3rd International Conference on Marine Mammal Protected Areas
It’s not rocket science. Much of the work we do involves conserving whale & dolphin populations by identifying the habitats most critical to their survival, and keeping the habitat quiet, and full of fish.
We’ve published extensively on the value of Marine Protected Areas to survival of endangered killer whale populations. This week, we’re thrilled to participate in the 3rd International Conference on Marine Mammal Protected Areas in Adelaide. Rob is chairing a workshop on extreme challenges in marine mammal conservation, when critical habitats occur in heavily industrialized coastlines.
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To many conservation scientists, though, it’s not the absolute number of whales in the population that matters — what we care about is whether the population is going up or down. And we’ve known for more than a decade that the Antarctic minke whale population appears to be declining.
That’s bad. But if the whales’ sea ice habitat is being affected by global climate change, its long term trajectory may be even worse. That would make Antarctic minke whales an icon of climate change — a Southern Ocean counterpart to the polar bear in the Arctic. One problem: Antarctic minke whales are even more difficult to count than polar bears.
That’s the context in which we partnered with the German and Dutch Antarctic programs, with input from British, American and Australian scientists. We conducted the first icebreaker-supported helicopter surveys in open water and adjacent ice-covered waters along the edge of the sea ice in the Weddell Sea. Our study found that there is a high density band of whales just along the ice edge, where ship surveys are confounded by fickle navigational safety issues. That region is home to high concentrations of the whales’ favourite food, krill. That region is being affected by climate change in different ways in different regions of the Southern Ocean. And maddeningly, just as we are beginning to understand the threat, changing ice conditions may be changing the surveys we use to monitor the health of the whales’ population. Depending on the ice conditions on a given day, a ship may or may not be able to access this high density region. And that affects our ability to tell if the population is going up or down.
Australia is suing to end Japan’s special permit whaling. The International Court of Justice will announce its decision tomorrow. Regardless of that decision, our research shows that if we really want to know how this population is being affected by climate change, we need bigger and much more expensive surveys than ever before.
Killer whale surfing the wake of a cruise ship in Johnstone Strait
Killer whales depend on a quiet ocean to navigate, find food and choose mates. Much of our work with acousticians at Cornell involves estimating how much acoustic habitat whales are losing from chronic, rising levels of noise. Here’s a simple animation that describes that work.
In addition to masking the whales’ calls, animals can also show behavioural responses to ships. Our new research, published in Marine Pollution Bulletin, shows that ships cause whales to change their swimming speed, breathing patterns and path direction. In most parts of the whales’ range, whales rarely encounter big ships; but in the whales’ most important, critical habitats (Johnstone and Haro Straits), the whales may encounter a big ship every hour of every day.
This new research allows us to predict how often the whales change their behaviour to accommodate a ship. Our next work will make some predictions about what it might cost the whales at a population level to spend less time feeding and more time avoiding ships. Our ultimate aim is to partner with ship builders and operators to find ways to reduce those costs to whales.
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.
