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…

Are you in a healthy relationship with the ocean? 5 ways to show the ocean your love

by oceansadminConservationPosted on 3 Comments


  1. Nothing says commitment like real estate. Support efforts to create Marine Protected Areas. We went to the Zoological Society of London’s recent Symposium on High-Seas MPAs and found out how much the world hearts the ocean.  Currently, only 1.17% of the ocean is protected.  In 2002, nations pledged to protect 10% by 2012.  We’d best get moving!  Need inspiration?  Watch this video! Sylvia Earle is on a mission (Mission Blue) to create hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean.
  2. Good things come in NO packaging. When you buy your sweetheart a gift, please pass on the plastic.
  3. The way to the heart is through the stomach. When you go out to dinner tonight, consider the impact our food choices have on the oceans.  Show your love by checking out the Monterey Bay Aquarium seafood guide or their cool app.  Cooking at home?  Buy organic.  Pesticides and fertilizers are poisoning the ocean, ending up in the fish consumed by whales, dolphins and us.
  4. Cracks in your relationship?  Establish healthy boundaries. As the ice caps melt, the Arctic will be opening up for shipping and offshore oil exploration, which opens up questions about sovereignty and boundaries.  Urge your representatives to embrace a holistic approach to marine spatial planning in the Arctic that encompasses industrial, socio-economic and conservation applications together.  We all want to save the whales, the polar bears, reduce global warming – our policy and management approaches should reflect this interconnectedness.
  5. It’s the thought that counts.  Buy less junk, because most of the world’s trade is transported by marine shipping. Practice minimalism: we think that Zen Habits can lead to Zen habitat for whales. Global shipping accounts for huge fractions of CO2 emissions, raises ocean noise levels, and where shipping lanes cross critical habitat for whales, whales lose.  In any healthy long-term relationship, it’s the quality of gifts that matter, not their quantity.

The ocean gives us oxygen, food, water, and regulates our temperature. Doesn’t the ocean deserve something special from us this year? What do you love about the ocean?  This Valentine’s Day, how will you show the ocean that you care?

TOP TEN IN TWENTY-TEN

by oceansadminAcoustics, Conservation, Dolphins, Killer Whale Conservation, Ocean Noise, Populations, Whales, Women in SciencePosted on 5 Comments

Marine conservation highlights:  2010

1. A protected area for killer whales?
We kicked the year off with a paper published by Erin, Rob and Dr Dawn Noren in Animal Conservation proposing a Marine Protected Area for southern resident killer whales.  It was profiled on NPR and in dozens of news stories.  Our scientific advice fits nicely with the recovery objectives specified by Canada and the US, but uses a simple priority-setting approach:  give the whales a quiet place to eat.

2. Whales, salmon and ocean noise
Rob spent 6 months as Canada-US Fulbright Research Chair at University of Washington to explore transboundary issues in marine conservation, using killer whales, salmon and ocean noise as themes.  It was a hugely productive fellowship, and we loved hosting an efficient, collaborative workshop to estimate how much salmon it costs to feed southern resident killer whales.  We miss Seattle – not only because of Molly Moon’s Grey Salted Caramel ice cream.

3. Pacific white-sided dolphins
So, come here often? Erin’s dolphin study leaped ahead this year with support from SeaDoc to encourage wider contributions to the photo-identification catalogue that our mentor,Alexandra Morton, initiated in the 1980s and maintained for more than 20 years.  Are the dolphins of the Broughton Archipelago cosmopolitan, or do they like to stick close to home?  Our partnership with SeaDoc will help us find out if the dolphins we see are a unique population or if they regularly move between BC and Washington State.  We collected more photographs of dolphins, which will allow us to estimate abundance and track population health.  We recorded dolphin calls and tweets, and saw newborn calves in the study area!  Want to be part of the fun?  Please send us your dolphin ID photos!

4. Collecting killer whale poop
Yup.  Sounds messy and weird.  But it’s actually a neat, non-invasive way to evaluate whether whales are stressed out by noise, and whether they’re finding enough to eat.  We’ve initiated a proof-of-concept study, and are excited about the opportunity to partner with Prof Sam Wasser and his team in Conservation Biology at University of Washington.

5. Mapping where ships might collide with whales
When ships strike whales, it is often fatal.  Rob and Dr Patrick O’Hara at Environment Canada authored a paper to predict and identify where these collisions are most likely to occur.  Rob presented the work at the International Whaling Commission’s Scientific Committee meeting in Morocco and was invited by NOAA to offer scientific advice on vessel strikes to protect blue whales in Santa Barbara Channel, California.

6. Ocean noise measuring and mapping
Pop-up study 3.0!  Yes, our chronic ocean noise study has grown into a trilogy.  This year, we deployed and retrieved 6 hydrophones, our most ever! Thanks for field support from Hawk Bay, Straitwatch, Ocean Rose Coastal Adventures, Orcalab, Salmon Coast Field Station, Silver King Ventures and our friends at Cornell. This brings our total to 12 autonomous hydrophones sent to the bottom of the sea, called back and sent safely home to New York.  Wow!  Mixing saltwater and electronics, on purpose.  The “on purpose” part is new for us.  Soon we can say which parts of BC coastal waters are quiet, loud or somewhere in between.  Whales and dolphins need a quiet ocean to find food and mates.  Our work with Cornell allows us to model how much acoustic habitat whales currently lose due to shipping noise; and how much more would be lost if oil tankers started using Douglas Channel.  Next, we plan to screen the tens of thousands of hours of recordings for whale and dolphin calls (want some boat noise for your iPod?).  In 2011, we are integrating our acoustic work into multi-stakeholder marine spatial planning exercises to ensure that marine protected areas can be built with a quiet ocean in mind.  We’re calling it our Quiet Ocean Campaign.

