Mingan Island Cetacean Study 84-07
Richard Sears, Mingan Island Cetacean Study

Richard Sears, Mingan Island Cetacean Study

The sightings contained in this dataset were obtained during surveys designed to photo-identify blue whales in the Sea of Cortez during their peak abundance in February and March. The surveys were conducted between 1984 and 2007 from 25' fiberglass boats in sea state less than 3-4 and designed to maximize the number of blue whale IDs. Although focusing primarily on the areas where blue whales are most commonly sighted, they also covered most of the area accessible by boat during a day trip at least once per field season.

Any marine mammal sighting was recorded using cross-bearings from 1984 to 1991 and using GPS from 1992 on. Unusual bird and fish sightings were also recorded.

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The sightings of Balaenoptera edeni were recognized as Bryde's whale by the data provider. The ITIS taxonomy database gives it the common name of Eden's whale. Thus, in our system it shows Eden's whale instead of Bryde's whale as a common name.

There may seem to be duplicated records in the dataset. However, records are different, near-by sightings (within 100-200 m) recorded while the researchers were conducting photo-ID activities and for which an exact position could not be obtained. Thus, their positions were approximated as that of the animal/group the researchers were working with at that time.

The records without coordinates were removed.

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Overview

Attributes described below represent those in the original dataset provided by the provider.
Only minimum required attributes are visible and downlodable online. Other attributes may be obtained upon provider's permission unless otherwise noteded below.

Attributes in dataset provided

Attribute (table column)	Description
sight_id	Generated by OBIS-SEAMAP to distinguish records
obs_date	Observed date
obs_time	Observed time
latitude	Latitude of observation
longitude	Longitude of observation
obs_count	Number of animals in a group
sp_obs	Species codes
sp_scientific
sp_common
sp_tsn	Species ITIS TSN
oid	Unique ID number (generated by SEAMAP)