A Year of Impact, Resilience and Joy

This year, we were reminded that the changing planet will affect us all. As flood waters threatened his new home in British Columbia just months after nearly losing his home to fire in California, writer Malcolm Johnson remarked, “It’s also hard to believe that when we moved back to BC from California, not long after almost losing our home to an out-of-season wildfire, we thought we were moving away from climate disasters. But the truth is that there’s no away.”

There is no away for wildlife that have evolved over millennia to occupy particular habitats and ecological niches. In fact, it is precisely this variety of unique ecological roles that captivates us as scientists, inspires awe, and drives us to learn more. The things that make animals special and bring us into their world can be the very things that make them vulnerable.

Among the extraordinary animals we at Oceans Initiative study in order to protect: walrus and belugas that rely on icy habitats; river dolphins, nearly blind, using sound to swim through submerged forests in the Amazon River; and of course, killer whales evolving particular ways to make a living in the sea, with populations specializing on prey ranging from herring to salmon to stingrays and sharks.

For these animals, there is no away. They cannot occupy new habitats if we degrade or destroy the critical habitats they have occupied for millennia. After evolving cultural traditions (and anatomical adaptations) to hunt specific prey items, orcas cannot switch from eating salmon to jellyfish, just because we’ve destroyed their prey base.

But what about us? Human evolution is taking place over millions of years, but humans are rare in that our cultural and technological evolution can also take place in the blink of an eye. We can change our behavior, so the onus is on us to fix the environmental problems we have caused, collectively.

How do we make real change? How is change born? After such a rough few years, do we still have the capacity to change? I hope so, because countless lives depend on our ability to change. Change can feel overwhelming, because it is. When faced with complex challenges, it can be alluring to just keep “admiring the problem” as former President Obama said, and do nothing. We find there is power and joy in creating change together.

Human ingenuity and creativity allow us to take large problems, and break them down into smaller solutions quickly. But sometimes the enormity of what has been lost, and the changes we will see in an ever-warming climate, can seem too much to bear. So we need to build resilience to stay on the path together.

One way we do this is to look for joy in our work. We find joy in the beautiful animals we study and the magic of this planet. We see joy in the teams and partnerships we build and the inspiring people we meet. And, when we reflect on our unique place in this world, and see that our strengths and gifts are needed, we can take a small step and then another on a joyful journey toward healing the world.

Oceans Initiative is committed to this joyful journey to build resilience and make change in the world. We hope you will join us.

Building Resilience of Wildlife Populations

By Dr. Rob Williams, Chief Scientist

Have you ever read the fine print on your retirement plan? There’s probably a footnote somewhere to warn you that past performance of mutual funds or stocks do not guarantee similar results in the future. Investing in biodiversity conservation needs a similar caveat.

Sometimes, protecting endangered species comes down to common sense. When we stopped killing whales—after the 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling—many populations of large baleen whales recovered quickly. Many populations of humpback or grey whales, for example, have been growing at 5-10% each year for decades. Some have done so well that they have been taken off endangered species lists in countries around the world.

But, there are exceptions to the rule. Hundreds of thousands of dolphins were killed accidentally in seine nets in tuna fisheries in the eastern tropical Pacific until public pressure forced industry to adopt dolphin-safe fishing practices. After the initial problem was solved, spotted and spinner dolphin populations have barely recovered.

The southern resident killer whale population was depleted by about 30% during live-capture fisheries for display in aquaria. Even though the live-captures stopped in 1977, the population has not recovered to historic levels. On the contrary, the population has declined from 98 to 73 individuals over the last two decades.

Our newest research on beluga in the St Lawrence Estuary showed that, even though beluga hunting stopped in the 1970s, the population is unlikely to recover to pre-exploitation levels in our lifetime, because the threats of contaminants, inadequate prey, noise, and climate change work together to hinder recovery.

What do these populations teach us? Complacency leads to extinction. Decimating whale and dolphin populations is easier than recovering them. We see this in our own health. You can fall out of a tree and break your arm in an instant, but healing takes time. With whales, we cannot count on populations bouncing back from harm. Each population is unique. Some may need us to slow ships down to make less noise. Others may need us to reroute ships to avoid striking and killing coastal whales. Others may need us to invest in ropeless gear for lobster and crab traps. Each action, on its own, seems trivial. But collectively, we can build the natural resilience of the population to buffer the next threat—climate change.

In 2022, we need your help to build our organization’s resilience, as we build resilience of wildlife populations in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. As the effects of climate change become too obvious to ignore, there has never been a more urgent time to invest in our efforts to keep important ocean habitats clean, quiet, and full of life. Thank you for supporting our conservation mission.

