Author: Lisa Hildebrand

Flying halfway around the world to learn about marine mammals from around the world!

By Lisa Hildebrand, MSc student, OSU Department of Fisheries & Wildlife, Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Lab

The GEMM Lab is back from Barcelona after attending the World Marine Mammal Conference last week and it sure was a week to remember! Not only did every GEMM member present some aspect of their research at the conference (either as a poster, speed or full-length talk) but some of us also attended workshops, scheduled meetings with collaborators, new & old, and we certainly all learned a lot of new information about what is going on in marine mammalogy across the globe. Having had a few days now to reflect upon the intense four days spent at the conference, we want to highlight the talks that we each personally thought were some of the most interesting and exciting.

“Double Drone Drama” was the alliterative title of Héloïse Frouin-Mouy‘s talk about using two drones to collect simultaneous visual and underwater acoustic behavioral data of gray whales in Baja California, Mexico. While there were many talks during the week that discussed incorporating drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), into marine mammal research, this project was potentially the only one that discussed using two simultaneously. One drone collected visual aerial observations while the other obtained close-range passive acoustic measurements with an underwater recording hydrophone to better understand the behavioral contexts of call generation. Froiun-Mouy and her team detected call-type-specific source levels relative to behavior state through this dual-approach. For example, they were able to estimate the acoustic source levels of bubble-blasts produced by gray whales, and the double drone action recorded a variety of calls. Using two or more UAVs can provide a more integrated snapshot into the animal vocalization context, and it will be interesting to see whether this method is applied elsewhere on a variety of whale species.

Source: Twitter
Tara Sayuri Whitty. Source: UCSD Aquarium.

Tara Sayuri Whitty discussed her doctoral research focused on understanding the mental models of local, artisanal fishing communities at the heart of the vaquita conservation efforts. The vaquita has experienced rapid population declines due primarily to bycatch in gillnet fisheries from legal local gillnet fisheries and the illegal totoaba fishery. With the sole intent of preventing bycatch, gillnets were banned for legal practice, but the illegal totoaba fishery continued, as did vaquita bycatch. Whitty conducted interviews to understand the mental models and perceptions of local fishing communities towards officials and conservationists regarding the gillnet band. She discovered that these conservation efforts have not only failed to prevent vaquita bycatch, but they have now pitted conservationists against local communities because an important aspect of their livelihoods is now banned. This misstep and lack of trust with the community now threatens future conservation and recovery progress for the vaquita and highlights the need to collaborate and engage with local communities early and often when such efforts are so closely tied to human well-being.

Pauline Goulet. Source: Soundtags.

Pauline Goulet, a PhD student in the Sea Mammal Research Unit at the University of St. Andrews, presented findings obtained from a novel sonar tag deployed on southern elephant seals (SES) in the Kerguelen Islands and Peninsula Valdes. Gaining insight into predator-prey interactions is critical to understanding the ecology of marine mammals as they live in dynamic and vast environments where prey is patchy. Collecting in-situ prey information is difficult, and in some cases impossible, due to the remote locations where marine mammals forage and it is not being feasible to follow individuals around continuously to collect prey samples at every foraging event. In an attempt to overcome this universal challenge to marine mammal research, Goulet and her collaborators decided to mimic the experts in prey detection and visualization from a distance in the marine environment – echolocating odontocetes. By equipping conventional DTAGs with a 1.5 MHz single beam sonar with a 6 m detection range, Goulet was able to identify whether SES were pursuing individual fish or large schools of fish. Additionally, by also analyzing the accelerometer data, she could document whether prey capture attempts were successful or not, and link these results to the body condition of individual SES (inferred from the horizontal distance an individual traveled during drift dives, whereby a longer horizontal distance in the same period of time suggested that the individual had gained weight and was now heavier). It was ingenious to see researchers utilize a biological trait that evolved millions of years ago in certain marine mammal predators to better understand the ecology of another marine mammal predator.

