Revised 12/15/2000 SEI WHALE (Balaenoptera borealis): Eastern North Pacific Stock STOCK DEFINITION AND GEOGRAPHIC RANGE

• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Pacific; Balaenoptera borealis; Sei Whale
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.294.8500; http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/pdfs/sars/po2000whse-en.pdf

considers one stock of sei whales in the North Pacific (Donovan 1991), but some evidence exists for multiple populations (Masaki 1977; Mizroch et al. 1984; Horwood 1987). Sei whales are distributed far out to sea in temperate regions of the world and do not appear to be associated with coastal features. Whaling effort for this species was distributed continuously across the North Pacific between 45-55 o N (Masaki 1977). Two sei whales that were tagged off California were later killed off Washington and British Columbia (Rice 1974) and the movement of tagged animals has been noted in many other regions of the North Pacific. Sei whales are now rare in California waters (Dohl et al. 1983; Barlow 1997; Forney et al. 1995; Mangels and Gerrodette 1994), but were the fourth most common whale taken by California coastal whalers in the 1950s-1960s (Rice 1974). They are extremely rare south of California (Wade and Gerrodette 1993;