oceansadmin - Oceans Initiative

A Rare Visit

by oceansadminPopulations December 29, 2012No Comments

Grey whales are pretty neat. We were lucky enough to encounter two of them on Boxing Day. Their visit to inshore waters of British Columbia in December was a bit of a surprise. Grey whales are legendary for their migration, which is among the longest of any mammal. We’d expect to see grey whales in spring and fall as they make their annual trip between Mexico and Alaska. But it’s December, so we were surprised to find that these two were in front of our field cabin rather than in Mexico with the rest of their family.

It seems grey whales are full of surprises. Our colleague, Bruce Mate, at the Hatfield Marine Science Center at Oregon State University, has tagged several individuals from the highly endangered Eastern North Pacific grey whale population off Sakhalin Island in Russia. One whale, now known as Flex, traveled from Russia to the Oregon Coast when its satellite tag stopped signaling. In 2012, another whale called Varvara, traveled from Russia to Mexico in two months!

Have you seen Big Miracle with Drew Barrymore and John Krasinski? If you haven’t, you might want to check it out. Based on a true story, the movie tells the tale of three grey whales that became trapped in the ice off Barrow, Alaska.

Anyway, we felt pretty lucky to photograph these two whales and are sending our ID photos to colleagues to see whether we can find a match in their extensive catalogs. Unique markings on grey whales (the pigmentation patterns on the flukes and flanks (sides) of the whales, as well as the knuckles on the back) offer clues to help identify who the whales are and where else they’ve been. We’ll keep you posted on whether our colleagues find a match.

Meanwhile, we’re still hoping to find Pacific white-sided dolphins when the winds die down. We hope you’ve had a great holiday season, and we look forward to having a lot of results from our ocean noise and dolphin studies to report in 2013.

Please vote for our Quiet Ocean Campaign

by oceansadminAcoustics, Conservation, Ocean Noise December 15, 2012October 11, 2015No Comments

Please help our work win much-needed funding to keep whale and dolphin habitat quiet. It is ridiculously easy for you to help.

Click HERE. It’ll take you to Facebook so you can vote for our Quiet Ocean Campaign. Just click the green button.

Great! Thanks! That’s it. Unless you want to ask your friends to vote, too, which would be great, too!

Thanks!

Our 12 wishes for the ocean on 12.12.12

by oceansadminHuman Impacts December 12, 2012No Comments

I woke up this morning and decided that everyone gets twelve wishes today! Ta-da! Here are ours.

1. Quiet oceans for whales, dolphins and all marine life. You can help make this a reality. Please vote here to support our Quiet Oceans Campaign. It’s easy to vote and you’re welcome to vote once per day!

2. A plastic-free ocean. Help make this one come true by bringing your own bag to the grocery store. As the City of Vancouver says, “Create Memories, Not Garbage” by buying experiences, not gifts, this holiday season. The best way to reduce plastic waste in the ocean is to stop buying things we don’t need.

3. Be an effective voice for ocean conservation in 2013. You can help us achieve our goal by spreading the word about the work we do. We’d like to get to 1000 likes on Facebook in the next 3 months.

4. Reduce bycatch in fishing gear and marine plastics. Here are our priority regions in BC to reduce marine plastics and their impacts on marine mammals.

5. Subscribe to our newsletter Scroll up near the top of our page to “Get the Ocean in your Inbox”. You’ll be glad you did!

6. Reduce the risk of oil spill. The Deepwater Horizon incident was a huge wake-up call to everyone in the ocean conservation community. Our work showed that every dead dolphin recovered on the beach probably translated to 50-250 deaths that went undetected at sea. In 2013, we’re keen to draw attention to “silent spills” – we’re trying to understand what happens when marine life comes into contact with small oil spills that happen everyday during routine operations when transporting oil by sea. Keep in touch for our new findings.

7. Sign up to become a monthly donor to Oceans Initiative. We hate to ask. We know that everyone is asking you to fund a lot of great causes. But the reality is that our charitable organization can’t function without your financial support. Please consider making a one-time or monthly donation.

8. A new ocean etiquette. This isn’t rocket science. Being a good ocean neighbour is no different than being a good neighbour on land. Don’t litter. Recycle. Keep the noise down when you’re having a party. Pick up your dog poop. Cover your mouth when you cough (i.e., don’t transmit diseases into the ocean through unsafe aquaculture practices).

