Two pygmy blue whale publications and an erratum

It’s been a while since I visited this blog. After five years of hiatus, I am happy to report that at the moment I have a fixed term contract work with the James Cook University (.5 FTE) and hopefully another one (which completes it to 1.0 FTE) will be coming early next year. 

Anyway, the purpose of this blogpost is to update you on my publications. My ORCID page is this one and SCOPUS page is this one. My two latest publications are about pygmy blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus brevicauda) – accidentally also two individuals. One publication is a Note on Marine Mammal Science titled “The first record of the southbound movements of satellite-tagged pygmy blue whales (B. m. brevicauda) from Savu Sea (Indonesia) to the subantarctic waters” (Mustika et al. 2024). The paper received quite a good Altimetric; 31 as I wrote this article.

The other publication is a book chapter titled “A Whale of a Journey: On the connectivity between pygmy blue whales in Indonesia, Australia, and beyond” (DOI: 10.4324/9781003365501-17), which was actually published in early August 2024, thus earlier than the above paper. This book chapter is part of the book titled “Critical Approaches to the Australian Blue Humanities”, edited by Maxine Newlands and Claire Hansen. 

Notably, this post is to inform you that I made a tiny but crucial mistake in this book chapter, but the mistake has now been rectified in the PDF (eChapter) version. However, I make this post to inform potential readers who might have downloaded the incorrect eChapter or have obtained the hardcopy book. 

My mistake revolves around leaving out one simple but important word: “southern”. The context is as follows:

p166 paragraph 1: “The fact that Whale One chose to hang out in the waters between the Subtropical Front and the Sub-Antarctic Front was not a surprise for me, because ocean zones around any fronts are abundant with their prey. The fact that it roamed the southern waters of Australia beyond the EEZ was the surprising factor here, for other scientists (Double et al., 2014; Möller et al., 2020; Thums et al., 2022) have never observed pygmy blue whales beyond Australia’s EEZ.” 

p167 paragraph 3: “Yet, none of those pygmy blue whales was ever observed to venture beyond Australia’s EEZ.”

Here I should have written “beyond Australia’s southern EEZ” because at least 36 pygmy blue whales have indeed been satellite-tagged from the western and southern Australian waters, and these whales swam up to the Banda Sea in Indonesia. It is just one word, but its omission is important because the sentences then imply that no pygmy blue whales have ever swum beyond Australia’s EEZ, which is incorrect.

Upon recognising the error, I have asked Routledge to revise the eChapter (PDF) version. After some considerations, they agreed to revise the PDF and have uploaded the correct version now. Corrected, the sentences are as follows:

p166 paragraph 1: “The fact that Whale One chose to hang out in the waters between the Subtropical Front and the Sub-Antarctic Front was not a surprise for me, because ocean zones around any fronts are abundant with their prey. The fact that it roamed the southern waters of Australia beyond the EEZ was the surprising factor here, for other scientists (Double et al., 2014; Möller et al., 2020; Thums et al., 2022) have never observed pygmy blue whales beyond Australia’s southern EEZ.” 

p167 paragraph 3: “Yet, none of those pygmy blue whales was ever observed to venture beyond Australia’s southern EEZ.”

The eChapter has now contained the correct version. My gratitude to Routledge for agreeing to revise the PDF. I learned a lot from this mistake and here’s hoping that I won’t be making the same one again.