A trio of talks given by Kristi Fazioli, Valeria Paz, and Shauna McBride-Kebert, in the ‘Habitat and Distribution II’ session, discussed responses of coastal bottlenose dolphins to hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM). Besides continuing to be an area of interest in conservation after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the GoM frequently experiences hurricanes and other strong storm systems that cause extensive flooding events annually. Hence, dolphins along the GoM coast experience a large outflow of freshwater after severe precipitation, leading to low salinity events. Both Fazioli and Paz hypothesized that these changes in environmental conditions can create health problems to the dolphins.

Bottlenose dolphin underwater in the Gulf of Mexico. Source: Mike Heithaus.

Fazioli investigated encounter rates and skin conditions of bottlenose dolphins after Hurricane Harvey. She found that, in 2017, the encounter rates in her study area decreased, while skin lesions increased (Christina Toms, unpublished work, expected Spring 2020). Skin lesions are known to occur at higher rates after exposure to freshwater and even though they persist for some time, they eventually do heal. After less than two years, preliminary data suggest that these dolphins have returned to their original distributions in the study area. Paz’s study in Shark Bay Estuary examined different environmental drivers of dolphin distribution following Hurricane Irma. She found that dissolved oxygen, salinity, and temperature were the primary dynamic, environmental drivers of distribution following a major hurricane. Lastly, McBride’s species distribution models of bottlenose dolphins in response to severe flooding concluded that depth, slope, latitude, longitude, season, and dissolved oxygen all contributed in different percentages to distribution.

Marta Guerra. Source: RBR.

Marta Guerra presented findings from her PhD research at the University of Otago in New Zealand on the ecology and distribution of sperm whales in New Zealand. Kaikoura canyon is a region utilized by sperm whales for foraging, and Marta’s research highlighted marked differences in their distribution between the summer and winter, likely reflective of the sperm whales switching their target prey items seasonally. In the middle of their data collection period, a very intense earthquake struck the region in 2016, causing a canyon-flushing event that altered the canyon ecosystem. The sperm whales responded to this extreme event by altering their distribution away from the areas most affected by the earthquake, demonstrating that these marine predators respond to environmental shifts in the ecosystem they depend on at multiple scales. 

David Wiley. Source: NOAA.

On the final day of the conference, David Wiley gave a talk entitled “First documentation of coordinated bottom-feeding by humpback whales”. Using footage from tags containing a suite of sensors and video cameras, Wiley and colleagues observed humpback whales feeding on sand lace in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. Sand lace are a species of fish that frequently burrow in the sand in an attempt to avoid capture by predators looking for their next meal. Humpback whales in the area have been observed with lacerations and scars along their mouths, originally leading to the hypothesis that whales were bottom-feeding. However, it was never known whether whales compete or cooperate when exploiting this resource and what the actual mechanics of this feeding behavior look like. The tag data revealed that groups of 3-4 individuals work together to approach the seafloor in a star-shape formation and when they get close enough, the sand lace emerge from the sand (probably an escape response to the approaching vibrations created by large whales) only to be engulfed by the humpbacks who are poised directly above them with wide-open mouths. Not only did the video footage reveal that individuals are so close together that their rostrums are almost touching, but Wiley and team were able to determine that whales perform their behavior usually within the same group of 3-4 individuals and that the orientation of each individual within the star-formation remains the same almost every time. This talk was so enjoyable because it was a reminder of how little we still know about marine mammals and provided a moment of audible awe and surprise throughout the room.

Measuring dolphin response to Navy sonar

By Lisa Hildebrand, MSc student, OSU Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Lab

During the summer of 2017 I was an intern for Cascadia Research Collective (CRC), a non-profit organization based out of Olympia, Washington, that conducts research on marine mammal behavior, ecology, and population status along the western US coast and around Hawaii. My internship was primarily office-based and involved processing photographs of humpback and blue whales along the US west coast to add to CRC’s long-term photo-identification catalogues. However, I was asked to join a research project investigating the behavioral and physiological responses of four dolphin species in southern California (Fig. 1). The research project is a collaborative effort lead by Dr. Brandon Southall and involves researchers from CRC, Kelp Marine Research, NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center, and SR3. Since my internship with CRC, there have been three pilot efforts and one full field effort of this project, called the SOCAL Tagless Behavioral and Physiological Response Study (BPRS), and I have been a part of all of them.

