Category: Current Projects

These are posts about ongoing projects in the GEMM lab at the moment.

Significant others? Thinking beyond p-values in science

By Natalie Chazal, PhD student, OSU Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, & Conservation Sciences, Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Lab

Scientific inquiry relies on quantifying how certain we are of the differences we see in observations. This means that we must look at phenomena based on probabilities that we calculate from observed data, or data that we collect from sampling efforts. Historically, p-values have served as a relatively ubiquitous tool for assessing the strength of evidence in support of a hypothesis. However, as our understanding of statistical methods evolves, so does the scrutiny surrounding the appropriateness and interpretation of p-values. In the realm of research, the debate surrounding the use of p-values for determining statistical significance has sparked some controversy and reflection within the academic community. 

What is a p-value?

To understand the debate itself, we need to understand what a p-value is. The p-value represents the probability of obtaining a result as extreme as, or more extreme than, the observed data, under the assumption that there is no true difference or relationship between groups or variables. Traditionally, a p-value below a predetermined threshold (often 0.05) is considered statistically significant, suggesting that the observed data are unlikely (i.e., a 5% probability) to have occurred by chance alone. Many statistical tests provide p-values, which gives us a unified framework for interpretation across a range of analyses.

To illustrate this, imagine a study aimed at investigating the effects of underwater noise pollution on the foraging behavior of gray whales. Researchers collect data on the diving behavior of gray whales in both noisy and quiet regions of the ocean.

Drawings of gray whales with tags (depicted by orange shapes) in quiet areas (left) and noisy areas (right). 

In this example, the researchers hypothesize that gray whales stop foraging and ultimately change their diving behavior in response to increased marine noise pollution. The data collected from this hypothetical scenario could come from tags equipped with sensors that record diving depth, duration, and location, allowing us to calculate the exact length of time spent foraging. Data would be collected from both noisy areas (maybe near shipping lanes or industrial sites) and quiet areas (more remote regions with minimal human activity). 

To assess the significance of the differences between the two noise regimes, researchers may use statistical tests like t-tests to compare two groups. In our example, researchers use a t-test to compare the average foraging time between whales in noisy and quiet regimes. The next step would be to define hypotheses about the differences we expect to see. The null hypothesis (HN) would be that there is no difference in the average foraging time (X) between noisy and quiet areas: 

Scenario where the noisy area does not elicit a behavioral response that can be detected by the data collected by the tags (orange shapes on whales back). The lower graph shows the distribution of the data (foraging time) for the noisy and the quiet areas. The means of this data (X) are not different. 

And the alternative hypothesis (HA) would be that there is a difference between the noisy and quiet areas: 

Scenario where the noisy area elicits a behavioral response (swimming more towards the surface instead of foraging) that can be detected by the data collected by the tags (orange shapes on whales back). The lower graph shows the distribution of the data (foraging time) for the noisy and the quiet areas. The means of this data (X) are different with the noisy mean foraging time (pink) being lower than the quiet mean foraging time (blue).

For now, we will skip over the nitty gritty of a t-test and just say that the researchers get a “t-score” that says whether or not there is a difference in the means (X) of the quiet and noisy areas. A larger t-score means that there is a difference in the means whereas a smaller t-score would indicate that the means are more similar. This t-score comes along with a p-value. Let’s say we get a t-score (green dot) that is associated with a p-value of 0.03 shown as the yellow area under the curve: 

The t-score is a test statistic that tells us how different the means of our observed data groups are from each other (green dot). The area under the t-distribution that is above the t-score is the p-value (yellow shaded area).

A p-value of 0.03 means that there is a 3% probability of obtaining these observed differences in foraging time between noisy and quiet areas purely by chance, which assumes that the null hypothesis is true (that there is no difference). We usually compare this p-value to a threshold value to say whether this finding is significant. We set this threshold before looking at the results of the test. If the threshold is above our value, like 0.05, then we can “reject the null hypothesis” and conclude that there is a significant difference in foraging time between noisy and quiet areas (green check mark scenario). On the flip-side, if the threshold that we set before our results is too low (0.01), then we will “fail to reject the null hypothesis” and conclude that there was no significant difference in foraging time between noisy and quiet areas (red check mark scenario). The reason that we don’t ever “accept the null” is because we are testing an alternative hypothesis with observations and if those observations are consistent with the null rather than the alternative, this is not evidence for the null because it could be consistent with a different alternative hypothesis that we are not yet testing for.

When our pre-set threshold to determine significance is above or greater than our p-value that was calculated we have enough evidence to ‘reject the null hypothesis’ (left figure) whereas if our p-value is lower or smaller than our calculated p-value, then we ‘fail to reject the null hypothesis’ (right figure).

In this example, the use of p-values helps the researchers quantify the strength of evidence for their hypothesis and determine whether the observed differences in gray whale behavior are likely to be meaningful or merely due to chance. 

The Debate

Despite its widespread use, the reliance on p-values has been met with criticism. Firstly, because p-values are so ubiquitous, it can be easy to calculate them with or without enough critical thinking or interpretation. This critical thinking should include an understanding of what is biologically relevant and avoid the trap of using binary language like significant or non-significant results instead of looking directly at the uncertainty of your results. One of the other most common misconceptions about p-values is that they can measure the direct probability of the null hypothesis being true. As amazing as that would be, in reality we can only use p-values to understand the probability of our observed data. Additionally, it’s common to conflate the significance or magnitude of the p-value with effect size (which is the strength of the relationship between the variables). You can have a small p-value for an effect that isn’t very large or meaningful, especially if you have a large sample size. Sample size is an important metric to report. Larger number of samples generally means more precise estimates, higher statistical power, increased generalizability, and higher possibility for replication.

Furthermore, in studies that require multiple comparisons (i.e. multiple statistical analyses are done in a single study), there is an increased likelihood of observing false positives because each test introduces a chance of obtaining a significant result by random variability alone. In p-value language, a “false positive” is when you say something is significant (below your p-value threshold) when it actually is not, and a “false negative” is when you say something is not significant (above the p-value threshold) when it actually is. So, in terms of multiple comparisons, if there are no adjustments made for the increased risk of false positives, this can potentially lead to inaccurate conclusions of significance.

In our example using foraging time in gray whales, we didn’t consider the context of our findings. To make this a more reliable study, we have to consider factors like the number of whales tagged (sample size!), the magnitude of noise near the tagged whales, other variables in the environment (e.g. prey availability) that could affect our results, and the ecological significance in the difference in foraging time that was found. To make robust conclusions, we need to carefully build hypotheses and study designs that will answer the questions we seek. We must then carefully choose the statistical tests that we use and explore how our data align with the assumptions that these tests make. It’s essential to contextualize our results within the bounds of our study design and broader ecological system. Finally, performing sensitivity analyses (e.g. running the same tests multiple times on slightly different datasets) ensures that our results are stable over a variety of different model parameters and assumptions. 

In the real world, there have been many studies done on the effects of noise pollution on baleen whale behavior that incorporate multiple sources of variance and bias to get robust results that show behavioral responses and physiological consequences to anthropogenic sound stressors (Melcón et al. 2012, Blair et al. 2016, Gailey et al. 2022, Lemos et al. 2022).

Moving Beyond P-values

There has been growing interest in reassessing the role of p-values in scientific inference and publishing. Scientists appreciate p-values because they provide one clear numeric threshold to determine significance of their results. However, the reality is more complicated than this binary approach. We have to explore the uncertainty around these estimates and test statistics (e.g. t-score) and what they represent ecologically. One avenue to explore might be focusing more on effect sizes and confidence intervals as more informative measures of the magnitude and precision of observed effects. There has also been a shift towards using Bayesian methods, which allow for the incorporation of prior knowledge and a more nuanced quantification of uncertainty.

Bayesian methods in particular are a leading alternative to p-values because instead of looking at how likely our observations are given a null hypothesis, we get a direct probability of the hypothesis given our data. For example, we can use Bayes factor for our noisy vs quiet gray whale behavioral t-test (Johnson et al. 2023). Bayes factor measures the likelihood of the data being observed for each hypothesis separately (instead of assuming the null hypothesis is true) so if we calculate a Bayes factor of 3 for the alternative hypothesis (HA), we could directly say that it is 3 times more likely for there to be decreased foraging time in a noisy area than for there to be no difference in the noisy vs quiet group. But that is just one example of Bayesian methods at work. The GEMM lab uses Bayesian methods in many projects from Lisa’s spatial capture-recapture models (link to blog) and Dawn’s blue whale abundance estimates (Barlow et al. 2018) to quantifying uncertainty associated with drone photogrammetry data collection methods in KC’s body size models (link to blog). 

