It rains a lot in the rainforest. Even when the rain lets up, photographing grey dolphins swimming through grey water under a grey sky has its challenges. Our camera is often pushed to its limits. Out in the snow, rain, mist or fog falls in our little open boat, we dream of sunnier habitat. They do have dolphins in Mexico, after all. But, the dolphins we study here in British Columbia, Pacific white-sided dolphins, have decided this is home. And, while it’s true, they do have closely-related cousins in Mexico, we suspect these dolphins are homebodies.
We’re glad they like it here. Although we travel a lot for work, we’re homebodies too. The thousands of photos we take are helping us figure out where these dolphins call home. With each photograph of each individual dolphin, we have a data point that can help us tell the dolphins’ stories. The more times we capture an individual on film, the more times it enters our catalogue, and skipping over some math, that tells us how well the dolphin population is doing. Do they need protection or is the population doing just fine without our help? It also gives us clues about dolphin movement and whether they remain inshore or go exploring in pelagic waters.
Thanks to the generous support of contributors to the Beyond Miles Aeroplan Program, all the wonderful supporters from our Dolphinpalooza fundraising campaign, and a lot of friends at home, we are conducting another field season this August. We’re pretty anxious to get home, and see what’s changed since the last time we saw the dolphins.
Oceans Initiative is a team of scientists on a mission to protect whales, dolphins and their habitat. To celebrate World Oceans Day, we’re releasing the main findings from our Ocean Noise project. Our clever friends at Column Five Media have helped us turn our cutting-edge acoustics research with Cornell University’s Bioacoustics Research Program into a simple, visual story. Please feel free to download the infographic, or share our page with your friends.
But whale habitat is more than physical space and food to eat.
“The places in which these animals live are defined not only in terms of space, but in terms of sound – they live in an acoustic world and depend on that world for survival,” says Dr. Christopher Clark from the Cornell Lab’s Bioacoustics Research Program, who has been listening in on the whales to get a better understanding of how noise impacts their acoustic habitat. “Imagine living in a village where you can’t see each other or where you’re going. Instead, everyone relies on sounds and calls to go about your lives and to maintain the social network. What happens to your world as the smog of noise gets to the point where you cannot hear each other?”
We love partnering with smart, talented people to multiply our impact. In 2008, we partnered with Dr Christopher Clark and Dimitri Ponirakis at Cornell University’s Bioacoustics Research Program to find out how ocean noise levels in British Columbia measure up to the rest of the world. We wanted to find out whether the whales in BC have a relatively quiet ocean or if ocean noise levels are high enough to challenge the whales’ ability to hear each other and find food.
With the help of a few visionary funders and a very long list of generous friends (THANK YOU!) who helped us in the field, we used Cornell’s cutting-edge hardware (specialized underwater microphones) to record shipping noise and whale calls in strategic sites along the BC coast in 2008, 2008 & 2010. The hydrophone recorders sit on the seabed for weeks or months, recording all ocean sounds (human and natural), then we navigate back to where the hydrophones were dropped, play a signal to them and the device pops up to the surface with a record of everything it heard during the deployment.
Once we retrieve the hydrophones, Dimitri Ponirakis works his magic in the Cornell lab, and turns thousands of hours of recordings, terabytes of data, into some results that we can use to quantify how noisy or quiet whale habitats are. We then asked the visionary team at Column 5 Media to help turn our decibels and decimals into a delightfully appealing infographic that communicates our results.
The Secret to a Sound Ocean infographic shows typical noise levels in three frequency bands. Think of it this way: the three bands represent what the noise levels may sound like to a killer whale (a soprano), a humpback whale (a tenor) and a fin whale (a bass). What we’re finding is that some of the most important areas for killer whales (e.g., Robson Bight & Haro Strait) happen to be among the noisiest sites we sampled. And some of the areas that are most important for humpback whales are fairly quiet (Caamano Sound, Kitkiata Inlet), but could get a lot noisier given the number of industrial developments planned for the area. Our data for this important area are unique, and we are glad that our funders helped us collect essential baseline recordings while the area is still relatively quiet.
