4/2/08

Blog #6: Migration North

April 1, 2008
Fernandina Beach, FL

April 1st has always been a day of mixed emotions for me. First, I am extremely happy that the season was successful. We documented 18 mom/calf pairs and over 70 other individual whales while we worked hard to help protect all of them from ship strikes on the calving ground. In addition, we collected an amazing amount of data on right whales distribution and occurrence in this critical
habitat.



However, I did find myself extremely happy this morning that for first time in 122 days I do not have to wake up on schedule and check the marine and aviation weather. I don't have to coordinate with other aerial survey teams or biopsy teams on the water. I don't have to decide where it might be most important for us to fly first. Our survey covers two of the major shipping channels in the critical habitat and we could have whales in or around either one, or both at any given time. Our biggest problem is we can't be in two places at once. Each day I find myself asking, "Am I making the right decision to fly north first today ... what if whales are close to the Jax Channel (the St. Johns River Entrance, Jacksonville, FL)?" Sometimes I worry about making a bad weather decision and think "the weather does not look as bad as was forecast, should I be out there ... what if whales are in a channel?" These are some of the pressures I struggle with on a daily basis.

However, I also find myself anxious to get home. We have all been away from our homes, friends and families for four months and this can take its toll. It will also be nice to get back to a "normal" work schedule and have a weekend off! On the other hand leaving Fernandina Beach is also in some respects difficult. For me, after nine winters here it always feels like I am leaving my second home and my second family. The transition is always a bit difficult, but mostly I keep my fingers crossed that the right whales we documented this winter will make the migration north safely. We are currently in the midst of a packing frenzy as Jon, Kara, Gabby and myself also begin to make our migration north. This will be the last entry in our field season blog and I do hope that you have enjoyed it. We look forward to reporting to you this summer from working in the Bay of Fundy from our field station in Lubec, Maine. Stay tuned and we should be blogging by August.

Monica
Posted by NEAQ at 12:57 PM 0 comments
Labels: , ,

4/1/08

Blog #5: Just a Bit About Photo ID

March 31, 2008
Fernandina Beach, Fl

Hi again, Kara Mahoney here. As I had mentioned in my first blog that this is my second season here as a right whale aerial observer. This year has been different for me than last year. Besides from a new house and a new team, there have been new whales! This year I have noticed that I recognize a lot more whales than I did last year. I think last year, being my first year exposed to right whales, it was a lot to take in. It was a good thing that I could ID a few whales in the field! This year I found it much easier to take a quick glance through the binoculars or a quick review of images in the camera and be able to describe the whale's callosity to the other observer, and also remember if I had seen that whale before. (For more information about individually identifying right whales, visit the online right whale catalog website.)



The mother whales are the easiest for me to remember. Not only do we see them often (this is the calving grounds after all, and they don't tend to move much day to day) but we also start to ID them in the plane in order to provide some aerial support to the scientists on the water looking to biopsy dart each calf. Biopsy samples provide scientists with important genetic information that can help determine the calf's sex and paternity. In right whales, maternity from DNA is difficult, it is helpful to link all calves to their mother while it is still nursing and associated its mother. DNA sampling can help scientists learn more about the population.

Since we are working in the only known calving ground the majority of calves born will be documented in this area with their mothers and therefore it is ideal to biopsy dart calves here. In fact while the biopsy team was here they were able to get a biopsy sample from all the calves except for one, whale #3020's calf. Hopefully this calf will be seen again in the Bay of Fundy with its mother where it can be darted. Not all mothers take their calves into the Bay of Fundy (it's still a mystery where some of them go in the late summer months). If #3020 does not bring her calf up to the Bay of Fundy, and next year her calf comes down here (as many one year olds do) without its mother, now it is a juvenile who will need to be darted.

This year I have found that not only did I learn all 18 moms pretty well, but I was also able to learn a number of juveniles (one to eight years of age) that spent about a month (in some cases more, in some cases less) in our survey area. I also learned the hard way that with this population one of the first things we should do is a quick scan for fresh wounds and entanglements.



