It’s officially spring!  Cherry blossoms are a sure sign that spring has sprung in the Pacific Northwest.  But for Pacific white-sided dolphins, spring means herring.  Each spring, Pacific herring find their way to inlets and coastal areas to spawn, laying tens of thousands of eggs.  This dramatic event attracts birds, sea lions, and dolphins.  We were lucky enough to capture footage of Pacific white-sided dolphins working together to corral herring.  Dolphins require a quiet ocean to both to find their prey and to avoid predators like killer whales.  Stay tuned for the results of our investigation to assess which areas along the BC coast are quietest for dolphins.  Hope you enjoy!

Cattle Point lighthouse San Juan Island

In 2009, we published a paper mapping where the whales carry out various activities within their core summer habitat.  The idea was to identify and prioritize important habitat and to propose a candidate Marine Protected Area (MPA) for the whales, especially their feeding habitat.  Our previous work has revealed that feeding behavior is the activity state in which killer whales are most vulnerable to disturbance from boats.  Although we can’t protect all of their summer habitat by closing it off to or reducing boat traffic, and neither would we want to, it seemed sensible to us that we could protected the most important parts.  In this case, that leaves their feeding areas.

Candidate killer whale Marine Protected Area (MPA)

Candidate Marine Protected Area for killer whales

Our research suggests that ocean noise from boats in the area plays a role in interrupting feeding behaviour.  Now, our work on ocean noise, Marine Protected Areas, and killer whale behaviour are all coming together and we look forward to sharing our latest and greatest results.  Please let us know what you think.

Dall’s porpoise

We are fascinated by porpoise.  We’ve published abundance estimates for harbor and Dall’s porpoise in the continental shelf waters of BC and then reanalyzed the data to produce pretty maps of harbor and Dall’s porpoise distribution.

Our colleague Anna Hall has spent years studying these neat critters and is helping to identify how these two ecologically similar species share the waters of the Salish Sea, while avoiding competition and together with Anna and Arliss Winship, Rob published a paper trying to estimate how many porpoise are being caught in salmon gillnets.

Harbor porpoise. Photo credit: Olive Andrews

So, we’re pretty invested in these species.

Our latest research effort on porpoise is a bit of a stretch for us.  In July 2009, our colleagues Line Kyhn and Jakob Tougaard visited from Denmark with some sophisticated recording equipment.  Hardware issues have made it difficult to compare echolocation patterns of these two species before, but Line worked magic!  Line’s found some compelling evidence that these two species can be told apart acoustically — at least if you can hear over 120 kHz.  Check out her PhD thesis for this work, and for results on other dolphins and porpoise around the world.

This may sound esoteric, but there are two reasons it’s so exciting.  First, it teaches us something new about the biology of the species — how they avoid overlap with each other, and how they try to avoid being heard by mammal-eating killer whales.  Secondly, it guides real-world conservation efforts, so that passive acoustic monitoring programs can detect which of these species is present when visual surveys are not possible — in remote areas, or at night, or in rough weather.  That will help us identify important habitats, and protect them, as human activities on the BC coast continue to grow.  We hope to have a paper on this in a scientific journal in the coming year.  We’ll keep you posted.

Click HERE. It’ll take you to Facebook so you can vote for our Quiet Ocean Campaign.  Just click the green button.

Great! Thanks! That’s it. Unless you want to ask your friends to vote, too, which would be great, too!

Thanks!

I woke up this morning and decided that everyone gets twelve wishes today! Ta-da! Here are ours.

1.  Quiet oceans for whales, dolphins and all marine life.  You can help make this a reality.  Please vote here to support our Quiet Oceans Campaign.  It’s easy to vote and you’re welcome to vote once per day!

2. A plastic-free ocean.  Help make this one come true by bringing your own bag to the grocery store.  As the City of Vancouver says, “Create Memories, Not Garbage” by buying experiences, not gifts, this holiday season.  The best way to reduce plastic waste in the ocean is to stop buying things we don’t need.

3. Be an effective voice for ocean conservation in 2013.  You can help us achieve our goal by spreading the word about the work we do.  We’d like to get to 1000 likes on Facebook in the next 3 months.

