The dolphin days of summer

by oceansadminConservation, Dolphins, Human Impacts, Populations, Wildlife Health, Women in SciencePosted on 2 Comments

Our team has arrived in the Broughton Archipelago and we are poised to carry out our dolphin photo-ID, health assessment, and disturbance studies. This year, we are thrilled to have an amazing team Laura Bogaard and Doug Sandilands. Laura, a student from Quest University, is our newest research assistant. Doug Sandilands has been working with the incredible team at The Center for Coastal Studies in Cape Cod as part of their large whale disentanglement program. As you all know, Doug is one of a kind and we are so happy to have his help.

Our dolphin health and conservation status project monitors health of individual Pacific white-sided dolphins and their population(s) in the Pacific Northwest. Thanks to Alexandra Morton’s pioneering work on this species, we now have a combined >25 years of data. This project is yielding new insights into the biology of the dolphins themselves, and ultimately about the health of the Salish and Great Bear Seas. In 2015, we launched a health study in partnership with Dr. Stephen Raverty to collect dolphin breath samples on petri dishes to screen for pathogens. This year, we plan to look for drug-resistant bacteria (e.g., linked to agricultural and sewage runoff) and how pathogen exposure changes in urban versus wild marine environments.

A second aim of our work this year is to assess the impact of human disturbance on dolphin behavio(u)r and populations. This non-invasive study will merge our past work on the impacts of vessels, noise, and other sources of disturbance (e.g., on resident killer whales) and the long-term demographic study to understand the population consequences of disturbance. We are not playing noise to the dolphins, but we will use their responses to our own boat and to large ships to explore how much harder dolphins may have to work to find food in a quiet versus noisy habitat.

Our first day on the water was a huge success. We encountered a few hundred Pacific white-sided dolphins foraging in a beautifully coordinated group. Many of the dolphins were well-marked, about 10% of the group were moms with babies, and the dolphins were vocalizing to one another in addition to echolocating. Please check out our Instagram account for more photos.

We look forward to sharing our notes and observations. Thank you to everyone for your support with launching these projects! Please sign up for our newsletter (see sidebar) if you’d like updates when we start generating results from our hard-won field data.

This dolphin has a well-marked dorsal fin, which we will match against thousands of photographs in our database. This photo was taken under research permit with a telephoto lens and cropped.
This dolphin has a well-marked dorsal fin, which we will match against thousands of photographs in our database. This photo was taken under research permit with a telephoto lens and cropped.

Which raindrop caused the flood?

by oceansadminAcoustics, Conservation, Human Impacts, Killer Whale Conservation, Ocean Noise, Populations, Protecting Species, WhalesPosted on No Comments

KW_seiner RWA lot of the research our charity, Oceans Initiative, conducts is to see how human activities — all of them — affect marine wildlife, both in the Pacific Northwest and around the world. The iconic orca we study illustrate this problem well. According to the latest census by Center for Whale Research, the population is hovering at 84 individuals. The original problem was a live capture fishery for display in aquaria, with all the direct and collateral damage that entailed. But why aren’t they recovering, nearly 40 years after the captures stopped? Regulatory agencies in Canada and the US agree:  it’s a combination of lack of prey (Chinook salmon), too much noise, and chemical pollution.  Some of these threats are much easier to manage in the real world than others. But are we focusing on the right threats?

In our field, this thorny problem is described as “cumulative impacts of multiple anthropogenic stressors.” Clumsy, right? Our colleague, Dr David Bain, described it better:  Which raindrop caused the flood? 

It’s really, really hard to predict how wildlife populations will respond to a minefield of too much ocean noise, not enough food and a body full of chemicals. Think about that for a moment. The blubber that whales put on to survive — used by mothers to make milk for their young — is full of toxic chemicals, and the best way for a whale to detox is to transfer those pollutants to their offspring. Not great for the calf. Adult males don’t even have that option. And if you’re honest about the uncertainty in all the steps and how they fit together, your predictions span the entire range from no effect to catastrophic effects.

Our newest research proposes a way around it.  Start at the end.  Start by asking how much impact on endangered whale populations that our laws allow, and work backwards to calculate how much perturbation (noise, competition with fisheries) it would take to get there.

This approach doesn’t solve the problem, but it helps identify the problem, and the math is easier. For some critically endangered species, policy-makers may not want to allow ANY impact on a population. For healthy, growing populations, our laws allow some impact on marine mammal populations, because humans use the ocean too: for fishing, shipping, recreation, tourism and extracting energy. Our approach gives us a rough, ballpark estimate of what a healthy population can withstand.  Then, you can convene a group of scientists, managers and stakeholders to ask how likely it is that the sum total of all current and proposed activities could cause us to be exceeding that threshold.

There are a number of places around the world where this sort of exercise is needed.  As we try to ensure whale and dolphin populations recover from the Deepwater Horizon incident, it would be good to look at the cumulative effects of all activities, including seismic surveys, in the Gulf of Mexico. As we discuss opening new parts of the Arctic to oil and gas activities and shipping, we can use this method to test whether all of those activities, together, could affect food security of communities living in the Arctic. As we consider the number of industrial developments for the British Columbia coast — ports, liquefied natural gas terminals, pipelines and tanker traffic proposals — it may be time to consider how all of these factor may affect whale and dolphin populations. Some are doing fine. Others are barely hanging on. Our new tool can give us a starting point for discussion how much is too much.

