We’ve been making a lot of noise about ocean noise for years.
Today, the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Marine Fellows Program announced that they’re listening. Our co-founder, Dr Rob Williams, won a 3-year Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation. He will use the award to expand his studies of impacts of ocean noise on whale, fish, and the interactions between marine predators and their prey. More importantly, he will use the award to help identify solutions to reduce ocean noise levels in important marine habitats.
The work we do on ocean noise has been made possible with a whole host of visionary funders. We’re grateful to them for seeing the value and potential of this work, which we started in 2008. We’re also grateful to our main co-conspirators in ocean acoustics, Dr Chris Clark at Cornell University and Dr Christine Erbe at Curtin University, as well as our colleagues at University of St Andrews’ Sea Mammal Research Unit (Prof Philip Hammond and Prof Ian Boyd) and Centre for Research into Ecological & Environmental Modelling (Dr Len Thomas), who help us integrate the noise studies into ecological models of what the noise means for whale health and population conservation status. Together, we’re building up a solid evidence base on the ecological effects of noise, but there is a lot more work to do. And of course, thanks to all of you for supporting our charity to do this important work. It’s starting to get noticed.
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.
Thanks so much for your support for our charity. We couldn’t do this work without your support. If you like the work we do, please share our work through your social networks, or consider making a donation.
Our colleagues at Northwest Fisheries Science Center recently released an impressive summary of their work on critically endangered Southern Resident killer whales over the last 10 years. We applaud the quantity and quality of research on the population, and think more agencies should do this kind of outreach to summarize technical work on complicated subjects.
But we were struck by the reaction of our friend, colleague & frequent co-author, Dr David Bain. Dr Bain wrote this on his Facebook page, and has given us permission to reprint it here in its entirety. Please note that the headline is ours, not his. Dr Bain’s comments are reprinted below, in italics. What do you think?
“Science is about what we believe and how certain we are that it is true. In 2002, I was a co-organizer of the Orca Recovery Conference on what was known about Southern Resident Killer Whales and what could be done to recover them, the same ground covered by this new report (the conference report is still available on the Earth Island website, in case anyone is interested in what we thought in the “old days”). Very little has changed in what we believe, but today there is a lot more certainty that our beliefs are true.
As for genuine progress in understanding, there is a a little that is new. The satellite tracks indicate how far offshore SRKWs went on a couple of their trips to California. We know about PBDEs (flame retardants) in their blubber. We have enough data on age, sex, birth order, and reproductive history to extrapolate toxin burdens to individuals who have not actually been measured. We’ve added suppression of foraging behavior to the effects of vessel traffic.
But overall, they ate what we thought they ate, have the toxin levels we thought they had, and the effects of disturbance are about what we thought they were. So, there’s no surprise that we haven’t seen signs of recovery. The effort has been on double checking results of previously completed work with more sophisticated techniques and larger sample sizes, not implementing recovery actions.
Three SRKW specific recovery actions have been taken. One was designed to reduce but not eliminate the effects of disturbance. The other two are partial steps toward preparing for emergencies: oil spills and disease outbreaks. The first obviously has been too little, and the other two need to be completed before it is too late. E.g., the report notes that in 2002 we demonstrated that we knew how to reunite an isolated whale with its pod, but that knowledge was not applied to an isolated SRKW, and he died as a result.
The big steps still need to be taken. The removal of the Elwha dams is a start, and recolonization of the upper Elwha by chinook salmon may start to benefit SRKWs in about 15 years. If Washington State were to drop its appeal of the culvert replacement ruling and complete replacement by 2030 as ordered, SRKWs would see the benefits of that over the next 30 years. If the federal government would agree to start removing Snake River dams now instead of going back to the judge each year with a new set of reasons for putting it off, SRKWs might start seeing the benefit of that in 30 years, if they’re still around (the listing petition calculated that in the absence of action, SRKWs could become extinct as early as 2035, and Congress has set a pace to complete the research needed to finalize the recovery plan in the 2050’s). If we could get everyone who watches whales to spend equal time restoring salmon spawning habitat, along with the above government actions, we could make real progress on dealing with the prey availability problem (so whale watch operators, quit whining about unfairly being made the scapegoat and do what it takes for history to record you as the heroes who succeeded in starting recovery while governments fiddled).
The other big step is dealing with toxins. That means actually cleaning up superfund sites in SRKW habitat and adjacent coastal watersheds. That means convincing people to use their time instead of chemicals to remove weeds. It means paying attention to what our cars put onto streets and parking lots, and ultimately into stormwater and the food web (oil and other chemicals that leak, metals such as lead and copper that flake off). It means being more selective about the use of flame retardants (e.g., if your home has a good sprinkler system and no one smokes, you might be able to get by without them in a lot of products).
And last but not least, there is the matter of scrubbing carbon dioxide out of the ocean and atmosphere. Ocean acidification and climate change threaten to offset progress that could be made to improve prey availability. That’s going to require societal-scale change in transportation, energy, land use and restoration policies.
The report outlines research on killer whales NOAA hopes to accomplish over the next ten years. But, I have to wonder whether they plan to study the wrong species. To recover killer whales, don’t we really need to study human behavior, so we can discover how to get approval to actually implement the recovery actions we’ve been putting off the last ten years?”
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.
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.”
