The Oceania Project's
Whale Research Expeditions
in Hervey Bay

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Comparison of humpback whale fluke catalogues and DNA data will provide information on migratory exchange between breeding regions within Oceania and Eastern Australia.

Map of Oceania showing location of New Caledonia, New Zealand, Tonga, Solomons, Cook Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, Samoa and French Polynesia.
(Click To Enlarge)

Research on humpbacks is being undertaken in New Zealand by Professor Scott Baker and Nadine Bott; in Tonga by Kirstey Russel and Dr Rochelle Constantine; in New Caledonia and Vanuatu by Dr Claire Garrigue; in the Cook Islands by Nan Hauser - who is also a PhD Candidate at the Southern Cross University Whale Research Centre; David Paton in Samoa, Fiji, the Solomons and by Dr Michael Poole in Moorea, French Polynesia.

In 2003 The Oceania Project became an Affilliate of the South Pacific Whale Research Consortium to participate in Pacific-wide colaborative studies of humpback whales using both Photo-identification and Genetic techniques.

The collaborative work is revealing migratory interchange of humpback whales between South Pacific breeding grounds and Eastern Australian breeding areas.
(Anderson et al. 2010);(Garrigue et al. 2011) and (Jackson et al. 2012)

Also photo-id and genetic linkages have been established between Pacific breeding grounds and Antarctic feeding areas.
(Anderson et al. 2010);(Constantine et al.2011) and (Steel et al. 2011)

A recent paper showed that the Eastern Australian Humpback whales are using the New Zealand migratory corridor.
(Franklin et al. 2014 JCRM)