A crowd of 150 people gathered at the Edmonds Waterfront Center (EWC) Oct. 9 to learn more about harbor porpoises from Cindy Elliser, Ph.D, associate director of the Salish Sea Institute and founder/research director of Pacific Mammal Research.

The event, part of the EWC’s Environmental Education series, was organized by award-winning filmmaker, photographer and ocean advocate Annie Crawley. It included a presentation by a 14-year-old student who went to Florida with Crawley to study and film bottlenose dolphins.

Elliser has spent more than a decade unlocking the mysteries of the harbor porpoise, the second smallest cetacean in the world, reaching just 5 to 5.5 feet in length and weighing about 150 pounds. Despite being one of the most abundant marine mammals in the Salish Sea, harbor porpoises are often overlooked because of their shy nature and fleeting surfacings. Through groundbreaking long-term research in Burrows Pass, off Fidalgo Island, Pacific Mammal Research has changed that story — showing that these animals and their calves regularly return to the same waters year after year, some for over a decade.