In one day, January 29, Jon Cunha and I spotted two right whales, #3530 and #3333. Right whale #3530 was seen in the morning with what turned out to be fresh wounds all over its body from probably some sort of entanglement and #3333 was seen in the afternoon with a line of fishing gear through its mouth (see the above image). In our first photo pass over #3333 we didn't even notice the gear, I was photographing and I was trying to get a good head shot for photo ID that I didn't notice the entanglement. On our second pass however I did notice it, there were already two biopsy boats on the water, so we called them and unfortunately the whale was very elusive and they were not able to find this whale. The whale was seen a few days later up off Sapelo Island, GA and has not been seen since. Hopefully this whale will be sighted up north so that a highly trained disentanglement team will have the opportunity to try to disentangle this whale

This job has provided me with such a wonderful opportunity to observe and learn about this population. Our mission down here has been ship mitigation, and it has been rewarding when we have been able to find whales in harm's way of a vessel and we are able to alert them, so the whales are safe. The research aspect, including photo identifying individual whales has been equally rewarding. It is interesting to learn the sighting history of each individual which leads to learning the life history of each whale in this struggling population. The more we know about this endangered species the more we are able to help these majestic animals fight extinction.

~ Kara Mahoney
Posted by NEAQ at 3:23 PM 0 comments
Labels: , ,

3/29/08

Blog #4: Right Whale Mothers

29 March 2008
Fernandina Beach, FL

Hey blog readers, my name is Gabriela Munoz and this is my first season working as a right whale observer for the New England Aquarium. I've recently graduated from Bates College where I wrote my thesis on the effects of vessel traffic on bottlenose dolphins so the work I'm doing down here with right whale ship mitigation ties in nicely with my previous research.

Our current calf count is at 18. There have been a few interesting mothers this year. Most reproductively active mothers have calves on average every three years, i.e. a three-year calving interval. However, three of our mothers, Eg# 1802, 1243, 1301, have had two-year calving intervals after losing their 2006 calves. We have also had a handful of young first time mothers. Females are believed to reproductively mature at about 9 years of age but Eg# 3292 had her first calf this year at the age of six! Eg# 3130 and 3180 both had their first calves this year as well and they are 7 years old. Eg# 1243 has given birth to her fifth calf this year and has the largest number of offspring compared to the other mothers of this season.



Last year at this time, the calf count was at 18 but four more calves were bornafter the season ended bringing the calf count up to 22. This season we have seen two young females together, Eg # 3142 and 3240, consistently. This has been observed with other pairs of pregnant females this year who have been seen traveling down together or have paired upon their arrival to the Southeast calving grounds and then separate once they have given birth. There is no quantitative data at the moment to support this type of association with pregnant females but it might be worth looking at previous and future years to see if there are trends. I'm still holding out hope that this pair or other females might calve. We've had a bad stretch of weather this past week with high winds so we have been unable to locate any stragglers or any potential calving mothers. Despite the calving season winding down, I still have hopes that one or two more calves will be born. Every calf counts with this small critically endangered specie so fingers crossed for a couple more calves!
Posted by NEAQ at 8:54 PM 0 comments
Labels: , ,

3/24/08

Blog #3: Right Whale Education

24 March 2008
Fernandina Beach, Fl

Hi, my name is Kara Mahoney. This is my second season working on this project here in Florida. When I am not down here I have a full time position in the Education Department at the New England Aquarium where I work with our school and family programs. I do a lot of teaching both at schools and onsite at the Aquarium. I have been working at the New England Aquarium since I graduated college in May 2002. I have spent my time at the Aquarium studying whales, teaching kids about whales and the ocean or all of the above!



I first started at the Aquarium as a college intern, first with the Harbor Discoveries camps program and second with the Whale Watch program. Upon graduating college, I began working on both the whale watch boat as well as the Science at Sea program, where we would take students out into Boston Harbor and educate them about the marine environment. In the winter months I started working in the Education Department traveling to schools and teaching mostly elementary age children. This led to my current fulltime position. This is the second time I have taken a winter break from the Education Department and been able to come down here and participate in this great project.

Just last week I was able to combine my two areas of work with the Aquarium; I went to Hilliard Elementary School in Hilliard, Florida and did four presentations to the entire 1st grade about right whales. I was asked to teach at this school because one of our pilot's wives is a teacher there. Unlike other presentations I have done back in Massachusetts, this one was solely focused on right whales and the fact that right whales are in their backyard. I encountered children who had seen a right whale from a boat (I think almost everyone in Florida goes fishing), some who have seen them from the beach, and some who I am sure didn't know that right whales (or any whales) frequent the waters right off northeast Florida.



The children were so receptive! They were grossed out by cyamids (whale lice that live on right whales heads and bodies), excited that right whales travel to their state to give birth, fascinated that they have so much fat (in the form of blubber) on their body, awestruck that such a large whale can eat such little food, and thought that right whales certainly are funny looking. What I thought was great about these children was that I felt that they really understood the problem of ship strikes that right whales can encounter. I showed them a map detailing the coast of the Southeast United States, highlighting the shipping channels and right whale sightings from the 2007 season. Many of the children commented that they have been to Jacksonville and seen all the large ships in the port; from the car carriers to the navy warships to the tug and barges to the container ships. One child took a look at the map and asked: "why can't boats just not go where the whales are?" What a great question to ask!

