Whalefest in Sitka, AK

I know this is technically a late blog post, but I decided to postpone writing so I could include Whalefest in this week’s update! My Marine Mammalogy classmates and I shipped off to Sitka on Thursday evening for the amazing scientific conference we have been preparing for all semester. We’ve been reading scientific articles every week and discussing them in class to prepare for meeting the authors at the conference. Basically, it was set up to be three days of a mandatory workshop, lectures, discussion, and mingle.

For the first day, I signed up for a marine mammal necropsy as my workshop, which in hindsight was a personal mistake (albeit a cool experience). We had to arrive in the lab at 8am for the dissection of some California seals and sea lions. My dissection experience prior to this was extremely limited to a couple of fish, squids, and a baby pig, so this was a huge leap for me. The primary assessment was very interesting (which was basically assessing damages, measurements, and other characteristics from the outside), but as soon as the dissection began, I did not enjoy myself as much. It was a great learning experience but I’ve learned I like seals wayyyy too much to sit there and watch their organs removed. After that, it was lunch time (I know… horrible timing right?). I surprisingly got over my queasiness quickly and lunch was absolutely delicious. All the students then funneled into the conference room to hear from our first three speakers. It was insanely cool to recognize what the speakers were talking about since we had already read their papers in class. I think my favorite presentation from the first day was Dr. Chrissy Huffard’s (she discussed octopod mating strategies). After the lectures ended, we were able to break out into smaller groups and meet the scientists individually to ask questions.

The next day, we were informed that our Sunday whale watching cruise was canceled due to inclement weather (foreshadowing) so it was moved to Saturday morning. We ended up boarding the ship at Sitka Harbor at 8 am and saw so many humpback whales! The seas eventually became too rough, so we ultimately spent an hour cruising around a bay and taking in the beautiful scenery. There’s a dormant volcano in Sitka (although, this year scientists have detected some earthquake activity that could indicate that it is no longer dormant…), and it was insanely cool to see it covered in snow! Following lunch, we sat through three more lectures and had the same small-group discussion after. My favorite part of the second day was hearing Dara Orbach discuss her research on cetacean interactions! I was so exhausted after that day that I went to bed at 8 pm– it was MUCH needed.

Since the whale-watching was canceled on Sunday, we got to sleep in and explore Sitka on our own in the morning. I ended up going to a really cool coffee shop and then a restaurant that had AMAZING wood-fired pizza (dad, you would’ve LOVED it). After that, we went to some more lectures. I really liked all of them on this day– Schery Umanzor talked about seaweed mechanics and farming; Matt Wilson talked about cold-water jellyfish; and Andy Szabo talked about humpback whales (his videos were so cool). After the smaller discussion, we had to sprint to the vans that would take us back to the airport. Our flight was supposed to leave at 7, so naturally, we arrived at 5. We got there so early that they didn’t even have someone at the TSA yet. I have never been in an airport that small. Once we all got through TSA and sat on the floor for a good three hours, we noticed our flight kept getting delayed an hour at a time. Eventually, we looked up the plane and noticed it got redirected to Juneau without the stop in Sitka, thus stranding us here for another night (currently in a Sitka coffee shop writing this post). The weather is supposedly better today, so hopefully tonight’s flight is not delayed/canceled so I don’t miss even more classes. Wish me luck! I’ll post whale-watching pictures when I get back home and can upload them from the camera. :)