Revised 01/15/2011 BLUE WHALE (Balaenoptera musculus musculus): Eastern North Pacific

• Main Authors: Stock Definition, Geographic Range
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: For the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) stock assessment reports; the Eastern North Pacific S; Gulf of Alaska; Kamchatka Peninsula; Pacific; Reeves; Balaenoptera musculus; Blue whale; Kamchatka; Alaska; Aleutian Islands
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.233.6158; http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/pdfs/sars/po2010whbl-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, Stafford 2003). 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, though both call types have been recorded concurrently in the Gulf of