Cascadia Research Collective

25/08/2026

Yesterday was our last survey day for the Kaua‘i project. Over the last eight days we encountered eight different species of dolphins and whales, took over 20,000 photos (although admittedly many of those were of seabirds), and deployed eight tags on five different species of delphinids. Thanks to the amazing crew, our Navy collaborators monitoring the hydrophone range at PMRF for directing us to a number of groups, our volunteers, the ocean users who reported sightings to us, to the U.S. Navy Marine Species Monitoring Program for supporting this effort, to Dolphin Quest for supporting our finmount tagging work, and to the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program for their collaboration on the finmount tagging project!

As of this morning all eight tags are still transmitting and we are looking forward to learning more about the behavior and movements of these individuals.

If you go to our project web page you can find a 'live' map that shows two days of movements of each of the tagged individuals https://cascadiaresearch.org/hawaii-update/august2026/

Today, two of our crew are taking the boat across the channel back to O'ahu - we are wishing them calm seas and hopefully a sighting of false killer whales : )

These photos are of rough-toothed dolphins, a mother and calf spinner dolphin, and a map showing movements of all the tagged individuals through this morning.

24/08/2026

Needless to say we are always excited to encounter false killer whales. At 7:07 this morning, on day 7 of our Kaua‘i project, we came across a group of false killer whales moving quickly east along the south shore of Kaua‘i. We were able to deploy two depth-transmitting satellite-linked tags, and get ID photos of three individuals in the widely-spread group, before the seas became unworkable.

This afternoon, Sabre Mahaffy, the curator of our false killer whale catalog, was able to ID all three individuals - all are members of Cluster 3 of the endangered main Hawaiian Islands population. The three whales encountered, HIPc367, HIPc650, and HIPC914, are part of a rarely-seen subgroup of Cluster 3, and were all last photographed in 2024. This is the first time we’ve deployed any tags on Cluster 3 individuals since 2022 (the last tag on a Cluster 3 individual was also deployed off Kaua‘i). Both tags were depth-transmitting SPLASH10-F tags – in addition to providing information on locations (24 hours per day), these tags also record and transmit dive depths and durations. Tomorrow will be our last day on the water but we are hoping the group will come back into our range so we are able to collect more information on this group.

These tags were deployed as part of the U.S. Navy's Marine Species Monitoring Program. If you want to see where these individuals go, we have a live-map (with a one-day delay) on the project web page at https://cascadiaresearch.org/hawaii-update/august2026/

23/08/2026

A good couple of days on the water. Yesterday we had a group of short-finned pilot whales, thanks to a call from Holoholo Charters! The day before we encountered two different groups of Blainville's beaked whales, including the adult male shown here. For those not familiar with Blainville's beaked whales, the large bulges on the head are the arches of the lower jaws - the single erupted tooth on each side is not visible as they are covered in stalked barnacles, which like to grow on any hard surface. The rest of the head is largely white, covered with scar tissue from fighting with other adult males. If you check out our project website you'll see another photo of this male showing how much tissue it is missing from one fight. https://cascadiaresearch.org/hawaii-update/august2026/ We'll be comparing the photos of both species to our catalogs to see who these individuals are.

21/08/2026

We are halfway through our Kaua'i trip. In addition to working with five species of cetaceans we've photographed one oceanic manta (an endangered species) and contributed those images to researchers studying that species, and documented many species of seabirds, including this endemic ‘A‘o (Newell's Shearwater), a threatened species. So far we've deployed four satellite-linked tags on three different species of delphinids - if you want to see a "live" map of movements of the tagged individuals check out our project web page https://cascadiaresearch.org/hawaii-update/august2026/

19/08/2026

Yesterday off Kaua‘i we deployed a finmount tag on a spinner dolphin, the first spinner we've tagged off this island (and the 16th total in the last two years). This tag is a SPLASH tag, so in addition to location information provides data on diving depths and durations. The individual is an adult male, and returned to bowride within about 15 minutes after tagging. The tag was deployed with the TADpole tool, developed by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program. If you want to learn more about our current Kaua‘i field project check out https://cascadiaresearch.org/hawaii-update/august2026/

19/08/2026

John Calambokidis and Doug Sandilands discuss CRC's successful disentanglement efforts of a humpback whale off of Westport, WA with FOX 13 Seattle's Mathew Smith.

