12/31/2025
Aloha Friends and Supporters of The Dolphin Institute (TDI),
Welcome to our end of the year wrap-up highlights! 2025 was a very productive and exciting year in research and education. Below, please find some of the highlights. Aside from these activities, we just announced our biennial request for student proposals for the Louis M. Herman Student Research Scholarship. Every two years, there is a great competition for this award to support creative and groundbreaking student research that aligns with the themes of Dr. Herman’s pioneering work with dolphins or whales. We look forward to announcing the awardee on Dr. Herman’s birthday in April. Also, 2026 will mark the 50th anniversary of our whale project, one of the longest continuous studies of humpback whales in the world. As you will see below, we are continuing to make great strides in this work. We are also dedicated to completing the digitization of our entire humpback whale fluke catalog to share online in the automated matching program and multi-research group database entitled “Happy Whale.” If you are interested in supporting the TDI student scholarship and our research projects, please visit TDI’s donation page at https://thedolphininstitute.org/donate/ . In this time of substantial reductions in government grants, we very much appreciate all your support!
· Field Research Across Oceans: This year, TDI researchers ventured far and wide to conduct field research. During the spring, we traveled to Maui to collaborate with Dr. Marc Lammers, Research Ecologist for the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary on investigating humpback whale responses to underwater playback of various natural and anthropogenic sounds to learn about whale communication as well as whale impacts from vessel sounds. In June, we traveled to the Bahamas to collaborate with Dr. Denise Herzing, Founder and Research Director of the Wild Dolphin Project to continue our collaborative investigation of responses of Atlantic spotted dolphins to a human-dolphin acoustic communication interface. Finally, in July, we headed to Petersburg, Alaska to study the humpback whales from Hawaii in their feeding grounds. In addition to documenting individual humpbacks working cooperatively in bubble net feeding grounds to hunt herring, we encountered both resident killer whales and transients. The former were extraordinarily social performing synchronous behaviors as they tracked our vessel, and the latter were in the process of hunting Stellar Sea Lions.
· Dedicated Students Making Great Strides at UH Hilo Marine Mammal Laboratory:
This fall under the guidance of lab manager Dawn McSwain, we were blessed to have five students from UH Hilo working in our lab digitizing and preparing images of humpback whale tail flukes from individually-identified whales from our long-term archival catalog for uploading to “Happy Whale” a multi-research group database and automated matching system https://happywhale.com/home . This system has greatly facilitated large scale collaborations across the North Pacific and enhanced our ability to identify individual whales and their histories in real time while conducting field work. This fall, lab founder and director Dr. Adam Pack’s co-mentored Ph.D. student Megan McElligot successfully defended her doctoral thesis, “Spatial and temporal variation in acoustic activity of spinner dolphins (Stenella longirostris) during their daytime rest in the main Hawaiian Islands.” Congratulations Megan!
· New Publications and Reports: This year we co-authored four scientific publications and reports including “Movement and sound production in yearling humpback whales: Age-class comparisons,” in “Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology,” “Tending the sick: Epilmeletic behavior towards entangled conspecifics provides evidence of empathy in humpback whales,” in PLOS One,” “Age-specific body length, mass and energetic cost of grown in humpback whales,” in “Marine Ecology Progress Series,” and “Harnessing the power of photo-ID data for apportionment to migratory whale hers: U.S. West Coast humpback whale stock proportions by latitude for the period 2019-2024,” a U.S. Department of Commerce, NOAA Technical Memorandum.
· New Presentations: On December 2-3, TDI’s Dr. Adam Pack co-chaired sessions on "Animal Bioacoustics: Baleen Whale Acoustics" at the 6th Joint Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the Japan Acoustical Society held in Honolulu. Pack presented the talk "Eavesdropping on a humpback whale male's song can provide information on its physical and reproductive condition." He was also a co-author on "Humpback whales in a population sing the same song-or do they? Assessing intra- and inter-individual song variability on the Hawaiian Breeding ground," "A comparison of humpback whale song structure between the Northwestern and main Hawaiian Islands," "Estimating bearings to low-frequency baleen whale calls with closely spaced hydrophones," "Lombard effect in humpback whales in Hawai'i is context and call-type dependent," and "The behavioral context in social call production by humpback whales on the Hawaiian breeding ground."
Send us your whale photos, we’ll identify the individuals for fun and for science. We'll share with you what we find!
