Showing posts with label Kathleen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kathleen. Show all posts

9/15/11

#16: Whale Blow, Chapter 3: THAR HE BLOWS!

This is the third installment of "The Quest for Whale Blow,"detailing our newest research project focused on collecting and analyzing right whale blow. You can read Chapter 2 here.

WE HAVE BLOW!

Our first few weeks here (in August) for blow sampling were actually a bit frustrating - simply because the weather was just terrible. In fact, it was the worst August weather for whale work that we've had in years. Day after day there would be fog, then rain, then wind, then fog again, then more fog, then more rain, more wind... and day after day we'd be stuck on shore. In the whole month of August our blow-collecting boat, Callisto, got out just three times. And each of those three times we were only able to be out for a half-day, in somewhat choppy seas and much-less-than-ideal conditions (it's very tricky operating a long pole on a little boat if there are any kind of waves).



Yet despite the poor weather ... we're getting samples anyway! So far we've always gotten at least three samples per half-day, and often more. Our "bride's-head" collectors seem to be doing quite well at catching droplets of blow vapor, and we're also getting better and better at operating the blow-collecting pole. On our most recent day out, Sept. 11th, we got ten blow samples in just four hours!

Pole operation is definitely a skill that improves with practice. We've got a whole system worked out now in which Scott Kraus carefully pilots Callisto up to the whales, taking a great deal of care not to disturb them, while Roz Rolland stands at the bow maneuvering the pole to get the bride's-head collector over the blowholes of the whale. (This is not at all as easy as it sounds.) Meanwhile, a skilled whale photographer (usually either Moe, Monica, Amy or Marianna) is dashing around the boat trying to stay out of the way of the end of the pole, taking photos of the whales so as to ID them later, and is shouting whale ID's and frame numbers to me so I can scribble them down on our data sheet.

As soon as we get a sample, Roz flings the end of the pole back at me in the stern (as I toss the data sheets out of the way, pull out my sample-processing equipment and try not to drop my pencil overboard). As fast as possible, I haul in the 32-foot-long pole till Roz can grab the sample off its other end; Roz hands the sample to me for processing, I label it and tuck it in our cooler surrounded by ice packs, Roz puts a new bride-'s-head on the pole, we re-deploy the pole, and off we go again! Roz and I have got this pole-retrieval choreography pretty well rehearsed now, and we can retrieve one sample and re-deploy the pole for the next sample pretty fast.



All four crew members are in high gear the whole time, so it's pretty busy. And it's exciting! Check out this video (taken Sept. 9th, 2011) to see Roz getting a blow sample from male North Atlantic right whale "Sparky", who is in the middle of a SAG (surface active group). Thanks, Sparky! (And a big thanks also to New England Aquarium president Bud Ris, who happened to be on the boat with us that day and who took the video; and to the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research, which is funding this study.)

- Kathleen Hunt
Posted by samba kat at 11:19 AM 2 comments
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9/12/11

#15: Whale Blow, Chapter 2: Brideshead Revisited

This is the second installment of "The Quest for Whale Blow,"detailing our newest research project focused on collecting and analyzing right whale blow. You can read Chapter 1 here.


Blow analysis is very much the cutting-edge frontier of marine mammal research, and it's often quite difficult to find funding for innovative new research ideas like this. Fortunately, the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research (O.N.R.) has a particular interest in developing methods to detect and ameliorate effects of chronic stress in marine mammals (particularly the effects of noise, because of the Navy's need to use military sonar). ONR Program Officer Michael Weise, Ph.D., has even taken the trouble to sponsor several research conferences on the topic, inviting the top stress researchers from around the world to brainstorm ideas about innovative new methods for assessing stress in marine mammals. These conferences have essentially jump-started a whole new research field on marine mammmal stress. The ONR has recently given us funding to study stress hormones in feces of 3 different cetaceans (see, for example, our previous posts on our beaked whale project in the Bahamas). And now the ONR has also funded our study to study stress hormones in respiratory blow of North Atlantic right whales.


So here we are in the Bay of Fundy, trying to catch right whale blow!


Right off the bat we faced three fundamental questions:

1. Can we build a device that can capture enough blow vapor? Previous studies only succeeded at collecting infinitesimal amounts, about 50ul (picture a tiny droplet about the size of a poppyseed). What we need is at least four times more, about 200ul (approximately apple-seed size). That may still sound tiny, but it's much more than anybody's collected before from a large whale.

2. Can we actually get the device over the blowhole of a free-swimming whale? We know we can approach right whales very closely, but the whales are constantly swimming and rolling and moving around, and it's not at all clear how easy it will be to hold a blow collector right over their blowholes.

3. If we succeed at both #1 and #2, and if we actually get samples and get them back to our lab, will the samples actually contain any measurable hormones?