  • A
  • B
  • C
  • D

The marine environment is stressed out, and so are the millions of flora and fauna that inhabit the global ocean. Humans are a big contributor to this stress. During the last few decades, we have produced more and more things that have ended up in the ocean, whether by choice or by chance. Plastic pollution has become a pervasive and persistent problem, especially after the discovery that when large plastic items are exposed to UV light and seawater they break down into smaller pieces, termed micro- and nano-plastics (Jambeck et al. 2015). Increased demand for oil and gas to supply a growing human population has led to much more marine oil and gas exploration and exploitation (World Ocean Review 2013). Since 1985, global container shipping has increased by approximately 10% annually (World Ocean Review 2010) and it is estimated that global freight demand will triple by 2050 (International Transport Forum 2019). The list of impacts is long. Our impact on the earth, of which the ocean makes up 71%, has been so extreme that expert groups suggest that a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – needs to be declared to define the time that we now find ourselves in and the impact humanity is having on the environment (Lewis and Maslin 2015). While this term has not been officially recognized, it is irrefutable that humans have and continue to alter ecosystems, impacting the organisms within them. 

Noise is an impact often overlooked when thinking about anthropogenic effects in the marine environment, likely because we as humans do not hear much of what happens beneath the ocean surface. However, ocean noise is of particular concern for cetaceans as sound is their primary sense, both over long and short distances. Sound travels extremely efficiently underwater and therefore anthropogenic sounds can be propagated for thousands of kilometers or more (Weilgart 2007a). While it is widely agreed upon that anthropogenic noise is likely a significant stressor to cetaceans (Weilgart 2007b; Wright et al. 2007; Tyack 2008), very few studies have quantified their responses to noise to date. This knowledge gap is likely because behavioral and physiological responses to sound can be subtle, short-lived or slowly proliferate over time, hence making them hard to study. However, growing concern over this issue has resulted in more research into impacts of noise on marine mammals, including the GEMM Lab’s impacts of ocean noise on gray whales project.

The most extreme impact of sound exposure on marine mammals is death. Mass strandings of a few cetacean species have coincided in time and space with Navy sonar operations (Jepson et al. 2003; Fernández et al. 2005; Filadelfo et al. 2009). While fatal mass strandings of cetaceans are extremely troubling, they are a relatively rare occurrence. A cause for perhaps greater concern are sub-lethal changes in important behaviors such as feeding, social interactions, and avoidance of key habitat as a result of exposure to Navy sonar. All of these potential outcomes have raised interest within the U.S. Navy to better understand the responses of cetaceans to sonar. 

The SOCAL Tagless BPRS is just one of several studies that has been funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research to improve our understanding of Navy sonar impact on cetaceans, in particular the sub-lethal effects described earlier. It builds upon knowledge and expertise gained from previous behavioral response studies led by Dr. Southall on a variety of marine mammal species, including beaked whales, baleen whales, and sperm whales. Those efforts included deploying tags on individual whales to obtain high-resolution movement and passive acoustic data paired with controlled exposure experiments (CEEs) during which simulated Navy mid-frequency active sonar (MFAS) or real Navy sonar were employed. Results from that multi-year effort have shown that for blue whales, responses generally only lasted for as long as the sound was active and highly dependent on exposure context such as behavioral state, prey availability and the horizontal distance between the sound source and the individual whale. Blue whales identified as feeding in shallow depths showed no changes in behavior, however over 50% of deep-feeding whales responded during CEEs (Southall et al. 2019).

The SOCAL Tagless BPRS, as the name implies, does not involve deploying tags on the animals. Tags were omitted from this study design because tags on dolphins have not had high success rates of staying on for a very long time. Furthermore, dolphins are social species that typically occur in groups and individuals within a group are likely to interact or react together when exposed to an external stimuli. Therefore, the project integrates established methods of quantifying dolphin behavior and physiology in a novel way to measure broad and fine-scale group and individual changes of dolphin behavior and physiology to simulated Navy MFAS or real Navy sonars using CEEs. 

