Beam Reach

whales, sharks, and good times

what a day for whale watching it was this last thursday!

off the southern end of San Juan around noon time we found two leading whales from J pod, with the rest of the group scattered widely further south amongst the many whale watch boats. while we did manage to get some good click data, the whales were generally quiet and it was hard to find or get to them considering how spread out they were.

But finally after all the whale watch boats left Salmon Bank our patience paid off and we found a group of 5-6 whales and recorded many clear calls, clicks, and whistles in very serene calm water and clear sunny skies – we saw a lot of action too – pectoral and tail slaps, breaches, and yes, even some dork!!!!! (all within 100-200m!) we think these two lovebirds were just playing- we did make a few matches, and with further analyzing we’re going to try to ID those two as well. Hands down we all agreed it was our best day yet.

We tried again yesterday to catch up to the whales, but they moved too quickly north for us to catch up. The day was still exciting- we encountered a headless shark around False bay, which we believe is a thresher shark- and it looks like there are teeth mark where the head was taken- suggesting perhaps some Orcas got to it! We brought it aboard (and it sure was soupy) and passed it along to FHL for them to necropsy- and I spent the rest of my day getting some echosounder data from False bay to Lime Kiln, and then burst another light bulb at a deeper depth- I think I really got some good sound on this one!

so it looks like our work it cut out for us these next 3 weeks- i can’t believe we only have 3 weeks left- I’m going to try and make the most of it while I can

i’m off to try and make my own anemone for my service project…

Thresher shark and flow noise

Mackaye Harbor to Friday Harbor Labs

Today the whales were spotted near Val’s house in the morning, but they headed up north faster than we could get up to them, eventually heading east at Point Roberts. We did still have an eventful day – we found a stranded shark around False Bay that we think was thresher shark killed by a Transient. Later in the day as we made our way to Friday Harbor Labs we tested another bursting light bulb to calculate source level and tested the Blue Box hydrophone’s flow noise through the water quality. We now our making great speed as we sail fast with clear skies back to FHL!

Serene sounds over Salmon Bank

Snug Harbor to Mackaye Harbor

Today was a terrific day of clear skies and whale sightings! We encountered two leaders from a further southern scattered part of J-Pod off Eagle point around noon time, starting to record at 13:36. We followed them back North to Lime Kiln, only hearing clicks as they traveled fast and far past our hydrophones. We then made our way slowly back around the Southern side of San Juan, encountering a large, spread-out group of whales, where it was hard to keep track of them or catch up to individuals. But our patience paid off, and after all the whale watch boats left we encountered a group of 4-5 whales and heard loud and clear calls, clicks, and whistles! It was a serene moment as we followed them through Salmon bank. We observed breaching, tail and pectoral slaps, spy hops, foraging, and even some social-play mating-like behavior! Confirmed ID’s we’ve made so far are J27, J17, J28, J19, and possibly J30. We stopped recording at 18:45, leaving the whales at the Salmon bank buoy around 18:45, where we hope to catch up with them again tomorrow. Definitely our best day yet!

bloggin from Snug

the whales are back!

 yesterday after making a few phone calls in the morning we found J-pod off the southern tip of San Juan! We got some wonderful recordings along Salmon Bank – and even though it was cold, raining, and miserable, I don’t think any one of the beam reacher’s noticed – in fact I think I can say for everyone it was our best day yet – I’ve never seen so many breaches and tail slaps in my life!!

 The coolest part was when J27 was following directly behind us for about 20 minutes (he seemed to like us) not only did he completely jump out of the water (which we could pick up on the radar!) but he clicked away loud and clear staight towards our hydrophones – and we’re pretty sure we got some foraging actions with all his deep dives and clear clicks with no calls for the duration. It was very cool and I can’t wait to look at the data!

 My other task, (which of course is more reliant on finding time now in between our hopefully now frequent sightings) is to start deploying my light bulb clicks and test for some masking effects. I was a bit daughted for a while about getting it all done, mostly because I hadn’t actually found a good enough mechanism for making a click – but my most recent recordings show that my light bulb bursts aren’t so bad after all- so now I feel like I’m going somewhere.

 It should only get better (and busy busy busier) from now on – and it should be sunny and warm by the end of this week!!

~Laura~

Dr. Holt guidance and CT profile

Roche Harbor to Snug Harbor

We didn’t catch up to the whales again today, but there were some conflicting reports, probably because some transients were in the area of Kelp Reef and then moved down past Discovery Island. Under that decoy cover it seems that J-pod headed north past Active Pass, probably heading for the Fraser River again. Although we didn’t see whales we did have a very productive science day. Marla finished off her lecture on masking, critical ratios, critical bandwidths, directional effects on masking, and temporary threshold shifts. It is always good to have her expertise available to the students as they are grappling with these complex issues. During the day we managed to deploy the CTD to measure the sound speed profile at various depths. The sound speed was very close to 1480 meters per second at all but the deepest points we went, where it peaked at 1482 meters per second. We dropped Val and Marla off at Snug in the afternoon and spent the rest of our time analyzing data. The students are making good progress on our data from yesterday which is exciting. Keep tuned in for exciting findings….

