Beam Reach

Transportation contemplation

It’s a silent night in Roche Harbor — a stark contrast to the tempest last night. Team JaMi is settled down to rest up for a big day on the water tomorrow. Team VaTo is clean and polished back at the labs, surely reveling in the broadband access at the Labs.

The highlight for me today was the afternoon class discussion of sustainability and the transportation sector. After I gave a brief motivational introduction, asking “How should sustainability scientists BE?,” Jason gave some statistics on the relative environmental impacts of different vehicles.

Here are some of the numbers Jason noted:

Mode of transport of freight within the U.S.:  trucks 32%, rail 28%, water 16% — (that’s 76% diesel!)

gCO2 produced per ton-km for different vehicles: boat 15, rail 22, bus 30, heavy truck 90, motorcycle 120, car 275, light duty vehicle 400.

The teams this year have done a much better job of tracking the resources we use and the waste we generate while aboard the Gato Verde.  I’m excited to read what sustainability improvements the students recommend  and to finally quantify with metrics like g CO2/ton-km how Gato Verde compares to other human transportation technologies.  With biodiesel emissions and production properly accounted for, will Gato Verde be close to the boat emmission rate or way below it?

Traveling with transients

Monday, October 1, 2007

Worked our way south through Mosquito Pass after a quiet night in Roche Harbor. Headed southwards with the flood tide, intending to return on the ebb if we didn’t encounter the whales down south. As we passed Lime Kiln mid-Haro, we started hearing VHF conversations about killer whales. We nearly circumnavigated Discovery Island E of Victoria before joining a group of about 7 transients. They proceeded northward in Haro Strait on the western side and we monitored them and the surrounding whale watch fleet with the array. We didn’t hear any calls or clicks (but weren’t listening carefully all the time). The session was recorded, however, to the tune of about 1.2 Gb of data. Just north of Kelp Reef we turned and headed towards the south end of San Juan Island. We knew the southern residents were exiting the Sound around 130pm and our calculations indicated we might meet them near Salmon Bank. It was nearly dark when we finally pulled into Mackaye Harbor. Little did we know that the orcas were likely just a few miles to the south of us at that point!

Wild wind & water work

It’s a rare and exhilarating experience to lie at anchor with steady 35 knot winds howling through the rigging. Gato Verde is galloping on her anchor bridle tonight. Each gust makes the whole boat shudder. Last night the aerial soundscape was geese honking, great blue herons squawking, and tiny fish leaping. Tonight it is all elemental: moaning and whistling of wind over wire, lapping waves, rattling ports, and the creaking of a thousand stowed items jostled by the boats vibrations.

Today was a windy day, with the orcas lingering in the Strait of Juan de Fuca — just beyond our listening range. We made an effort to be at the right place at the right time, but didn’t get lucky like yesterday. Instead, we had a lot of good sailing and even managed to generate some electricity by using the props to slow ourselves down as we ran with the wind.

Alex holds the record for generating a peak current of 10.6 amps at 52 volts on a single motor! That’s a peak power generation of about 500 watts. I was thinking about how to put that in perspective this evening at anchor. Normally, I say use incandescent light bulbs (100W say) or toasters (1kW) and hair dryers (2kW) as references.

But I want to make an intuitive, tangible connection between food (which powers us) and green power on the Gato Verde, like wind/water power. Luckily, as Anne prepared ocean algae pudding (wonderfully accurate texture), Ash mentioned that sugar has an energy density of 16.5 kJ/g. My Treo informs me that chocolate packs 18.5 MJ/kg, while biodiesel offers 41.2 MJ/kg.

Since a watt is just a rate of energy flow equivalent to joules/second, Alex was generating 500 J/s. To get an equivalent supply rate of energy, you could eat 2.7 g of chocolate in 100 seconds, or burn 1.2 g of biodiesel in 100 seconds.

I also like to mention Greg Lemond on a hill climb in the Tour du France as one of the few humans who can generate 700W for extended periods. At rest, humans need about 100W to keep warm and happy. That range is confirmed by the NOLS Cookery book on board that says easy going sailors in warm climates should eat 2500 kcal per day and active, cold weather sailors should eat more like 5000 kcal (5000 “food” Calories). Averaged over 24 hours (86,400 seconds) and knowing there are 3.8 J/calorie, the NOLS rations are meant to supply 110 – 220 watts. This implies that it would take 2-4 of us well-fed humans pulling pretty hard to match the power of the wind.

