Oceans Initiative launches Quiet Ocean Campaign

by oceansadminAcoustics, Conservation, Ocean NoisePosted on 2 Comments

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

by oceansadminAcoustics, Dolphins, Populations, Women in SciencePosted on 2 Comments

Dolphin leaping in Knight Inlet

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:

Example of a photo used for identification

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?

by oceansadminEcosystems, PopulationsPosted on No Comments

| iStockphoto

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?]

(WHALE, DOLPHIN AND HUMAN) MOTHERS ROCK

by oceansadminDolphins, Habitat, Human Impacts, Populations, Whales, Women in SciencePosted on No Comments
Killer whale (orca) mother and calf

I’m not a mom (yet), but being in the field with whales and dolphins for my PhD research is making me think a lot lately about motherhood.  The killer whales (orcas) that we study stay with their mothers their entire lives:  they live in a matrifocal society.  That’s rare.  Sure, when the daughters grow up and have whale babies of their own, they often travel in their smaller family groups and spend days apart, but what’s unusual is that even sons stay with their mums their entire lives.  That’s unheard-of in any other mammalian society.  We’re not sure what advantage this social structure offers to killer whales.  Maybe mothers pass on critical information, and serve as archives of lessons learned through time on where to find salmon in lean years and where the best rubbing beaches are.

This week we attended a fantastic lecture by Jane Goodall here in St Andrews.  The science was interesting, but we were most struck by the story of how Jane Goodall became Jane Goodall.  As Dr. Goodall recounted her incredible story of becoming first a primatologist and then a force of nature, she attributes her path and success to the support of her mother (we do too!).  Chimpanzees, Dr. Goodall reminded us, also have societies that rely on mothers to teach offspring, and nurture and protect young chimps.

Moms know stuff.  In one ‘green mommy blog’, Eco Child’s Play , the author points out the possible dangers to your baby (decreased IQ, increase in attention-deficit disorder, cancer, endocrine disruption) from using products loaded with chemical flame retardants.  These contaminants are not good for human babies and, as it turns out, not good for killer whale babies either.  Our colleague, Dr. Peter Ross has found very high levels flame retardant chemicals in the blubber of killer whales.

Mom and baby Pacific white-sided dolphin

Alexandra Morton began to notice Pacific white-sided dolphins in her study area in the late 1980’s.  If you open any guidebook, they’ll tell you that Pacific white-sided dolphins “belong” way offshore, but after a decades-long absence, these dolphins came into the inlets of mainland BC in groups of hundreds.  The odd thing was, there were no babies.  Just adult dolphins.  Then, in 1995, the first young dolphins began to appear.  Were other dolphins scoping out peripheral, new habitat before letting moms and babies know that it was safe?  These days, I see quite a number of mothers and babies.  Even newborns.  In fact, these dolphins may actually be giving birth in the inlets right in our neighborhood. That’s quite a surprise for a species perceived as a resident of the high seas.  This is the phenomenon I want to study next.

In the meantime, knowing this makes me want to protect dolphin habitat from noise, nets, pollution and plastic.  Are these my maternal instincts kicking in?

The best of times, the worst of times: Dolphin-palooza 2011; Earth Day; and the First Anniversary of the BP Spill

by oceansadminDolphins, Habitat, Human Impacts, Populations, Women in SciencePosted on No Comments

This is a big week for the planet. Earth Day and the one-year anniversary of  the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  It will take years to assess the damage from the Gulf spill economically, societally and ecologically. A recent paper in Conservation Letters led by Oceans Initiative’s Dr Rob Williams with the help of many co-authors, suggests that the dead dolphins washing up on the beach are really just the tip of the iceberg.   The team evaluated historic carcass recovery rates in two ways.  One indicated that there could be as many as 50 dolphins that were scavenged, drifted offshore or sank to the bottom of the ocean for every dolphin carcass recovered on the beaches. The other method yielded an even scarier ratio of 250:1.

Photo: Associated Free Press

Dead whales and dolphins on beaches represent only the damage we can see. Killer whale biologist and director of the North Gulf Oceanic Society, Craig Matkin, notes that a genetically distinct pod of killer whales, the AT1pod, exposed to oil from the Exxon Valdez oil spill, have yet to reproduce 22 years later. Since no calves have been born, the unique killer whale pod will be lost.  However grim the statistics, scientists are able to make these calculations thanks to years of careful research on whale and dolphin populations.  Closer to home, imagine how warped our perception of killer whale populations in BC and Washington would be if all the information we had available came from the occasional carcass that washes ashore, instead of conducting annual counts of the entire population, which is what our colleagues at Fisheries and Oceans Canada and the Center for Whale Research do.  There is simply no substitute for the hands-on, hard work of long-term monitoring of cetacean populations.

But many cetacean populations are still under the radar.  You may be surprised to find that for many whale and dolphin species, we still lack basic information on how many  there are and how healthy the populations are.  In 2004, we partnered with Raincoast Conservation to design and conduct systematic surveys to estimate abundance of 6 cetacean species in BC, and we’ve seen first-hand that it is possible to contribute important baseline science while working on a modest budget.

At Oceans Initiative, our aim is to identify data gaps and make it a priority to fill the ones we can afford to (and are most qualified) to fill. Earth Day prompts us to reflect on the contribution we are making to marine research and conservation, but our goal, every day, is to identify modest contributions that we can make to improve the quantity and quality of science available to make decisions that sustain the BC marine environment.

Our recent dolphin ‘spring fling’ {AKA Dolphin-Palooza 2011} is a good example.  With 10 days and a lot of help from our friends and neighbours, we collected gigabytes of photo-identification and acoustic data on Pacific white-sided dolphins in BC, at the extreme south end of the Great Bear Rainforest. Because we are building on Alexandra Morton’s 20 years’ worth of meticulous photographs and observations, we expect that soon we will have a good estimate of abundance, survival and a glimpse into Pacific white-sided dolphin population structure. These important pieces of information form the basis on which sound management decisions can be made. The kind of baseline information we are collecting is essential, whether we are dealing with day-to-day conservation and management decisions or (heaven forbid) assessing damage and supporting recovery if a catastrophe on the scale of the BP oil spill should ever occur in Pacific Northwest waters. The science we do is not the most glamourous kind of field work, but it is necessary.  And we love what we do.

Pacific white-sided dolphins leaping in Knight Inlet, British Columbia