NIMMSA Conservation Fund Project
Year awarded
Know your neighbours: fine-scale site fidelity of Humpback Whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) within their British Columbia feeding ground
Awarded Organization:
This project aims to analyze long-term data to better understand how individual Humpback Whales use specific areas along the British Columbia coast. By studying site fidelity, movement patterns, and population structure, the research will help identify important habitats and inform conservation, management, and responsible marine tourism.
Humpback whales travel thousands of kilometres every year to migrate, but once they arrive in British Columbia, do they roam the coast or stay close to home? With support from the NIMMSA Conservation Fund, MERS set out to answer that question.
The team analyzed more than 76,000 sightings of 4,767 individual whales, collected by over 873 data contributors. Many were citizen scientists, ecotourism operators and coastal community members, brought together through the Canadian Pacific Humpback Collaboration.
What they found
- Whales show strong “site fidelity.” Researchers identified 10 sub-areas along the BC coast, each with its own group of whales and little mixing between them.
- About 70-80% of whales seen in a given year had been seen in the same sub-area in a previous year.
- Within BC, individual whales typically move only about 70-180 km.
- Whales that use specialized feeding techniques, like bubble-net feeding, tend to stay closer to home, and calves tend to show similar loyalty to their mothers.
- This points to a possible culturally passed-down form of population structure, where whales rely on knowledge of particular areas that they return to each year.
Why it matters
Because different whales use different areas, local threats like vessel traffic, fisheries interactions and prey shifts may affect some individuals far more than others. The same is true in reverse: local actions like ghost gear cleanup and boat speed reduction can make a real difference for the whales that live here.
Sharing the science
The research has been submitted for publication in the open-access journal PLoS One. It has been presented at the Humpback Whale World Congress, the Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals, the Campbell River Ocean Day event and a NIMMSA Community Meeting.
Thank you to MERS and to everyone who contributes whale sightings along our coast.