Revised 12/15/2008 BLUE WHALE (Balaenoptera musculus): Eastern North Pacific Stock

• Main Authors: Stock Definition, Geographic Range
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Calambokidis and Barlow; pers. comm; Gulf of Alaska; Pacific; Kamchatka Peninsula; Queen Charlotte; Reeves; Barlow; Balaenoptera musculus; Blue whale; Kamchatka; Alaska; Aleutian Islands
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.222.4838; http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/pdfs/sars/po2008whbl-en.pdf

(IWC) has formally considered only one management stock for blue whales in the North Pacific (Donovan 1991), but this ocean is thought to include more than one population (Ohsumi and Wada 1972; Braham 1991), possibly as many as five (Reeves et al. 1998). Blue whales in the North Pacific produce two distinct, stereotypic calls that have been termed the northwestern and northeastern call types, and it has been proposed that these represent two distinct populations with some degree of geographic overlap (Stafford et al. 2001). The northeastern call predominates in the Gulf of Alaska, the U.S. West Coast, and the eastern tropical Pacific, and the northwestern call predominates from south of the Aleutian Islands to the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia (Stafford et al. 2001). Both call types are represented in lower latitudes in the central North Pacific but differ in their seasonal patterns (Stafford et al. 2001). Gilpatrick and Perryman (submitted) showed that blue whales from California to Central America are on average about two meters shorter than blue whales from the central and western north Pacific regions. Mate et al. (1999) used satellite tags to show that the eastern tropical Pacific is a migratory destination for blue whales that were tagged off southern California, and photographs of blue whales on the Costa Rica Dome in the eastern tropical Pacific have matched individuals that had been previously photographed off California (Calambokidis, pers. comm.). Photographs of blue whales in California have also been matched to individuals photographed off the Queen Charlotte Islands in northern British Columbia (Calambokidis, pers. comm.) and to one individual photographed in the northern Gulf of Alaska