Like the whales we study, the Oceans Initiative team is highly mobile and migratory. We divide our time between getting our feet wet in the field, wherever our work is needed, and using our science to inform smart decisions to conserve wildlife. Covid-19 required us to hit pause on most of our travel plans this year, but it was a bit of a treat. We slowed down, and tried to improve our local conservation impact. With all of the time we saved on travel, we took the time to look inward to think strategically about the kind of work we want to do in the coming years, when a vaccine is in widespread use.
We are proud of the real-world impact our conservation science has, but some of it can feel pretty abstract at times. After all, you can’t see noise in the ocean. It will take years before the orcas we study start to show us—through increased births and longer lifespans—that our efforts to protect the whales’ habitats are paying off. So it was a real joy this year to work on projects that use carefully engineered sound signals to scare seals away from eating endangered salmon. We could see the conservation benefit of our work in real life, in real time. Five years from now, we hope that the offspring of some of the Chinook salmon we helped make it to their spawning grounds return as prey for endangered orcas.
Of course, time is the constraint here. As we work to get the whales more salmon, and quiet enough conditions to hunt, climate change is making our job harder every year. In 2021, we are strengthening our work to climate-proof recovery of belugas, dolphins, killer whales, and marine predators around the world. Our work is showing that we can save species by removing as many stressors as we can now, in order to build their resilience to buffer effects of climate change.
At Oceans Initiative, one of our core values is Optimism. We actively cultivate hope, focus on solutions, and acknowledge conservation successes. I am proud of our scientific accomplishments and our team’s optimism that carried us through 2020. With your support, I am hopeful that we can celebrate even more conservation wins in 2021 and beyond. Thank you for supporting our efforts to keep our oceans clean, quiet, and full of life.
SUMMARY A group of partners working to improve salmon stocks have deployed a newly developed device on the west side of the Ballard Locks that uses underwater sound to keep harbor seals away from this salmon migration bottleneck. If effective, the device may help salmon populations in jeopardy by reducing predation without harming marine mammals.
STORY The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Oceans Initiative, with support from Long Live the Kings, University of St Andrews, Genuswave, Puget Sound Partnership, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, Muckleshoot Indian Tribe, and other partner organizations have deployed a Targeted Acoustic Startle Technology (TAST) on the west side of the Ballard (Hiram M. Chittenden) Locks. The TAST is intended to keep harbor seals away from the fish ladder allowing salmon to reach the Lake Washington Ship Canal from Puget Sound. Seals and sea lions are known to linger at this migration bottleneck and consume large numbers of salmon returning to the spawning grounds. If successful, the device may help recover dwindling salmon runs, without harming marine mammals.
“We are always looking for new innovations to help the environment,” said USACE spokesperson Dallas Edwards. “We are excited to see the results of this study.”
Every salmon and steelhead originating from the Sammamish or Cedar river must pass through the Ballard Locks twice during its life, once as a young smolt and again as an adult. With limited routes to get through the locks, salmon are funneled through a small area. This makes an easy meal for some marine mammals that use this human-made obstacle to their advantage.
Over the past 50 years, observers have also seen a spike in marine mammals near the locks, compounding the significant habitat declines over the past century across the watershed. This combination of factors has led to the lowest returns of salmon and steelhead in history, resulting in fishery closures and populations on the edge of extinction.
During the summer and fall salmon migration, the area is being monitored by scientists from Oceans Initiative, a Seattle-based marine conservation research nonprofit. The scientists are observing marine mammal behavior when the device is on and comparing that with their behavior when the device is off.
“Everyone at Oceans Initiative is excited to see whether this benign use of acoustic technology can protect endangered salmon, without harming seals,” said Laura Bogaard, who is leading data collection at the Locks. “During the first week of observing with the TAST on, it feels like the seals have shifted away from the fish ladder compared to observation days when the TAST was off. We are keen to see if this observation is also reflected in our data when it comes time for analysis.”
If the device is effective at reducing the presence of marine mammals at the Locks, it may then be deployed at other locations in Puget Sound, giving resource managers a sorely needed tool to prevent marine mammals from consuming large numbers of salmon and steelhead at migration bottlenecks.