9. More support for research and conservation for animals like Pacific white-sided dolphins that are currently under the conservation radar, but may need our help. This is a pet peeve of ours. The ocean is facing multiple threats, and we need to set priorities when spending scarce conservation funding. But the current model isn’t working. Too often, we wait for a conservation problem to become a crisis, with funding thrown at the problem in hopes of reversing declines. Instead, we’d like to see a calmer approach, where species are monitored routinely, and potential problems are identified before they become catastrophic.

10. Keep it cool and save the polar ice caps. Everyone loves polar bears and penguins, especially at this time of year. Reduce your dependence on fossil fuels. It feels like a tall order, but we each can make progress in even small ways. We travel a lot to do science (including in the Antarctic), but also to see our science used in making smart decisions to protect the ocean. In fact, we rely on our charitable pooling account with Aeroplan to keep our field costs low. But we’ve recently discovered Aeroplan’s partner programs to offset carbon. We’ve switched to video conference whenever we can, but when we have to travel, we try to offset the carbon costs.

11. For you to become our next Twitter follower. It’s a fantastic spot to engage in conversation. Hope to see you there.

12. Our final wish is for you to connect and engage in ocean conservation in a way that speaks to you. For us, it’s sitting on our deck at our field site, listening to the sounds of whales and dolphins breathing as they swim by. For our land-locked friends, it’s listening to the songs of whales online. What works for you? How do you connect to the ocean? What is your wish for the ocean?

Wishing you all the best for 2013!

-Erin & Rob

PUTTING OCEAN NOISE ON THE MAP

by oceansadminAcoustics, Habitat, Human Impacts, Ocean Noise November 4, 2012No Comments

Chronic ocean noise — This map from Dr Erbe’s paper shows the cumulative noise energy we predict across one year from shipping traffic in BC waters.

We recently partnered with two acousticians, Christine Erbe of Curtin University and Alex MacGillivray of JASCO, to predict how BC’s waters sound to a whale. Using shipping traffic data compiled by Patrick O’Hara (which we used previously in a ship strike analysis for fin, humpback and killer whales), and making some assumptions about how noisy ships are at different speeds, Christine and Alex were able to predict how much noise different parts of BC experience throughout the year.

What we found is that while ship noise comes and goes, human activities are carving persistent acoustic features into the ocean soundscape, because shipping lanes are entrenched.

The good news is that some areas, particularly some of the mainland inlets on BC’s north central coast, are still comparatively quiet. It may be that the tangle of islands, fjords and narrow passageways, buffer the ability of anthropogenic ocean noise to propagate up into those inlets, some of which remain in a bit of an acoustic shadow. Armed with this new information, perhaps Canadians would like to manage human activities in such a way as to maintain these sites as acoustic sanctuaries — marine wilderness areas that remind us what the ocean used to sound like decades ago, when whales were the loudest features of the soundscape.

We enjoyed working on this project, which was supported by WWF-Canada. Please see what WWF had to say about our study, and check out the original article, which is published in the open-access {FREE!} journal, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Express Letters.

We Heart Vancouver…and Vancouver Magazine

by oceansadminOcean Noise October 9, 2012July 6, 2022No Comments

erin&rob_brianhowell — Our photoshoot with Brian Howell

In July, Rob and I stopped in Vancouver on our way up to our field site for our dolphin field work. We love Vancouver and don’t need much of an excuse to spend time in the city, but this one had a purpose: a Vancouver Magazine photoshoot. Journalist, Roberta Staley had written an article for Vancouver Magazine about our Quiet Ocean Campaign and all we needed were a few photos to go with it. Rob & I were both a little nervous and having just flown in from Scotland were not necessarily looking our best. Did I mention that we’re field biologists, not urban sophisticates, and frankly it shows? But the photographer, the amazing Brian Howell, quickly put our worries to rest by promising to take good care of us. All we had to do was meet up with Brian at 4:30am (good thing we still had jetlag) and be ready to get wet. A beautiful sunrise and a wade in the Pacific Ocean was the perfect welcome home. If you don’t know Brian’s work, we recommend checking out his stunning exhibit on shopping carts. We returned to the city late that beautiful summer morning and sipped our coffees next to Douglas Coupland’s (did you know he sculpted ?!?!) Digital Orca sculpture, overlooking Vancouver Harbour. OK. Full disclosure: we ended up at Cafe Medina for one of the best breakfasts of our lives.

Please be sure to check out the Vancouver Magazine article about our work on whales & ocean noise. We just thought you might like to know the story behind the photo.