Southern resident killer whales in Haro Strait. Photo by Toby Hall
Southern resident killer whales are in decline. Our recent population viability analysis on southern resident killer whales predicted that, if threats remained constant, it should take several decades for the population to decline from 80 to 75 whales. In fact, that decline took only three years. We fear that the decline is accelerating, and we may be reaching a tipping point.
By studying killer whales from land, we can measure their responses to noise without adding the noise of a research boat to the equation. We use noninvasive techniques to measure swimming speeds, breathing rates, and other behavior. Our work on both northern and southern resident orca has shown us that the whales spend 18-25% less time feeding in the presence of boats than in their absence.
We recently joined an international, interdisciplinary study to understand the relative importance of the three main threats to recovery in the endangered killer whale population. The whales are facing a perfect storm of threats–not enough salmon, too much noise, and too many toxic chemicals in their bodies–but lack of prey is at the eye of the storm. This research shows it will take 30% more big, fatty, Chinook salmon than we’ve seen on average over the last 40 years for the population to reach our recovery goals. That will take time, but we have to start now. Meanwhile, reducing noise and disturbance can help make it a little bit easier for whales to find the salmon we have now. In the coming months, we will be revisiting our study on identifying critical foraging areas in the Salish Sea and strengthening their protection.
Our Animal Counting Toolkit offers open-access data and tools to guide low-cost, small-boat surveys for marine wildlife
Knowing how many animals are in a population is at the cornerstone of many conservation and management decisions. For whales, dolphins & porpoises, ship time to estimate abundance can be prohibitively expensive — often running into the tens of thousands of dollars each day.
We’ve just launched our Animal Counting Toolkit to share some of the lessons we’ve learned over the years in conducting low-cost, small boat surveys for marine mammals in coastal waters. It was a lot of fun to publish this work with our colleagues at University of St Andrews, NOAA, IUCN, CyberTracker, BlueWater GIS, and other NGOs and consulting companies. This is a gentle introduction to designing and conducting a survey to estimate abundance of marine wildlife. It is not a substitute for statistical training, but it should provide a good background for data collection. For data analysis, we strongly recommend joining the Distance Sampling web community and taking the Distance workshops at University of St Andrews.
We published an open access paper introducing our Animal Counting Toolkit approach. Wherever possible, the approach prioritizes free software and tools. Our audience is the community of marine naturalists and scientists who may need a bit of guidance to ensure that their observations could be turned into a useful biodiversity monitoring program. We hope the Toolkit finds an audience among NGOs, grad students, coastal communities, and researchers working in countries where funding is severely limited. The US just passed a rule requiring countries to demonstrate that their fisheries are sustainable in terms of marine mammal bycatch. This rule affects $20 billion/year in seafood trade. It is driven in part by a need to level the playing field for US fisheries that have to comply with the Marine Mammal Protection Act and are competing with fisheries that are not MMPA-compliant. Used wisely, the new trade rule will use the purchasing power of the US market to create incentives to improve fisheries sustainability and transparency. But if it is imposed too harshly, and without funding for low-income countries to comply, the US risks penalizing countries that can least afford to take an economic hit. Our Animal Counting Toolkit was motivated in part by this new rule. We want to fill in important data gaps around the world, but we also see value in using this toolkit to help build local and regional capacity for countries to begin to do the kind of surveys that will be needed to demonstrate compliance with this new seafood trade rule. Our hope is to see countries actually improve sustainability of their fisheries, so that we reduce the number of marine mammals killed in fisheries while improving economic opportunities for people who earn their living from the sea.
Guest post from our newest team member, Natalie Mastick
“I look at pictures of dolphins all day,” is my most common answer when asked what I do for work.
This dolphin has a well-marked dorsal fin, which we will match against thousands of photographs in our database. This photo was taken under research permit with a telephoto lens and cropped.
It’s an over-simplified statement, albeit accurate, and it usually leads to many follow-up questions. The most frequent being “Why?” That’s a fair question. I then proceed to explain how by looking at photos of the dorsal fins of dolphins, I can identify individuals, which can be used in calculating population estimates and survival rates. I am usually surprised by the awe that this explanation inspires, as I am somewhat numb to the task after several months of photo analysis. “You can really tell dolphins apart like that?” They have a point; photo-identification is quite remarkable when you think about it.