Designed at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, the TAST uses sound to startle animals and induce a flight response, causing the animal to leave the area, with the intention of training the animals to keep away altogether. It produces short sounds that are unexpected and startling, but does not lead to hearing damage, as is often the case for other acoustic methods. This helps to maintain its effectiveness much better over time. Recently, a Scotland-based company, Genuswave, brought the device to market after a number of peer-reviewed articles showed positive results.
Prof Vincent Janik, the Director of the Scottish Oceans Institute and one of the developers of the system remarked: “My colleague Thomas Goetz and I came across this very specific acoustic method after testing many commercially available devices and generally aversive sounds on seals. The reactions in our tests were in stark contrast to the habituation we saw in response to all other sounds. Seals avoided the area of exposure more and more over time, even when freely available food was presented next to the device.”
The TAST deployed at the locks is a marked improvement over similar devices used in the past. Some other devices using noise to deter marine mammals have seen very limited success and rely on high-volume sounds that risk damaging the hearing of marine mammals. The TAST being deployed at the Locks emits sound at volumes that do not harm seals or sea lions, and at frequencies outside the hearing range of salmon and other marine mammals, such as whales.
Marine mammals are notorious for eating fish at the Locks thanks to Herschel, an 800-pound sea lion that, with other sea lions, was a significant factor contributing to the decline of the nearly extinct steelhead population in the watershed. Almost every strategy available, including other acoustic devices, has been used to separate marine mammals from salmon at the Locks, but none have proven successful. While Herschel hasn’t returned to the locks since the 1980s, other sea lions appear annually, and smaller harbor seals are now seen camping in the fish ladder to intercept returning fish.
If the Locks are reopened this summer to the thousands of tourists who visit each year, they may be able to see the device in action or see scientists observing marine mammals in the area. Operation of the device should not affect visitors to the locks.
The effort to deploy and evaluate the TAST at the locks is made possible through a grant from the Puget Sound Partnership to build on the findings from the Salish Sea Marine Survival Project, an international research effort led by the salmon recovery nonprofit, Long Live the Kings and their Canadian co-leaders, the Pacific Salmon Foundation.
This summer, from mid-July to the end of September, we studied southern resident killer whale behavior under varying levels of boat and ship traffic. (This is an extension of our 2017 field season with OrcaSound). The Port of Vancouver has asked ships to slow down to less than 11 knots as they transit Haro Strait. Reducing ship speed can reduce shipping noise underwater, but slower speeds mean those ships take longer to transit the area. Working with Port of Vancouver and SMRU Consulting, we are exploring how whales navigate that trade-off between noise level and duration of exposure.
Do the whales find more salmon if they are exposed to a little bit of noise for long periods of time? Or is it better to get the noise over with quickly?
Reducing noise is especially important because endangered southern resident killer whales (SRKW) feed in Haro Strait in the summer, and our work has shown that vessel noise disrupts killer whale foraging. While missing one meal might not seem like it would have long-lasting or population-level effects, Haro Strait is a noisy place, which may result cumulatively in many lost meals for the killer whales. We had our team on the western hillsides of San Juan Island all summer to track killer whales in an effort to find out if and how their behavior changes with the slower, quieter ships.
A ship transits Haro Strait by a family of southern resident killer whales. (PC Toby Hall). The theodolite crosshairs allow us to convert horizontal and vertical angles to estimates of latitude and longitude, knowing the cliff height.
To track these whales, we used an instrument called a theodolite. You may have seen them on construction sites or traffic surveys. A theodolite has a telescopic lens that we use to track killer whale movement. After setting a constant reference point, the theodolite can determine the angle between the reference point and the whale we’re looking at. It gets the vertical angle from a gravity-referenced level vector. A computer connected to the theodolite can use those two angles (along with the precise location and elevation of the theodolite) to estimate distances and fixed positions of objects on the ocean’s surface (whales, ships, etc). Your geometry teacher was right—this math does have real-world applications. And we can get all of this fine-scale information noninvasively, without another research boat confounding the effect we are trying to measure. This year, the developer of Pythagoras software generously shared code to let us integrate extremely high-resolution AIS data on the movement of ships, so we could automagically collect precise and accurate data on the ships, while having our expert observers concentrate on measuring the whales’ behavior.