Dr. Rosalind Rolland operating the customized blow-collecting pole

on the R/V Callisto.


To get the project underway, Aquarium researcher Scott Kraus, Ph.D. spent much of the spring months designing and building a telescoping 32' carbon-fiber pole mounted on a beautiful, custom-machined swiveling mount that is bolted to to the bow of our boat, Callisto. Meanwhile, I spent innumerable weeks designing a blow collector that can be put on the end of the carbon-fiber pole. I tested a variety of bottles, hoops, rings, and different kinds of absorbent material that we could potentially hold over a whale's blowhole to catch absorbent vapor. My best blow collector has turned out to be a plastic bottle covered with 2 yards of nylon tulle bridal veil. Yes, that's right, bridal veil - what can I say, bridal veil just turned out to be the best fabric I tested for catching small droplets of vapor! From a distance, the finished collectors look uncannily like a person's head draped in veil, so of course we've taken to calling them "Bride's Heads".



To date I've made several different, improved versions of bride's-heads (I'm now on Bride's-Head Model 8), and as I write this the forward cuddies of Callisto are stocked with 20 different bride's-head blow collectors of various designs. Our beautiful carbon-fiber pole and mount are working smoothly, and in trial runs, Aquarium researcher Rosalind Rolland has developed a considerable degree of skill at swinging the huge pole around. Roz and I have also worked out a method to rapidly retrieve a used bride's-head and swapping a new one onto the pole.



Now all we need is good weather, and whales!

-Kathleen Hunt



Stay tuned for Chapter 3!
Posted by Marianna at 6:05 PM 1 comments
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9/11/11

#14: The Quest for Whale Blow, Chapter 1: The Adventure Begins

One of our newest research projects is a pilot study to see if it is possible to collect respiratory vapor ("blow") from free-swimming North Atlantic right whales, and then to see if we can measure stress hormones in it.

But first: why are we trying to measure hormones in whale blow? To give a little background, one of the most urgent needs in marine mammal research today (in my opinion, anyway) is that we really need a good way of measuring stress hormones in free-swimming whales. I've been measuring stress hormones in terrestrial wildlife for most of my career, and time and again I've found that that if you have a good method of measuring stress hormones, you have a good chance of figuring out whether or not certain human activities are seriously affecting the animals.
For example, whales worldwide are being affected these days by a huge variety of disturbances, ranging from noise (shipping traffic, sonar, seismic exploration), to global climate change, to direct physical effects like net entanglement and ship strikes. Some of these disturbances are obviously bad for the animals. An entangled whale, for example, is very obviously in trouble. But what about the disturbances that have subtler effects? It's not always so easy to figure out whether, or how much, certain disturbances might be affecting the animals. Take shipping noise, for example. Suppose a population of whales is subjected so much shipping noise that (say) the whales fall silent, apparently unable to hear each other; or maybe they move away, leaving a preferred feeding ground and moving to a less preferred feeding ground. Those responses might look rather minor. But sometimes the animals actually turn to be highly stressed by such impacts, to such a degree that their health and reproduction starts to suffer. Eventually, the whole population can start to go downhill.

The good news is that these subtle effects are very often detectable early on, via elevations in the animals' stress hormones. So, if we could develop a way of measuring stress hormones in whales, we could potentially finally have a good method to detect, assess, and hopefully ameliorate, the stressful impacts of human activities - before the impacts get too severe.
So, that's why we want to be able to measure stress hormones in whales. There's a fundamental problem, though: Most hormone techniques require blood samples, and it's basically impossible to get a blood sample from free-swimming whale. So we have to try to get some other kind of sample from the whale instead.


A North Atlantic right whale's distinctive V-shaped blow.
Photo: Jessica Taylor

We've already found that we can measure stress hormones very well in whale feces, and we have several other research projects focused on fecal stress hormones. But unfortunately, not all whales are thoughtful enough to provide a fecal sample when we want one! Enter respiratory sampling. If you spend any amount of time watching large whales, you'll know that every whale, every time it surfaces, produce a big, puffy cloud of respiratory vapor. When you're watching a whale, usually it does not happen to produce a fecal sample when you're nearby, but it always blows. Repeatedly. In fact, these "blow" clouds are so big and visible that they're often how we spot and find the whale in the first place (as in, "Thar she blows!"). A few researchers have already succeeded in collecting tiny amounts of blow vapor, and one of our colleagues even found some hormones (testosterone and progesterone) in a few of her blow samples.

What we want to do now is develop a method to collect larger volumes of blow, enough so that we could try to measure several different hormones at once - including the first-ever attempt to measure stress hormones in whale blow.

-Kathleen Hunt

ps- stay tuned for Chapter 2!
Posted by Marianna at 3:51 PM 0 comments
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