Moby Dick
Did You Know?
Moby Dick gets her name because she has a whiter pigmentation than most other gray whales, much like the famous white sperm whale in Moby Dick.

About Moby Dick

We have seen Moby Dick many times along the Oregon coast during our research efforts since 2016, both in our Newport/Depoe Bay study region and near Port Orford. But her data history goes back further, as the WHET Lab in the Marine Mammal Institute at OSU satellite tagged her in 2009. In this animation (to the right), you can watch a portion of Moby Dick’s trackline as she moves between multiple locations along the Oregon and Northern California coast. After being tagged near Newport, she moves south to Port Orford, then heads back north to Newport, then back to Port Orford – all within 17 days! That’s a lot of commuting. Of our 26 sightings of Moby Dick since 2016, exactly half (13) have been in Port Orford and the other half in the Newport/Depoe Bay region, which demonstrates Moby Dick’s broad habitat use as she searches and forages across the Oregon coastline.

We have observed Moby Dick feeding with many different tactics, including headstanding, side- swimming, bubble blasts below the water, and sediment streaming from her mouth at the surface. Gray whales in Oregon feed on multiple zooplankton species using many different tactics to capture their prey. Watch this video (see below) to see some of Moby Dick’s foraging behaviors we have documented from drone footage, and you’ll understand why we call gray whales “bendy whales”. You can also learn more about how we study gray whale behavior and what we are learning at this project webpage.

Friends of Moby Dick

#BARINAFOREVER
John Stevens
Patricia McGarvey
Kiera Sears
KWM

Facts and Figures

How to Identify Moby Dick:

Moby Dick's left side shows off her characteristic white pigmentation as she is covered in large white splotches.
Moby Dick also has pointy knuckles that are distinctive and stand out compared to some other whales.
Moby Dick's Health History
We don’t have that many body condition measurements of Moby Dick, but those that we do have show that she has consistently been in pretty good body condition. If you compare Moby Dick’s BAI plot to those of some of the other whales on our website, you’ll see that her BAI scores are relatively high.

We fly drones over whales and then measure how skinny or fat they are from the images we capture. We compare the body condition of whales using an index called the Body Area Index (BAI), which is like the Body Mass Index (BMI) used to compare the body condition of humans. Small BAI values mean the whale is skinnier and larger BAI values indicate the whale is fatter.

Video