4.  Reduce bycatch in fishing gear and marine plastics.  Here are our priority regions in BC to reduce marine plastics and their impacts on marine mammals.

5.  Subscribe to our newsletter Scroll up near the top of our page to “Get the Ocean in your Inbox”.  You’ll be glad you did!

6.  Reduce the risk of oil spill.  The Deepwater Horizon incident was a huge wake-up call to everyone in the ocean conservation community.  Our work showed that every dead dolphin recovered on the beach probably translated to 50-250 deaths that went undetected at sea.  In 2013, we’re keen to draw attention to “silent spills” – we’re trying to understand what happens when marine life comes into contact with small oil spills that happen everyday during routine operations when transporting oil by sea.  Keep in touch for our new findings.

7.  Sign up to become a monthly donor to Oceans Initiative.  We hate to ask.  We know that everyone is asking you to fund a lot of great causes.  But the reality is that our charitable organization can’t function without your financial support.  Please consider making a one-time or monthly donation.

8.  A new ocean etiquette.  This isn’t rocket science.  Being a good ocean neighbour is no different than being a good neighbour on land.  Don’t litter.  Recycle.  Keep the noise down when you’re having a party.  Pick up your dog poop. Cover your mouth when you cough (i.e., don’t transmit diseases into the ocean through unsafe aquaculture practices).

9.  More support for research and conservation for animals like Pacific white-sided dolphins that are currently under the conservation radar, but may need our help.  This is a pet peeve of ours.  The ocean is facing multiple threats, and we need to set priorities when spending scarce conservation funding.  But the current model isn’t working.  Too often, we wait for a conservation problem to become a crisis, with funding thrown at the problem in hopes of reversing declines.  Instead, we’d like to see a calmer approach, where species are monitored routinely, and potential problems are identified before they become catastrophic.

10. Keep it cool and save the polar ice caps.  Everyone loves polar bears and penguins, especially at this time of year.  Reduce your dependence on fossil fuels.  It feels like a tall order, but we each can make progress in even small ways.  We travel a lot to do science (including in the Antarctic), but also to see our science used in making smart decisions to protect the ocean.  In fact, we rely on our charitable pooling account with Aeroplan to keep our field costs low.  But we’ve recently discovered Aeroplan’s partner programs to offset carbon.  We’ve switched to video conference whenever we can, but when we have to travel, we try to offset the carbon costs.

11. For you to become our next Twitter follower.  It’s a fantastic spot to engage in conversation.  Hope to see you there.

12. Our final wish is for you to connect and engage in ocean conservation in a way that speaks to you.  For us, it’s sitting on our deck at our field site, listening to the sounds of whales and dolphins breathing as they swim by.  For our land-locked friends, it’s listening to the songs of whales online.  What works for you?  How do you connect to the ocean?  What is your wish for the ocean?

Wishing you all the best for 2013!

-Erin & Rob

This map from Dr Erbe’s paper shows the cumulative noise energy we predict across one year from shipping traffic in BC waters.

We recently partnered with two acousticians, Christine Erbe of Curtin University and Alex MacGillivray of JASCO, to predict how BC’s waters sound to a whale.  Using shipping traffic data compiled by Patrick O’Hara (which we used previously in a ship strike analysis for fin, humpback and killer whales), and making some assumptions about how noisy ships are at different speeds, Christine and Alex were able to predict how much noise different parts of BC experience throughout the year.

What we found is that while ship noise comes and goes, human activities are carving persistent acoustic features into the ocean soundscape, because shipping lanes are entrenched.

The good news is that some areas, particularly some of the mainland inlets on BC’s north central coast, are still comparatively quiet.  It may be that the tangle of islands, fjords and narrow passageways, buffer the ability of anthropogenic ocean noise to propagate up into those inlets, some of which remain in a bit of an acoustic shadow.  Armed with this new information, perhaps Canadians would like to manage human activities in such a way as to maintain these sites as acoustic sanctuaries — marine wilderness areas that remind us what the ocean used to sound like decades ago, when whales were the loudest features of the soundscape.

We enjoyed working on this project, which was supported by WWF-Canada.  Please see what WWF had to say about our study, and check out the original article, which is published in the open-access {FREE!} journal, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Express Letters.