Ultimately, the debate surrounding p-values highlights the necessity of nuanced and transparent approaches to statistical inference in scientific research. Rather than relying solely on arbitrary thresholds, researchers can consider the context, relevance, and robustness of their findings. From justifying our significance thresholds to directly describing parameters based on probability, we have increasingly powerful tools to improve the methodological rigor of our studies. 

References

Agathokleous, E., 2022. Environmental pollution impacts: Are p values over-valued? Science of The Total Environment 850, 157807. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.157807

Barlow, D.R., Torres, L.G., Hodge, K.B., Steel, D., Baker, C.S., Chandler, T.E., Bott, N., Constantine, R., Double, M.C., Gill, P., Glasgow, D., Hamner, R.M., Lilley, C., Ogle, M., Olson, P.A., Peters, C., Stockin, K.A., Tessaglia-Hymes, C.T., Klinck, H., 2018. Documentation of a New Zealand blue whale population based on multiple lines of evidence. Endangered Species Research 36, 27–40. https://doi.org/10.3354/esr00891

Blair, H.B., Merchant, N.D., Friedlaender, A.S., Wiley, D.N., Parks, S.E., 2016. Evidence for ship noise impacts on humpback whale foraging behaviour. Biol Lett 12, 20160005. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2016.0005

Brophy, C., 2015. Should ecologists be banned from using p-values? Journal of Ecology Blog. URL https://jecologyblog.com/2015/03/06/should-ecologists-be-banned-from-using-p-values/ (accessed 4.19.24).

Castilho, L.B., Prado, P.I., 2021. Towards a pragmatic use of statistics in ecology. PeerJ 9, e12090. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.12090

Gailey, G., Sychenko, O., Zykov, M., Rutenko, A., Blanchard, A., Melton, R.H., 2022. Western gray whale behavioral response to seismic surveys during their foraging season. Environ Monit Assess 194, 740. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-022-10023-w

Halsey, L.G., 2019. The reign of the p-value is over: what alternative analyses could we employ to fill the power vacuum? Biology Letters 15, 20190174. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2019.0174

Johnson, V.E., Pramanik, S., Shudde, R., 2023. Bayes factor functions for reporting outcomes of hypothesis tests. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, e2217331120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2217331120

Lemos, L.S., Haxel, J.H., Olsen, A., Burnett, J.D., Smith, A., Chandler, T.E., Nieukirk, S.L., Larson, S.E., Hunt, K.E., Torres, L.G., 2022. Effects of vessel traffic and ocean noise on gray whale stress hormones. Sci Rep 12, 18580. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-14510-5

LU, Y., BELITSKAYA-LEVY, I., 2015. The debate about p-values. Shanghai Arch Psychiatry 27, 381–385. https://doi.org/10.11919/j.issn.1002-0829.216027

Melcón, M.L., Cummins, A.J., Kerosky, S.M., Roche, L.K., Wiggins, S.M., Hildebrand, J.A., 2012. Blue Whales Respond to Anthropogenic Noise. PLOS ONE 7, e32681. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0032681

Murtaugh, P.A., 2014. In defense of P values. Ecology 95, 611–617. https://doi.org/10.1890/13-0590.1

Vidgen, B., Yasseri, T., 2016. P-Values: Misunderstood and Misused. Front. Phys. 4. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphy.2016.00006

Baleen analyses reveals patterns in foraging ecology and stress physiology in gray whales prior to death.

Dr. Alejandro A. Fernández Ajó, Postdoctoral Scholar, Marine Mammal Institute – OSU Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, & Conservation Sciences, Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna (GEMM) Lab.

The Eastern North Pacific (ENP) gray whale population has experienced at least two recorded Unusual Mortality Events (UMEs), from 1999–2000 and from 2019 to 2024, during which many gray whales stranded along the Pacific coast from northern Mexico to the Alaskan Arctic, USA (Martínez-Aguilar et al., 2019; Urbán, 2020). Several factors have been considered as possible causes for the high number of gray whale’s strandings, including variation in Arctic prey availability and the duration of their feeding season caused by the timing of sea ice formation and breakup (Stewart et al., 2023), starvation, anthropogenically derived toxicants, biotoxins, infectious diseases, parasites, fisheries interactions, and ship strikes (F. Gulland et al., 2005). In the most recent UME, many of the stranded whales showed signs of emaciation, indicating malnutrition as a causal factor of death (Christiansen et al., 2021; Torres et al., 2022). While the poor condition of many of the stranded whales supports the idea of starvation as a cause for these mortalities, the underlying causes of malnutrition are unknown, and it is also unclear whether the whales’ decline in body condition was rapid or gradual.

Figure 1. Gray whale with baleen exposed. Photo: GEMM Lab  NOAA/NMFS permit #16111.

Large whales face a multitude of stressors in their environment, ranging from ocean noise to contaminants, climate change, and prey shifts. Understanding how individual whales respond to these disturbances is crucial for assessing potential impacts on the population as a whole. However, monitoring the health parameters and vital rates of whales presents significant challenges due to their large size, mobility, and the vast ranges of their marine habitat. Studying stranded whales can provide valuable insights into health risks, disease susceptibility, and the impacts of pollutants and other stressors on whale populations, thus informing conservation strategies (see post). Nonetheless, the quality of information obtained from necropsies heavily relies on the timeliness of stranding reports, as decomposition begins immediately after death, limiting detailed investigations into the cause of death. Therefore, establishing a robust network capable of promptly reporting and addressing stranding events is essential (Gulland & Stockin, 2020). An effective network involves having well-trained staff, proper infrastructure, sufficient funding, and the expertise and tools necessary to gather and analyze data and samples to infer their health and causes of mortality.

During my doctoral dissertation, I worked to develop and ground truth the endocrine analyses of whale baleen as a novel sample type that can be used for retrospective assessments of the whale’s physiology (see my previous post & post). Baleen, the filter-feeding apparatus of mysticetes whales (Figure 1), consists of long fringed plates of keratinized tissue that grow continuously and slowly downward from the whale’s upper jaw. These plates are routinely collected at necropsies; and unlike other tissue types, they are durable and have minimum storage requirements; they can be preserved dry at room temperature, allowing for the analysis of both historical and current whale populations. Moreover, while most sample types used for studying whale health and physiology provide a single time-point measure of current circulating hormone levels (e.g., skin or respiratory vapor) or hold integrated information from the previous few hours or days (e.g., urine and feces), baleen tissue provides a unique opportunity for retrospective and longitudinal analyses of multiple biological parameters of the individual during the time that the tissue was grown, i.e., months to years prior to death, helping to describe the whale’s physiology, migration patterns, and exposure to pollutants (see my previous post).

In our recent study, “A longitudinal study of endocrinology and foraging ecology of subadult gray whales prior to death based on baleen analysis”, published in the journal General and Comparative Endocrinology, we examine isotope and hormone levels in the baleen of five young gray whales stranded in central Oregon during the most recent UME. Our primary objectives were to retrospectively examine the hormone and isotopic profiles of the individual whales prior to mortality, assess potential factors contributing to death, and identify the timing for the onset of chronic illness leading to mortality. Our analysis included tracing longitudinal changes in (1) stable isotope values in baleen (δ13C and δ15N), which allowed us to infer the baleen growth rate and assess the seasonal changes in diet and foraging location in large whales (Figure 2), along with the quantification of (2) two adrenal glucocorticoid steroids that are biomarkers for the whale’s stress response, (3) one thyroid hormone (triiodothyronine, T3) as an indicator of nutritional state, and (4) two sex hormones, progesterone and testosterone, to infer about reproductive status and sexual maturity. By integrating isotopic and hormonal methodologies, our study demonstrates how baleen analysis offers a comprehensive narrative of the endocrine and trophic ecology of individual whales over time.

