Happy LEAP(S) Year

by oceansadminDolphins, Populations, Women in SciencePosted on No Comments

Happy Leap(s) Year!

Here, we call it LEAPS Year, because that’s the snazzy acronym for our dolphin project:  Lagenorhynchus Ecology, Abundance and Population Status.

Mom and baby dolphin leaping in British Columbia, Canada

This time of year, our dolphin research involves a lot of time in front of the computer.  We’re training computers to screen thousands of hours of underwater recordings to detect dolphin calls in an increasingly noisy ocean.  And, learning more about how these dolphins communicate with one another.

While that set of computers is chugging away and the dolphin calls are analyzed, the rest of our team is going through more than 10,000 dolphin photographs to see if we see anyone we know.  While a lot of these dolphins look alike, some fraction of the individuals have unique natural markings that allow us to identify individuals, like mugshots or fingerprints.  (FIN-erprints?)

I know.  It sounds like Dolphin TMZ, except that this is for a good cause.  We use these photographs to develop an encounter history for hundreds of individuals, and {insert fancy math here} estimate how many dolphins there are in the population, and whether the population is going up or down.  We use that information to assess the health of the population, like a checkup at the doctor’s office, and that allows us to make recommendations about whether we need to change human activities to protect these dolphins, or if they’re doing just fine without our help.

What’s next?  Right now, we’re trying to raise funds for an intensive dolphin field season this summer.  We’re shaking out the sofa cushions and collecting frequent flyer miles  to make sure we can spend some time in the field to collect the last few photographs I need to finish my PhD on Pacific white-sided dolphin ecology.  If you’re able to help this project, or know someone who can, please get in touch.

It takes a village to do this work, and we are thrilled to be working with a team of smart, talented, eagle-eyed women.  Thanks, Christie, Marie, Nicole & Melissa!  It’s great working with you on this!

Finally, do you spend time on the water in the Salish Sea?  If you see dolphins, let us know:  http://www.seadocsociety.org/dolphin-study  If we find a match to the dolphins in our catalogue, it will tell us about movement patterns across the Canada-US border, and whether our two countries need to work more closely together to protect these dolphins and their habitat.

Happy Leap(s) Year, everyone!

 

OCEANS ELEVEN

by oceansadminConservation, Dolphins, Ocean Noise, Populations, Whales, Women in SciencePosted on 2 Comments

Our plan was to spend a quiet year in Scotland.  Erin’s making great strides on her PhD on Pacific white-sided dolphins.  Rob won a Marie Curie Fellowship to model the effects of noise on whale populations.  But MAN!  This ended up being one of our busiest years ever.  Here are 11 of our highlights of 2011.

 

Oceans ’11

I LOVE DOLPHINS IN THE SPRINGTIME

by oceansadminAcoustics, Dolphins, Populations, Women in SciencePosted on 2 Comments

Dolphin leaping in Knight Inlet

It’s that time of year again.  Pacific white-sided are making appearances in the waters throughout the Pacific Northwest.  Last month, Knight Inlet, BC was bursting with Pacific white-sided dolphins and we were there to collect ID photographs, acoustic recordings (Click here to listen) and prey samples.

Soon after our Knight Inlet trip ended, our colleague, Dr Andrew Wright, photographed a group of dolphins in Howe Sound, between Vancouver and Bowen Island!  He took some beautiful photographs, and a few of the individuals bear distinctive markings.  Now, thanks to the support from the SeaDoc Society, we are doing the painstaking work of comparing his few mug shots to our catalogue, to see if there are any matches between dolphins in the Broughton Archipelago and those using the Salish Sea.  In fact, our partnership with SeaDoc has inspired us to take a transboundary look at our cetacean conservation work more generally.

Which reminds us, if you spot any dolphins, we are very grateful for any opportunistic photographs of dolphin dorsal fins.  This is what a dolphin ID shot looks like:

Example of a photo used for identification

but, please, only try this at home if you have a really long lens.  Remember that the “Be Whale Wise Guidelines” also apply to dolphins, so please remember to remain at least 100 meters/yards away.  Thanks!

SHARKS IN BC?

by oceansadminEcosystems, PopulationsPosted on No Comments

| iStockphoto

Mark Hume, at the Globe & Mail, just published a neat new story about our recently published paper on sharks in BC (with Tom Okey, Scott Wallace and Vince Gallucci).  The paper was published months ago, but became newsworthy again recently in light of the Cohen Commission’s discussions about the potential role of marine predators in governing salmon population dynamics in BC.  Over and over again at that hearing, we heard that scientists, managers and decision-makers in BC need good estimates of abundance for top predators in our marine ecosystem.