Photo-identification (photo-ID for short) is a non-invasive way to study marine mammal populations. It’s been used for both cetaceans (dolphins and whales) and pinnipeds (seals and sea lions), and requires a high-resolution photo of each individual. Photo-ID is an effective way to determine individuals based on coloration, markings, scars, fin shape, nicks and notches. For humpback whales, the underside of the fluke is the most recognizable feature, which is can be photographed as the whale dives. For dolphins, one of the most recognizable features is an individual’s dorsal fin, visible as the dolphin breathes at the surface.
I have worked on several projects that use photo-ID, including a long-term study of bottlenose dolphins in Florida, humpback whale population analysis in Antarctica, and currently, a long-term study of Pacific white-sided dolphins in British Columbia with Oceans Initiative. To accomplish this work takes three major steps: photographing wild dolphins, processing the photos, and then looking for matches between the photos.
Oceans Initiative has been taking photos of these dolphins since 2007, which is not an easy feat. Pacific white-sided dolphin are fast and can often travel in large pods of hundreds of animals. Erin, Rob, and their dedicated field team have a ton of experience taking photos of these animals, which provided me with a hearty collection of over 10,000 photos to process. One by one, I went through and determined the quality of each photo. Obviously when photographing hundreds of dolphins quickly surfacing and diving, not every photo will be useable for a photo-ID catalog. I found the photos in which fins were in focus, parallel with the camera, and mostly visible (not partly submerged or covered by water or other dolphins) and then looked carefully at each fin to determine its distinctiveness.
It never ceases to amaze me how different dolphin fins can look. A dolphin can have a single little notch at the base of its fin that makes it completely distinct from the rest of the dolphins seen that day. The combination of scarring, nicks from other dolphins, entanglements, killer whales, and normal wear and tear provide an endless permutation of unique fins. I visually assessed each high-quality photo and determined if the fin was not distinctive, somewhat distinctive by temporary marking or discoloration, moderately distinctive, or highly distinctive. Moderately and highly distinctive fins can be used to identify an individual over longer temporal scales.
Once the fins were scored for distinctiveness, it was then my job to match them to other fins within that encounter, and lastly between encounters from that season. When matching between a single encounter, it’s a lot like a game of memory. You know you’ve seen that fin before, you just need to remember where in order to match them. Once the fins are matched within an encounter, I compile a “best of” folder with all of the identifiable individuals observed in that area to match to the other encounters.
When you include the variable of time, then it becomes more like a game of 6 differences, in which you need to spot what’s changed in a fin over time. Except instead of having two fins that you know are just slightly different versions of the same fin that you’re comparing side-by-side, you need to look through the entire catalog to determine if a fin has actually changed since last identified or if it’s a new individual. Though that’s a fun challenge, it is unlikely that a fin changes much over the course of a few weeks, which means matching fins across encounters is a little easier than across years.
To match fins across encounters, I compile all of the moderately and highly distinctive fins from each encounter and look for individuals seen more than once. The 2016 field season provided over 1000 identifiable photos, which were then compared to each other to determine if there were matches. This is where your imagination comes into play. Looking at these fins enough, you start to see shapes in the nicks and notches and fin shape. There was a fin with a distinctive nick towards the top that looked like the profile of a person yelling. There was another that looked remarkably like a bicep. There was one photo in which a fin caught the light just right and looked like it was reflecting back the shape of a storm trooper.
Reading that back sounds like I’ve kind of lost it. Looking at fins enough might do that to you! But overall, being able to put a minimum number to the dolphins seen last season (think about all the dolphins we couldn’t photograph and the fins that weren’t distinctive enough to match!) is incredibly rewarding, and completing each step of the processing myself was oddly satisfying. I’m hoping we can get a comparable number of photos in 2017, and look forward to seeing some familiar fins in the field.
A family of orca (killer whales) works together to find food off northern Vancouver Island. (Photo taken under research permit, zoomed and cropped.)