During these tagless CEEs, a dolphin group is tracked from multiple platforms using several different tools. Kelp Marine Research is our on-shore team that spots workable groups (workable meaning that a group should be within range of all platforms and not moving too quickly so that they will leave this range during the CEE), tracks the group using a theodolite (just like I do for my Port Orford gray whale project), and does focal follows to record behavior of the group over a period of time. Ziphiid, one of CRC’s RHIBs, is tasked with deploying three passive acoustic sensors to record sounds emitted by the dolphins and to measure the intensity of the sound of the simulated Navy MFAS or the real Navy sonars. Musculus, the second CRC RHIB, has a dual-function during CEEs; it holds the custom vertical line array sound source, which emits the simulated Navy MFAS, and it is also the ‘biopsy boat’ tasked with obtaining biopsy samples of individuals within the dolphin group to measure potential changes in stress hormone levels. And last but not least, the Magician, the third vessel on the water, serves as ‘home-base’ for the project (Fig. 3). Quite literally it is where the research team eats and sleeps, but it is also the spotting vessel from which visual observations occur, and it is the launch pad for the unmanned aerial system (UAS) used to measure potential changes in group composure, spacing, and speed of travel.

  • A
  • B
  • C
  • D

The project involves a lot of moving parts and we are careful to conduct the research with explicit monitoring and mitigation requirements to ensure our work is carried out safely and ethically. These factors, as well as the fact that we are working with live, wild animals that we cannot ‘control’, are why three pilot efforts were necessary. Our first ‘official’ phase this past October was a success: in just eight days we conducted 11 CEEs. Six of these involved experimental sonar transmissions (two being from real Navy sonars dipped from hovering helicopters) and five were no-sonar controls that are critical to be able to experimentally associate sonar exposure with potential response. There are more phases to come in 2020 and 2021 and I look forward to continue working on such a collaborative project.

For more information on the project, you can visit Southall Environmental Associates project page, or read the blog posts written by Dr. Brandon Southall (this one or this one).

For anyone attending the World Marine Mammal Conference in Barcelona, Spain, there will be several talks related to this research:

  • Dr. Brandon Southall will be presenting on the Atlantic BRS on beaked whales and short-finned pilot whales on Wednesday, December 11 from 2:15 – 2:30 pm
  • Dr. Caroline Casey will be presenting on the experimental design and results of this SOCAL Tagless BPRS project on Wednesday, December 11 from 2:30 – 2:45 pm

All research is authorized under NMFS permits #16111, 19091, and 19116 as well as numerous Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and other federal, state, and local authorizations. More information is available upon request from the project chief scientist at Brandon.Southall@sea-inc.net. 

Literature cited

Fernández, A., J. F. Edwards, F. Rodríguez, A. Espinosa de los Monteros, P. Herráez, P. Castro, J. R. Jaber, V. Martín, and M. Arbelo. 2005. “Gas and fat embolic syndrome” involving a mass stranding of beaked whales (Family Ziphiidae) exposed to anthropogenic sonar signals. Veterinary Pathology 42(4):446-457.

Filadelfo, R., J. Mintz, E. Michlovich, A. D’Amico, P. L. Tyack, and D. R. Ketten. 2009. Correlating military sonar use with beaked whale mass strandings: what do the historical data show? Aquatic Mammals 35(4):435-444.

International Transport Forum. 2019. Transport demand set to triple, but sector faces potential disruptions. Retrieved from: https://www.itf-oecd.org/transport-demand-set-triple-sector-faces-potential-disruptions. 

Jambeck, J. R., R. Geyer, C. Wilcox, T. R. Siegler, M. Perryman, A. Andrady, R. Narayan, and K. L. Law. 2015. Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean. Science 347(6223):768-771.

Jepson, P. D., M. Arbelo, R. Deaville, I A. P. Patterson, P. Castro, J. R. Baker, E. Degollada, H. M. Ross, P. Herráez, A. M. Pocknell, F. Rodríguez, F. E. Howie II, A. Espinosa, R. J. Reid, J. R. Jaber, V. Martin, A. A. Cunningham, and A. Fernández. 2003. Gas-bubble lesions in stranded cetaceans. Nature 425:575.

Lewis, S. L., and M. A. Maslin. 2015. Defining the Anthropocene. Nature 519:171-180.