Figure 2. Gray whales, like other large marine mammals that rely on built-up energy reserves, exhibit distinct seasonal shifts in their feeding habits. During summer, these whales feed at the ocean’s bottom, consuming organisms lower in the food chain, which is reflected in lower nitrogen values in their baleen (summer foraging). In winter, however, they must rely on their own fat reserves, causing an increase in nitrogen values (wintering). In this plot we can observe the oscillations in δ15N over time; this information allows us to estimate the baleen growth rate. Our results suggest that gray whale baleen holds a record of around 1.3 years of stable isotopes and hormone data prior to the time of death (Fernandez Ajo et al. 2024). The red cross in the X-axis, indicate the time of death. Gray whale illustration https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/species/gray-whale

Our endocrine assessments revealed detailed profiles of stress-related hormones (glucocorticoids, cortisol) and thyroid hormones along the lengths of the baleen. We found increased levels of cortisol in whales that died from unknown causes, starting about eight months prior to their deaths. This suggests these whales were under prolonged stress before dying. In contrast, in the case of a whale killed acutely by a killer whale, cortisol levels were low and constant prior to death, indicating this individual was likely in good health prior to the sudden attack. In terms of thyroid activity, indicated by T3 hormone levels, we found a gradual increase over several months in the whales that died of unknown causes. This pattern is not typically expected, as stress usually suppresses thyroid function. This anomaly could suggest an adaptive response to maintain body temperature and metabolism in potentially malnourished whales. Regarding the sex hormones, as expected for this age class, we found no significant fluctuations or spikes that would indicate sexual maturity in these young whales (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Longitudinal hormone profiles in an individual gray whale that died due to unknown causes (left) and one that died acutely due to orca predation (right). Note the pronounced elevations in cortisol levels (indicative of stress) and T3 prior to death in the case of unknown cause of death, while hormone levels remained low and constant prior to death in the whale acutely killed. Sex hormones do not present any clear oscillations, indicating that these whales were likely sexually immature. The red cross in the X-axis, indicate the time of death. Killer whale (Orcinus orca) illustration https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/species/ killer-whale

Although commercial whaling is currently banned and several whale populations show evidence of recovery, today’s whales are exposed to a variety of other human stressors that cause significant lethal and non-lethal impacts (e.g., entanglement in fishing gear, vessel strikes, shipping noise, climate change, etc.; reviewed in Thomas et al., 2016). The recovery and conservation of large whale populations is particularly important to the oceanic environment due to their key ecological role and unique biological traits (See my previous post). Our research demonstrates the strengths of using baleen as a tool for the retrospective assessments of whale endocrinology and trophic ecology. As the Eastern North Pacific gray whale population faces recurring challenges, indicated by fluctuating numbers and unusual mortality events, innovative techniques like the baleen analysis presented here, are essential to investigate the causes of mortality and inform management, helping us understand not only the immediate causes of death but also broader environmental and ecological changes affecting their survival. Broadly implementing this approach with a greater sample size of baleen collected across a larger spatial and temporal range could significantly improve our strategies for conservation and management of baleen whales.

Did you enjoy this blog? Want to learn more about marine life, research, and
conservation? Subscribe to our blog and get a weekly message when we post a new
blog. Just add your name and email into the subscribe box below.

References

Christiansen, F., Rodríguez-González, F., Martínez-Aguilar, S., Urbán, J., Swartz, S., Warick, H., Vivier, F., & Bejder, L. (2021). Poor body condition associated with an unusual mortality event in gray whales. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 658, 237–252. https://doi.org/10.3354/meps13585

Gulland, F. M. D., & Stockin, K. A. (2020). Harmonizing global strandings response. European Cetacean Society Special Publication Series.

Gulland, F., Pérez-Cortés, H., Urbán, J. R., Rojas-Bracho, L., Ylitalo, G., Weir, J., Norman, S., Muto, M., Rugh, D., Kreuder, C., & Rowles, T. (2005). Eastern North Pacific gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) unusual mortality event, 1999-2000. U.S. Department of Commerce. NOAA Technical Memorandum. NMFS-AFSC-150., March, 33 pp. http://www.afsc.noaa.gov/publications/AFSC-TM/NOAA-TM-AFSC-150.pdf

Martínez-Aguilar, S., Mariano-Meléndez, E., López-Paz, N., Castillo-Romero, F., Zaragoza-aguilar, G. A., Rivera-Rodriguez, J., Zaragoza-Aguilar, A., Swartz, S., Viloria-Gómora, L., & Urbán, J. R. (2019). Gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) stranding records in Mexico during the winter breeding season in 2019. Report of the International Whaling Commission. Document SC/68A/CMP/14, May.

Stewart, J. D., Joyce, T. W., Durban, J. W., Calambokidis, J., Fauquier, D., Fearnbach, H., Grebmeier, J. M., Lynn, M., Manizza, M., Perryman, W. L., Tinker, M. T., & Weller, D. W. (2023). Boom-bust cycles in gray whales associated with dynamic and changing Arctic conditions. Science, 382(6667), 207–211. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adi1847

Torres, L. G., Bird, C. N., Rodríguez-González, F., Christiansen, F., Bejder, L., Lemos, L., Urban R, J., Swartz, S., Willoughby, A., Hewitt, J., & Bierlich, KC. (2022). Range-Wide Comparison of Gray Whale Body Condition Reveals Contrasting Sub-Population Health Characteristics and Vulnerability to Environmental Change. Frontiers in Marine Science, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2022.867258

Urbán, R. (2020). Gray whale stranding records in Mexico during the 2020 winter breeding season. Unpublished Paper SC/68B/CMP/13 Presented to the IWC Scientific Committee, Cambridge.

A MOSAIC of species, datasets, tools, and collaborators

By Dr. Dawn Barlow, Postdoctoral Scholar, OSU Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences, Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Lab

Imagine you are 50 nautical miles from shore, perched on the observation platform of a research vessel. The ocean is blue, calm, and seems—for all intents and purposes—empty. No birds fly overhead, nothing disturbs the rolling swells except the occasional whitecap from a light breeze. The view through your binoculars is excellent, and in the distance, you spot a disturbance at the surface of the water. As the ship gets closer, you see splashing, and a flurry of activity emerges as a large group of dolphins leap and dive, likely chasing a school of fish. They swim along with the ship, riding the bow-wave in a brief break from their activity. Birds circle in the air above them and float on the water around them. Together with your team of observers, you rush to record the species, the number of animals, their distance to the ship, and their behavior. The research vessel carries along its pre-determined trackline, and the feeding frenzy of birds and dolphins fades off behind you as quickly as it came. You return to scanning the blue water.

Craig Hayslip and Dawn Barlow scan for marine mammals from the crow’s nest (elevated observation platform) of the R/V Pacific Storm.

The marine environment is highly dynamic, and resources in the ocean are notoriously patchy. One of our main objectives in marine ecology is to understand what drives these ephemeral hotspots of species diversity and biological activity. This objective is particularly important now as the oceans warm and shift. In the context of rapid global climate change, there is a push to establish alternatives to fossil fuels that can support society’s energy needs while minimizing the carbon emissions that are a root cause of climate change. One emergent option is offshore wind, which has become a hot topic on the West Coast of the United States in recent years. The technology has the potential to supply a clean energy source, but the infrastructure could have environmental and societal impacts of its own, depending on where it is placed, how it is implemented, and when it is operational.

Northern right whale dolphins leap into the air. Photo by Craig Hayslip.

Any development in the marine environment, including alternative energy such as offshore wind, should be undertaken using the best available scientific knowledge of the ecosystem where it will be implemented. The Marine Mammal Institute’s collaborative project, Marine Offshore Species Assessments to Inform Clean energy (MOSAIC), was designed for just this reason. As the name “MOSAIC” implies, it is all about using different tools to compile different datasets to establish crucial baseline information on where marine mammals and seabirds are distributed in Oregon and Northern California, a region of interest for wind energy development.

A MOSAIC of species

The waters of Oregon and Northern California are rich with life. Numerous cetaceans are found here, from the largest species to ever live, the blue whale, to one of the smallest cetaceans, the harbor porpoise, with many species filling in the size range in between: fin whales, humpback whales, sperm whales, killer whales, Risso’s dolphins, Pacific white-sided dolphins, northern right whale dolphins, and Dall’s porpoises, to name a few. Seabirds likewise rely on these productive waters, from the large, graceful albatrosses that feature in maritime legends, to charismatic tufted puffins, to the little Leach’s storm petrels that could fit in the palm of your hand yet cover vast distances at sea. From our data collection efforts so far, we have already documented 16 cetacean species and 64 seabird species.

A Laysan albatross glides over the water’s surface. Photo by Will Kennerley.

A MOSAIC of data and tools

Schematic of the different components of the MOSAIC project. Graphic created by Solene Derville.

Through the four-year MOSAIC project, we are undertaking two years of visual surveys and passive acoustic monitoring from Cape Mendocino to the mouth of the Columbia River on the border of Oregon and Washington and seaward to the continental slope. Six comprehensive surveys for cetaceans and seabirds are being conducted aboard the R/V Pacific Storm following a carefully chosen trackline to cover a variety of habitats, including areas of interest to wind energy developers.