One of the things we admire most about orca or killer whale cultures is their commitment to teamwork. They work together to find food, coordinate travel, and thrive in a cold, dark environment where prey are easier to find using sound than light. These whales serve as a great template for people working together to tackle some of the world’s most pressing environmental problems, including unsustainable fishing, climate change, and ocean noise. These are challenging times.
As we enter World Oceans Week, we are inspired by the team at Sea Legacy, including the amazing conservation photographers, Cristina Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen. In words and in deed, they show that we can accomplish more #together than we can as separate voices. Taking a cue from Paul and Cristina, we’d like to offer the Oceans Initiative team three ways to help during Oceans Week.
Spread the word. We do “use-inspired science” to guide effective conservation of marine wildlife. By definition, you are a key part of the research questions we ask, and what we do with the information we produce. We can’t do this without you. We’d love to hear from you. Please comment on this blog, or share it with your friends. Sign up for our newsletter. We never share lists, and we won’t fill up your inbox. Encourage your friends to like us on Facebook, and actually click the “follow” button to see what we post. We’d love to hear from you on Facebook, because the platform lends itself to back and forth conversations. Our Twitter feed is interactive, and light, but focuses on emerging science on marine conservation and solutions. We have a large and growing audience on Instagram, and we’d love to see you there. These sound like trivial things, but they matter. Many funders use social media metrics as an indicator of a nonprofit’s reach. Please help us spread the word about our work.
Donate frequent flyer miles.Aeroplan, Air Canada‘s frequent flyer program, is matching all donations of Aeroplan miles 1:1, up to 500,000 miles, this week. Your donated miles help in many ways. The flights get our team to the field, bring top scientists and aspiring young biologists to join us, let us bring our skills to other countries to help build capacity in lower-income countries, and ultimately, to take the information to the meetings where important conservation decisions are made. Aeroplan even offsets the carbon footprint for every flight we redeem through this special program.
Thank you so much for your help. We are starting to see some real-world conservation successes emerging from our work on ocean noise and marine mammal bycatch in fisheries. Thank you for allowing us to do that work.
Today, 22 April 2017, marks the 48th time that people around the world celebrate Earth Day. Since 1970, the effects of climate change have become undeniable, but the environmental news is not all bad. The voices of 1970s environmental grassroots movement were heard, and that public pressure led the USA to pass some of the most powerful legislation anywhere to protect endangered species and their habitat. Given our focus, it’s not surprising that we see the Marine Mammal Protection Act as one of the best examples of grassroots movements leading to real-world conservation gains. Over the last few decades, consumer demand has shifted fisheries practices to the extent that “dolphin-safe tuna” is now the industry standard in North America and Europe. Similar efforts drove the Save the Whales movement, which led to a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986. We’re not naive, but we are inspired by #OceanOptimism.
After every public lecture we give, people ask how they can help.
People often share feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of global losses of biodiversity and wilderness. The paradox is that collectively, we hold the power to influence policy, and with every purchase we make, we have the power to influence markets and industrial practices. We cast a vote every time we buy – or choose not to buy – a product. And we are struck by the energy in today’s March For Science events around the world. The people have spoken, and they want policy to be based on reliable evidence. Our tagline, Science for the Sea, tells you that we share that view.
Here are some examples of the power of consumer choice that have inspired us lately. This is not an exhaustive list, and it draws heavily from personal experience. When have you “voted” or made a sustainable choice with your dollar? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Don’t buy what you don’t need. Our friends at Patagonia blew us away in 2011 with their New York Times ad asking people not to buy their products. Prevention is far better than a cure.
Reuse and upcycle. Last year, Patagonia donated their entire Black Friday sales to environmental programs like ours. Reusing or repurposing products is far more resource-efficient than recycling.
Buy locally. As Rose George wrote in her gorgeous book, 90% of all the goods we purchase were shipped overseas. Support local businesses and reduce your environmental footprint. Our friend, Alexandria Rossoff, has run a thriving jewelry business in Seattle for 38 years that seamlessly integrates sustainability by reusing estate jewelry and catering to a local market. As she launches an online business model to spend more of her time on her conservation mission, we were touched that Alexandria has decided to donate a portion of her last month’s in-store sales to our nonprofit. Thank you!
