Dolphin Blowing Bubbles
Big Skye Country
In the summer, you can you usually find Rob, Wishart (the dog) and me doing field work in our little boat with whales and dolphins in British Columbia, Canada. This year’s different.
We’re in a new country. Scotland. I’m finishing my PhD on dolphin ecology and Rob is in the middle of his Marie Curie Research Fellowship (researching ocean noise), both at the University of St Andrews.
This is the first time in over a decade that we are away from the Pacific Northwest and sitting a summer out. There’s no denying it: we are homesick. Wishart’s actually homestick (there is way less driftwood on these beaches than at home!).
We find ourselves fighting the urge to pack our camera equipment, binoculars, field notes and dog biscuits into the boat. We’re restless. We are constantly gazing out into the waves, hoping for a marine mammal to emerge.
Wilderness was required. We needed to increase the probability of a dolphin sighting. A road trip was in order. So, we packed up and headed to the Highlands, to the stunning Isle of Skye to visit a friend, Deirdre. (Truth is, we needed a doctor’s signature on a form, but any excuse for a road trip. We also miss long Canadian drives.) So we did what you do before any pilot field study: we asked around for traditional ecological knowledge. Fortunately, here at the world renowned Sea Mammal Research Unit, you don’t need to go far to find an expert on sea mammals. Our good friend and colleague, Lindsay Wilson, conducts amazing research on seals and their diet all over Scotland. Lindsay handed us a map, pointed out some hotspots, and away we went!
Wishart is an incredible dolphin-spotter. But this trip was going to be exclusively shore-based. However, he did mange to spot some wildlife for us along the way.
When we reached our destination the first night, we spotted a pod of about 20 common dolphins swimming past our hotel as we parked the car! Mission accomplished. Unless we start seeing bottlenose dolphins in St Andrews Bay, that glimpse may have to tide us over until the fall, when Rob and I will be presenting our work at the Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference in Vancouver. Rob will present his work on ocean noise, killer whales and salmon. I’ll present on dolphins. We will travel to the conference thanks to generous donations of frequent flyer miles to our charitable pooling account with Aeroplan. If we can raise enough cash to put fuel in our boat, we will also be able to spend two weeks conducting conservation-minded research on Pacific white-sided dolphins. Learn more about our dolphin study here, and if you’re interested, you can help support our dolphin field work here. Thanks very much!
Happy summer,
Erin +Rob
Oceans Initiative launches Quiet Ocean Campaign
There’s a whole lot of noise in the ocean, and it seems to be getting worse. Chronic ocean noise in some sites is doubling every decade. Today on World Oceans Day, we explain why we should all care about the rising levels of noise on whales and other marine species.
In 2008, we started an ambitious research project in partnership with world leading Bioacoustics Research Program at Cornell University. The results from our comprehensive ocean noise study are streaming in. We are excited and want to share them.
Whales rely on a quiet ocean to find mates and feeding grounds, by listening and calling to one another. But, when the ocean is too noisy from ships and other human activities, these beautiful songs and other acoustic signals are masked and may be prevented from reaching the whale on the other end (the receiver).
We have been concerned about this for years.
Listening to hydrophones in our front yard for just a few minutes was enough to drive us crazy. Look at the comments on websites that host live listening stations (Orca Live, or Orca Sound) and you’ll see that boat noise drives everyone nuts. So we decided to do some science to quantify the impacts on whales, and get everyone involved in doing something to reduce ocean noise.
World Oceans Day 2011 marks the official launch of Oceans Initiative’s Quiet Ocean Campaign.
The Quiet Ocean Campaign aims to: 
1. Measure the human contribution to ambient noise levels in important whale habitats in British Columbia (BC), Canada.
2. Assess impacts of chronic ocean noise on whales (and inspire colleagues to do similar work on fish).
3. Build capacity among environmental NGOs to understand the impacts of noise on marine wildlife and incorporate noise data into marine spatial planning.
4. Identify ways to mitigate noise impacts – through the use of ship-quieting technologies, speed and area restrictions, and through the identification of particularly quiet sites that could be protected as Quiet MPAs or Acoustic Sanctuaries.
