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CORVALLIS - Where do the whales come from, and where are they going?

Those two questions are related, according Bruce Mate, a professor of fisheries and wildlife at Oregon State University and world-recognized expert on marine mammals. He also directs OSU's endowed Marine Mammal Program.

Mate will speak at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 12, on whales and efforts save them from extinction. The free lecture, part of OSU's John Byrne lecture series, will be in the Austin Auditorium at LaSells Stewart Center, 26th Street and Western Boulevard. The series is co-sponsored by OSU's College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences and Oregon Sea Grant.

Whales have survived eons of environmental change and almost two centuries of industrial-scale whaling that drove them to the edge of extinction. But now whales face an even bigger challenge, according to Mate - coping with humanity's increased use of the world's oceans.

Mate has traveled the globe tracking whales and working to save them from extinction. He recently returned to Oregon from Gabon, Africa, where he was tagging humpback whales as part of his research, which uses radio transmitters to track whales via satellite.

Everywhere you look around the globe, he said, there is evidence of humanity interacting with whales, with the whales coming off the worse for the encounter. Forty-ton right whales eat tiny copepods and were the first heavily exploited species. Now a North Atlantic population, which has been protected since 1935, is hovering at just 325 individuals and most have scars from fishing gear entanglement. Half of the right whales that are found dead have been killed by ship collisions.

Sperm whales feed on deep-water squids during 45-minute dives in an offshore environment increasingly sonified by seismic surveys used to identify oil and gas resources.

Krill-eating blue whales may be the largest animals that have ever lived. The worldwide population is only eight percent of its pre-exploitation size - and a quarter of them feed off of California and Oregon during the summer months. They represent the largest remaining population anywhere.

Humpback whales, breeding and calving in Hawaii during the winter, come from all over the Pacific, but not all at the same time.

The recovery of these species may hinge on how well we identify and protect their important habitats from the adverse impacts of human activities, Mate said. Scientists, industries, and conservationists are all working to achieve these goals.