Our plan was to spend a quiet year in Scotland. Erin’s making great strides on her PhD on Pacific white-sided dolphins. Rob won a Marie Curie Fellowship to model the effects of noise on whale populations. But MAN! This ended up being one of our busiest years ever. Here are 11 of our highlights of 2011.
Former First Lady, Rosalynn Carter, said it best: “There is nothing more important than a good, safe, secure home.” She was talking about people, but it’s not a bad description of how we protect wildlife. Much of our work as marine conservation biologists involves identifying habitat that’s important to whales and dolphins, and ensuring that their home is kept safe from human activities that may be causing harm. Easy, right?
THE CONCEPT OF HOME MAY BE A BIT, UM, BIGGER TO A WHALE THAN IT IS TO US.
Some whales migrate half-way around the world between a good meal and a hot date, so a whale’s home covers some serious square footage. Legal definitions of “critical habitat” tend to be a bit fuzzy: critical habitat is the habitat area essential to the conservation of a listed species. Canada has interpreted this definition progressively for resident killer whales. Their critical habitat includes adequate availability of Chinook salmon, the whales’ preferred prey, and most interestingly, a recognition that a whale’s habitat is inherently acoustic. So we know that critical habitat is more than just a box on a map.
The pioneers of killer whale research, like the late Dr Michael Bigg, first called the fish-eating killer whales “resident”, because they found the same whales in Johnstone Strait year after year. Some features of the whales’ landscape are pretty obvious. The famous pebble rubbing beaches off northern Vancouver Island, are fixed and immediately apparent to casual observation. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to guess that a place like Salmon Bank might be important feeding habitat for southern resident killer whales. A rubbing beach, a narrow strait, Salmon Bank — these are relatively small, tractable areas to protect.
We do a lot of work in critical habitat for killer whales. We estimate how much salmon killer whales need to thrive, how boat noise can mask a killer whale’s ability to find fish, and how many killer whales could be affected if an oil spill occurred in critical habitat. For years, we’ve studied how boat traffic can affect behaviours and activities of killer whales, and have recently identified a candidate marine protected area for southern residents built around the whales’ feeding hotspots.
What about all the other whale, dolphin and porpoise species? How do you begin to identify the areas that are most important to species that cross national boundaries the way you and I cross the street? How do you look at the whole ocean and set aside priority areas to protect? These questions are at the core of marine spatial planning and systematic conservation planning. We partnered with Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society’s (WDCS) Critical Habitat/ Marine Protected Area Programme to outline steps to incorporate cetacean distribution into marine planning. Download the report by Rob Williams, Kristin Kaschner, Erich Hoyt, Randall Reeves and Erin Ashe here, or on Erich’s website, www.cetaceanhabitat.org.
The first step is outlining where people have looked for whales, and where they have and have not seen them. Then you can figure out methods to fill in the gaps.
One use of this report is in designing marine mammal-oriented protected areas (MPAs), networks and protection zones. We’ve mapped the data so you don’t have to. We’ve combed the published literature from all the line transect surveys we could find, and with Doug Sandilands’ help, we produced cetacean distribution and density maps for dozens of species throughout the vast IUCN marine region of the northeastern Pacific Ocean. The report includes a number of appendices for data sets and experts for the region.
At the First International Conference on Marine Mammal Protected Areas (ICMMPA) in Maui (Hawaii) in 2009, participants concluded that a global effort was needed to identify and define important marine mammal habitats and hot spots. Our new report is our contribution to that global effort. It sums up the current state of knowledge on the density of cetaceans on a large geographical scale. Such information — once integrated and mapped with similar data on other species and with biogeographic data covering environmental features and ocean processes — can be used to help identify critical habitat and contribute to the design and creation of MPAs, networks and zones in national waters and on the high seas. To paraphrase Mrs Carter, we’re working to create good, safe and secure homes for whales, dolphins and porpoises in BC waters.
They say write about what you know. That’s tough, because I don’t know what it’s like to be a girl in the developing world. I’m trying to learn, because girls in the developing world hold the key to creating a better life for all of us. It’s called The Girl Effect.
I can’t think about The Girl Effect without thinking about my two best friends.
When I was 12, all I had to worry about was how to spend my afternoons with my two best friends. We spent our time at the farm where we lived and breathed horses. My friend’s mom had one of the best jobs on earth. She was a riding instructor, which meant we could have riding lessons and unlimited access to horses in exchange for doing chores around the barn. More than 20 years later, these amazing women are still my best friends and we all have or are pursuing advanced graduate degrees. One an environmental lawyer, the other now pursuing her MBA, and I’m finishing my PhD as a marine conservation biologist at the University of St Andrews. We were lucky.
While we certainly weren’t rich, we were definitely not living in poverty like 600 million adolescent girls in the developing world. We had the chance to cultivate friendships and draw upon these for support when we needed. We had the chance to play, pursue an education and now give back. The reality is, around a quarter of girls in the developing world are not in school. This is unacceptable.
Studies show that giving adolescent girls in the developing world the chance to thrive causes a RIPPLE EFFECT. When she receives seven or more years of education, she marries four years later and has 2.2 fewer children. Plus, when women and girls earn income, they reinvest 90 percent of it into their families,. (Men tend to reinvest only 30 to 40% of their income to their families.) And this goes on generation after generation. Educated mothers are likely to send their children to school.
