (SR3's) work since opening the Pacific Northwest’s first dedicated marine animal hospital in 2021. Casey will share insights into the organization's role in marine mammal rescue and rehabilitation, and how their efforts support research and conservation in the region. She will also provide updates on SR3’s cetacean health research, which employs non-invasive methods such as drone-based photogrammetry to assess body condition and monitor health trends in populations like the endangered Southern Resident killer whales. This research aims to understand the impacts of human activities — including entanglement, vessel disturbance, and prey availability — on whale and dolphin health, thereby informing conservation strategies in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

Casey Mclean is the Executive Director and Veterinary Nurse at SR3. She is also a licensed veterinary technician who has a degree in marine biology and a long-standing passion and experience in marine animal medical care, rehabilitation, and conservation. She has worked in areas of sea turtle rehabilitation, wildlife rehabilitation, and marine mammal rehabilitation for over 12 years. She is an active member of the Marine Mammal Stranding Network in the Puget Sound and works on a variety of marine animals including stranded seal pups, sea otters, and sea lions. Casey is also a trained oil-spill responder.

Effective management strategies for marine mammals depend on accurate scientific reporting of individual and population-level health, but monitoring the condition and survival of wild whales comes with challenges. Long-term survey programs, in combination with innovative observation and sampling techniques developed over decades of experimentation, allow researchers to examine the body condition, endocrine activity, contamination, survival, and reproduction of free-swimming cetaceans. Current research efforts led by Chloe Kotik and collaborators seek to understand the mechanisms of population growth and determine potential effects of contamination in mammal-eating killer whales of the eastern North Pacific.

Chloe Kotik is an early-career cetologist who has been researching killer whales in the eastern North Pacific since 2019. She holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Marine Biology from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and is currently a PhD candidate in the Horstmann Marine Mammal Lab at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. With a background in drone photogrammetry and marine mammal emergency response, her current work tackles several aspects of life history, ecology, and health in mammal-eating killer whales in collaboration with Bay Cetology and DFO. Chloe is also the Board Secretary of the Society for Marine Mammalogy’s Alaska Student Chapter, an associate researcher with the Orca Conservancy, and a scientific illustrator specializing in watercolor and digital media. In 2024, Chloe was awarded a Student Travel Grant from ACS/PS for the work she's presnting at this meeting.

Baleen whales exhale with loud, conspicuous “semi-explosive” spouts when they return to the surface to breathe. Modern behavioral research makes extensive use of these sounds to detect and track animals, as well as infer dive depths, oxygen consumption and disturbance. In contrast, the acoustic features of spouts have received far less attention. We will review these understudied aerial sounds: (normal blows, wheezed blows and trumpet blasts) and discuss their connection to whale behavior. We also describe several new blowhole sounds (pew, hoot, thrum and gargle) that were documented during the previous summer’s research at Five Finger Lighthouse in SE Alaska. We are also examining the conservation applications of whale spouts, including their use in censusing, distance estimation, and disentangling. One additional intriguing aspect of this work is the link to Astrobiology. It is not surprising that we struggle to detect life in the universe, given that thus far we have barely acknowledged the potential complexity imbedded in whale breathing sounds. We will reflect on the notion of missed signals, the Fermi Paradox and its implications for the study of life in the universe.

Fred Sharpe has been studying the foraging ecology of humpback whales in SE Alaska since 1987. He received his Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University and is currently a Co-Investigator with the WhaleSETI Research Team. He is a co-founder of the Alaska Whale Foundation and currently serves as AWF’s stranding coordinator and as a volunteer with NOAA’s Large Whale Disentanglement Response. His research interests include paralinguistic communication (aerial sounds) at Five Finger Lighthouse in Frederick Sound, Alaska. Fred’s interest in conservation biology has led him to Hawaiian to investigate Polynesian Traditional Ecological Knowledge and impacts to Hawaii’s baleen whales from commercial whaling. He has been awarded the Fairfield Award for Innovative Marine Mammal Research and the Society for Marine Mammology’s Award for Excellence in Scientific Communication. He is a naturalist in the classical tradition and enjoys botanizing and conserving native grasslands. During his botany undergraduate days (University of Washington) he co-authored and illustrated Wild Plants of the San Juan Islands. After graduation, he continued his work in the archipelago and co-authored and illustrated Birding in the San Juan Islands.

Rachel Meade is an early-career marine mammalogist dedicated to understanding and conserving marine mammal behavior and culture through hands-on field research, bioacoustic analysis, scientific collaboration and public engagement. She holds a B.S. in Marine and Coastal Science from Western Washington University and is a key researcher on humpback whale non-vocal sounds. Her work includes field seasons in Southeast Alaska and the San Juan Islands, bioacoustic analysis, marine mammal rehabilitation, and public outreach to bridge science and conservation. Rachel has experience in marine mammal rehabilitation, stranding response, and necropsies, working with organizations such as SR3 and the San Juan County Marine Mammal Stranding Network. She is also an AAUS Scientific Diver, a Level 1 Large Whale Entanglement Response Responder, and presented this research at the Society for Marine Mammalogy Conference (SMM 2024) and is currently working towards publication on the team's humpback whale bioacoustic research.

Join Dr. Anais Remili for an in-depth look at how molecular ecology is transforming our understanding of killer whale diets. Using lipids from blubber biopsies, researchers can now reconstruct what these top predators eat over the long term—without the need for continuous monitoring. This technique has been applied to multiple North Atlantic populations and is now being used to predict the diet of endangered Southern Resident killer whales. We will also explore how dietary preferences influence the accumulation of harmful contaminants like PCBs and other "forever chemicals," and the implications for the health of some killer whale populations.

Anaïs Remili is a postdoctoral fellow at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada), studying ecotoxicology (contaminants and diets) in marine mammals, with a focus on killer whales. She is also the editor-in-chief of Whale Scientists, a marine mammal website by early-career researchers.