The Dolphin Institute

Aloha Friends and Supporters of The Dolphin Institute (TDI),

Welcome to our end of the year wrap-up highlights! 2025 was a very productive and exciting year in research and education. Below, please find some of the highlights. Aside from these activities, we just announced our biennial request for student proposals for the Louis M. Herman Student Research Scholarship. Every two years, there is a great competition for this award to support creative and groundbreaking student research that aligns with the themes of Dr. Herman’s pioneering work with dolphins or whales. We look forward to announcing the awardee on Dr. Herman’s birthday in April. Also, 2026 will mark the 50th anniversary of our whale project, one of the longest continuous studies of humpback whales in the world. As you will see below, we are continuing to make great strides in this work. We are also dedicated to completing the digitization of our entire humpback whale fluke catalog to share online in the automated matching program and multi-research group database entitled “Happy Whale.” If you are interested in supporting the TDI student scholarship and our research projects, please visit TDI’s donation page at https://thedolphininstitute.org/donate/ . In this time of substantial reductions in government grants, we very much appreciate all your support!

· Field Research Across Oceans: This year, TDI researchers ventured far and wide to conduct field research. During the spring, we traveled to Maui to collaborate with Dr. Marc Lammers, Research Ecologist for the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary on investigating humpback whale responses to underwater playback of various natural and anthropogenic sounds to learn about whale communication as well as whale impacts from vessel sounds. In June, we traveled to the Bahamas to collaborate with Dr. Denise Herzing, Founder and Research Director of the Wild Dolphin Project to continue our collaborative investigation of responses of Atlantic spotted dolphins to a human-dolphin acoustic communication interface. Finally, in July, we headed to Petersburg, Alaska to study the humpback whales from Hawaii in their feeding grounds. In addition to documenting individual humpbacks working cooperatively in bubble net feeding grounds to hunt herring, we encountered both resident killer whales and transients. The former were extraordinarily social performing synchronous behaviors as they tracked our vessel, and the latter were in the process of hunting Stellar Sea Lions.

· Dedicated Students Making Great Strides at UH Hilo Marine Mammal Laboratory:
This fall under the guidance of lab manager Dawn McSwain, we were blessed to have five students from UH Hilo working in our lab digitizing and preparing images of humpback whale tail flukes from individually-identified whales from our long-term archival catalog for uploading to “Happy Whale” a multi-research group database and automated matching system https://happywhale.com/home . This system has greatly facilitated large scale collaborations across the North Pacific and enhanced our ability to identify individual whales and their histories in real time while conducting field work. This fall, lab founder and director Dr. Adam Pack’s co-mentored Ph.D. student Megan McElligot successfully defended her doctoral thesis, “Spatial and temporal variation in acoustic activity of spinner dolphins (Stenella longirostris) during their daytime rest in the main Hawaiian Islands.” Congratulations Megan!
· New Publications and Reports: This year we co-authored four scientific publications and reports including “Movement and sound production in yearling humpback whales: Age-class comparisons,” in “Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology,” “Tending the sick: Epilmeletic behavior towards entangled conspecifics provides evidence of empathy in humpback whales,” in PLOS One,” “Age-specific body length, mass and energetic cost of grown in humpback whales,” in “Marine Ecology Progress Series,” and “Harnessing the power of photo-ID data for apportionment to migratory whale hers: U.S. West Coast humpback whale stock proportions by latitude for the period 2019-2024,” a U.S. Department of Commerce, NOAA Technical Memorandum.

· New Presentations: On December 2-3, TDI’s Dr. Adam Pack co-chaired sessions on "Animal Bioacoustics: Baleen Whale Acoustics" at the 6th Joint Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the Japan Acoustical Society held in Honolulu. Pack presented the talk "Eavesdropping on a humpback whale male's song can provide information on its physical and reproductive condition." He was also a co-author on "Humpback whales in a population sing the same song-or do they? Assessing intra- and inter-individual song variability on the Hawaiian Breeding ground," "A comparison of humpback whale song structure between the Northwestern and main Hawaiian Islands," "Estimating bearings to low-frequency baleen whale calls with closely spaced hydrophones," "Lombard effect in humpback whales in Hawai'i is context and call-type dependent," and "The behavioral context in social call production by humpback whales on the Hawaiian breeding ground."

Happywhale Send us your whale photos, we’ll identify the individuals for fun and for science. We'll share with you what we find!

