Puget Sound Whales: Minkes at 30 Years

Jonathon Stern:

Minke whales are the most heavily hunted species of whale. Started out 30 years ago trying to determine non-lethal methods of study for Minkes.

What did he learn?
They distinguish themselves in small, localized populations. Long-lived species: individuals live up to 35 or 40 years. Able to study whales that went through several el nine years, pacific ecatolocelation.
Was able to see how they responded to different changes in climate and environment. National Marine Fisheries was able to come up with stock boundaries for populations fo minke whales. Each stock has very few individuals within it.
Potential biological removal (how many can be removed from a population without causing population collapse) of the Minke is 5 whales.

Eat the same local food web as Orcas. Likely that Minkes carry similar types of pollutants as Minke whales. Sample ecosystems, so by studying how they respond to changing environmental conditions, we can understand what’s going on in ocean ecosystems.
Japanese are stockpiling whale meat in freezers, because people aren’t eating it. Their harvest could be disastrous to these populations.

Why does whaling occur?
a. Cultural history– though Jon’s ancestors were Cossacks, and he doesn’t run around pillaging and pplundering.
b. Whales are eating too many fish. But everything whales eat is recycled in ocean ecosystems, but we remove it completely, which has done terrible things to ocean ecosystems.

Janice Nickels:
leveraging expertise and facilities of HP to develop a smart drug delivery device using ink jet technologies. Independent reservoirs inject drugs through micro-needles that activated through wireless signals. The patch is about 1″ square, and is worn against the skin.

Microneedle penetrates the skin barrier so that you don’t need to worry about adhesives interfering with your drug and it very quickly goes into the blood stream; quicker uptake through delivery to capillary bed, rather than subcutaneous. It also decreases the risk of overdose, because the drug level stays constant. $25 per patch, without drugs. Independent Irish company is licensed to take it to market.