These dedicated surveys are complemented by additional surveys conducted aboard NOAA research vessels during collaborative expeditions in the Northern California Current, and ongoing aerial surveys in partnership with the United States Coast Guard through the GEMM Lab’s OPAL project. Three bottom-mounted hydrophones were deployed in August 2022, and are recording cetacean vocalizations and the ambient soundscape, and these recordings will be complemented by acoustic data that is being collected continuously by the Oceans Observing Initiative. In addition to these methods to collect broad-scale species distribution information, concurrent efforts are being conducted via small boats to collect individual identification photographs of baleen whales and tissue biopsy samples for genetic analysis. Building on the legacy of satellite tracking here at the Marine Mammal Institute, the MOSAIC project is breathing new life into tag data from large whales to assess movement patterns over many years and determine the amount of time spent within our study area.

A curious fin whale approaches the R/V Pacific Storm during one of the visual surveys. Photo by Craig Hayslip.
Survey tracklines extending between the Columbia River and Cape Mendocino, designed for the MOSAIC visual surveys aboard the R/V Pacific Storm.

The resulting species occurrence data from visual surveys and acoustic monitoring will be integrated to develop Species Distribution Models for the many different species in our study region. Identification photographs of individual baleen whales, DNA profiles from whale biopsy samples, and data from satellite-tagged whales will provide detailed insight into whale population structure, behavior, and site fidelity (i.e., how long they typically stay in a given area), which will add important context to the distribution data we collect through the visual surveys and acoustic monitoring. The models will be implemented to produce maps of predicted species occurrence patterns, describing when and where we expect different cetaceans and seabirds to be under different environmental conditions.

With five visual surveys down, the MOSAIC team is gearing up for one final survey this month. The hydrophones will be retrieved this summer. Then, with data in-hand, the team will dive deep into analysis.

A MOSAIC of collaborators

The MOSAIC-4 team waves from the crow’s nest (observation platform) of the R/V Pacific Storm. Photo by Craig Hayslip.

The collaborative MOSAIC team brings together a diverse set of tools. The depth of expertise here at the Marine Mammal Institute spans a broad range of disciplines, well-positioned to provide robust scientific knowledge needed to inform alternative energy development in Oregon and Northern California waters.  

I have had the pleasure of participating in three of the six surveys aboard the R/V Pacific Storm, including leading one as Chief Scientist, and have collected visual survey data aboard NOAA Ship Bell M. Shimada and from United States Coast Guard helicopters over the years that will be incorporated in the MOSAIC of datasets for the project. This ecosystem is one that I feel deeply connected to from time spent in the field. Now, I am thrilled to dive into the analysis, and will lead the modeling of the visual survey data and the integration of the different components to produce species distribution maps for cetaceans and seabirds our study region.

This project is funded by the United States Department of Energy. The Principal Investigator is the Institute’s Director Dr. Lisa Ballance, and Co-Principal Investigators include Scott Baker, Barbara Lagerquist, Rachael Orben, Daniel Palacios, Kate Stafford, and Leigh Torres of the Marine Mammal Institute; John Calambokidis of the Cascadia Research Collective; and Elizabeth Becker of ManTech International Corp. For more information, please visit the project website, and stay tuned for updates as we enter the analysis phase.

Did you enjoy this blog? Want to learn more about marine life, research, and conservation? Subscribe to our blog and get a weekly alert when we make a new post! Just add your name into the subscribe box below!

Every breath [a whale] takes: How and why we study cetacean respiration

Clara Bird, PhD Candidate, OSU Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences, Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Lab

We need energy to function and survive. For animals in the wild who may have limited food availability, knowing how they spend their energy is a critical question for many scientists because it fundamentally informs how we understand their decisions about where they go and what they do. The entire field of foraging theory is founded on the concept that animals optimize their ratio of energy in and energy out so that they have enough energy to survive, reproduce (pass on their genes), watch out for threats, if need be, and rest. And, if we understand an animal’s ‘typical’ energy budget, we can then try to predict how disturbance or environmental change will affect their actual energy budgets as a consequence of that change. But how do we measure energy expenditure?

The most commonly measured energy currency is oxygen. Since our cells use oxygen to produce energy (this is why we need oxygen to live), we can measure oxygen consumption as a metric of energy expenditure. The more oxygen we consume, the more energy we’re expending. In ideal lab settings, oxygen consumption can be accurately measured by placing the subject in a chamber where the oxygen flow can be controlled (Speakman, 1999). However, you can probably see how that approach is problematic for measuring oxygen consumption in most large free-living animals, especially cetaceans. It isn’t exactly feasible to put a whale in a box.

Image 1. A great tit in a metabolic chamber. Figure 1 from Broggi et al., 2009

Fortunately, a tool called a spirometer was developed to measure oxygen consumption in restrained cetaceans. A spirometer is a device that can be placed over the blowhole(s) of an individual to accurately measure the amount of air that is exhaled and inhaled (Figure 1).  For trained cetaceans in captivity (e.g., dolphins), spirometers can be used to quantify how respiration changes after the animal performs certain behaviors (Fahlman et al., 2019). The breathing patterns of diving mammals are particularly interesting because they cannot breathe during most of their exercise (energy expenditure) as they are underwater. So, their breathing patterns after a dive tell us a lot about how much energy they spent during that dive. For example, Fahlman et al. (2019) used spirometer data from dolphins in captivity to study how their breathing patterns changed while recovering from dives of different durations. Interestingly, they found that after longer dives, dolphins took larger breaths (i.e., inhaled more air) while recovering but did not change the number of breaths. This finding is particularly relevant to the work we are conducting in the GEMM lab, where we utilize breathing patterns to quantify the energy expenditure of cetaceans in the wild, where spirometers cannot be used.

Figure 1. Figure 1 from Sumich et al. (2023). Left: a spirometer being held over the blow holes of JJ, a gray whale calf at sea world in 1997; one of the rare times that a large baleen whale was in captivity and available for these measurements. Right: example of a plot created using the data from a spirometer over JJ’s blow holes. The duration of a “blow” (exhale followed by immediate inhale) is on the x-axis, the flow rate (in liters per second) is on the y-axis. The positive curve during the exhale shows that the whale strongly exhales a lot of air very quickly, then the negative curve shows the whale inhaling a lot of air very quickly.

In a previous blog, I described how inter-breath intervals (the time between consecutive blows) are useful for estimating energy expenditure in free-living cetaceans. Essentially, a shorter interval indicates that the whale was just engaged in an energetically demanding activity. When you’re recovering from a sprint, you breathe faster (i.e., with shorter inter-breath intervals), than when you’re recovering from a walk. However, a big assumption in using inter-breath intervals as a proxy for energy expenditure is that every breath is equal. But as Fahlman et al. emphasize in their 2016 paper, every blow is not equal (Fahlman et al., 2016). In addition to varying the time between breaths, an animal can vary the intensity of each breath (e.g., Fahlman et al., 2019), the duration of each breath (Sumich et al., 2023), the number of breaths, and even the expansion of their nostrils (Nazario et al., 2022; check out this blog for more).

Image 2. Gray whale blow. Source: https://www.lajollalight.com/sdljl-natural-la-jolla-winter-wildlife-2015jan08-story.html

Altogether, this means that it’s important to measure every breath and that no one metric tells the complete story. This also means my research question focused on comparing the energetic costs of different tactics is more complicated than I originally thought. If we go back to the first blog I wrote on this topic, I was planning ons only using inter-breath intervals to estimate energy expenditure. Fast forward four years, with all my new knowledge gained on respiration variability, I’ve modified my plan and now I’m working to first understand how all these different metrics of breathing relate to each other. Then, I’ll compare how breathing varies between different foraging tactics, which is an important follow up to my questions around individual specialization of foraging tactics. If different whales are using different foraging behaviors, does that mean they’re spending different amounts of energy? If so, are certain behaviors more advantageous than others? Of course, these answers are incomplete without understanding the prey the whales are eating, but that’s something that PhD student Nat Chazal is working to understand (check out her recent blog here).  For now, I’m working on bringing integrating all the measures of breathing, then we will start putting the story together and finding some answers to our pressing questions. 

Did you enjoy this blog? Want to learn more about marine life, research, and conservation? Subscribe to our blog and get a weekly alert when we make a new post! Just add your name into the subscribe box below!