Wandering whales

What a classic field day. Leslie relayed news that she was hearing calls early in the day. But as we caught up with them, muliple factors conspired to deny us high-quality data (in the way they often do in field research). First we would be near a whale, but it wouldn’t be vocalizing. Then a noisy ship would approach as the orcas started to call. When the ship would pass and the calls would be frequent, the wind would rise, blow us down wind, and cause the cables to “thrum.” We’d trouble shoot the flow noise and be ready to record, when the waves would build extremely. Suddenly, enforcement agents (Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife) would swing over to ask us some questions — distracting us from our quarry.

It was a very long day, but in the end we all gained some new insights. We were lucky the killer whales turned back when it seemed they were headed out to the big ocean! And then we were treated to the near-silent underwater noise from Bob McLaughlin’s jet-drive powered boat, quite a few nice calls and clicks, and stunning silhouettes of a resting (quiet) pod traveling up Haro Strait on the flood tide.

Mid-program reflections

Today I began my second week with the fall 2007 Beam Reach class. It feels like a real privilege for this dad to again have a chance to go to sea, particularly with this group, these technologies, and the winds building for good sailing as October looms. The killer whales have been doing some exciting things this week — superpods and ceremonies — and with luck we’ll have another chance to listen to them and the boats in their environment.

My main goal this week is to give everyone a few opportunities to reflect on the program, teachers, and students and provide some feedback. With some guidance, we can improve the next 4-5 weeks, as well as future programs. I’ll also try help everyone acquire, manage, and process their data.

The highlights today were marveling at the challenge of planning a day of field work and the calming beauty of a sunset seascape. Ash, Alex, Anne, Tim and Sam did a valiant job of deciding what to do when J+K pod headed up toward the Fraser and L pod evanesced along the southwest side of San Juan Island. With a foreboding forecast (30 knots out of the west), substantial tides changing direction at mid-day, and the lure of novel anchorages, it was tough call. But we ultimately headed south and nearly overlapped with L pod.

The reprieves were some fun sailing, the sunset, lasagna, and the prospect of an evening spent sifting through the GREAT data we have already acquired. The pace is always blistering up here, but the challenges are refreshing and the insights come fast.

It was a treat today to read in Fred Felleman’s thesis that the southern residents “change their direction of travel within an hour of slack current 7 times more frequently than would be expected by chance,” and to then observe L-pod head north against the ebb in the morning (max ~8am), north as the flow reversed ~2pm, and then (within an hour!) south as the flood current strengthened. There is clearly more work to be done on what guides their behavior and how the fish in Haro Strait react to the local oceanography. In fact, looking at the pager record, it seems that there are data for examining at least the relationship between orca travel direction and the local currents.

First-ever localization of mother/calf calls

First ever mother/calf recording!

An amazing scientific feat was accomplished during the first sea-week of the fall 2007 program. At the end of the first deployment of our hydrophone array, a mother and calf were recorded vocalizing on the west side of San Juan Island. While orca calves rarely leave their mother’s side, this calf seemed adventurous. It left its mother and another female foraging along a tidal front, approached the hydrophone array we were towing, made an underwater turn to parallel our heading, surfaced close off our port bow, and then diverged from our course to rejoin its mother.Luckily, the Beam Reach team was already effectively collecting data when this rare mother/calf separation occurred. Most of us were watching and listening carefully enough to remember the course of events. Todd was helping Sam take bearings on the orca calf with a hand-held compass and Shannon was taking photographs to help identify the whales. I was writing down the bearings and GPS-synchronized times, noting when good calls were heard (listening through the deck speakers). Val’s computer was recording the data from each of the four hydrophones in the array. Mike was doing a good job of being Whale Wise and maintaining a steady heading (to keep the array straight).

When the array data were analyzed with software that allows us to “localize” sounds recorded on all four hydrophones, the locations of the calls corresponded well with the visual bearings Sam took and the general sequence of events we all remember (and wrote down). This is remarkable because we have struggled for two years to get all of the technologies functioning together. Courtney (2005) and Peggy (2006) will certainly appreciate how lucky we were to have the ability to localize the calls that were made during this unusual mother/calf interaction.

