September 30, 2025 — The following transcript was generated using automated transcription software for the accessibility and convenience of our audience. While we strive for accuracy, the automated process may introduce errors, omissions, or misinterpretations. This transcript is intended as a helpful companion to the original audio and should not be considered a verbatim record. For the most accurate representation, please refer to the audio recording.
MICHAEL DUNNE: I’m Michael Dunne. I count myself lucky to live in Oregon, and a big reason for that is easy access to the Oregon coast. Recently, I was even more fortunate to be invited onto the Pacific storm OS using a research vessel to join with researchers and local high school students to venture out miles off the Oregon coast in search of whales. The scientists on board are photographing whales to learn more about their habitat and record scarring from entanglements with fishing gear. The students are part of the OSU Sea Grant program to teach kids about amazing careers in STEM fields. And I was there to record our adventure. Bring it back to you. It was a rough day, and a few of us, including yours truly, got a little green around the gills, but it was an amazing journey from the deck of Oregon State University’s research ship the Pacific storm. I was invited to join both marine mammal researchers and a group of students to venture out beyond the breakers and search for whales that inhabit the waters far off of Newport. Our destination was about 15 miles off the coast, to an area known by the scientists and crew as a good habitat for our humpback whales. The researchers are interested in seeing how the habitat is conducive to these giants, as well as photographing them to determine how they might be scarred by fishing gear and other man-made obstacles. Lindsay Wickham, a post-doctoral scholar at OSU, explains why they’re studying entanglements and why that’s important. Talk about your specific area of study.
LINDSAY WICKMAN: So, I’m involved in a couple of projects researching the issue of large whale entanglement on the Oregon coast. So one of those projects is Opal. It stands for overlap predictions about large whales. And in that one, we are trying to understand where the whales are and create models to predict where these large whale species are. So that’s fin whales, humpback whales and blue whales, and then overlapping those predictions with fishery effort so that we can better understand where the risky areas for potential entanglement in Oregon are and when, so that we can prevent entanglements from happening. And then the other project I’m working on is called slate, and that one stands for scar based long term assessments on trends and entanglement. And in that one, we’re taking photographs of humpback whales and then looking at those photos for evidence of scarring that could be caused by temporary entanglement in fishing gear. And that’s to get a better idea of the actual prevalence of entanglement in Oregon and how that’s changing over time, since we know our probability of actually seeing an entangled whale was so low, we can get a better idea of the scope of it by looking at photographic evidence.
MICHAEL DUNNE: What is your research suggesting thus far regarding the problem of whales off the Oregon Coast getting entangled in fishing nets and other types of gear. Do you have a generalized hypothesis of how, how big of a problem it is, and its impact on our both our permanent and visiting whales?
LINDSAY WICKMAN: It’s really tricky. So there has been an increasing trend and reported confirmed entanglements over time. So that’s when we see a whale with gear on it. And from the photographic work that we’ve been doing on entanglement scars, the number of whales that are getting entangled at some point in their life is more, a lot more than what we’re seeing from these confirmed entanglements. But what’s really tricky is we’re not exactly sure where they’re getting entangled when they get entangled during their life, and that’s where we are gathering all this additional evidence around the overlay. The risk of exposure to fishery gear in Oregon is, I think, going to help a lot with that question.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Okay, do you think that through your research, you and other scientists as well as the fishing community, do you think that it will lead to solutions to reduce the conflict, and is it a simple matter of, you know, trying to remove gear from where whales are, or could there be other solutions so that the fishing community can still do what they need to do, but also can reduce the conflicts between whales and fishing gear?