We loved writing this paper with Dr Christopher Clark (an acoustician at Cornell University), Dr Len Thomas (a statistician at the University of St Andrews), and Prof Philip Hammond (a marine mammal population ecologist at the University of St Andrews).  Please check out the #openaccess paper on the website of the journal, Marine Policy:

Gauging allowable harm limits to cumulative, sub-lethal effects of human activities on wildlife: A case-study approach using two whale populations

Quiet(er) Marine Protected Areas

by oceansadminAcoustics, Human Impacts, Ocean Noise, WhalesPosted on No Comments

 

New research identifies areas that are important for many marine mammal species in BC, but still quiet
New research identifies areas that are important for many marine mammal species in BC, but still quiet

 

Sound is as important to marine mammals as vision is to us. 

Our new research, published open access in Marine Pollution Bulletin, has mapped areas that are important to 10 marine mammal species in BC, and overlaid those maps with maps of chronic ocean noise from shipping.  Most studies of this kind focus on the problems:  where we still have a lot of work to do to make noisy areas quieter.

This new paper identifies opportunity sites — places that have lots of wildlife but very little ship traffic.  We don’t want to minimize the serious, hard work needed to make noisy areas quieter, but our #oceanoptimism paper notes that there are places that give us hope.  All we have to do is keep the quiet areas quiet.

The next steps are up to managers and policy makers, but there are many things we can do NOW to keep quiet areas quiet.  We can do that by asking ships to slow down through important marine mammal habitats, just like we ask drivers to slow down through school zones.  As ships slow down, they become quieter.  We could identify the noisiest ships, and find financial incentives to replace those noisy ships as fleets age.  Our colleague, Russell Leaper, has figured out that focusing on the noisiest 10% of ships will generate outsize returns.  Finally, we could discuss incentives for Canada’s shipbuilding industry to take advantage of recent technological developments in building quieter ships.

For now, our main point is a simple one:  Haida Gwaii and British Columbia’s north coast are blessed with important marine mammal habitats that are still quiet.  We think of wild, quiet oceans as a valuable natural resource, and Canada is a steward of quiet oceans that are becoming increasingly rare in the developed world.

UPDATE: Check out a nice interpretation of this study from Mongabay.

Co-founder wins prestigious Pew Fellowship to protect whales

by oceansadminAcoustics, Human Impacts, Ocean Noise, WhalesPosted on No Comments

We’ve been making a lot of noise about ocean noise for years. 

Today, the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Marine Fellows Program announced that they’re listening.  Our co-founder, Dr Rob Williams, won a 3-year Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation. He will use the award to expand his studies of impacts of ocean noise on whale, fish, and the interactions between marine predators and their prey. More importantly, he will use the award to help identify solutions to reduce ocean noise levels in important marine habitats.

This award makes it possible for our organizations (Oceans Research and Conservation Society, a registered charity in Canada, and Oceans Initiative, a nonprofit in Washington state) to take on much more logistically challenging projects, with a bigger team.  We’re looking forward to taking on more bright students like Inge van der Knaap, who blew us away with her pilot study last year on the effects of noise on wild Pacific salmon, herring and rockfish.  Of course, to do so, we’re gonna need a bigger boat!

The work we do on ocean noise has been made possible with a whole host of visionary funders.  We’re grateful to them for seeing the value and potential of this work, which we started in 2008.  We’re also grateful to our main co-conspirators in ocean acoustics, Dr Chris Clark at Cornell University and Dr Christine Erbe at Curtin University, as well as our colleagues at University of St Andrews’ Sea Mammal Research Unit (Prof Philip Hammond and Prof Ian Boyd) and Centre for Research into Ecological & Environmental Modelling (Dr Len Thomas), who help us integrate the noise studies into ecological models of what the noise means for whale health and population conservation status.  Together, we’re building up a solid evidence base on the ecological effects of noise, but there is a lot more work to do. And of course, thanks to all of you for supporting our charity to do this important work. It’s starting to get noticed.

 

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Happy Valentine’s Day! Show some love for the ocean

by oceansadminAcoustics, Conservation, Human Impacts, Ocean NoisePosted on No Comments

lonely whale

Valentine’s day can be a pretty lonely time for many people.  Every day seems to be a lonely one for the whale in the North Pacific that sings at a unique frequency — 52 Hz — that no other whale uses to communicate.

Researchers and Navy submariners have been listening to this oddball whale for decades, but no one has seen him or her.  In all those years the whale has been singing, no one has ever heard a reply.

Maybe it’s a hybrid between a fin and a blue whale.  Maybe it’s a whale with a deformity or a speech impediment.  But a team of filmmakers are launching an expedition to find him or her.  They’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund it.  If you want to show your love for the ocean this Valentine’s day, we strongly encourage you to support this effort to learn how this compelling story ends.

Here’s our connection.  Much of our work focuses on the rising levels of ocean noise from shipping, oil and gas exploration, and other human activities in an increasingly industrialized ocean.  Because whales rely on sound to communicate — sound is as important to them as vision is to us — that background noise masks the whales’ ability to find each other, navigate, find food or avoid predators.  Human-generated noise causes whales to lose acoustic space.  It causes their acoustic world to shrink.  It isolates them from other members of their family and their species.

It’s hard to think of a better poster child (or whale) for isolation than the lonely, 52 Hertz whale.  Please consider supporting this wonderful effort to learn more about this lonely whale.  Keep up to date on their efforts by following them on Twitter.