Humpback whale research in Kimberley
October 2009
When German marine geology student Eike Marohn’s international studies took him to the furthest corner of northern Western Australia to study humpback whales, he couldn’t believe his luck.
A window-less caravan on top of an isolated cliff at Pender Bay, at the Aboriginal Two Moons Whale and Marine Research Station in the Kimberley, gave him a first taste of marine mammal research.
His 10-week assignment was to monitor the numbers and behaviour patterns of thousands of humpback whales that passed by his ‘door’ on the cliff as they made their way up and down the coast.
Eike arrived at Two Moons via the Western Australian Marine Science Institution, which had been asked by the Goojarr Goonyool Aboriginal Corporation to send someone to work on its whale monitoring project, now in its fourth year,
He gave whale monitoring training to more than 70 Kimberley Land Council Indigenous rangers.
He and four other volunteers monitored the whales for five hours each day – two counting with the naked eye, two scanning the horizon with telescopes and the fifth monitoring the whales and their behaviours.
In one five-minute sighting in early August, 70 whales were counted.
“But the highlight of my time was watching a whale give birth,” he said. “The mother lay on her back, not moving, for about 45 minutes and then went under the water for about three minutes before coming up with the calf, which rested on her back as she checked that it could breathe. After one and a half hours the calf was swimming! Pender Bay is clearly a very important humpback calving ground with large numbers of mothers and calves.”
He said a trip into the bay on a four-metre boat which drifted beside calves was amazing because they were the same size or bigger than the craft.
“They simply came up to the boat to check us out! It was amazing,” he said.
His work maintained the independent baseline survey of humpback whale numbers and behaviours in Pender Bay that began in 2006 by PhD student Shannon McKay, making an estimate of the number of mothers and calves in the bay during the season.
“Whale sightings were very high in Pender Bay,” he said. “I saw thousands… Numbers dropped off by mid-September but total sightings were still high. The proportion of cows and calves increased from late August until by mid-September to early October, they made up most of the sightings. There were still whales in the Bay in the third week of October when I left.”
Eike returned to Perth before heading to Ningaloo and travelling down to the beach spots along the coast.
“I hope to come back to WA and hopefully back to Two Moons Whale and Marine Research Station,” he said.
“I will definitely work in marine science when I graduate and would like to return to Australia as a qualified scientist… I hope that this project will continue for many more years.”
He has met several travellers who called in to Pender Bay to assist as volunteers, and who are now his friends.
He also met Australian Channel 7 television personality Ernie Dingo, who was filming a program about the Kimberley marine region.
“The other thing is that the Kimberley has 38,000 people in an area the size of Germany which has 82 million people, so the concept of distance was another new dimension,” he said.
Top photograph: German marine geology student Eike Marohn, WAMSI Chief Executive Officer Dr Steve Blake and researcher Louis Malatzky monitor the whales from a caravan on the cliff at Pender Bay.
Middle photograph: Eike and an Aboriginal researcher watching whales.
Bottom photograph: Eike pictured with Kimberley WAMSI documentary host Ernie Dingo.