References

Broggi, J., Hohtola, E., Koivula, K., Orell, M., & Nilsson, J. (2009). Long‐term repeatability of winter basal metabolic rate and mass in a wild passerine. Functional Ecology, 23(4), 768–773. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2435.2009.01561.x

Fahlman, A., Brodsky, M., Miedler, S., Dennison, S., Ivančić, M., Levine, G., Rocho-Levine, J., Manley, M., Rocabert, J., & Borque-Espinosa, A. (2019). Ventilation and gas exchange before and after voluntary static surface breath-holds in clinically healthy bottlenose dolphins, Tursiops truncatus. Journal of Experimental Biology, 222(5), jeb192211. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.192211

Fahlman, A., van der Hoop, J., Moore, M. J., Levine, G., Rocho-Levine, J., & Brodsky, M. (2016). Estimating energetics in cetaceans from respiratory frequency: Why we need to understand physiology. Biology Open,5(4), 436–442. https://doi.org/10.1242/bio.017251

Nazario, E. C., Cade, D. E., Bierlich, K. C., Czapanskiy, M. F., Goldbogen, J. A., Kahane-Rapport, S. R., Hoop, J. M. van der, Luis, M. T. S., & Friedlaender, A. S. (2022). Baleen whale inhalation variability revealed using animal-borne video tags. PeerJ, 10, e13724. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.13724

Speakman, J. R. (1999). The Cost of Living: Field Metabolic Rates of Small Mammals. In A. H. Fitter & D. G. Raffaelli (Eds.), Advances in Ecological Research (Vol. 30, pp. 177–297). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2504(08)60019-7

Sumich, J. L., Albertson, R., Torres, L. G., Bird, C. N., Bierlich, K. C., & Harris, C. (2023). Using audio and UAS-based video for estimating tidal lung volumes of resting and active adult gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus). Marine Mammal Science, 1(8). https://doi.org/10.1111/mms.13081

The Dark Side of Upwelling: It’s getting harder and harder to breathe off the Oregon coast

By Rachel Kaplan, PhD candidate, Oregon State University College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences, Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Lab

The depths of the productive coastal Oregon ecosystem have long held a mystery – an increasing paucity in the concentration of dissolved oxygen at depth. When dissolved oxygen concentrations dips low enough, the condition “hypoxia” can alter biogeochemical cycling in the ocean environment and threaten marine life. Essentially, organisms can’t get enough oxygen from the water, forcing them to try to escape to more favorable waters, stay and change their behavior, or suffer the consequences and potentially suffocate.

Recent work has illuminated the cause of this mysterious rise in hypoxic waters: an increase in the wind-driven oceanographic process of upwelling (Barth et al., 2024). The seasonal upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich waters underlies the incredible productivity of the Oregon coast, but its dark twin is hypoxia: when organic material in the upper layer of the water column sinks, microbial respiration processes consume dissolved oxygen in the surrounding water. In addition, the deep waters brought to the surface by upwelling are depleted in oxygen compared to the aerated surface waters. These effects combine to form an oxygen-poor water layer over the continental shelf, which typically lasts from May until October in the Northern California Current (NCC) region. The spatial extent of this layer is highly variable – hypoxic bottom waters cover 10% of the shelf in some years and up to 62% in others, presenting challenging conditions for life occupying the Oregon shelf (Peterson et al., 2013).

Figure 1. An article in The Oregonian from 2004 documents research on a hypoxia-driven “dead zone” off the Oregon coast.

While effects of hypoxia on benthic communities and some fish species are well-documented, is unclear how increasing levels of hypoxia off Oregon may impact highly mobile, migratory organisms like whales. A primary pathway is likely through their prey – particularly species that occupy hypoxic regions and depths, like the zooplankton krill. Over the continental shelf and slope, which are important krill habitat, seasonally hypoxic waters tend to extend from about 150 meters depth to the bottom. The vertical center of krill distribution in the NCC region is around 170 meters depth, suggesting that these animals encounter hypoxic conditions regularly.

Interestingly, the two main krill species off the Oregon coast, Euphausia pacifica and Thysanoessa spinifera, use different strategies to deal with hypoxic conditions. Thysanoessa spinifera krill decrease their oxygen consumption rate to better tolerate ambient hypoxia, a behavioral modification strategy called “oxyconformity”. Euphausia pacifica, on the other hand, use “oxyregulation” to maintain the same, quite high, oxygen utilization rate regardless of ambient levels – which may indicate that this species will be less able to tolerate increasingly hypoxic waters (Tremblay et al., 2020).

Figure 2. This figure from Barth et al. 2024 maps the concentration of dissolved oxygen (uM/kg; cooler colors indicate less dissolved oxygen) to show an increase in hypoxic conditions over the continental shelf and slope (green and blue colors) across seven decades in the NCC region.

Over long time scales, such environmental pressures shape species physiology, life history, and evolution. The krill species Euphausia mucronate is endemic to the Humboldt Current System off the coast of South America, which includes a region of year-round upwelling and a persistent Oxygen Minimum Zone (OMZ). Fascinatingly, Humboldt krill can live in the core of the OMZ, using metabolic adaptations that even let them survive in anoxic conditions (i.e., no oxygen in the water). Humboldt krill abundances actually increase with shallower OMZ depths and lower levels of dissolved oxygen, pointing to the huge success of this species in evolving to thrive in conditions that challenge other local krill species (Díaz-Astudillo et al., 2022).

Back home in the NCC region, will Euphausia pacifica and Thysanoessa spinifera be pressured to adapt to continually increasing levels of hypoxia? If so, will they be able to adapt? One of krill’s many superpowers is an ability to tolerate a wide range of environmental conditions, including the dramatic gradients in temperature, water density, and dissolved oxygen that they encounter during their daily vertical migrations through the water column. Both species have strategies to deal with hypoxic conditions, and this capacity has allowed them to thrive in the active upwelling region that is the NCC. Now, the question is whether increasingly hypoxic waters will eventually force a threshold that compromises the capacity of krill to adapt – and then, what will happen to these species, and the foragers dependent on them?

References

Barth, J. A., Pierce, S. D., Carter, B. R., Chan, F., Erofeev, A. Y., Fisher, J. L., Feely, R. A., Jacobson, K. C., Keller, A. A., Morgan, C. A., Pohl, J. E., Rasmuson, L. K., & Simon, V. (2024). Widespread and increasing near-bottom hypoxia in the coastal ocean off the United States Pacific Northwest. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 3798. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-54476-0

Díaz-Astudillo, M., Riquelme-Bugueño, R., Bernard, K. S., Saldías, G. S., Rivera, R., & Letelier, J. (2022). Disentangling species-specific krill responses to local oceanography and predator’s biomass: The case of the Humboldt krill and the Peruvian anchovy. Frontiers in Marine Science, 9, 979984. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2022.979984

Peterson, J. O., Morgan, C. A., Peterson, W. T., & Lorenzo, E. D. (2013). Seasonal and interannual variation in the extent of hypoxia in the northern California Current from 1998–2012. Limnology and Oceanography, 58(6), 2279–2292. https://doi.org/10.4319/lo.2013.58.6.2279

Tremblay, N., Hünerlage, K., & Werner, T. (2020). Hypoxia Tolerance of 10 Euphausiid Species in Relation to Vertical Temperature and Oxygen Gradients. Frontiers in Physiology, 11, 248. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2020.00248

How big, how blue, how beautiful! Studying the impacts of climate change on big, (and beautiful) blue whales

Dr. KC Bierlich, Postdoctoral Scholar, OSU Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, & Conservation Sciences, Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Lab

The SAPPHIRE Project is in full swing, as we spend our days aboard the R/V Star Keys searching for krill and blue whales (Figure 1) in the South Taranaki Bight (STB) region of Aotearoa New Zealand. We are investigating how changing ocean conditions impact krill availability and quality, and how this in turn impacts blue whale behavior, health, and reproduction. Understanding the link between changing environmental conditions on prey species and predators is key to understanding the larger implications of climate change on ocean food webs and each populations’ resiliency. 

Figure 1. The SAPPHIRE team searching for blue whales. Top left) KC Bierlich, top right) Dawn Barlow, bottom left) Dawn Barlow, Kim Bernard (left to right), bottom right) KC Bierlich, Dawn Barlow, Leigh Torres, Mike Ogle (left to right).  

One of the many components of the SAPPHIRE Project is to understand how foraging success of blue whales is influenced by environmental variation (see this recent blog written by Dr. Dawn Barlow introducing each component of the project). When you cannot go to a grocery store or restaurant any time you are hungry, you must rely on stored energy from previous feeds to fuel energy needs. Body condition reflects an individual’s stored energy in the body as a result of feeding and thus represents the foraging success of an individual, which can then affect its potential for reproductive output and the individual’s overall health (see this previous blog). As discussed in a previous blog, drones serve as a valuable tool for obtaining morphological measurements of whales to estimate their body condition. We are using drones to collect aerial imagery of pygmy blue whales to obtain body condition measurements late in the foraging season between years 2024 and 2026 of the SAPPHIRE Project (Figure 2). We are quantifying body condition as Body Area Index (BAI), which is a relative measure standardized by the total length of the whale and well suited for comparing individuals and populations (Figure 3). 