Southall, B. L., S. L. DeRuiter, A. Friedlaender, A. K. Stimpert, J. A. Goldbogen, E. Hazen, C. Casey, S. Fregosi, D. E. Cade, A. N. Allen, C. M. Harris, G. Schorr, D. Moretti, S. Guan, and J. Calambokidis. 2019. Behavioral responses of individual blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus) to mid-frequency military sonar. Journal of Experimental Biology 222: doi. 10.1242/jeb.190637.

Tyack, P. L. 2008. Implications for marine mammals of large-scale changes in the marine acoustic environment. Journal of Mammalogy 89(3):549-558.

Weilgart, L. S. 2007a. The impacts of anthropogenic ocean noise on cetaceans and implications for management. Canadian Journal of Zoology 85(11):1091-1116.

Weilgart, L. S. 2007b. A brief review of known effects of noise on marine mammals. International Journal of Comparative Psychology 20(2):159-168.

World Ocean Review. 2014. WOR 3: Marine resources – opportunities and risks. Report No 3. Retrieved from: https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-3/oil-and-gas/.

World Ocean Review. 2010. WOR 1: Marine resources – Living with the oceans. A report on the state of the world’s oceans. Report No 1. Retrieved from: https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-1/transport/global-shipping/3/. 

Wright, A. J., N. A. Soto, A. L. Baldwin, M. Bateson, C. M. Beale, C. Clark, T. Deak, E. F. Edwards, A. Fernández, A. Godinho, L. T. Hatch, A. Kakuschke, D. Lusseau, D. Martineau, M. L. Romero, L. S. Weilgart, B. A. Wintle, G. Notarbartolo-di-Sciara, and V. Martin. Do marine mammals experience stress related to anthropogenic noise? International Journal of Comparative Psychology 20(2):274-316.

What is that whale doing? Only residence in space and time will tell…

By Lisa Hildebrand, MSc student, OSU Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Lab

For my research in Port Orford, my field team and I track individual gray whales continuously from a shore-based location: once we spot a whale we will track it for the entire time that it remains in our study site. The time spent tracking a whale can vary widely. In the 2018 field season, our shortest trackline was three minutes, and our longest track was over three hours in duration.

This variability in foraging time is partly what sparked my curiosity to investigate potential foraging differences between individuals of the Pacific Coast Feeding Group (PCFG) gray whales. I want to know why some individuals, like “Humpy” who was our longest tracked individual in 2018, stayed in an area for so long, while others, like “Smokey”, only stayed for three minutes (Figure 1). It is hard to pinpoint just one variable that drives these decisions (e.g., prey, habitat) made by individuals about where they forage and how long because the marine environment is so dynamic. Foraging decisions are likely dictated by several factors acting in concert with one another. As a result, I have many research questions, including (but certainly not limited to):

  1. Does prey density drive length of individual foraging bouts?
  2. Do individual whales have preferences for a particular prey species?
  3. Are prey patches containing gravid zooplankton targeted more by whales?
  4. Do whales prefer to feed closer to kelp patches?
  5. How does water depth factor into all of the above decisions and/or preferences? 

I hope to get to the bottom of these questions through the data analyses I will be undertaking for my second chapter of my Master’s thesis. However, before I can answer those questions, I need to do a little bit of tidying up of my whale tracklines. Now that the 2019 field season is over and I have all of the years of data that I will be analyzing for my thesis (2015-2019), I have spent the past 1-2 weeks diving into the trackline clean-up and analysis preparation.

The first step in this process is to run a speed filter over each trackline. The aim of the speed filter is to remove any erroneous points or outliers that must be wrong based on the known travel speeds of gray whales. Barb Lagerquist, a Marine Mammal Institute (MMI) colleague who has tracked gray whales for several field seasons, found that the fastest individual she ever encountered traveled at a speed of 17.3 km/h (personal communication). Therefore, based on this information,  my tracklines are run through a speed filter set to remove any points that suggest that the whale traveled at 17.3 km/h or faster (Figure 2). 

Fig 3. Trackline of “Humpy” after interpolation. The red points are interpolated.