Destroying and Restoring Critical Habitats of Endangered Killer Whales

Endangered species legislation in the U.S. and Canada aims to prevent extinction of species, in part by designating and protecting critical habitats essential to ensure survival and recovery. These strict laws prohibit adverse modification or destruction of critical habitat. The population dynamics of SRKWs are now driven largely by the cumulative effects of prey limitation, anthropogenic noise and disturbance, and toxic contaminants, which are all forms of habitat degradation.

It is difficult to define a single threshold beyond which permissible habitat degradation becomes unlawful destruction. In a recent paper in BioScience, with lawyers, scientists, and policy experts from Natural Resources Defense Council, Ecojustice, and the US Marine Mammal Commission, we present evidence suggesting that line may have already been crossed.

Counting and protecting Amazon river dolphins

Did you know two species of river dolphin‬ live in the Amazon‬? The pink one is called boto‬, or Inia; the grey one is called tucuxi‬, or Sotalia. Both are gorgeous, ancient species that have become adapted to live their entire lives in freshwater. They are also incredibly tough to spot in muddy waters, and have a cryptic behaviour that makes them difficult to count.

That’s a problem, because a key task in‪ ‎conservation‬ science‬ is knowing whether a species is increasing or decreasing.

We partnered with scientists at Fundación Omacha, University of St Andrews & NOAA to survey river dolphins in a stretch of the Amazon at the border of‪ Colombia‬ & Peru‬. Using some simple field methods [learn more about our small-boat survey toolkit here] & fairly sophisticated analytical methods, we found that tucuxi is likely to be stable or increasing, but boto are likely to be declining.

Our findings are worrisome, given reports from‪ Brazil‬ that there is a major problem with deliberate killing of boto for bait in a lucrative catfish fishery. Our next steps are to (a) continue surveys withFundación Omacha to improve our understanding of seasonal and annual trends; and (b) work with Dr Fernando Trujillo (founder of Omacha) to identify solutions. If poaching is the problem, we can work toward finding alternative sources of fish bait. Dr Trujillo points out that more than 150 major hydroelectric dams are proposed for Amazonia. These would fragment dolphin habitat, and our research shows that we have very low statistical power to detect declines — possibly until they become irreversible.

Want to learn more?

Please check out our video describing the project and showing the animals swimming through flooded rainforest (underwater footage courtesy BBC Natural History Unit).  Science Magazine wrote a news article describing our work — a first for our team.  And of course, let us know if you’d like to read the original, technical paper published in Biological Conservation

It’s a fish-eat-fish world: does noise affect them?

We’re so grateful for this week’s special guest post from Inge van der Knaap, a Erasmus Mundus Master’s student in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation. Inge and her assistant, Sofya Reger, recently completed a beautiful experiment on noise and fish in collaboration with Salmon Coast Field Station.  Inge produced a great video introducing people to her study.  We’ll post it here, with her description and some photos below.  Let us know what you think!  And many, many thanks to those of you who donated to our charity to support this work.  

 

Inge’s guest post:

Noise pollution is a relatively new topic in marine sciences. Little is known about the impact of underwater noise on marine life, while the number of ships travelling the seas still increases every year. This might not seem of major concern since our oceans are large and take up more than 70% of the planet’s surface; however noise travels 5 times faster and further in water than in air!
In a busy shipping area like the Strait of Georgia, where thousands of cargo ships pass through every year, the underwater noise production will have consequences for the marine life. This will become an even bigger concern in relation to proposed increase in tanker traffic to and from the port of Vancouver.

Many marine species are vocal and rely on their auditory senses to locate their prey. Numerous studies have investigated the effect of boat noise on cetaceans; however, effects on the largest group of marine vertebra; the fish, has not been studied much yet. In the quiet surroundings of the Broughton Archipelago myself, Inge van der Knaap (a marine conservation master’s student) and Soyna Reger (an undergrad biology student) have conducted a pilot study designed to investigate the effect of boat noise on the behaviour of a Pacific salmon and herring, and a rockfish species:  fish species of ecological, cultural and economic value.

This pilot study was done during the summer of 2014 at the Salmon Coast field station under the supervision of Dr Rob Williams, of Oceans Initiative. Soyna and I collected the fish with the help of the experienced Salmon Coast staff and local people living around the area. We made sure that the fish were not harmed during the collection and all of them were released after our study was completed.
The fish where held inside large net pens and their behaviour was monitored using underwater camera’s. The noise was produced by a small motor boats passing the nets at different speeds and distances and noise levels in the net pens were recorded with a hydrophone (provided by David Hannay of JASCO Applied sciences).

The analysis of the data is still ongoing as part of my master thesis dissertation, which will be finishing in June this year. The results will hopefully give us an indication of the impact vessel noise can have on different fish species and provide a baseline for future studies in this area.

Inge and Sofya