First whale recordings

Garrison Bay to Roche Harbor

Today was a good day. We started calling other people in the whale network and found J pod by Lummi Island in Bellingham Channel. We made our way around the south side of San Juan and Lopez islands and finally found them. At 14:20:00 we started recording whale data for the first time in our research trip. The first 45 minutes or so the whales were silent then at the we got great recordings of calls and clicks. We also got to see a lot of behavioral events like breaching and tail-slapping. We stayed with them and continued to record until 17:24:28 with one break inbetween to turn on the generator and catch up to the whales. Once we finished with the whales we motored around to Roche Harbor to spend the evening. Our last report was from Orca Spirit and they said the whales were slowly heading west. And we hope to be able to catch up to them again tomorrow.

Calibration with Marla Holt

Jones Island to Garrison Bay

We left Jones Island this morning and sailed through Speiden channel.  Because it was calm conditions we practiced doing actual jibes. Around one o’clock we picked up Val and Marla Holt at Snug Harbor. Marla will be on until Wednesday teaching us what she knows about sound and masking in the killer whales. We also used Marla’s hydrophone in addition to all of our own to perform another calibration exercise playing pure tones out of the underwater speaker. While we had the hydrophones out Dominique also managed to record a passing ship and Laura managed to record light bulbs breaking underwater. In the evening we started analyzing the calibration data that was collected in the afternoon.

Bathymetry and Jones Island picnic

On land at FHL to Jones Island, North Bay

We loaded the boat on Sunday at noon when the Gato Verde arrived. We departed the Labs after talking with a guest expert: Gary Greene, a marine geologist from the non-profit Tombolo and Moss Landing. Scott had also joined us for some time, fiddling with computers and metadata, though he left us for the night to fullfill his Mother’s day duties. We embarked around 1630 with decent winds and headed for the North Bay of Jones Island.  A beautiful place to spend the night, especially since we were tied up to a dock and were free to roam the small island — a State park. We took advantage of the land opportunity by taking our dinner out to the picnic tables on the beach and finished the night by huddling around a computer to watch a couple episodes of Planet Earth: Iceworld and Caves.

Has someone shot J pod?

It is disconcerting to me that J pod did not re-visit the west side of San Juan Island during the first two-week research cruise of the spring Beam Reach program. I joined the ship last Thursday fully expecting our fish tagging exercise to be interrupted by the returning southern residents. There was even a tantalizing missive from the respective American and Canadian killer whale God-fathers (from Ken Balcomb with allusions to John Ford) the previous day:

“Thursday, 1 May 2008 @ 13:41 …somewhere between here and Nanaimo there are 12-15 other whales that were heading south past John Ford’s house at sunset last night. It is about an 18 hour trip typically from there, so we could see whales any moment.”

But we were off Lime Kiln on Thursday and Friday and heard nothing but lingcod depth measurements. And so I returned to Seattle and listened fervently through the weekend — Port Townsend in one ear, Lime Kiln or OrcaSound in the other. I heard a lot of ships and noted that something seems to be beating the PT hydrophone during peak current flow, but there were no familiar calls or clicks.

Thus, I’m up late re-visiting my previous analysis of the historical sighting data. The general pattern is that there aren’t many days when southern residents are sighted (or heard) in Haro Strait during March, but the sightings per month steadily increase from April through June.

We designed the spring Beam Reach curriculum around these data which suggest that there is high likelihood of getting some preliminary data from J pod during the final two weeks of April. Analysis of the archives confirms that there are typically more sightings at the end of April than during the beginning.

Of course, our diligent (and patient!) students are now back on land analyzing simulated data sets so they’ll be ready for the arrival of J pod in May. We’re now about a week into May and J pod hasn’t been definitively sighted in the Salish Sea for nearly a month. When last seen on April 8th at 2pm, they were heading southwestward from Hein Bank into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, gateway to the Northeast Pacific.

Who else will be worried if they don’t return by this Thursday? The trend in sightings per month is hinting that 2008 is shaping up to be an unusual year. While March sightings were about average, April sightings were the lowest observed in the last 7 years. (There may be biases in these values, but if anything the sighting effort was less in the past, so older values are expected to be relatively low — not high!) Will May set a record low as well?

All this has me wondering what is going on out there. Has something appalling happened, akin to the surreptitious killing of California and Stellar sea lions in the Columbia River on Sunday? Or is there a problem with the fish that the residents prefer to eat: salmon, and Chinook in particular? We know that the California runs have essentially failed this year, with the commercial Chinook fishery mostly closed along the West Coast for the first time in more than 40 years.

Surprisingly, it’s proving very difficult (even for an oceanographer like me) to get a coherent overview of what marine fish are around Puget Sound. The data I’ve found and ways Beam Reach is helping to fill the gaps are the topic of my next post…

Tim Hunt helps measure lightbulb sounds

Today on land I performed an experiment in order to measure the attenuation of a light bulb breaking under water. At the FHL dock a lined up the array with the CRT in place of hydrophone D. At the other end of the dock I lowered a light bulb about 4.8 m in depth 35m away from the CRT, and 75 away from Hydrophone A, etc, and dropped a weight on the bulb to make it break. I recorded two files, one with our class gain settings, and the second with the gain settings as low as the sound devices allowed me to put them, because I could hear the light bulb breaking under water and I imagined the sound would clip on the recording devices. Tim Hunt helped me out setting up the experiment and gave me some advice.