Our 12 wishes for the ocean on 12.12.12

by oceansadminHuman ImpactsPosted on No 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 NoisePosted on No Comments
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 NoisePosted on No Comments
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.

Douglas Coupland’s Digital Orca sculpture in Vancouver, British Columbia

WHERE THE WHALES (AND WHALE RESEARCHERS) ARE

by oceansadminHabitat, Human Impacts, Populations, WhalesPosted on No Comments

 

A global summary of where researchers have published density estimates for whales, dolphins and porpoises (from Kaschner et al. 2012)

Rob and his colleagues published a neat new paper today in the open access journal, PLOS ONE.  The paper, led by Dr Kristin Kaschner at the University of Freiburg, examined >1100 estimates of the abundance of whales, dolphins and porpoises reported in more than 400 surveys conducted worldwide between 1975 and 2005.

It is hard to convey how boring science can be sometimes.  

During the research, the team digitized thousands of maps, so you don’t have to.  Seriously.  Kristin made the data for the map (above) available for download, in case you ever want to do a global analysis of where people have and haven’t surveyed for whales.  Here’s what was learned about the global patchiness of whale and dolphin research.  Overall, only 25% of the world’s ocean surface has been surveyed at all, while only 6% has been covered well enough to offer any hope of detecting trends in population size.  Other findings included:

  • The vast majority of surveying effort has taken place in waters under the jurisdiction of wealthy, northern hemisphere countries like the US, Canada and Europe.
  • Southern hemisphere regions are underrepresented, except the Antarctic, where the International Whaling Commission leads surveys to estimate abundance of the Antarctic minke whale, which is subject to scientific whaling by Japan.
  • Few surveys have taken place in high-seas waters beyond national jurisdiction.  This hinders global initiatives to implement high-seas marine protected areas that reflect the habitat needs of whales and dolphins.
  • The level of survey effort conducted in the eastern tropical Pacific may look excessive but is actually at the low end of what is needed to detect population trends.
  • The main focus for surveying populations was in tuna fishing regions due to the market for “dolphin-friendly” tuna, with more surveys in the eastern tropic Pacific Ocean than in the rest of world combined.

Our ability to protect cetaceans from threats such as military sonar, seismic surveys (for offshore oil exploration), oil spills or bycatch in fisheries hinges on good information, and this latest research indicates a lack of baseline information to evaluate threats across the vast majority of the world’s oceans.  As international efforts are underway to protect global biodiversity, the researchers conclude there is an urgent need to develop new methods to fill in data gaps which can in turn improve marine conservation efforts.

 

Here are some quotes from the authors:

Dr Nicola Quick, co-author and honorary research fellow from the University of St Andrews, commented: “One of the primary motivations for our research was to know where whales might be most vulnerable to the use of military sonar or seismic surveys to find oil under the seabed. The enormous data gaps we found in our study remind us that we still have a lot of work to do to predict whether vulnerable species might be using the waters that have never been surveyed.  We recommend international coordination of surveys to share resources to fill in these gaps.”

When looking at the coverage in the eastern tropical Pacific, Kristin noted that “the rest of the world has a lot of catching up to do if we want to know if whale populations are recovering from historic whaling or bycatch in fisheries. The issue of data gaps pervades every issue in marine planning, from fisheries management to marine protected areas.  Because of the strict science needs of whaling, the information available on whales and dolphins may paint an optimistic picture of marine science.  Knowledge gaps are almost certainly worse for deep-sea invertebrates, sharks or marine viruses.”

Oceans Initiative co-founder, Dr Rob Williams (who is also a Researcher in the Sea Mammal Research Unit at the University of St Andrews) added: “One of the most important management and conservation decisions we make is how to allocate scarce funding for research.  As we aim to protect marine biodiversity on a global scale, we need to ensure that our scientific advice reflects the fact that the vast majority of the world ocean has never been surveyed in a comprehensive way. If we ignore that, our advice is biased toward coastal waters of wealthy countries, and that is unjust.”

 

Whale stranding in Scotland

by oceansadminHuman ImpactsPosted on One Comment

Recently (2 September 2012), 26 pilot whales stranded on the beach about a mile from the place where we’re staying in Anstruther, Scotland.  The whales came ashore just a few feet from the coastal path where we run with our dog, Wishart.  Pilot whales are normally found in deeper water, so this was highly unusual and highly distressing.  Many capable people from our research group at the University of St Andrews, Sea Mammal Research Unit, were at the ready to assist.  In the United Kingdom, the British Divers Marine Life Rescue take the lead (with the help of veterinarians) on refloating the whales that are still alive.  Later, postmortems, or necropsies, are performed on the whales that do not survive.

 

 

Every whale stranding is a loss.  But, along with this loss is a scientific opportunity to learn more about why whales strand generally and why these whales stranded in particular.  Marine mammals can strand for a variety of reasons including disease, starvation, entanglement in fishing gear, trauma from tactical sonar, and injuries from ship strikes.  We look forward to hearing the results of the detailed necropsies conducted on the animals that died during this event.  In addition to the animal welfare concerns, which are paramount, we see an important role for science to play in these strandings, because there are some tests that can only be conducted on animals while they are still alive. At a recent workshop on noise and stress, one of the biggest recommendations was that opportunities like this recent stranding need to be exploited to conduct stress-related research so that we can better understand the impact of human activities on whales.  Every time we attend a meeting on ocean noise and whales, we’re reminded that we are still missing basic information on hearing abilities in many marine mammal species.

We understand that these whales are suffering, and the last thing they need is some cold-hearted scientist poking and prodding it to take a blood sample.  These are inherently stressful situations.  But just as you learn a lot when your doctor takes a blood or urine sample, these tragedies present an important opportunity to learn what we can from living whales to help us figure out why whales strand and advance our knowledge on marine mammal physiology and biology so that we can better protect the survivors and their habitat.

The resulting information dramatically improves our ability to answer the questions that everyone will ask after a stranding:  Why did it happen?  How can we prevent it from happening again?

 

If you see a marine mammal stranding, please contact the authorities in your country.

In the US

NOAA Marine Mammal Stranding Networks:

In Canada

Marine Animal Strandings and Entanglement Response Program

Toll Free: 1-888-895-3003

 

In the UK

British Divers: