We've been working towards getting our American Samoa survey data published, and there is light at the end of the tunnel. I'm excited about the results - they represent the first dedicated attempts to survey the diversity of toothed whales that inhabit the waters of American Samoa.
It's been great working with Dave Mattila (HIHWNMS) and Jooke Robbins (Center for Coastal Studies) on this project. They've been working the humpbacks down there for years and contributed all of their opportunistic odontocete cetacean sightings, pictures and biopsy samples for this project. The paper includes a workup of all these data, including some genetic analyses thanks to Kim Andrews (HIMB), and will present some really interesting findings. As a teaser, the map below illustrates the locations of some of the encounters around the main island of Tutuila that are included in the paper - and the kind of boat effort required to find these whales.
We hope to have this paper published in the Journal of Cetacean Research and Management sometime in 2008.