Next, the speed-filtered tracklines are interpolated (Figure 3). Interpolation fills spatial and/or temporal gaps in a data set by evenly spacing points (by distance or time interval) between adjacent points. These gaps sometimes occur in my tracklines when the tracking teams misses one or several surfacings of a whale or because the whale is obscured by a large rock. 

After speed filtration and interpolation has occurred, the tracklines are ready to be analyzed using Residence in Space and Time (RST; Torres et al. 2017) to assign behavior state to each location. The questions I am hoping to answer for my thesis are based upon knowing the behavioral state of a whale at a given location and time. In order for me to draw conclusions over whether or not a whale prefers to forage by a reef with kelp rather than a reef without kelp, or whether it prefers Holmesimysis sculpta over Neomysis rayii, I need to know when a whale is actually foraging and when it is not. When we track whales from our cliff site, we assign a behavior to each marked location of an individual. It may sound simple to pick the behavior a whale is currently exhibiting, however it is much harder than it seems. Sometimes the behavioral state of a whale only becomes apparent after tracking it for several minutes. Yet, it’s difficult to change behaviors retroactively while tracking a whale and the qualitative assignment of behavior states is not an objective method. Here is where RST comes in.

Those of you who have been following the blog for a few years may recall a post written in early 2017 by Rachael Orben, a former post-doc in the GEMM Lab who currently leads the Seabird Oceanography Lab. The post discussed the paper “Classification of Animal Movement Behavior through Residence in Space Time” written by Leigh and Rachael with two other collaborators, which had just been published a few days prior. If you want to know the nitty gritty of what RST is and how it works, I suggest reading Rachael’s blog, the GEMM lab’s brief description of the project and/or the actual paper since it is an open-access publication. However, in a nut shell, RST allows a user to identify three primary behavioral states in a tracking dataset based on the time and distance the individual spent within a given radius. The three behavioral categories are as follows:

Fig 4. Visualization of the three RST behavioral categories. Taken from Torres et al. (2017).
  • Transit – characterized by short time and distance spent within an area (radius of given size), meaning the individual is traveling.
  • Time-intensive – characterized by a long time spent within an area, meaning the individual is spending relatively more time but not moving much distance (such as resting in one spot). 
  • Time & distance-intensive – characterized by relatively high time and distances spent within an area, meaning the individual is staying within and moving around a lot in an area, such as searching or foraging. 

What behavior these three categories represent depends on the resolution of the data analyzed. Is one point every day for two years? Then the data are unlikely to represent resting. Or is the data 1 point every second for 1 hour? In which case travel segments may cover short distances. On average, my gray whale tracklines are composed of a point every 4-5 minutes for 1-2 hours.  Bases on this scale of tracking data, I will interpret the categories as follows: Transit is still travel, time & distance-intensive points represent locations where the whale was searching because it was moving around one area for a while, and time-intensive points represent foraging behavior because the whale has ‘found what it is looking for’ and is spending lots of time there but not moving around much anymore. The great thing about RST is that it removes the bias that is introduced by my field team when assigning behavioral states to individual whales (Figure 5). RST looks at the tracklines in a very objective way and determines the behavioral categories quantitatively, which helps to remove the human subjectivity.

While it took quite a bit of troubleshooting in R and overcoming error messages to make the codes run on my data, I am proud to have results that are interesting and meaningful with which I can now start to answer some of my many research questions. My next steps are to create interpolated prey density and distance to kelp layers in ArcGIS. I will then be able to overlay my cleaned up tracklines to start teasing out potential patterns and relationships between individual whale foraging movements and their environment. 

Literature cited

Torres, L. G., R. A. Orben, I. Tolkova, and D. R. Thompson. 2017. Classification of animal movement behavior through residence in space and time. PLoS ONE: doi. org/10.1371/journal.pone.0168513.

