John Durban, PhD
Killer Whale Research Co-ordinator


Current Activities:
John Durban leads the Killer Whale Ecological Studies Team (KWEST), a collection of researchers from government, academic and non-profit groups, which co-ordinates and conducts collaborative studies on the role of killer whales within North Pacific marine ecosystems. Currently, John is conducting research under contract to the National Marine Fisheries Service (U.S.) and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (Canada) to support killer whale stock assessments, and to assess their role as predators of protected marine mammals. John’s research focuses on the population biology of killer whales, using photographic mark-recapture and satellite telemetry to assess abundance, survival and movements, and laser photogrammetry to monitor the size and growth of individual whales.


Background:
John began his research career at CWR in 1993, and has since been conducting research on marine mammals to support management issues in the U.S., U.K., Canada and the Bahamas. John has published papers on the population biology of bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, right whales and harbor seals, as well as describing novel techniques for data collection and new statistical approaches for data analysis. He obtained a B.Sc. and Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, with doctoral research developing Bayesian statistical methods for estimating population parameters from cetacean photo-identification data. John conducted post-doctoral research at the NOAA National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle, with a focus on estimating the abundance of mammal-eating killer whales off western Alaska.