This is going to sound a bit weird, but please bear with me. I study whale and dolphin families. My early love of animals and a supportive environment catalyzed my passion for biology, conservation of marine mammals and the math required to study whales and dolphins. Early on, I was captivated by killer whales, or orcas. At 18, I left home to go to university, but orcas live with their families for their entire lives. Maintaining the integrity of this close-knit social network is essential for their survival. Mothers teach their babies how to find fish, how to sing their family dialect and how to stick together in a storm. Siblings babysit for one another. Everyone shares fish with each other.
But, we’ve discovered that like The Girl Effect, it’s the young females who are the vital link in these societies. When aquariums go looking for new whales to capture, they often target these young females who have not had babies yet because they are smaller and have an entire reproductive lifetime ahead of them. But removing these young females from their families is one of the worst things you can do to an orca family and its population. It breaks their social network apart. Could The Girl Effect be universal?
I had the opportunity to go to school and study biology so I can be a part of these amazing discoveries about whales and dolphins. Every girl should and can have the opportunity to go to school and make her own choices.
What can you do? Watch this video to learn more then share. You can even write your own Girl Effect blog post by clicking here .
Happy (?!?) Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup Day! We hope you’re reading this post on your smart phone, on your way to a beach to clean up plastic.
The ocean needs all the help it can get, from people everywhere and in all walks of life, to remove plastic from the ecosystem before it chokes something. This is a practical and tangible thing we can do to promote better stewardship of our coastal environment.
We recently published a paper that provides the first estimate of how much plastic is floating in BC coastal waters. The answer ain’t pretty.
RIGHT NOW, THERE ARE TENS OF THOUSANDS OF PIECES OF PLASTIC AND STYROFOAM, FIST-SIZED OR BIGGER, FLOATING IN BC WATERS.
And most of the plastic accumulates in places far from big cities. That’s a problem, because our perception of the problem is influenced by how visible or cryptic it is. With Raincoast, we conducted systematic surveys of the BC coast, used the the data to estimate abundance and distribution of 11 marine mammal species, sharks and now garbage. By overlaying the maps of wildlife and plastic distribution, we are able to identify where marine mammals might be encountering marine debris that they eat by accident or get tangled in. These higher-risk areas are also well out of sight, so the scale of the marine plastic problem can only be underestimated.
Much of our work deals with that aspect of human nature: out of sight, out of mind. After the Deepwater Horizon Incident/BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, we combined publicly available data in a novel way to estimate that every dead dolphin recovered after the spill may represent another 50-250 deaths that went undetected. Similar work needs to be done in BC to understand cryptic forms of human-caused mortality: porpoise and dolphin bycatch in unmonitored fisheries; oiling of seabirds from small spills and pumping oily bilge water; entanglement in marine debris; ship and vessel strikes for whales and dolphins. Actually, the to-do list can feel pretty overwhelming sometimes. Which is why it feels so good to accomplish something tangible.
Like picking up plastic off the beach.
So, get out there, and tell us how you did! We will too.
We are field biologists. We get excited about field work, not meetings. But we can’t tell you how excited we are to attend next week’s planning session for an International Quiet Ocean Experiment. {The fact that it’s in Paris, home of the best bakery in the world, may have something to do with it.} The IQOE is an international research effort coordinated by the team that led the wildly successful Census of Marine Life. The idea is to bring together the best and brightest to synthesize what we know about impacts of noise on marine organisms, experimentally remove human-generated noise in certain areas, and measure the response. The scale and complexity of the problem and the experiment are staggering. You can easily see how this exercise could take a decade.
Since 1995, Rob has been studying the effects of boat traffic and boat noise on the behaviour, activity budgets and energetics of killer whales. Since 2008, we have been immersed in our Quiet Ocean Campaign, which measures noise levels along the BC coast, modelling the impacts of that noise on whale populations, and proposing solutions to keep quiet areas quiet and make noisy areas quieter. This concern about human impacts on marine mammals is evident in our track record. Most of our publications deal with human impacts in one way or another. Last week’s near-miss, where a private boater came so close to L90 that many observers thought she’d been struck by a boat, reaffirms our belief that whales need sanctuaries, like the no-go zone we’ve been proposing to protect critical feeding habitats for southern resident killer whales. Our ocean noise study is maturing, and is poised to become a result-generating machine in the next year. You’ll be hearing a lot more scientific results from us in the coming year, especially about our proposals for acoustic sanctuaries, or Quiet Marine Protected Areas.
BUT SCIENCE ALONE DOES NOT SOLVE PROBLEMS LIKE RISING NOISE LEVELS IN THE OCEAN.
To change the way the world works will require tremendous cooperation and vision, because most people are simply unaware that the products they buy every day are shipped across ocean basins, and that the sum total of global shipping is a constant roar that drowns out the natural sounds of the ocean. So, there is something wonderfully idealistic and poetic about a global experiment to turn off the noise we make in the ocean, just for one day, to see and to hear how the sea responds. In that spirit, our post today is Pablo Neruda’s extraordinary, visionary poem, Keeping Quiet:
Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.
Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.
Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.
What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about…
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Now I will count to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.
{Extravagaria : A Bilingual Edition
by Pablo Neruda (Author), Alastair Reid (Translator)
Noonday Press; Bilingual edition (January 2001) ISBN: 0374512388 page 26
(original Estravagario, Editorial Losada, Buenos Aires, 1958}