#5: Roseway Adventure Underway!

This is our third consecutive year of working with the Canadian Whale Institute (CWI) to survey for right whales in Canadian waters offshore, with the purpose of searching for new potential habitats as well as conducting systematic surveys through Roseway Basin, a known right whale habitat. Our research vessel for these offshore trips is the comfortable liveaboard Shelagh, generously made available to us by the co-founder and Chairperson of CWI, Sarah Haney.

Like in 2014, our voyages will send six team members to sea for approximately two weeks. Onboard this first trip is Moe, Kelsey, Marianna, Sam, Molly, and Captain Joe. You can check where the Shelagh is as we sail the open seas through her AIS, and you can also follow our track with the Spot we will have onboard. When we need fuel and/or water, we'll be docking in Cape Sable Island, NS, where we'll also pick up a plankton net on loan from Dalhousie University to do plankton tows.

The crew for the first 2015 offshore trip!

You may have read in the news recently that there is a large collaborative effort by scientists to use new technologies in the search for right whales. As a part of this work last year, our team deployed and retrieved passive acoustic recorders in Roseway Basin, while the MEOPAR WHaLE team sent autonomous gliders that can detect large whale calls in real-time. These gliders are unique in that they can determine the species behind some of the calls, and report their findings when they surface from the depths. This year, the gliders were deployed on July 28 and have been reporting whale detections in Roseway Basin. You can stay up-to-date with this information by checking this glider site!