As I type this the R/V Nereid is surveying the Grand Manan Basin in the Bay of Fundy. I’m back at the field house waiting for Internet technicians to arrive to help sort out some of our own going Internet problems. Working in the field has many challenges and keeping a field house in good working order (including Internet) is just one of those many challenges. However, it also seems that finding right whales this season is a bigger challenge then any of us anticipated.

Meanwhile the offshore researchers on Shelagh also have their work cut out for them. They have been covering approximately 100 nautical miles of trackline each day. The following is a quick summary of their trip so far.

 Day 1: (August 16): Left Campobello Island around 5:00 AM and headed for Grand Manan Banks   via Grand Manan Channel. Cut across the mouth of the Bay of Fundy and ran about 2/3 of their planned tracklines on Lurcher Shoal. The only large whales seen the entire day were two humpbacks and two fin whales. Spent the night in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.

 Day 2: (August 17): The crew left Yarmouth prior to sunrise and continued tracklines of the remaining 1/3 of Lurcher Shoal. From Lurcher they headed to Roseway Basin. In addition to reporting lots of leatherback turtles, jellies and common dolphins the team found five right whales on the western edge of Roseway! Spent the night at sea.


 Day 3: (August 18): Full day of survey in absolutely amazing sighting conditions. The crew had a sea state 2 most of the day and worked near the NE corner of the Roseway Basin. While the team did report seeing 2 Sei whales, a few mola molas and basking sharks they also noted a lack of birds. The crew spent the night at sea.

 Day 4: (August 19): The crew was up and on watch by first light. The working conditions were more difficult and work continued in a sea state 4 and 5 for most of the morning. Despite the difficult conditions the crew documented another right whale! The crew headed into Cape Sable Island by the afternoon for fuel and a solid night of sleep.

 Day 5: (August 20): The crew reports no right whales.  They spend the night at sea. 



 In my last post I asked folks if they had any questions for the crew of the Shelagh. We got some great questions and many will need some time to answer. The questions have given us some great ideas for future blogs and so we will try our best to answer them all. For now I’m going to answer the questions that were the most appropriate to ask the crew while speaking via satellite phone.

Question: Are your bunks big? Can you stretch out and roll over?
Answer: (Philip reports)While the bunks are not overly spacious they are comfortable. Everyone can roll over and Kelsey (the tallest member of the team at 6’1”) reports that she can lay flat and stretch her legs out.

Monica

Over the past two days we have had both the R/V Nereid and R/V Callisto offshore surveying the Bay of Fundy for the elusive right whales. On Sunday, teams from both boats saw a couple of right whales but again they were very difficult to work -- single animals staying at the surface only briefly and traveling long distances between each surfacing. Neither boat was able to collect any photos for our right whale identification catalog. Our impression was that the right whales were searching for food but weren't finding anything. But at the end of the day on Sunday, our colleagues working out of the Grand Manan Research Station called to report they had found a mother/calf pair in the Grand Manan basin (where right whales are typically found) which was exciting news. Maybe this was a sign that things were shifting.

On Monday when the Nereid crew got back out to the basin, it felt like the Bay had come alive! We began to see right whale flukes in all directions and the bird life was incredibly active: storm petrels, shearwaters and gannets were there in droves! There were also many fin whales, minke whales, basking sharks and harbor porpoise in a very small area perhaps just a few square miles in size. It seemed to be a feeding frenzy! Over the course of the day the Nereid crew photographed seven individual right whales including #3390 and her calf, one of only seven calves documented this past winter calving season off the southeast U.S. coast. The Nereid crew is out again today and hopefully will be out over the next few days as the fog has finally lifted and the winds are calm.

Stay tuned for videos and updates from the Nereid crew!

We finally had two great days in a row on the water. The R/V Nereid went out the 20th and 21st and our other vessel, the R/V Callisto, also went out on the 20th. The result of this effort was a fairly comprehensive picture of right whales in the Bay of Fundy. They are spread out over a very large area with at least two different aggregations--one to the northeast and another to the southwest. Yesterday, we started the day with a small SAG off Swallowtail Light House within a stones throw of Grand Manan Island.



With such good coverage, we learned that there has been an influx of quite a few new animals into the Bay and many of them are big, adult males. These animals seem frequently to be on the edges of the distribution, often performing acoustic displays known as gunshots--loud, percussive underwater sounds. Towards the end of the day yesterday, we had several old males exhibiting typical gunshot behavior (lifting their heads out of the water and then pushing them down forcefully) way to the south in the middle of the outbound shipping lane. One of them was "Starry Night," an old favorite that we have been watching since 1980.



We don't know why animals segregate in the Bay, but that doesn't keep us from having fun speculating. For example, why would adult males stay on the fringes? Are they setting up acoustic territories advertising to females with the gunshot sound (Here's a little more about right whale acoustics)? Since many of the big males were on the southern edge of the distribution, someone joked that they are serving as the "gate keepers" to the Bay of Fundy. That joke got me thinking--could that be possible?

Nothing described about this species' social structure would indicate that they coordinate in such a way, and yet there is much we don't know about these animals. Could they patrol the edges of the right whale distribution forming a protective perimeter like male musk ox in a circle with the females and young in the middle? What would they be protecting them from? Killer whales are their only possible predators and they are relatively rare in these waters.

I include this wild speculation to show the fun part of science--exploring ideas. If we found any evidence of this behavior in other similar species, then we could formulate a formal hypothesis and then test it with the appropriate data. The small yet exciting steps of science.

- Philip

Photos:
1- SAG in front of Swallowtail Light, Grand Manan (Yan Guilbault)
2- Bottom photo: Starry Night (Moe Brown)

Monica Zani (left) and Amy Knowlton (right) examining a buoy that holds a satellite transmitter. The buoy is used to help track entangled large whales making it easier for the Atlantic Large Whale Disentanglement Network to respond to the distressed animal.

-Jonathan

Hi all. It is August 1st, the time of year when right whale researchers at the New England Aquarium and other organizations gather in Lubec, Maine for an annual field season. It's our 29th year in a row! We are about to head out to the Bay of Fundy on our research vessel Nereid in hopes of finding right whales. Earlier this week, there were reports of as many as 20 right whales in the Bay of Fundy already, including several mother calf pairs that have migrated over 1,500 miles to get here from the calving grounds off Florida! Record numbers of right whales were reported on the calving grounds in the Southeastern United States this past winter and on the feeding grounds in Cape Cod Bay this spring. We are hoping for record numbers of whales into the summer months in the Bay of Fundy.

The weather today is not conducive for surveying. We woke up at 5 a.m. to check the weather conditions and saw there was rain and fog in our survey area. We looked at the weather radar and it appeared that the rain was moving to the northeast of us. We were optimistically hoping that the rain would pass allowing the sun to shine through the clouds and burn away the fog making it a beautiful day for surveying. We checked the weather again at 6:15 a.m., but no such luck. It was still raining. We are all keeping our fingers crossed for tomorrow!

We will be here until October so stay tuned for photos of who was sighted and stories from other right whale researchers about their days spent in the Bay of Fundy.

From the field,
Jonathan