Our plans for this work is to put this all into a framework that allows us to answer the So What? question. We’re able to model how much acoustic habitat these different whale species lose in sites with different noise levels. Rob’s Fulbright Chair position explored the ocean noise issue from a policy perspective. Now his Marie Curie fellowship at the University of St Andrews allows him to build mathematical models to explore how chronic ocean noise could affect the dynamics of fin, humpback and killer whale populations.
The thing we love most about this issue is that it is a relatively solvable problem that lends itself to creative solutions to make life quieter for marine wildlife. Our current work identifies whether we can reduce noise levels by asking ships to slow down or avoid certain areas altogether. We’re identifying whether some areas are so quiet that they should be recognized as national treasures: acoustic refuges that we try to manage so they stay quiet. Our mission is to identify noisy areas and to help make them quieter; and to identify quiet areas and to try to keep them quiet.
If you’d like to help our efforts do that, please spread the word. Please share this page, subscribe to our newsletter, or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or our Aeroplan Beyond Miles donation page. Thanks again to everyone who has helped us do this work, and Happy World Oceans Day!!!!!
In these troubled economic times, scientists are under increasing pressure to (a) demonstrate the value of the services we provide to society, and (b) find creative ways to provide those services at ever-lower cost. Money is scarce, and environmental research is competing for funding with other worthy causes. Because many of the biggest foundations in the charitable sector make funding decisions based on the year-end value of their portfolio, an economic downturn like the 2008 crash can affect funding decisions for years to come, so that grantmaking remains low and risk-averse long after the private sector has started to experience fiscal recovery.
At Oceans Initiative, we specialize in doing more with less.
The theme of Rob’s doctoral thesis was how to study whales when you have no money. The mathematical models at the core of his PhD research were cutting edge and represented an interesting scientific question in their own right, but their real societal value was to provide cost-effective tools to estimate how many whales are in an area by collecting sightings from ships that were already on the water: platforms of opportunity. He developed the methods in the Antarctic, where research costs are high and whale populations are still recovering from historic whaling. Our colleague, Nicole Koshure, recently earned her Master’s degree from Simon Fraser University using a similar approach to estimate abundance of cetaceans around Vancouver Island using sightings collected from the Straitwatch monitoring vessel.
We’ve just read about a new partnership between UVic and BC Ferries, where forward-thinking oceanographers have installed sophisticated sensors on ferries to collect oceanographic data to monitor the health of the Strait of Georgia. We think this is a great idea. In our view, funding is the greatest challenge we face in marine conservation. Kurt Vonnegut said it best: “We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.” True enough, but given the financial realities we face, there is also a compelling need for scientists to identify clever, cost-saving methods so we can identify ways to be sound stewards of the environment at minimal cost to society.
A killer whale and a cruise ship, sharing Johnstone Strait
One of the overarching themes of our work is quintessentially Canadian. We study survival. {Margaret Atwood proposed that survival is one of the most central and enduring narratives in Canadian literature.} OK, we study the probability that whales and dolphins, not humans, will survive from one year to the next, given the amount of fish or noise or propellers in the sea, but bear with us for a minute.
We ran across a few quotes today about the environment from Margaret Atwood’s talk at this week’s “Big Thinking” lecture series in Ontario, and thought you’d want to read them:
With the growing awareness of human impacts on the environment, Atwood notes that there’s a sense that “we’re clinging on by our finger nails.” “We will kill it [the environment], and in doing so seal our own doom, because you are what you breathe and we and nature were joined by the hip all along.”
Amen. But listen to this perspective on the importance of story-telling. She called her talk “Bedtime Stories,” because that’s how children learn about their world from their parents. “People are natural storytellers,” she said. “Most people will put up with almost anything to engage in an act of communication. We must narrate or die.”
“The world is uncertain, and it has been dark, and it’s always been dark at bedtime,” said Atwood. “[But] we listen better in the dark.”
We’re still mulling this over, but this story resonates with our work on whales. Killer whales are rare among mammals in that they possess what can only be called culture. Our colleagues have shown that different families use different dialects, and that mothers teach their calves their vocal repertoire in much the same way that we learn our stories from our parents. Much of our work now focusses on increasing levels of human-made ocean noise that hinders the ability of whales to communicate with one another. Ocean noise is the aquatic equivalent of turning out the lights. We’re still struggling to understand what that means for the story-telling whales we study.
