A WEEK IN THE LIFE OF HARO STRAIT AND DOUGLAS CHANNEL

by oceansadminAcoustics, Habitat, Human Impacts, Ocean NoisePosted on No Comments

We recently published a paper reporting ocean noise levels in important whale habitats along the BC coast.  At the same time, we released an animation that outlined the key concepts.  Our research showed that the most important habitats for killer whales were the noisiest; important habitats for humpback whales were comparatively quiet.

We thought you might like to hear for yourself what those sites sound like.  Don’t worry.  We won’t make you listen to all 10,000 hours of recordings, but our co-authors (Dimitri Ponirakis and Chris Clark) at Cornell University’s Bioacoustics Research Program distilled some of the results into this nifty PowerPoint slide.  It’s a big file (22MB), but it lets you see and hear what Haro Strait and Douglas Channel sound like.

The neatest part of Dimitri’s work is that there was a windstorm partway through this period.  You can hear the wind on the recordings made off Kitimat (Douglas Channel), but the same wind noise cannot be heard in Haro Strait over the background noise from ships.  We still have a lot of work to do to understand what these noise levels might mean to whales and fish in terms of ecological effects, but we thought you might like to see and hear some of the recordings.  Please let us know what you think.

[slideonline id=5854]


Secret to a Sound Ocean

by oceansadminAcoustics, Habitat, Human Impacts, Ocean NoisePosted on No Comments

[vsw id=”77623625″ source=”vimeo” width=”425″ height=”344″ autoplay=”no”]

Sound is as important to whales as vision is to humans. Our scientific research (with Chris Clark and Dimitri Ponirakis at Cornell University’s Bioacoustics Research Program) is measuring how noisy or quiet important habitats are to fin, humpback and killer whales in British Columbia, Canada, and how we think that is affecting the whales’ ability to find food and each other. Joel Bellucci helped us turn our science into some nice 3D animations. Our big, cool friend, Douglas Coupland, narrates this gentle introduction to whales & ocean noise. We hope it gives you a overview of our work, and why underwater noise is worth worrying about.

To learn more about this topic, check out:
oceansinitiative.org/acoustics/

Or click here, to see the original, peer-reviewed, scientific research article in Animal Conservation.

Happy Spring!

by oceansadminAcoustics, Dolphins, Ocean NoisePosted on No Comments

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”
― Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard’s Egg

It’s officially spring!  Cherry blossoms are a sure sign that spring has sprung in the Pacific Northwest.  But for Pacific white-sided dolphins, spring means herring.  Each spring, Pacific herring find their way to inlets and coastal areas to spawn, laying tens of thousands of eggs.  This dramatic event attracts birds, sea lions, and dolphins.  We were lucky enough to capture footage of Pacific white-sided dolphins working together to corral herring.  Dolphins require a quiet ocean to both to find their prey and to avoid predators like killer whales.  Stay tuned for the results of our investigation to assess which areas along the BC coast are quietest for dolphins.  Hope you enjoy!

National Monuments and Marine Protected Areas

by oceansadminAcoustics, Habitat, Ocean Noise, Women in SciencePosted on No Comments

Today, President Barack Obama designated five new national monuments, including Cattle Point on San Juan Island in Washington state. This is exciting news, not only because Cattle Point is beautiful and has historic  relevance, but because important feeding habitat of one of the most critically endangered marine mammal populations in the US is just off Cattle Point.   Our past research shows that in summer, southern resident killer whales (or orcas) have preferred feeding hotspots just off Cattle Point.

 

Cattle Point lighthouse San Juan Island

In 2009, we published a paper mapping where the whales carry out various activities within their core summer habitat.  The idea was to identify and prioritize important habitat and to propose a candidate Marine Protected Area (MPA) for the whales, especially their feeding habitat.  Our previous work has revealed that feeding behavior is the activity state in which killer whales are most vulnerable to disturbance from boats.  Although we can’t protect all of their summer habitat by closing it off to or reducing boat traffic, and neither would we want to, it seemed sensible to us that we could protected the most important parts.  In this case, that leaves their feeding areas.

Candidate killer whale Marine Protected Area (MPA)

 

Candidate Marine Protected Area for killer whales

 

Our research suggests that ocean noise from boats in the area plays a role in interrupting feeding behaviour.  Now, our work on ocean noise, Marine Protected Areas, and killer whale behaviour are all coming together and we look forward to sharing our latest and greatest results.  Please let us know what you think.

 

Acoustic ecology of harbor and Dall’s porpoise in BC

by oceansadminAcousticsPosted on No Comments
Dall’s porpoise

We are fascinated by porpoise.  We’ve published abundance estimates for harbor and Dall’s porpoise in the continental shelf waters of BC and then reanalyzed the data to produce pretty maps of harbor and Dall’s porpoise distribution.

Our colleague Anna Hall has spent years studying these neat critters and is helping to identify how these two ecologically similar species share the waters of the Salish Sea, while avoiding competition and together with Anna and Arliss Winship, Rob published a paper trying to estimate how many porpoise are being caught in salmon gillnets.

 

Harbor porpoise. Photo credit: Olive Andrews

So, we’re pretty invested in these species.

Our latest research effort on porpoise is a bit of a stretch for us.  In July 2009, our colleagues Line Kyhn and Jakob Tougaard visited from Denmark with some sophisticated recording equipment.  Hardware issues have made it difficult to compare echolocation patterns of these two species before, but Line worked magic!  Line’s found some compelling evidence that these two species can be told apart acoustically — at least if you can hear over 120 kHz.  Check out her PhD thesis for this work, and for results on other dolphins and porpoise around the world.

This may sound esoteric, but there are two reasons it’s so exciting.  First, it teaches us something new about the biology of the species — how they avoid overlap with each other, and how they try to avoid being heard by mammal-eating killer whales.  Secondly, it guides real-world conservation efforts, so that passive acoustic monitoring programs can detect which of these species is present when visual surveys are not possible — in remote areas, or at night, or in rough weather.  That will help us identify important habitats, and protect them, as human activities on the BC coast continue to grow.  We hope to have a paper on this in a scientific journal in the coming year.  We’ll keep you posted.