User talk:Wevets

Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary
Hi! And welcome to wikipedia. I liked the article on Cordell Bank. I wasn't aware that the Wandering and white capped had even been vagrants in Cordell bank. I wonder, however, if it is customary to include them in bird lists except as rare freaks. Anyways, we can work out some wording that mentions them all. Sabine's Sunbird 03:47, 23 July 2005 (UTC)
 * There is no particular convention on wikipedia, but most texts would draw the distinction between regular passage migranst and super rare vagrants. Personally in all my time in the Gulf of the Farallones I've met one person that has even seen a short-tail, let alone any other vagrant albatross. That said, Cordell Bank does attract weird vagrants on as regular a basis as vagrants tend to come. They had the first Parkinson's Petrel in N America last year. Perhaps a line about them could draw attention to that, and mention Wanderes and white capped? Sabine's Sunbird 22:55, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

Egg War
Since you've contributed to the Farallon Islands article, I thought perhaps you'd be interested to know that I've put in a request for an article on the Egg War here. If you write the article, please remember to remove the article from that listing. Cheers, Tom e rtalk 17:43, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Environmental science
looks good to me. thanks for your thoughtful edit. best regards. Anlace 23:09, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

The Marine Mammal Center
thank you for your interest in this article. the migration paths of whales are rather well documented. this particular migration path was cited in a reference already supplied in this artcle (both on-line and hard copy citation versions). in the future, consider reading all the reference material in an article before deleting content that could be useful to wikipedia readers. Anlace 17:30, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Hi Anlace:

I read the reference you cited. You've omitted the word "presumably" (page 7) from the wikipedia article. I'm curious about whether readers of the article should take the presumption as a fact, and whether it's encyclopedic to include such a presumption. The writers of the Annual Report don't know where that particular whale went, so I'm wondering why we should trust their presumption.

As far as the migratory paths of whales being well-documented, that's a little vague. They're certainly not as well-documented as terrestrial migrations. They're also not as well-documented as grey whale migrations, which hug the coast, making them easily observable. I'd say whale migrations are poorly documented beyond grey whales, but it's six of one, half-a-dozen of the other, really.

Fundamentally, I don't think it's scientifically accurate to claim this particular whale was going to Baja California, when the evidence indicates that there are higher match rates between Calfornia humpbacks and mainland Mexico wintering sites over Baja California sites, and the rate of humpbacks wintering near Costa Rica but feeding off California has not been established.

"Migrations between winter regions and feeding areas did not follow a simple pattern, although highest match rates were found for whales that moved between Hawaii and southeastern Alaska and between mainland and Baja Mexico and California." ... "Humpback whales also winter at scattered locations along the Mexican mainland south of the subareas that have been sampled (Urban and Aguayo 1987). One known wintering region not included in our sample is the coastal waters of Central America, especially Costa Rica and Panama (Steiger et al. 1991, Calambokidis et al. 2000). This is a region where humpback whales from the North Pacific mate and give birth to calves, although no photographs were available from 1991 to 1993 for this analysis. This region appears to be used by humpback whales that migrate almost exclusively from feeding areas off California, with limited evidence of interchange with whales wintering off mainland Mexico (Calambokidis et a/. 2000)."

From: Movements and population structure of humpback whales in the North Pacific.

Also check out Table 8 in the above reference. The match rate for CA-WA feeding humpbacks was 0.51 for mainland Mexico but only 0.18 for Baja.

It seems to me that a good way to word the article would be to say "probably headed for wintering grounds near Mexico" if you have to say where the whale is going at all. Wevets 17:38, 29 November 2006 (UTC)