The GEMM Lab recently published an article led by Dr. Dawn Barlow where we investigated the differences in BAI between three blue whale populations: Eastern North Pacific blue whales feeding in Monterey Bay, California; Chilean blue whales feeding in the Corcovado Gulf; and New Zealand Pygmy blue whales feeding in the STB (Barlow et al., 2023). These three populations are interesting to compare since blue whales that feed in Monterey Bay and Corcovado Gulf migrate to and from these seasonally productive feeding grounds, while the Pygmy blue whales stay in Aotearoa New Zealand year-round. Interestingly, the Pygmy blue whales had higher BAI (were fatter) compared to the other two regions despite relatively lower productivity in their foraging grounds. This difference in body condition may be due to different life history strategies where the non-migratory Pygmy blue whales may be able to feed as opportunities arrive, while the migratory strategies of the Eastern North Pacific and Chilean blue whales require good timing to access high abundant prey. Another interesting and unexpected result from our blue whale comparison was that Pygmy blue whales are not so “pygmy”; they are actually the same size as Eastern North Pacific and Chilean blue whales, with an average size around 22 m. Our findings from this blue whale comparison leads us to more questions about how environmental conditions that vary from year to year influence body condition and reproduction of these “not so pygmy” blue whales. 

Figure 2. An aerial image of a Pygmy blue whale in the South Taranaki Bight region of Aotearoa New Zealand collected during the SAPPHIRE 2024 field season using a DJI Inspire 2 drone. 
Figure 3. A drone image of a Pygmy blue whale and the length and body width measurements used to estimate Body Area Index (BAI), represented by the shaded blue region. Width measurements will also be used to help identify pregnant individuals.

The GEMM Lab has been studying this population of Pygmy blue whales in the STB since 2013 and found that years designated as a marine heatwave resulted with a reduction in blue whale feeding activity. Interestingly, breeding activity is also reduced during marine heatwaves in the following season when compared to the breeding season following a more productive, typical foraging season. These findings indicate that fluctuations in the environment, such as marine heatwaves, may affect not only foraging success, but also reproduction in Pygmy blue whales. 

To help us better understand reproductive patterns across years, we will use body width measurements from drone images paired with hormone concentrations collected from fecal and biopsy samples to identify pregnant individuals. Progesterone is a hormone secreted in the ovaries of mammals during the estrous cycle and gestation, making it the predominant hormone responsible for sustaining pregnancy. Recently, the GEMM Lab’s Dr. Alejandro Fernandez-Ajo wrote a blog discussing his publication identifying pregnant individual gray whales using drone-based body width measurements and progesterone concentrations from fecal samples (Fernandez et al., 2023). While individuals that were pregnant had higher levels of progesterone compared to when they were not pregnant, the body width at 50% of the body length served as a more reliable method for detecting pregnancy in gray whales. We will use similar methods to help identify pregnancy in Pygmy blue whales for the SAPPHIRE Project where will we examine body width measurement paired with progesterone concentrations collected from fecal and biopsy samples to identify pregnant individuals. We hope our work will help to better understand how climate change will influence Pygmy blue whale body condition and reproduction, and thus the overall health and resiliency of the population. Stay tuned! 

References

Barlow, D. R., Bierlich, K. C., Oestreich, W. K., Chiang, G., Durban, J. W., Goldbogen, J. A., Johnston, D. W., Leslie, M. S., Moore, M. J., Ryan, J. P., & Torres, L. G. (2023). Shaped by Their Environment: Variation in Blue Whale Morphology across Three Productive Coastal Ecosystems. Integrative Organismal Biology, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.1093/iob/obad039

Fernandez Ajó, A., Pirotta, E., Bierlich, K. C., Hildebrand, L., Bird, C. N., Hunt, K. E., Buck, C. L., New, L., Dillon, D., & Torres, L. G. (2023). Assessment of a non-invasive approach to pregnancy diagnosis in gray whales through drone-based photogrammetry and faecal hormone analysis. Royal Society Open Science, 10(7), 230452. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.230452

It’s getting hot in here: studying the impacts of marine heatwaves on krill, life-blood of the ocean

By Kim Bernard, Associate Professor, Oregon State University College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences

Euphausiids, commonly known as “krill”, represent a globally distributed family of pelagic crustacean zooplankton, spanning from tropical to polar oceans. These remarkable organisms inhabit a vast range of marine habitats, from nearshore coastal waters to the expansive open ocean, and from the sea surface to abyssal depths. Notably, they claim the title of the largest biomass among non-domestic animal groups on Earth! Beyond their sheer abundance, euphausiids play a pivotal role in shaping global marine food webs, supporting both economically significant fisheries and extensive populations of marine megafauna.

Figure 1: Nyctiphanes australis. Photo credit: A. Slotwinski, CSIRO.

As our planet continues to warm, the ongoing and anticipated shifts in the distribution and biomass of krill populations herald potential disruptions to marine ecosystems and food webs globally. Marine heatwaves, which are expected to increase in frequency, intensity, and duration in the coming decades, have a significant impact on global krill populations, with knock-on effects through food webs. At our home-base off the coast of Oregon, a severe marine heatwave in 2014-2016 resulted in altered krill distributions and reduced biomass, causing a suite of ecological implications ranging from decline in salmon health to increased occurrence of whale entanglements in fishing gear (Daly et al. 2017; Santora et al. 2020).

Figure 2: (A) Simrad EK80 transducers (the larger one is a 38kHz transducer, the smaller is a 120kHz transducer) mounted to a pole that gets lowered into the water during our daily surveys. The transducers emit sound waves that bounce off objects, like krill, in the water and return to the instrument’s transceiver, allowing us to map krill within the water column. (B) The acoustic data collected by the echosounder appears in real-time on our computer screen allowing us to find krill that we can then target with the Bongo net. Photo credits: Kim Bernard.

Here, off the coast of New Zealand, the krill species Nyctiphanes australis (Figure 1) is an important prey item for many marine predators, including slender tuna (Allothunnus fallai), Australian salmon (Kahawai, Arripis trutta), Jack mackerel (Trachurus declivis), short-tailed shearwater (Puffinus tenuirostris) (O’Brien 1988), and of course, the reason we are out here, blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus brevicauda) (Torres et al. 2020). In a precursor study to the SAPPHIRE project, members of our current research team demonstrated the potential negative impacts that marine heatwaves can have off the coast of New Zealand. During that study, our team noted declines in the abundance and changes in the distribution patterns of Nyctiphanes australis during a marine heatwave compared to normal conditions, with subsequent negative impacts on the distribution and behavior of the local New Zealand blue whale population (Barlow et al. 2020). The impetus of the SAPPHIRE project is to improve our understanding of the physiological mechanisms underlying the observed changes in both krill and blue whale populations, with the goal to better predict future changes.

As a zooplankton ecologist and “kriller”, my role on the SAPPHIRE project is to further our knowledge on the prey, Nyctiphanes australis. There are several components to this part of our research: (1) mapping distribution patterns of krill, (2) measuring the quality of krill as prey to whales, and (3) running experiments to test how warming affects krill physiology. To map the krill distribution patterns, we are using active acoustics (Figure 2). To measure the quality of krill, we first need to collect them, and we do that using a Bongo net (Figure 3) that gets towed behind the boat targeting krill we find using the echosounder.

Figure 3: Kim Bernard and Ngatokoa Tikitau empty the contents of one of the Bongo net cod-ends into a bucket to examine the catch. Unfortunately, it was not filled with krill as we had hoped, but rather a gelatinous zooplankton known as Salpa democratica. Photo credit: KC Bierlich.

Once we have the krill, we’ll flash freeze them in liquid nitrogen and take them back to Oregon where we’ll measure the amount of protein, fats (lipids), and calories each one contains. Finally, for the experiments on temperature effects, we will use live krill collected with the Bongo net placed individually into 1L Nalgene bottles, each outfitted with oxygen sensors so that we can measure the respiration rates of krill at a range of temperatures they would experience during normal conditions and marine heatwaves (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Respiration experiment set-up with two circulating waterbaths in the foreground feeding two temperature treatments in coolers (aka “chilly bins”) behind. Once we catch krill (which has yet to happen), we will use this set-up to test the effects of warming on krill respiration rates. Photo credit: Kim Bernard.