5. Engage the public by building a constituency for a quiet ocean. Our science benefits enormously from our partnership with Dr. Christopher Clark (Cornell University Bioacoustics Research Program), who pioneered methods to model the volume of acoustic habitat that whales lose from shipping noise via acoustic masking, and to present this information in simple, objective and quantitative terms.
We are going to need your help to turn down the noise in the ocean.
“Like” us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter (@oceansresearch) if you want to learn more about our work. We’ll be posting our results quickly. Maybe not at the speed of sound, but as quickly as we can, so WATCH THIS SPACE…
I LOVE DOLPHINS IN THE SPRINGTIME
It’s that time of year again. Pacific white-sided are making appearances in the waters throughout the Pacific Northwest. Last month, Knight Inlet, BC was bursting with Pacific white-sided dolphins and we were there to collect ID photographs, acoustic recordings (Click here to listen) and prey samples.
Soon after our Knight Inlet trip ended, our colleague, Dr Andrew Wright, photographed a group of dolphins in Howe Sound, between Vancouver and Bowen Island! He took some beautiful photographs, and a few of the individuals bear distinctive markings. Now, thanks to the support from the SeaDoc Society, we are doing the painstaking work of comparing his few mug shots to our catalogue, to see if there are any matches between dolphins in the Broughton Archipelago and those using the Salish Sea. In fact, our partnership with SeaDoc has inspired us to take a transboundary look at our cetacean conservation work more generally.
Which reminds us, if you spot any dolphins, we are very grateful for any opportunistic photographs of dolphin dorsal fins. This is what a dolphin ID shot looks like:
but, please, only try this at home if you have a really long lens. Remember that the “Be Whale Wise Guidelines” also apply to dolphins, so please remember to remain at least 100 meters/yards away. Thanks!
SHARKS IN BC?
Mark Hume, at the Globe & Mail, just published a neat new story about our recently published paper on sharks in BC (with Tom Okey, Scott Wallace and Vince Gallucci). The paper was published months ago, but became newsworthy again recently in light of the Cohen Commission’s discussions about the potential role of marine predators in governing salmon population dynamics in BC. Over and over again at that hearing, we heard that scientists, managers and decision-makers in BC need good estimates of abundance for top predators in our marine ecosystem.
Our shark survey, which we conducted with Raincoast Conservation, was originally designed to estimate abundance and distribution of cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) in BC, because that number wasn’t available at the time for species that can’t be studied using photo-identification. Thanks to an incredibly hard-working team with strong stomachs (we crossed Hecate Strait dozens of times on a relatively small sailboat), we accomplished our primary goal and achieved a number of secondary objectives. The shark study was a great bonus, but so was our estimate of how much plastic pollution there is in BC waters. [There is a story on our garbage sightings here, but the peer-reviewed article is coming out in Marine Pollution Bulletin soon.] We used the data to evaluate where fin, humpback and killer whales are most vulnerable to ship strike risk. Don’t tell anyone, but we’re also working on a paper on Mola mola (those weird, giant ocean sunfish) in our spare time with sunfish expert, Dr Tierney Thys. At the same time, we collected zooplankton data, physical oceanographic data (temperature, salinity), and had a seabird observer on board. We are dying to find the funds to hire a statistician to turn those bird sightings into abundance estimates for seabirds, but that’s a bit of an aside.
Our surveys were conducted initially in 2004, and it’s getting time to start thinking about redoing them. The thought of all that fundraising and planning is a bit overwhelming, but when we look back at the scientific return on investment, it looks those surveys represented pretty good value. And who could have anticipated that (a) we’d find massive numbers of sharks; (b) that the salmon people hadn’t considered those predators in their ecosystem models, and (c) that there would be catastrophic sockeye salmon runs in the Fraser River years later that would require us to re-think marine ecosystem functioning in a holistic manner? Initially, we conducted the surveys out of concern that Canada would lift a moratorium on offshore oil and gas exploration and extraction, and we wanted to be able to quantify the risk to the marine mammals that we study. That threat has subsided, it seems. We hope that the next use of our science is in the Pacific North Coast Integrated Management Area planning process.
I guess one lesson here is that basic science never goes out of style. The other is, as Mark says, if we’re going to continue our work on a bigger scale, we’re gonna need a bigger boat. [Well, you knew we had to get the Jaws quote in there, right?]