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.
They say write about what you know. That’s tough, because I don’t know what it’s like to be a girl in the developing world. I’m trying to learn, because girls in the developing world hold the key to creating a better life for all of us. It’s called The Girl Effect.
I can’t think about The Girl Effect without thinking about my two best friends.
When I was 12, all I had to worry about was how to spend my afternoons with my two best friends. We spent our time at the farm where we lived and breathed horses. My friend’s mom had one of the best jobs on earth. She was a riding instructor, which meant we could have riding lessons and unlimited access to horses in exchange for doing chores around the barn. More than 20 years later, these amazing women are still my best friends and we all have or are pursuing advanced graduate degrees. One an environmental lawyer, the other now pursuing her MBA, and I’m finishing my PhD as a marine conservation biologist at the University of St Andrews. We were lucky.
While we certainly weren’t rich, we were definitely not living in poverty like 600 million adolescent girls in the developing world. We had the chance to cultivate friendships and draw upon these for support when we needed. We had the chance to play, pursue an education and now give back. The reality is, around a quarter of girls in the developing world are not in school. This is unacceptable.
Studies show that giving adolescent girls in the developing world the chance to thrive causes a RIPPLE EFFECT. When she receives seven or more years of education, she marries four years later and has 2.2 fewer children. Plus, when women and girls earn income, they reinvest 90 percent of it into their families,. (Men tend to reinvest only 30 to 40% of their income to their families.) And this goes on generation after generation. Educated mothers are likely to send their children to school.
This is going to sound a bit weird, but please bear with me. I study whale and dolphin families. My early love of animals and a supportive environment catalyzed my passion for biology, conservation of marine mammals and the math required to study whales and dolphins. Early on, I was captivated by killer whales, or orcas. At 18, I left home to go to university, but orcas live with their families for their entire lives. Maintaining the integrity of this close-knit social network is essential for their survival. Mothers teach their babies how to find fish, how to sing their family dialect and how to stick together in a storm. Siblings babysit for one another. Everyone shares fish with each other.
But, we’ve discovered that like The Girl Effect, it’s the young females who are the vital link in these societies. When aquariums go looking for new whales to capture, they often target these young females who have not had babies yet because they are smaller and have an entire reproductive lifetime ahead of them. But removing these young females from their families is one of the worst things you can do to an orca family and its population. It breaks their social network apart. Could The Girl Effect be universal?
I had the opportunity to go to school and study biology so I can be a part of these amazing discoveries about whales and dolphins. Every girl should and can have the opportunity to go to school and make her own choices.
What can you do? Watch this video to learn more then share. You can even write your own Girl Effect blog post by clicking here .
In the summer, you can you usually find Rob, Wishart (the dog) and me doing field work in our little boat with whales and dolphins in British Columbia, Canada. This year’s different.
We’re in a new country. Scotland. I’m finishing my PhD on dolphin ecology and Rob is in the middle of his Marie Curie Research Fellowship (researching ocean noise), both at the University of St Andrews.
This is the first time in over a decade that we are away from the Pacific Northwest and sitting a summer out. There’s no denying it: we are homesick. Wishart’s actually homestick (there is way less driftwood on these beaches than at home!).
We find ourselves fighting the urge to pack our camera equipment, binoculars, field notes and dog biscuits into the boat. We’re restless. We are constantly gazing out into the waves, hoping for a marine mammal to emerge.
Wilderness was required. We needed to increase the probability of a dolphin sighting. A road trip was in order. So, we packed up and headed to the Highlands, to the stunning Isle of Skye to visit a friend, Deirdre. (Truth is, we needed a doctor’s signature on a form, but any excuse for a road trip. We also miss long Canadian drives.) So we did what you do before any pilot field study: we asked around for traditional ecological knowledge. Fortunately, here at the world renowned Sea Mammal Research Unit, you don’t need to go far to find an expert on sea mammals. Our good friend and colleague, Lindsay Wilson, conducts amazing research on seals and their diet all over Scotland. Lindsay handed us a map, pointed out some hotspots, and away we went!
Wishart is an incredible dolphin-spotter. But this trip was going to be exclusively shore-based. However, he did mange to spot some wildlife for us along the way.
When we reached our destination the first night, we spotted a pod of about 20 common dolphins swimming past our hotel as we parked the car! Mission accomplished. Unless we start seeing bottlenose dolphins in St Andrews Bay, that glimpse may have to tide us over until the fall, when Rob and I will be presenting our work at the Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference in Vancouver. Rob will present his work on ocean noise, killer whales and salmon. I’ll present on dolphins. We will travel to the conference thanks to generous donations of frequent flyer miles to our charitable pooling account with Aeroplan. If we can raise enough cash to put fuel in our boat, we will also be able to spend two weeks conducting conservation-minded research on Pacific white-sided dolphins. Learn more about our dolphin study here, and if you’re interested, you can help support our dolphin field work here. Thanks very much!
Happy summer,
Erin +Rob
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:
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!
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.
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?