Our shark survey, which we conducted with Raincoast Conservation, was originally designed to estimate abundance and distribution of cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) in BC, because that number wasn’t available at the time for species that can’t be studied using photo-identification.  Thanks to an incredibly hard-working team with strong stomachs (we crossed Hecate Strait dozens of times on a relatively small sailboat), we accomplished our primary goal and achieved a number of secondary objectives.  The shark study was a great bonus, but so was our estimate of how much plastic pollution there is in BC waters.  [There is a story on our garbage sightings here, but the peer-reviewed article is coming out in Marine Pollution Bulletin soon.]  We used the data to evaluate where fin, humpback and killer whales are most vulnerable to ship strike risk.  Don’t tell anyone, but we’re also working on a paper on Mola mola (those weird, giant ocean sunfish) in our spare time with sunfish expert, Dr Tierney Thys.  At the same time, we collected zooplankton data, physical oceanographic data (temperature, salinity), and had a seabird observer on board.  We are dying to find the funds to hire a statistician to turn those bird sightings into abundance estimates for seabirds, but that’s a bit of an aside.

Our surveys were conducted initially in 2004, and it’s getting time to start thinking about redoing them.  The thought of all that fundraising and planning is a bit overwhelming, but when we look back at the scientific return on investment, it looks those surveys represented pretty good value.  And who could have anticipated that (a) we’d find massive numbers of sharks; (b) that the salmon people hadn’t considered those predators in their ecosystem models, and (c) that there would be catastrophic sockeye salmon runs in the Fraser River years later that would require us to re-think marine ecosystem functioning in a holistic manner?  Initially, we conducted the surveys out of concern that Canada would lift a moratorium on offshore oil and gas exploration and extraction, and we wanted to be able to quantify the risk to the marine mammals that we study.  That threat has subsided, it seems.  We hope that the next use of our science is in the Pacific North Coast Integrated Management Area planning process.

I guess one lesson here is that basic science never goes out of style.  The other is, as Mark says, if we’re going to continue our work on a bigger scale, we’re gonna need a bigger boat.  [Well, you knew we had to get the Jaws quote in there, right?]

(WHALE, DOLPHIN AND HUMAN) MOTHERS ROCK

by oceansadminDolphins, Habitat, Human Impacts, Populations, Whales, Women in SciencePosted on No Comments
Killer whale (orca) mother and calf

I’m not a mom (yet), but being in the field with whales and dolphins for my PhD research is making me think a lot lately about motherhood.  The killer whales (orcas) that we study stay with their mothers their entire lives:  they live in a matrifocal society.  That’s rare.  Sure, when the daughters grow up and have whale babies of their own, they often travel in their smaller family groups and spend days apart, but what’s unusual is that even sons stay with their mums their entire lives.  That’s unheard-of in any other mammalian society.  We’re not sure what advantage this social structure offers to killer whales.  Maybe mothers pass on critical information, and serve as archives of lessons learned through time on where to find salmon in lean years and where the best rubbing beaches are.

This week we attended a fantastic lecture by Jane Goodall here in St Andrews.  The science was interesting, but we were most struck by the story of how Jane Goodall became Jane Goodall.  As Dr. Goodall recounted her incredible story of becoming first a primatologist and then a force of nature, she attributes her path and success to the support of her mother (we do too!).  Chimpanzees, Dr. Goodall reminded us, also have societies that rely on mothers to teach offspring, and nurture and protect young chimps.

Moms know stuff.  In one ‘green mommy blog’, Eco Child’s Play , the author points out the possible dangers to your baby (decreased IQ, increase in attention-deficit disorder, cancer, endocrine disruption) from using products loaded with chemical flame retardants.  These contaminants are not good for human babies and, as it turns out, not good for killer whale babies either.  Our colleague, Dr. Peter Ross has found very high levels flame retardant chemicals in the blubber of killer whales.

Mom and baby Pacific white-sided dolphin

Alexandra Morton began to notice Pacific white-sided dolphins in her study area in the late 1980’s.  If you open any guidebook, they’ll tell you that Pacific white-sided dolphins “belong” way offshore, but after a decades-long absence, these dolphins came into the inlets of mainland BC in groups of hundreds.  The odd thing was, there were no babies.  Just adult dolphins.  Then, in 1995, the first young dolphins began to appear.  Were other dolphins scoping out peripheral, new habitat before letting moms and babies know that it was safe?  These days, I see quite a number of mothers and babies.  Even newborns.  In fact, these dolphins may actually be giving birth in the inlets right in our neighborhood. That’s quite a surprise for a species perceived as a resident of the high seas.  This is the phenomenon I want to study next.

In the meantime, knowing this makes me want to protect dolphin habitat from noise, nets, pollution and plastic.  Are these my maternal instincts kicking in?