The localization results tell us a lot. It is clear that the calf’s calls are interspersed with the calls of the two nearby adults (mother or brother). This is the first documented call/response interaction of southern resident killer whales! While we have long suspected that the residents call and respond to each other, it isn’t clear which animal makes which sound when listening through a single hydrophone. The array enables us to learn that different animals are making the calls. It also allows us to assign particular calls — and even voices — to specific individuals. So, now we know what one calf’s call sounds like, and we have an opportunity to compare its voice with its mothers voice. This is a fledgling, but critical, first step to voice-recognition in the southern residents. A final breakthrough is being able to visualize the trajectory of the calf underwater. By combining such “passive localization” techniques with acoustic fish tags and bleeding-edge 3-D active sonar technologies (at frequencies above killer whale hearing), we will soon be able to observe how the whales navigate within their complex ecosystem and interact with other animals, their prey, plankton, and the rest of the environment.

So, the fall 2007 program has already made a great technological leap. Congratulations all around! Let’s hope the Beam Reach class continues to have such great luck. Clearly, we are poised to learn a lot more about the southern residents this year with the array system.

Recollections from a week at sea

I recently had the wonderful opportunity to join the Beam Reach students at sea for a week. Thanks to my wife, Annie, and my mother, Leslie, I was able to step away from being a dad for a while and return to the equally intense experience of conducting field science at sea and thinking hard with a talented group of students and teachers.

I’ll blog in more detail about some of the highlights from my week, but first I want to offer a few photos, recollections, and associated vignettes:

• The excitement I felt when hearing orca calls on the radio while 1/2 mile offshore. All visitors to the west side of San Juan Island should know that underwater sound is broadcast live on FM radio station 88.1 MHz. We had lost track of the southern residents (they often seem to “disappear” when you least expect it), so for the first time I really benefitted from the FM transmitter atop the Lime Kiln State Park lighthouse. While scanning Haro Strait with the binoculars, I was surprised to hear clear calls from Lime Kiln where the hydrophone is just 10m offshore and 8m down. Focusing on that part of the shoreline, I could see tourists concentrated in front of the rising fins of orcas. The residents had surfaced right next to shore and were nigh impossible to see against the dark metamorphosed basalt of the Island’s coastline. Note: the FM transmitters have a range of a couple kilometers and a second one is located about a kilometer south of Smuggler’s Cove (at Val’s house, known as OrcaSound).
• We should be helping Soundwatch and Straitwatch educate boaters. After watching a big cruiser violate the voluntary 1/2 mile no-go zone around Lime Kiln lighthouse, paralleling the whales <100m off the Lime Kiln shoreline right in front of hundreds of tourists, I decided Beam Reach should take a more active role in educating boaters about how to be Whale Wise. In the past, I’ve leaned towards measuring first, and educating later. But with the Soundwatch vessel’s engines disabled by a bad head gasket and the Straitwatch vessel already over-burdened, why shouldn’t the Beam Reach staff and students (not to mention Whale Watch captains/naturalists) by hailing such boats on VHF channel 16 to ensure the Captains know the voluntary (soon to be mandatory) boating regulations? Perhaps we could/should also broadcast hydrophone signals from the boat on a VHF or FM channel for the whale watching, recreational, and fishing fleets? [Whoa, another service project.]
• Trying to let Wessal push her limits, but also avert disaster. There’s no question that Wessal is gung ho. I don’t know if it’s because she has relatives who are boat mechanics, or what, but when she took hold of the outboard engine on the Gatito (Gato Verde’s tender), she showed no fear. She did a great job of maneuvering through the kelp to grab some supplies that Val handed us from shore, but on the way back she got up on a plane and inspired me to (again) find the boundary between teaching by inquiry (like a good Beam Reach instructor) and mitigating risk (like a good Beam Reach administrator). Picture my left hand clutching the seat in front of me, my right poised surreptitiously just above hers, the tiller, and the too-sensitive throttle. I don’t know if she noticed my white knuckles as I tried to stay present and enjoy the ride while worst case scenarios skittered and cartwheeled through my imagination.
• The joy of not shaving for a week. My grad school advisor, Russ McDuff, instilled this oceanographic tradition in me. I shaved it off the night I got back to civilization, but I enjoyed the rare pleasure of growing a pirate’s countenance.
• Falling asleep listening to leopard seals recordings.
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• The stunning beauty of the Pacific Northwest — the sunsets, water textures, and mountain range silhouettes

There are many more memories, but those are my favorites. It was a pleasure meeting all of the 071 students in person at last. I look forward to another week-long immersion this Sept 26 – Oct 3!

