About the trip

The purpose of the trip is to apply suction cup tags to humpback and minke whales that measure their underwater movements and behaviors.  Concurrent to this, we will be making very detailed measurements of the distribution, abundance, and behavior of their prey (antarctic krill), as well as physical features of the water column.  We will then be able to visualize the foraging behavior of the whales and test specific hypotheses about how the whales feed, the amount of prey that is necessary to support whale feeding, how much time whales spend feeding and how much they consume on a daily basis, and how they make decisions about the specific patches of prey to exploit.