References

Barlow DR, Bernard KS, Escobar-Flores P, Palacios DM, Torres LG (2020) Links in the trophic chain: modeling functional relationships between in situ oceanography, krill, and blue whale distribution under different oceanographic regimes. Marine Ecology Progress Series 642:207-225. https://doi.org/10.3354/meps13339

Daly EA, Brodeur RD, Auth TD (2017) Anomalous ocean conditions in 2015: impacts on spring Chinook salmon and their prey field. Marine Ecology Progress Series 566:169-182. https://doi.org/10.3354/meps12021

O’Brien DP (1988) Surface schooling behaviour of the coastal krill Nyctiphanes australis (Crustacea: Euphausiacea) off Tasmania, Australia. Marine Ecology Progress Series 42: 219-233.

Santora JA, Mantua NJ, Schroeder ID, Field JC, Hazen EL, Bograd SJ, Sydeman WJ, Wells BK, Calambokidis J, Saez L, Lawson D, Forney KA (2020) Habitat compression and ecosystem shifts as potential links between marine heatwave and record whale entanglements. Nature Communications 11(1):536. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-14215-w.

Torres LG, Barlow DR, Chandler TE, Burnett JD. 2020. Insight into the kinematics of blue whale surface foraging through drone observations and prey data. PeerJ 8:e8906 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.8906

Oceanographic Alchemy: How Winds Become Whale Food in Oregon

By Rachel Kaplan, PhD student, Oregon State University College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences, Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Lab

Here in the GEMM lab, we love the Oregon coast for its amazing animals – the whales we all study, the seabirds we can sometimes spot from the lab, and the critters that come up in net tows when we’re out on the water. Oregonians owe the amazing biological productivity of the Oregon coast to the underlying atmospheric and oceanographic processes, which make our local Northern California Current (NCC) ecosystem one of the most productive places on earth.

While the topographical bumps of the Oregon coastline and vagaries of coastal weather do have a big impact on the physical and biological processes off the coast, the dominant forces shaping the NCC are large-scale, atmospheric heavy hitters. As the northeasterly trade winds blow across the globe, they set up the clockwise-rotating North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a major feature covering about 20 million square kilometers of the Pacific Ocean. The equatorward-flowing part of the gyre is the California Current. It comprises an Eastern Boundary Upwelling Ecosystem, one of four such global systems that, while occupying only 1% of the global ocean, are responsible for a whopping 11% of its total primary productivity, and 17% of global fish catch.

Figure 1. Important features of the California Current System (Checkley and Barth, 2009).

At its core, this incredible ocean productivity is due to atmospheric pressure gradients. Every spring, an atmospheric system called the North Pacific High strengthens, loosening the hold of the stormy Aleutian Low. As a result, the winds begin to blow from the north, pushing the surface water in the NCC with them towards the equator.

This water is subject to the Coriolis effect – an inertial force that acts upon objects moving across a rotating frame of reference, and the same force that airplane pilots must account for in their flight trajectories. As friction transmits the stress of wind acting upon the ocean’s surface downward through the water column, the Coriolis effect deflects deeper layers of water successively further to the right, before the original wind stress finally peters out due to frictional losses.

This process creates an oceanographic feature called an Ekman spiral, and its net effect in the NCC is the offshore transport of surface water. Deep water flows up to replace it, bringing along nutrients that feed the photosynthesizers at the base of the food web. Upwelling ecosystems like the NCC tend to be dominated by food webs full of large organisms, in which energy flows from single-celled phytoplankton like diatoms, to grazers like copepods and krill, to predators like fish, seabirds, and our favorite, whales. These bountiful food webs keep us busy: GEMM Lab research has explored how upwelling dynamics impact gray whale prey off the Oregon coast, as well as parallel questions far from home about blue whale prey in New Zealand.

Figure 2. The Coriolis effect creates an oceanographic feature called an Ekman Spiral, resulting in water transport perpendicular to the wind direction (Source: NOAA).

Although the process of upwelling lies at the heart of the productive NCC ecosystem, it isn’t enough for it to simply happen – timing matters, too. The seasonality of ecological events, or phenology, can have dramatic consequences for the food web, and individual populations in it. When upwelling is initiated as normal by the “spring transition”, the delivery of freshly upwelled nutrients activates the food web, with reverberations all the way from phytoplankton to predators. When the spring transition is late, however, the surface ocean is warm, nutrients are depleted, primary productivity is low, and the life cycles and abundances of some species can change dramatically. In 2005, for example, the spring transition was delayed by a month, resulting in declines and spatial redistributions of the taxa typically found in the NCC, including hake, rockfish, albacore tuna, and squid. The Cassin’s auklet, which feeds on plankton, suffered its worst year on record, including reproductive failure that may have resulted from a lack of food.

Upwelling is alchemical in its power to transform, modulating physical and atmospheric processes and turning them into ecosystem gold – or trouble. As oceanographers and Oregonians alike wonder how climate change may reshape our coast, changes to upwelling will likely play a big role in determining the outcome. Some expect that upwelling-favorable winds will become more prevalent, potentially increasing primary productivity. Others suspect that the timing of upwelling will shift, and ecological mismatches like those that occurred in 2005 will be increasingly detrimental to the NCC ecosystem. Whatever the outcome, upwelling is inherent to the character of the Oregon coast, and will help shape its future.

Figure 3. The GEMM Lab is grateful that the biological productivity generated by upwelling draws humpback whales like this one to the Oregon coast! (photo: Dawn Barlow)

References

Chavez, Francisco & Messié, Monique. (2009). A comparison of Eastern Boundary Upwelling Ecosystems. Progress In Oceanography. 83. 80-96. 10.1016/j.pocean.2009.07.032.

Chavez, F P., and J R Toggweiler, 1995: Physical estimates of global new production: The upwelling contribution. In Dahlem Workshop on Upwelling in the Ocean: Modern Processes and Ancient Records, Chichester, UK, John Wiley & Sons, 313-320.

Checkley, David & Barth, John. (2009). Patterns and processes in the California Current System. Progress In Oceanography. 83. 49-64. 10.1016/j.pocean.2009.07.028.

Sonar savvy: using echo sounders to characterize zooplankton swarms

By Natalie Chazal, PhD student, OSU Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, & Conservation Sciences, Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Lab

I’m Natalie Chazal, the GEMM Lab’s newest PhD student! This past spring I received my MS in Biological and Agricultural Engineering with Dr. Natalie Nelson’s Biosystems Analytics Lab at North Carolina State University. My thesis focused on using shellfish sanitation datasets to look at water quality trends in North Carolina and to forecast water quality for shellfish farmers in Florida. Now, I’m excited to be studying gray whales in the GEMM Lab!

Since the beginning of the Fall term, I’ve jumped into a project that will use our past 8 years of sonar data collected using a Garmin echo sounder during the GRANITE project work with gray whales off the Newport, OR coast. Echo sounder data is commonly used recreationally to detect bottom depth and for finding fish and my goal is to use these data to assess relative prey abundance at gray whale sightings over time and space. 

There are also scientific grade echo sounders that are built to be incredibly precise and very exact in the projection and reception of the sonar pulses. Both types of echosounders can be used to determine the depth of the ocean floor, structures within the water column, and organisms that are swimming within the sonar’s “cone” of acoustic sensing. The precision and stability of the scientific grade equipment allows us to answer questions related to the specific species of organisms, the substrate type at the sea floor, and even animal behavior. However, scientific grade echo sounders can be expensive, overly large for our small research vessel, and require expertise to operate. When it comes to generalists, like gray whales, we can answer questions about relative prey abundances without the use of such exact equipment (Benoit-Bird 2016; Brough 2019). 

While there are many variations of echo sounders that are specific to their purpose, commercially available, single beam echo sounders generally function in the same way (Fig. 1). First, a “ping” or short burst of sound at a specific frequency is produced from a transducer. The ping then travels downward and once it hits an object, some of the sound energy bounces off of the object and some moves into the object. The sound that bounces off of the object is either reflected or scattered. Sound energy that is either reflected or scattered back in the direction of the source is then received by the transducer. We can figure out the depth of the signal using the amount of travel time the ping took (SeaBeam Instruments 2000).

Figure 1. Diagram of how sound is scattered, reflected, and transmitted in marine environments (SeaBeam Instruments, 2000).

The data produced by this process is then displayed in real-time, on the screen on board the boat. Figure 2 is an example of the display that we see while on board RUBY (the GEMM Lab’s rigid-hull inflatable research boat): 

Figure 2. Photo of the echo sounder display on board RUBY. On the left is a map that is used for navigation. On the right is the real time feed where we can see the ocean bottom shown as the bright yellow area with the distinct boundary towards the lower portion of the screen. The more orange layer above that, with the  more “cloudy” structure  is a mysid swarm.