7. Humpback whales, oil tankers and critical habitat
Like most British Columbians, we are concerned about proposals to build an oil pipeline from the Alberta Tarsands to the Great Bear Rainforest.  We’re thrilled to be working withCetacealab and the Gitga’at Nation to estimate how many humpback whales use the waters along the proposed oil tanker route.  This area has been proposed as critical habitat.  Janie Wray, Hermann Meuter and Chris Picard have been collecting humpback whale data for years, and it was great fun to apply the skills we’ve been honing on our dolphin study to a valuable humpback whale study that has immediate conservation applications.

8. Sharks in British Columbia.
Did you know there tens of thousand of sharks in BC?  We didn’t either. But as January Jones says, ‘we shouldn’t be scared of sharks, we should be scared for them’.  Rob, with shark-experts, Tom Okey, Scott Wallace and Vince Gallucci reveal the goods in their new shark paper. Or, you can read all about it in this Vancouver Sun Shark week article.

9. Launching our website (www.oceansinitiative.org)
We resolve to keep in touch in 2011 a little better than we did in 2010.  Thanks to Sandy Buckley for the great logos, and Sarah Bray and her team for our outstanding new site.  The flexible WordPress system allows us to update periodically, and add content like photos, video and audio that we can’t publish in a traditional print journal.  If you want to receive updates from us auto-magically, please enter your e-mail address in the “Get In Touch” box here. If not, don’t worry:  we won’t spam you.

10. From the ‘Home of the killer whale’ to the ‘Home of Golf’
Pass the haggis. All of us (Erin, Wishart-the-dog and Rob) are ending the year in St Andrews, Scotland, where Erin is writing her PhD thesis on Pacific white-sided dolphins, and Rob is analyzing our acoustic data as part of his top-ranked Marie Curie Fellowship at the University of St Andrews, Sea Mammal Research Unit.  Yes, there are dolphins and killer whales in Scotland, and also some gifted scientists to offer advice and ideas.

Please check out our site for frequent updates in 2011.  We are happy and busy in Scotland with data analysis and writing, but part of us is still at home in BC.  Fortunately, with our spiffy charitable account at Aeroplan, we’re raising enough donations of Aeroplan frequent-flyer miles to come home to the Pacific Northwest for an amazing, cost-effective dolphin field season this spring.  (We’re working on offsetting our carbon footprint, too.)  We hope to see you in BC this spring.

Thanks again for working with us.  It’s been a tremendous year, and we’re excited about what 2011 will bring.  We wish you all the best for a happy and healthy and productive new year.

Oceans Initiative
Erin and Rob


DOESN’T EVERY GIRL WANT A BLOG FOR HER BIRTHDAY?

by oceansadminConservation, Women in SciencePosted on 5 Comments

OK, I'm cheating. This was Rob's birthday cake from summer. (Leos get all the sunshine and whales.) But you get the idea.

I’m so excited to launch our new website today.  It happens to be my birthday, and this (and the chocolate cake) was the perfect gift.  We love our research on whales and dolphins, and are happy to finally have a beautiful space for our work to live and grow.  We hope you like it here, and visit all the time.  Our goal is to have a place where we can discuss ideas with you — we publish in scientific journals, but not every story is publishable; not everyone reads scientific journals; publishing is slow; and we want to hear what you think.

What we do around here is fairly straightforward — marine conservation.  Each icon links to a page on one of our research themes.

I know what you’re thinking.  How did a couple of field biologists create such a beautiful website?  We didn’t.  The fantastic S. Joy Studios completely “got us” and what we are trying to do and designed a great place to hang out.  Sarah Bray and her amazing team, Julianne Carson (@juliannecherie) and Leah Shaver  (@leahcreates) are THE BEST and now know more about whale pooh than they ever cared to know.

The incredibly talented Sandy Buckley (@sandybuckley) created our “bespoke” graphics and logos.  We love them (and her) so much, we’ve named a dolphin after her.

And, we were so lucky to get expert advice from Sarah’s uber-inspiring colleagues, the fabulous Gwen Bell and Kelly Parkinson.

Well, here goes.

I HAVE BEEN COLLECTING WHALE POOP ALL MORNING (AND OTHER THINGS YOU COULD HAVE LIVED WITHOUT KNOWING)

by oceansadminConservation, Ecosystems, Human ImpactsPosted on One Comment

Together, we’ve spent 18 years in university.  We put our advanced degrees to work collecting whale poop.

OUR MOTHERS ARE VERY PROUD.

But we have a perfectly good reason for scooping whale poop.  Our colleagues at University of Washington have pioneered methods to extract hormones from whale feces.  Like a human pregnancy test that uses urine, high-tech methods at UW’s Center for Conservation Biology allow us to study whale diet, stress hormones and possibly toxic contaminant levels from non-invasively collected samples.  The UW team trained a sniffer dog to smell the scat samples at long range.  We’re jealous.  So far, our dog is more interested in dolphins than scat.  Go figure.

Ultimately, we aim to link the stress hormones we measure in the whale poop to the noise levels we measure on the hydrophones.  Which is a perfectly rational reason for collecting whale poop.  Right?