In 2017, the killer whales were worryingly absent from the islands much of the summer, which left us with a small sample size. In fact, for the month of August 2017, the SRKWs were nowhere to be found. This year’s longer field season produced much more data. There were 29 days with whales present around San Juan Island. We had tracking stations set up in three locations along the west side of San Juan Island: County Park, Hannah Heights, and Cattle Point, which allowed us to get close to continuous tracks along Haro Strait. We are excited to analyze the data, which should allow us to determine more about killer whale behavior in the presence of these slower ships.
Video credit: Toby Hall
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This work felt profoundly important this year, in a season riddled with heartbreaking news about the endangered southern residents. J35’s calf died shortly after being born, and the mother mourned the loss of her offspring by pushing around the carcass for 17 days. J50, the youngest individual in the southern resident population, was found to be critically malnourished. NOAA launched the first attempt to supplement a southern resident killer whale’s diet with additional fish. Unfortunately she has not been seen since September 7 and is presumed dead. It is abundantly clear than additional conservation effort is needed, and our team worked hard to make this field season count, both in the field and on the Southern Resident Killer Whale Task Force.
This work wouldn’t have been possible without a super pod of a team. The Oceans Initiative team was led by Erin and Rob, and consisted of our employees Laurel Yruretagoyena, Natalie Mastick, and Laura Bogaard, as well as Toby Hall, Sarah Colosimo, Jess and Chris Newley, and Elizabeth Robinson, who provided additional field support.
Thank you, as always, for supporting our efforts to keep orca habitat clean, quiet, and full of salmon.
We need to recover Chinook salmon stocks throughout the whales’ range.
We support all efforts to do so. We support dam removal, where this will get more salmon into the environment. We applaud the recent announcement to reduce salmon fishing quotas until the whales recovery, which will reduce our competition with the whales. While we wait for those measures to take effect, we need your help to give the whales a fighting chance to find as many of those salmon as possible in a noisy ocean.
We need to give the whales a quiet place to hunt for salmon
A protected area can help the whales if we put it in the right place.
We have found that killer whales are more vulnerable to disturbance when they are feeding than when they are travelling from A to B. They also need more salmon. We have identified areas that whales use preferentially for feeding. (One is called Salmon Bank. We have a feeling the whales knew this before people did.) We need to bring together all dedicated datasets we can use to identify areas where the whales are finding salmon, so we can prioritize those for protection. Protecting key feeding areas is essential to protecting the whales.
Please support our efforts to keep orca habitat clean, quiet, and full of fat, wild salmon.
PS Thanks to our team, especially Toby Hall, for the great footage, and to our friends at SeaLegacy for help editing this video.
Southern resident killer whales in Haro Strait. Photo by Toby Hall
Southern resident killer whales are in decline. Our recent population viability analysis on southern resident killer whales predicted that, if threats remained constant, it should take several decades for the population to decline from 80 to 75 whales. In fact, that decline took only three years. We fear that the decline is accelerating, and we may be reaching a tipping point.
By studying killer whales from land, we can measure their responses to noise without adding the noise of a research boat to the equation. We use noninvasive techniques to measure swimming speeds, breathing rates, and other behavior. Our work on both northern and southern resident orca has shown us that the whales spend 18-25% less time feeding in the presence of boats than in their absence.
We recently joined an international, interdisciplinary study to understand the relative importance of the three main threats to recovery in the endangered killer whale population. The whales are facing a perfect storm of threats–not enough salmon, too much noise, and too many toxic chemicals in their bodies–but lack of prey is at the eye of the storm. This research shows it will take 30% more big, fatty, Chinook salmon than we’ve seen on average over the last 40 years for the population to reach our recovery goals. That will take time, but we have to start now. Meanwhile, reducing noise and disturbance can help make it a little bit easier for whales to find the salmon we have now. In the coming months, we will be revisiting our study on identifying critical foraging areas in the Salish Sea and strengthening their protection.
