Hal Whitehead
Whereabouts
I
am normally based in the Department of Biology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
However, I like best to be at sea. The boat we use for our research, Balaena (Valiant
40 ocean-going cruising
boat) sometimes works off Nova Scotia,
and sometimes in other parts of the world.
Our work
Our
work is mainly on the behaviour (principally social
organization and cultural transmission), ecology and population biology of
sperm and northern bottlenose whales. We have ongoing research projects in the
eastern Pacific (sperm whales since 1985, work planned for 20013-14 off Ecuador)
and northwest Atlantic (sperm whales since 1986, bottlenose whales off Nova
Scotia since 1988). We spend weeks at sea on board ocean-going sailing boats
collecting acoustic, visual, photographic and oceanographic data, and then long
periods analyzing them in the lab. The graduate students whom I supervise study
the social organization, behaviour, acoustics,
population biology and conservation of pilot, sperm and northern bottlenose
whales. My own work is principally on the behaviour,
social structure, population biology and conservation of sperm whales,
techniques of studying social structure, and more general questions about
social structure in mammals and cultural evolution.
Books
Whitehead,
H. 2003. Sperm whales; social evolution in the ocean.
University of Chicago Press. 431pp.
Whitehead,
H. 1989. Voyage to the whales. Stoddart / Chelsea Green/ Robert Hale
Programs for the analysis of social structure (SOCPROG)
I
have written a series of MATLAB programs for analyzing data on social
structure, movements and populations based on individual identifications. The
programs are designed to be easy to use, most input is done through graphical
user interfaces (i.e. windows with things to click on), and most things can be
done without any knowledge of MATLAB (although this helps for custom options,
figuring out errors, making your own extensions, etc.). The programs are also
designed to be pretty flexible so you can tailor the analyses to your data and
hypotheses. The current version is designed to be used with MATLAB7.
These
programs are available to anyone who would like to use them. If you would like
more information and/or would like to download a copy of these programs click here
now.
Advice for potential graduate students
Courses, etc. at Dalhousie
Currently
I teach:
BIOL5700 Communications
Skills for Biologists
BIOL4062/5062 Analysis
of Biological Data
Address
Department
of Biology, Dalhousie University, 1355 Oxford St., Halifax, Nova Scotia, CANADA
B3H 4J1
email: hwhitehe@dal.ca
FAX:
902-494-3736 Ph: 902-494-3723
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