Searching Haro and measuring receive levels

Thursday 8/30/07
Garrison Bay to Fish Creek
Winds S 5-20 kts, sunny

Pump out at Roche Harbor. Travel south into Haro Strait winds, practicing tacks and going with the ebb. Search for killer whales on E/W beam reaches just N of Middle Bank. In late afternoon, ride flood through Cattle Pass (at 12 knots over the ground) and anchor in Griffin Bay, just N of Fish Creek. Spend evening processing spreading experiment data from dock experiment, learning how to measure Vrms and compute calibrated receive level of both test signals and background noise.

Fall 2007 group picture (via wpg2)

Here’s a great group photo of the fall 2007 class (taken by Tracy Smith):

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You can see a *lot* more eye candy in the Beam Reach photo gallery.

Attention Beam Reach bloggers!  This has been a test of the little G2 button that lives above the WordPress “write post” composition window.  If you get the passwords and usernames set properly between WordPress and Gallery, you should be able to click on that G2 button with the tree and insert any image from the Beam Reach photo gallery.

Marine intuition

We humans are fundamentally challenged to grasp the nature of the seas. Sound is the key to perception underwater, yet our ears are rudimentary tools compared to our eyes. Despite all our communicative abilities and sensory technologies, we really struggle to understand what is going on in our local marine ecosystems, and it’s taken us a long time to determine that a global oceanic collapse is afoot.

After spending a week with the Beam Reach students, I returned to land with a broad suite of observations. Since then, my brain has been struggling to synthesize them.

Given how difficult it is for us to predict and detect the movements of our top marine predator (the killer whale), it’s fascinating to consider how we have come to sense that a global oceanic collapse is afoot. Why is it so hard for me (an oceanographer) to witness first-hand, or at least be whole-heartedly convinced that the seas are truly troubled?

It is also tantalizing to ponder how effectively a long-lived matriarch and her pod may be able to intercept food in the Salish Sea — particularly salmon with their own complex life history, migratory mechanisms, and distributions.

“Everything’s late this year.” says Kari Koski.

Someone notes that this year El Nino conditions are developing in the tropical Pacific.

An 80=year fishing Derby in Admiralty Inlet experiences a unprecented event: only one fish is caught!

Steve Mihaly relays catch data that indicate 90+ percent of the Fraser River fall run of Sockeye are returning to the north of Vancouver Island. In “normal” years, I guess more come around the south end and are accessible to southern residents

A clerk in Kings Market says her long-time fisherman customer became sick of catching nothing locally and fished all the way out the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and finally found salmon (chum, Chinook, and sockeye) 10 km offshore.

The Seattle Times publishes a series on the decline of our local oceans

Andy Foote says the herring aren’t returning to the Norwegian fiords.

Thus, I conclude that a great asset of human society is our ability to communicate, or “network.” Our environmental salvation may hinge on our innate drive to share information and our increasingly effective ways of doing so. To this end, I drafted a list of cell phone numbers for key marine observers around the Salish Sea, and I encouraged our students and staff to reach out to them. I left feeling like we should be hailing every visible boat on the VHF, especially fishermen and whale watch operators, to glean their marine insights and to share our own (primarily acoustic) ones.

I sense a similar interconnectedness of humans is critical in maintaining an accurate sense of how our local marine ecosystem is faring. The Orcasphere is a step in the right direction, but we need much more (if we continue to impact the oceans as we currently do). Georeferenced multi-species monitoring could help. The expanding network of hydrophones and underwater sensors (from Race Rocks to Athena and Neptune) hold promise for keeping us conscious of the state of the seas.

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