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.
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.
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)
This map from Dr Erbe’s paper shows the cumulative noise energy we predict across one year from shipping traffic in BC waters.
We recently partnered with two acousticians, Christine Erbe of Curtin University and Alex MacGillivray of JASCO, to predict how BC’s waters sound to a whale. Using shipping traffic data compiled by Patrick O’Hara (which we used previously in a ship strike analysis for fin, humpback and killer whales), and making some assumptions about how noisy ships are at different speeds, Christine and Alex were able to predict how much noise different parts of BC experience throughout the year.
What we found is that while ship noise comes and goes, human activities are carving persistent acoustic features into the ocean soundscape, because shipping lanes are entrenched.
The good news is that some areas, particularly some of the mainland inlets on BC’s north central coast, are still comparatively quiet. It may be that the tangle of islands, fjords and narrow passageways, buffer the ability of anthropogenic ocean noise to propagate up into those inlets, some of which remain in a bit of an acoustic shadow. Armed with this new information, perhaps Canadians would like to manage human activities in such a way as to maintain these sites as acoustic sanctuaries — marine wilderness areas that remind us what the ocean used to sound like decades ago, when whales were the loudest features of the soundscape.
A global summary of where researchers have published density estimates for whales, dolphins and porpoises (from Kaschner et al. 2012)
Rob and his colleagues published a neat new paper today in the open access journal, PLOS ONE. The paper, led by Dr Kristin Kaschner at the University of Freiburg, examined >1100 estimates of the abundance of whales, dolphins and porpoises reported in more than 400 surveys conducted worldwide between 1975 and 2005.
It is hard to convey how boring science can be sometimes.
During the research, the team digitized thousands of maps, so you don’t have to. Seriously. Kristin made the data for the map (above) available for download, in case you ever want to do a global analysis of where people have and haven’t surveyed for whales. Here’s what was learned about the global patchiness of whale and dolphin research. Overall, only 25% of the world’s ocean surface has been surveyed at all, while only 6% has been covered well enough to offer any hope of detecting trends in population size. Other findings included:
The vast majority of surveying effort has taken place in waters under the jurisdiction of wealthy, northern hemisphere countries like the US, Canada and Europe.
Southern hemisphere regions are underrepresented, except the Antarctic, where the International Whaling Commission leads surveys to estimate abundance of the Antarctic minke whale, which is subject to scientific whaling by Japan.
Few surveys have taken place in high-seas waters beyond national jurisdiction. This hinders global initiatives to implement high-seas marine protected areas that reflect the habitat needs of whales and dolphins.
The level of survey effort conducted in the eastern tropical Pacific may look excessive but is actually at the low end of what is needed to detect population trends.
The main focus for surveying populations was in tuna fishing regions due to the market for “dolphin-friendly” tuna, with more surveys in the eastern tropic Pacific Ocean than in the rest of world combined.
Our ability to protect cetaceans from threats such as military sonar, seismic surveys (for offshore oil exploration), oil spills or bycatch in fisheries hinges on good information, and this latest research indicates a lack of baseline information to evaluate threats across the vast majority of the world’s oceans. As international efforts are underway to protect global biodiversity, the researchers conclude there is an urgent need to develop new methods to fill in data gaps which can in turn improve marine conservation efforts.
Here are some quotes from the authors:
Dr Nicola Quick, co-author and honorary research fellow from the University of St Andrews, commented: “One of the primary motivations for our research was to know where whales might be most vulnerable to the use of military sonar or seismic surveys to find oil under the seabed. The enormous data gaps we found in our study remind us that we still have a lot of work to do to predict whether vulnerable species might be using the waters that have never been surveyed. We recommend international coordination of surveys to share resources to fill in these gaps.”
When looking at the coverage in the eastern tropical Pacific, Kristin noted that “the rest of the world has a lot of catching up to do if we want to know if whale populations are recovering from historic whaling or bycatch in fisheries. The issue of data gaps pervades every issue in marine planning, from fisheries management to marine protected areas. Because of the strict science needs of whaling, the information available on whales and dolphins may paint an optimistic picture of marine science. Knowledge gaps are almost certainly worse for deep-sea invertebrates, sharks or marine viruses.”
Oceans Initiative co-founder, Dr Rob Williams (who is also a Researcher in the Sea Mammal Research Unit at the University of St Andrews) added: “One of the most important management and conservation decisions we make is how to allocate scarce funding for research. As we aim to protect marine biodiversity on a global scale, we need to ensure that our scientific advice reflects the fact that the vast majority of the world ocean has never been surveyed in a comprehensive way. If we ignore that, our advice is biased toward coastal waters of wealthy countries, and that is unjust.”