On the Birthday of Dr. Louis M. Herman, pioneer in the scientific study of dolphin cognition and communication, and co-founder of The Dolphin Institute, we are thrilled to announce that Emma Chereskin is the 2024 recipient of The Louis M. Herman Research Scholarship, established by family, colleagues and friends in memory of Dr. Herman. If you would like to donate to this biennial award in honor of Dr. Herman, please visit https://thedolphininstitute.org/donate/

Congratulations to Emma Chereskin for winning the Louis M Herman Research Scholarship 2024 for her proposal “Vocal communication and the cooperative mind: Exploring vocally mediated collaboration during a polyadic cooperative act in wild bottlenose dolphins”. The Dolphin Institute 🐬

Louis M. Herman, Ph.D. and Emeritus Professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA, will always be remembered for his innovative, creative, and scientifically rigorous approach to the study of the marine mammals he so loved, and for the future generations of marine mammal researchers he and his work continue to inspire. The Louis M. Herman Research Scholarship supports research projects that contribute to our understanding of either cetacean cognition and sensory perception or humpback whale behavioural ecology or communication.

Aloha Friends and Supporters of TDI,
We are pleased and honored to announce the publication of the paper “Bellwethers of change: population modelling of North Pacific humpback whales from 2002 through 2021 reveals shift from recovery to climate response” in the scientific journal Royal Society Open Science. Lead by Ted Cheeseman, developer of the HappyWhale https://happywhale.com an online automated humpback whale tail fluke matching program and database, the paper pooled together tens of thousands of humpback whale tail fluke photographs (the underside of a humpback whale’s tail fluke has a unique pigmentation pattern and trailing edge that can serve as the “finger-print” for identifying individuals) from scores of research groups including TDI. The results showed that the population of humpback whales in the North Pacific increased to a peak estimate of 33,488 +/- 4455 whales in 2012. However, a 20% decline in abundance to 2021 suggested that the population reached carrying capacity due to loss of prey resources. This was especially reflected in the Hawaiian humpback whale breeding grounds (the principal mating and calving area for North Pacific humpbacks) in which abundance had decreased by 34% by 2021 from its peak in 2013. In contrast, no parallel decline was observed over this period in Mainland Mexico, a small breeding grounds for North Pacific humpbacks. Sandwiched within these years from 2014-2016, an unprecedented in size marine heatwave adversely impacted marine resources which humpback whales and other species rely on for sustenance. The result appeared to be several years of poor reproductive and physical health for many humpbacks wintering in Hawaii and summering in Alaska. TDI is proud to have contributed over 10,000 tail fluke images from Hawaii and Alaska from its archival catalog of over 30,000 images for this study. TDI’s President and Research Director, Dr. Adam Pack joined over 60 other researchers as a co-author on the study which is available online at
https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.231462

The paper is an unprecedented-in-scope collaboration among humpback whale researchers as well as boat captains, crew and participants on whale watch excursions who generously donated their images to Happy Whale. It shows how when we all pool our resources and talent together we can learn remarkable things about humpback whales and their marine environment.

Bellwethers of change: population modelling of North Pacific humpback whales from 2002 through 2021 reveals shift from recovery to climate response | Royal Society Open Science For the 40 years after the end of commercial whaling in 1976, humpback whale populations in the North Pacific Ocean exhibited a prolonged period of recovery. Using mark–recapture methods on the largest individual photo-identification dataset ever ...

We are thrilled to inform our members and followers that this year, two students were chosen to receive the Louis M. Herman Student Research Scholarship: Franca Eichenberger of the University of St. Andrews, Scotland for the proposal “Eavesdropping on Whales – Does Humpback Whale Song Convey Genetic Quality?” and Julia Zeh of Syracuse University, the United States of America, for the proposal “Exploring Vocal Development in Humpback Whales.” Both proposals, rated at the top of 17 received from 9 different countries, focus on groundbreaking areas of marine mammal science closely related to Dr. Herman’s research, and capture his innovative and creative spirit. The winners were recently announced at the 24th Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals held in August in Palm Beach, Florida. A committee of marine mammal scientists meet every two years to consider proposals for The Louis M. Herman Student Research Scholarship. The scholarship was developed to honor Dr. Herman’s legacy of pioneering and creative research in dolphin cognition and humpback whale behavioral ecology, biology and communication by the Herman family, Dr. Adam A. Pack, TDI co-founder and long-time colleague of Dr. Herman, and the Society for Marine Mammalogy. To learn more about the scholarship and the awardees, please see the following link: https://marinemammalscience.org/awards-funding/awards-and-scholarships/louis-m-herman-research-scholarship/2022-louis-m-herman-winners/

For over 2 years, The Dolphin Institute has been working together with the UH Hilo Marine Mammal Laboratory to conduct pioneering studies of spinner dolphins off the windward coast of Hawai'i Island. This past Thursday, November 10, we were thrilled that UH Hilo Marine Mammal Lab co-Manager Trisha Alvarez, who is also TDI President Adam Pack's Graduate Student in the UH Hilo Tropical Conservation Biology and Environmental Science (TCBES) Master of Science Degree Program, successfully defended her thesis "INVESTIGATING SPINNER DOLPHIN PRESENCE ALONG THE WINDWARD COAST OF HAWAI’I ISLAND THROUGH BOTH PASSIVE ACOUSTIC MONITORING (PAM) AND BOAT-BASED VISUAL TECHNIQUES." Congratulations Trisha!!!