Dear colleagues,
The Namibian Dolphin Project had the privilege of seeing a Pacific gray whale off the coast of Namibia (SE Atlantic) in 2013, at which point we managed to collect a biopsy from it. It took a while to get it processed it but happily Rus Hoelzel and Fatih Sarigol
at Durham University in the UK managed to do this using genomic methods - revealing that the animal's most likely source population was the endangered Western Gray Whale population, known to feed off Sakhalin Island, Russia...making this the longest known movement of any mammal.
The paper is available on our all author's researchgate profiles:
Hoezel AR, F Sarigol, T
Gridley, SH Elwen. (2021). Natal
origin of Namibian gray whale reveals new distance record for in-water
migration. Biol. Lett. 17: 20210136. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2021.0136
and if reading genetic methods isn't your thing - we made a YouTube Video abstract of the paper as well available here: https://youtu.be/aKXZbqaXPiU
Many thanks :)
Simon Elwen
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Research Associate: Department of Zoology and Botany - Stellenbosch University