Click on the link and video for the full interview.

A humpback whale was entangled off the coast of WA, and through a team effort, the Cascadia Research Collective saved a life.

18/08/2026

Yesterday was our first day on the water off Kaua‘i and we encountered five different species of delphinids. The most unusual species was a group of pantropical spotted dolphins, part of an open-ocean population, but we also encountered melon-headed whales (and deployed one LIMPET tag to study movements and behavior), spinner dolphins, rough-toothed dolphins, and bottlenose dolphins.

This project is part of the U.S. Navy Marine Species Monitoring Program and we work with Navy scientists that use the hydrophone array off Kaua‘i to direct us to vocalizing odontocetes - the encounter yesterday with the melon-headed whales was one of those groups first heard vocalizing on the range.

If you want to learn more about this field effort check out https://cascadiaresearch.org/hawaii-update/august2026/

17/08/2026

Cascadia’s entanglement response team successfully freed another humpback whale. This whale was reported by a sport fisherman off Westport, Washington on Friday morning. The whale appeared otherwise healthy and is expected to make a full recovery.

17/08/2026

Cascadia’s entanglement response team successfully freed another humpback whale. This whale was reported by a sport fisherman off Westport, Washington on Friday morning. The whale appeared otherwise healthy and is expected to make a full recovery.

This case comes during an especially active season for response teams along the US West Coast, with a higher-than-average number of entanglement reports for this point in the year.

You can help these whales by supporting our work and ensuring we have the resources needed to continue responding throughout the year and gather the information needed to reduce entanglement risk.

Read about the event here: https://cascadiaresearch.org/20260814mn_entanglementresponse/
Watch the video: https://youtu.be/yFCuHwLATcc

Donate: https://cascadiaresearch.org/support_crc/
Join our mailing list: https://cascadiaresearch.org/subscribe/

All response activities were conducted by trained and authorized responders under NOAA permit #24359, following international and national safety standards that prohibit entering the water and prioritize the safety of both the whale and the crew.

13/08/2026

In 28 years of working around the Hawaiian Islands we’ve only encountered Risso’s dolphins on 19 different occasions, with all the sightings off Hawai‘i Island (and our last sighting there was in 2023). But with photos from citizen scientists and contributions from other researchers, we’ve built up a photo-ID catalog with 274 individuals from Hawai‘i, although not all of them are distinctive. We’ve had only a few matches within this catalog. Three individuals that were photographed south of Hawai‘i Island in September 2010 by the NOAA Fisheries Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center were re-photographed during one of our projects in August 2012, and one individual we photographed in August 2020 was re-sighted by Pacific Whale Foundation and Marine Mammal Research Program University of Hawaii researchers off Lāna‘i in October 2024. We’ve just added one more re-sighting (and 11 new IDs to the catalog!) using photos contributed by Hawaiian Adventures Kona – one of the individuals they photographed on July 29th this year matched to an individual they had photographed in April 2024! This brings our catalog up to 285 individuals with five individuals re-sighted.

Other contributions to our Risso’s catalog over the years have come from Seth Conae, Deron Verbeck, Jim Ward, Mandy Talpas, Colin Cornforth, and Dan McSweeney. If you know of anyone who has ever photographed Risso’s dolphins in Hawai‘i, please encourage them to contribute photos!

Thanks to Olivia Miller and www.hawaiianadventureskona.com for contributing these photos (all from the July 2026 encounter) and allowing us to share them! The photo showing two individuals includes HIGg0262 in our catalog (the individual in the foreground), that was sighted in both 2024 and 2026. These three photos also illustrate how Risso’s dolphins acquire more and more white scarring as they age, with one (very white) adult and two juveniles.

If you want to learn more about Risso’s dolphins in Hawaiian waters, check out our web page for this species at https://cascadiaresearch.org/hawaii-species/rissos-dolphins-hawaii/

Our next field project in Hawai‘i starts this weekend off Kaua‘i - if you want to follow along we'll be posting updates at https://cascadiaresearch.org/hawaii-update/august2026/