Once off the boat, we can download this echo sounder data and process it in the lab to recreate echograms similar to those seen on the boat. The echograms are shown with the time on the x-axis, depth on the y-axis, and are colored by the intensity of sound that was returned (Fig. 3). Echograms give us a sort of picture of what we see in the water column. When we look at these images as humans, we can infer what these objects are, given that we know what habitat we were in. Below (Fig. 3) are some example classifications of different fish and zooplankton swarms and what they look like in an echogram (Kaltenberg 2010).

Figure 3. Panel of echogram examples, from Kaltenberg 2010, for different fish and zooplankton aggregations that have been classified both visually (like we do in real time on the boat) as well as statistically (which we hope to do with the mysid aggregations). 

For our specific application, we are going to focus on characterizing mysid swarms, which are considered to be the main prey target of PCFG whales in our study area. With the echograms generated by the GRANITE fieldwork, we can gather relative mysid swarm densities, giving us an idea of how much prey is available to foraging gray whales. Because we have 8 years of GRANITE echosounder data, with 2,662 km of tracklines at gray whale sightings, we are going to need an automated process. This demand is where image segmentation can come in! If we treat our echograms like photographs, we can train models to identify mysid swarms within echograms, reducing our echogram processing load. Automating and standardizing the process can also help to reduce error. 

We are planning to utilize U-Nets, which are a method of image segmentation where the image goes through a series of compressions (encoders) and expansions (decoders), which is common when using convolutional neural nets (CNNs) for image segmentation. The encoder is generally a pre-trained classification network (CNNs work very well for this) that is used to classify pixels into a lower resolution category. The decoder then takes the low resolution categorized pixels and reprojects them back into an image to get a segmented mask. What makes U-Nets unique is that they re-introduce the higher resolution encoder information back into the decoder process through skip connections. This process allows for generalizations to be made for the image segmentation without sacrificing fine-scale details (Brautaset 2020; Ordoñez 2022; Slonimer 2023; Vohra 2023).

Figure 4. Diagram of the encoder, decoder architecture for U-Nets used in biomedical image segmentation. Note the skip connections illustrated by the gray lines connecting the higher resolution image information on the left, with the decoder process on the right (Ronneberger 2015)

What we hope to get from this analysis is an output image that provides us only the parts of the echogram that contain mysid swarms. Once the mysid swarms are found within the echograms, we can use both the intensity and the size of the swarm in the echogram as a proxy for the relative abundance of gray whale prey. We plan to quantify these estimates across multiple spatial and temporal scales, to link prey availability to changing environmental conditions and gray whale health and distribution metrics. This application is what will make our study particularly unique! By leveraging the GRANITE project’s extensive datasets, this study will be one of the first studies that quantifies prey variability in the Oregon coastal system and uses those results to directly assess prey availability on the body condition of gray whales. 

However, I have a little while to go before the data will be ready for any analysis. So far, I’ve been reading as much as I can about how sonar works in the marine environment, how sonar data structures work, and how others are using recreational sonar for robust analyses. There have been a few bumps in the road while starting this project (especially with disentangling the data structures produced from our particular GARMIN echosounder), but my new teammates in the GEMM Lab have been incredibly generous with their time and knowledge to help me set up a strong foundation for this project, and beyond. 

References

  1. Kaltenberg A. (2010) Bio-physical interactions of small pelagic fish schools and zooplankton prey in the California Current System over multiple scales. Oregon State University, Dissertation. https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/z890rz74t
  2. SeaBeam Instruments. (2000) Multibeam Sonar Theory of Operation. L-3 Communications, East Walpole MA. https://www3.mbari.org/data/mbsystem/sonarfunction/SeaBeamMultibeamTheoryOperation.pdf
  3. Benoit-Bird K., Lawson G. (2016) Ecological insights from pelagic habitats acquired using active acoustic techniques. Annual Review of Marine Science. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-marine-122414-034001
  4. Brough T., Rayment W., Dawson S. (2019) Using a recreational grade echosounder to quantify the potential prey field of coastal predators. PLoS One. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217013
  5. Brautaset O., Waldeland A., Johnsen E., Malde K., Eikvil L., Salberg A, Handegard N. (2020) Acoustic classification in multifrequency echosounder data using deep convolutional neural networks. ICES Journal of Marine Science 77, 1391–1400. https://doi.org/10.1093/icesjms/fsz235
  6. Ordoñez A., Utseth I., Brautaset O., Korneliussen R., Handegard N. (2022) Evaluation of echosounder data preparation strategies for modern machine learning models. Fisheries Research 254, 106411. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fishres.2022.106411
  7. Slonimer A., Dosso S., Albu A., Cote M., Marques T., Rezvanifar A., Ersahin K., Mudge T., Gauthier S., (2023) Classification of Herring, Salmon, and Bubbles in Multifrequency Echograms Using U-Net Neural Networks. IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering 48, 1236–1254. https://doi.org/10.1109/JOE.2023.3272393
  8. Ronneberger O., Fischer P., Brox T. (2015) U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1505.04597

Migrating back east

By: Kate Colson, MSc Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia, Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, Marine Mammal Research Unit

With the changing of the season, gray whales are starting their southbound migration that will end in the lagoons off the Baja California Mexico. The migration of the gray whale is the longest migration of any mammal—the round trip totals ~10,000 miles (Pike, 1962)! 

Map of the migration route taken by gray whales along the west coast of North America. (Image credit: Angle, Asplund, and Ostrander, 2017 https://www.slocoe.org/resources/parent-and-public-resources/what-is-a-california-gray-whale/california-gray-whale-migration/)

Like these gray whales, I am also undertaking my own “migration” as I leave Newport to start my post-Master’s journey. However, my migration will be a little shorter than the gray whale’s journey—only ~3,000 miles—as I head back to the east coast. As I talked about in my previous blog, I have finished my thesis studying the energetics of gray whale foraging behaviors and I attended my commencement ceremony at the University of British Columbia last Wednesday. As my time with the GEMM Lab comes to a close, I want to take some time to reflect on my time in Newport. 

Me in my graduation regalia (right) and my co-supervisor Andrew Trites holding the university mace (left) after my commencement ceremony at the University of British Columbia rose garden. 

Many depictions of scientists show them working in isolation but in my time with the GEMM Lab I got to fully experience the collaborative nature of science. My thesis was a part of the GEMM Lab’s Gray whale Response to Ambient Noise Informed by Technology and Ecology (GRANITE) project and I worked closely with the GRANITE team to help achieve the project’s research goals. The GRANITE team has annual meetings where team members give updates on their contributions to the project and flush out ideas in a series of very busy days. I found these collaborative meetings very helpful to ensure that I was keeping the big picture of the gray whale study system in mind while working with the energetics data I explored for my thesis. The collaborative nature of the GRANITE project provided the opportunity to learn from people that have a different skill set from my own and expose me to many different types of analysis. 

GRANITE team members hard at work thinking about gray whales and their physiological response to noise. 

This summer I also was able to participate in outreach with the partnership of the Oregon State University Marine Mammal Institute and the Eugene Exploding Whales (the alternate identity of the Eugene Emeralds) minor league baseball team to promote the Oregon Gray Whale License plates. It was exciting to talk to baseball fans about marine mammals and be able to demonstrate that the Gray Whale License plate sales are truly making a difference for the gray whales off the Oregon coast. In fact, the minimally invasive suction cup tags used in to collect the data I analyzed in my thesis were funded by the OSU Gray Whale License plate fund!

Photo of the GEMM Lab promoting Oregon Gray Whale License plates at the Eugene Exploding Whales baseball game. If you haven’t already, be sure to “Put a whale on your tail!” to help support marine mammal research off the Oregon Coast. 

Outside of the amazing science opportunities, I have thoroughly enjoyed the privilege of exploring Newport and the Oregon coast. I was lucky enough to find lots of agates and enjoyed consistently spotting gray whale blows on my many beach walks. I experienced so many breathtaking views from hikes (God’s thumb was my personal favorite). I got to attend an Oregon State Beavers football game where we crushed Stanford! And most of all, I am so thankful for all the friends I’ve made in my time here. These warm memories, and the knowledge that I can always come back, will help make it a little easier to start my migration away from Newport. 

Me and my friends outside of Reser Stadium for the Oregon State Beavers football game vs Stanford this season. Go Beavs!!!
Me and my friends celebrating after my defense. 

Did you enjoy this blog? Want to learn more about marine life, research, and
conservation? Subscribe to our blog and get a weekly message when we post a new
blog. Just add your name and email into the subscribe box below

References

Pike, G. C. (1962). Migration and feeding of the gray whale (Eschrichtius gibbosus). Journal of the Fisheries Research Board of Canada, 19(5), 815–838. https://doi.org/10.1139/f62-051