REMEMBER, THE CAMERA ADDS 10 TONNES…

by oceansadminAcoustics, Dolphins, Ecosystems, Habitat, Whales, Women in SciencePosted on 2 Comments

At New Year’s, we all make resolutions about diet. But we’ve got nothing on Pacific humpback whales, which are currently on their mating and calving grounds in Hawaii and Mexico. During this time, they go weeks or months without eating at all. BC waters provide important habitat for these highly migratory animals. When they’re here in summer, they only have a few months to put on all the fat reserves they need to migrate over 4000km (each way) across the ocean, calve, mate, nurse their calves and return to BC to start the cycle all over again. From our perspective, this creates a sense of responsibility for Canadian resource management: human activities that degrade the quality of feeding habitat in BC waters carries consequences that affect the whales throughout the rest of their range.

WE LOVE THE BBC SERIES, “NATURE’S GREAT EVENTS“.

Humpback whales eat a lot, and they accomplish all of this without teeth.  How do they do that?  An incredibly gifted filmmaker, Shane Moore shot this extraordinary footage for the BBC that shows the northeast Pacific ecosystem much better than we ever could describe in words (although Sir David Attenborough comes a close second to the whales themselves). [Please note:  BBC put this link on youtube, but they’ve also put some other amazing footage on their site, which we encourage you to see.] Enough lead-in.  Check out this frenzy of seabirds, herring and whales:

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH…

Of course, not all marine mammals migrate. Some, like the Pacific white-sided dolphins we study, have been seen in our study area every month of the year.  Dolphins, including the killer whale (the largest member of the dolphin family) do not fast over the winter months. Instead, they eat like we do — constantly.  And dolphins and killer whales both have teeth, and big brains, to help them come up with clever ways to find their prey.

The following video shows dolphins and killer whales hunting.  You might want to watch this on your own before deciding whether it’s appropriate for younger viewers.  [Note.  We collect our photographs and video under a research permit.  We learn a lot through photo-ID, but we are obviously not filmmakers.]

[vsw id=”14224604″ source=”vimeo” width=”600″ height=”400″ autoplay=”no”]

Listen.  Everybody’s gotta eat.  The whales aren’t doing this because they hate dolphins.  They’re doing this because, like dolphins, us and all organisms that can’t feed themselves through photosynthesis, whales need to eat to survive.  Our colleague, Jackie Hildering, recently witnessed a similar event.

A lot of our work aims to estimate abundance of whales, dolphins and other top predators, because we want to see ecosystem-based fishery management practices that ensure that nutritional needs of marine wildlife are taken into consideration when setting fishing quotas.  But lately, we’re growing concerned about the potential for underwater noise to mask the ability of a whale or dolphin to find its prey or detect when predators are nearby.  Going back to Shane Moore’s tremendous BBC footage, a frenzy like that must make some noise that a humpback whale could hear and use to locate a school of fish.  OK.  We’re guessing at that — it hasn’t been proven scientifically (although this is a research question we’d love to take on).  Our colleagues have shown convincingly that killer whales use sound to find and locate their prey, so it’s not rocket science to guess that human-caused noise can disrupt that sensitive acoustic system.

OK.  Maybe we shouldn’t make this all about human activities.  Maybe you should forget the text, watch that BBC footage again and just appreciate, as we do, how neat these animals are.

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


LEAPS: Lagenorhynchus Ecology, Abundance and Population Status

by oceansadminDolphins, Populations, Women in SciencePosted on 2 Comments

This study, led by Erin Ashe as part of her PhD project at the University of St Andrews, assesses the health of the population of Pacific white-sided dolphins found in the Broughton Archipelago, BC and nearby waters.  This is a demographic study, which means that it uses statistical methods to study a population. The statistics are important, because only the most catastrophic problems are apparent to casual observation, and the goal of conservation biology is to identify whether there are human-caused problems, and if so, mitigate them well before they reach catastrophic levels.

Come to BC and spend some time here.  If you’re lucky, you will see groups of hundreds of dolphins.  When people see large groups of dolphins, the obvious, superficial interpretation is that the population(s) must be thriving.  But that’s not always the case.  Remember when we first started hearing about “dolphin-safe tuna”?  Those measures were implemented because managers were concerned about levels of bycatch of other dolphin species in tuna fisheries.  Spinner dolphins are designated as depleted under the US Marine Mammal Protection Act, even though there are about 613,000 spinner dolphins.  That’s a lot of dolphins, but it is less than half of what there were before huge bycatch rates in tuna fisheries.  For BC’s dolphins, yes, we see hundreds of dolphins in a group.  And don’t get me wrong.  Abundance is a hugely important parameter to measure, and a lot of our time is spent producing good estimates of wildlife abundance:  it is an essential number to have if you want to know how much fish the dolphins need to thrive, or to estimate the probability that the population will go extinct.  But it is tough to detect anything but the most catastrophic population crash from the rough abundance estimates we are likely to produce for these dolphins.  The population could still be declining, and no one could “eyeball” a decline from 900 to 850 to 800 dolphins, or even measure it will all the uncertainty and variability in our estimates.  Fortunately, there are other reliable ways to measure population health.

The method we’re using is to estimate survivorship, which is the probability of an individual surviving from one year to the next.  If this number proves to be lower than what we expect from other, healthy dolphin populations, then we need to look at factors affecting survivorship.  If the number comes out to be typical of dolphin survivorship, then management actions are not necessary.

We’re off to a tremendous start.  Our good friend and neighbour, Alexandra Morton, has been collecting photographs of the dolphins’ unique markings and dorsal fin shapes since the dolphins returned to the area in the late 1980’s.  Alexandra’s exhaustive field efforts and meticulous work has produced records that include thousands of dolphins.  With this extensive catalogue and my photographic effort over the last 5 years, we now have the opportunity to learn essential information about Pacific white-sided dolphins and their populations.

Using photographs of unique natural markings on the dorsal fin and sometimes body, we create a record of encounters, an ‘encounter history’ that provides information about each time you saw that dolphin.  Using mark-recapture statistics, you can estimate how many there are, the likelihood that an adult dolphin will survive from year to year and lots of other neat things.  This helps make decisions about whether we need to take action to confer additional protections from human threats.

Imagine it as a trip to the doctor’s office.  The doctor weighs you, takes your blood pressure, and maybe takes some samples.  Then she compares your “status” to what she’d like to see in a healthy patient.  In much the same way, we’re identifying whether dolphins in BC are surviving as long as we’d like to see.  If not, then we’ll do some follow-up work to identify why, and whether we can do anything about it.  Sure, dolphins are cool.  We like them a lot.  But we also like the scientific challenge of studying this species.  We are only seeing a small fraction of individuals for brief periods at the surface.  It’s forcing us to develop new mathematical tools, and spend lots of time in the field, and everything we learn feels new and exciting.