Unfortunately this area is unlike other habitats such as the Bay of Fundy or the Great South Channel (east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts) where right whales often tend to form persistent aggregations. Here the whales tend to move quite a bit and are spread out throughout the entire critical habitat (from Brunswick, GA to St. Augustine, FL) and beyond. Sometimes as far as Miami, FL, the Gulf of Mexico and even Texas!

When it comes to the right whale story, it is often very doom and gloom, filled with hunting to near extinction resulting in only about 400 individuals left. So I tried to emphasize with the children things that they could do to help this endangered species. One topic I emphasized was the 500-yard rule. It is illegal for anyone to intentionally approach a right whale within 500 yards, or 5 football fields (I thought that image might be an easy thing for them to remember). Because many of the children spend a lot of time on the water, I thought this was something that they could easily do to help this species. I also tried to emphasize that just by learning about right whales they are helping them. With children and people of all ages it really comes down to knowledge. If people know more about a certain topic they will hopefully share that information with the people around them thus leading to more awareness; and if anything is good for right whales, it is more awareness. The children were excited to know that they could go online at the right whale catalog to look at pictures and sighting histories of individual right whales. I mentioned that some whales have names and that got them excited too!

Hopefully the excitement that was generated that day will spread through the local community and that the children will continue to be fascinated by right whales. One of the classes sent me some fan mail after my visit (see the image above), which made me smile and showed me that each of them learned something new that day, which to me is the point of education.

I look forward to sharing some other stories about my experiences here in Fernandina Beach, Florida.

Thanks for reading,
~ Kara
Posted by NEAQ at 3:02 PM 0 comments
Labels: , ,

3/19/08

Blog #2: Latest Mother and Calf Sightings

19 March 2008
From Fernandina Beach, FL




Hi,
My name is Jonathan. This is my first year working as an aerial observer on the New England Aquarium's right whale research project. I came to the Aquarium over a year ago as an intern and was able to get my feet wet last August when I worked on the Bay of Fundy project - which you will be able to read about in our Blog coming this summer! The aerial survey project is very different from the Bay of Fundy project. For starters, we are in a plane instead of on a boat.

As you can see from our photo, the plane is not very large. It seats four people, two pilots and two observers. The observers each have specific responsibilities depending on which seat they sit in, right or left. The observer in the right seat is the photographer, because we always circle clockwise. The observer in the left seat is the data recorder and the liaison between the plane and the ground contact. This is sometimes deemed a challenge, especially on days when we have 44 whales! Both observers usually share the radio responsibilities.

As Monica mentioned, this blog is new to us and took longer than expected to get it up and running. During the month of February, we were really busy documenting as much as 44 whales in our survey area in one day! You can imagine with such a large amount of whales cavorting in such a small, high traffic area that we had our work cut out for us.

February was not our only busy month. So far, March has also been exciting and edifying. I can remember on the first of March, Kara Mahoney and I sighted our 18th known mother with her calf for the first time this season. The mom is an eight-year-old female, known in the right whale catalog as Eg #3020. It is often times difficult to identify whales from the plane because we are circling around them at an altitude of 1,000 feet and a speed of 100 knots; as you can imagine it can be a little bumpy. We originally thought #3020 was an already known mother this season (Eg #2040), but were skeptical once we saw how small her calf looked from the photos that Kara took.

While we were circling over #3020, we saw a disturbance in the water that we call "funny whale water" (When right whales disrupt the surface tension of the water they agitate the water in such a way that can be seen with a trained eye). We left the area and circled over the "funny whale water". While we were circling, I noticed an integrated tug and barge heading right towards where we sighted #3020. Knowing how critical the timing is in these situations I asked the pilots to put me on marine band radio. Using Automated Information Systems (AIS), I was able to get the name of the tug and barge and immediately radioed the captain. By this time the pilots took action, returning to #3020's location and were circling overhead. The captain responded promptly and in one lengthy breath, I informed him that there were two right whales two nautical miles off his bow and he was in a direct route towards them. He acknowledged the position and altered his course without hesitation. The timely response from both the tug and barge and the aerial survey team is a prime example of how commercial operators and researchers can work together to help preserve a critically endangered species.


Till next time,
Jonathan Cunha
Posted by NEAQ at 2:00 PM 1 comments
Labels: , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)