project overview

Welcome to the baleen stable isotope and hormone project website. We're using baleen to peer into the life history of individual baleen whales.

Baleen is made up of the keratinized plates which comprise the filter feeding apparatus of mysticete whales. Baleen plates grow continuously during an animal's life from the upper gum line and slowly erode at the distal end. A single plate may consist of material from up to the past decade, depending on the species and individual, and a time series of ecological and reproductive events can be constructed by sampling repeatedly along the growth axis. Using stable isotope and hormone analysis we can look back in time in an animal's life and determine its foraging patterns, when it was migrating, when it was pregnant, or even when it was experiencing stress.

Baleen is durable and some specimens stored in museum collections were collected over 100 years ago. These older samples give a unique window into the ecology of past populations which can no longer be sampled and compared to more recent samples. We can use these plates to address topics such as:

• Isotopic niche width and trophic position.
• Individual and life history stage differences in foraging.
• Stress regimes over time in individual whales.
• How these factors may have changed over the last century in response to climate, whaling, and increasingly industrialized oceans.

Please take a look around the site to find out more. Check out the isotope explorer to visualize some example baleen stable isotope data.