A Series of Short Stories from A Field Season in Port Orford

By Mia Arvizu, Marine Studies Initiative (MSI) & GEMM Lab summer intern, OSU junior

Part 1: The Green Life Jacket

The swells are churning and for once my stomach is calm. I take advantage of it while I can, and head out on the kayak. Another beautiful day, another good data set. After about three hours in the kayak and a long paddle fighting winds and swells, we arrive at TC1. That’s short for Tichenor Cove Station 1. I’m fairly tired by now but my teammate and I are determined to finish all stations today. GPS says we arrived, and I paddle against any slight movement to keep us on station. It’s getting more difficult though, so I check in with Anthony, one of the high school interns this summer. “Anthony, have you sent the GoPro camera down yet?”  I take a quick look back peering over my green life jacket. Red flash, and I know it’s on. Anthony sends it down, and I watch as it plunges into depths I couldn’t see on my own. I’m confident it’s doing its job. 

  • Kayaking on the Port Orford coast collecting prey data on the foraging ecology of whales and collecting information on the abundance of sea urchins. Source: A. Howe.

Part 2: The GoPro Dive

The green life jacket is familiar, but there’s a different soul, a different face every year. It’s the same month though. August – the month of whales. 

Red flash, I’m on,  and it’s my time to shine. The scientists debrief me on my latest mission, and I’m alive. “Secchi depth .75 meters.” Hmm, low visibility. This may be a tough one. “Station TC1” One of my favorites but challenging no doubt. “Time is 10:36. 5, 6, 7, 8…” I’m ready. A flush of swirling water surrounds me as I plunge into the depths of a different realm. I’m cocooned in the beauty of an ocean so blue, so majestic, so entrancing. Oh, the mission! Right, I need to stay focused. They lurk all around but with sand clouding the water, I can barely see. I just need one good visual of the purple spikes and the swaying green leaves, and the mission will be complete. I glance just to the left and oh my!

Sea urchins actively foraging on kelp at station TC1 in Tichenor Cove. Source: GEMM Lab.

A giant purple spike comes too close. I barely caught a glimpse of it. I need a better shot, but I only have so much control especially with these undercurrents. I’m ready now though. I peer through the sediment and nothing, but one quick swivel to the right shows me what I feared and what the green life jackets predicted: The purple spikes have grown too many and reduced the swaying greens down to half chewed, severed, scared dead masses. I thought their hypothesis was right, but I didn’t expect this degree of damage. It’s so frightening I almost look away.

But I don’t. I have a mission. So, I look straight ahead documenting the scene. I haven’t seen it this bad in the past years. I wonder what the green life jackets will do about this. I feel a tug, and I’m reeled in. I guess I’ll find out.

GoPro video taken from tandem research kayak during 2019 gray whale field season in Tichenor Cove, Port Orford. Source: GEMM Lab.

Part 3: The Science, how I see it

After collecting data in the kayak, I go back to the field station ready to do data processing. I grab the GoPro and take a look at the video from TC1. I’m both amazed and terrified for the surrounding habitat from what I see. Sea urchins seem to have been actively foraging on kelp stalks. 

Last summer, around this time, a previous intern pointed out that he was witnessing damaged kelp and a notable number of urchins in the GoPro videos. Thus, the GEMM Lab is looking into the relationship between kelp health and sea urchin abundance in Port Orford, which can have significant trophic cascades for the rest of the ecosystem, including whales and their zooplankton prey. The hypothesis is that if sea urchin populations increase in number they may actively forage on kelp, reducing the health of that habitat. Many creatures depend on this habitat including zooplankton which whales feed on. I have looked at videos from past years and the temporal difference in the abundance of urchins is stark. A detailed methodology for the project and our pending results will be featured in a later post, but for now this story is unfolding before our eyes and the GoPro’s lens as well. 

Part 4: The Transformation from STEM to STEAM

I hope you enjoyed these short stories. As the writer, it was nice to express the ecological phenomena I’ve learned about in the last few weeks between sea urchins and kelp in this creative and artistic outlet. Especially since I feel science can be rigid at times. It can be easy to lose myself in numbers and large datasets. However, by tying together the arts and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics), there is more space for well-rounded inquiry and expressive results. STEAM, which is STEM with the Arts included, is not a new movement. Examples of STEAM are preserved in the past and is ongoing in present examples. A great example of how the sciences and arts are merged together is in the songs of Aboriginal Australians. These songs can take hours to recite fully and are full of environmental knowledge such as species types, behavior of animals, and edible plants. The combination of art and STEM is also displayed in the modern age and is shown in Leah Heiss’s work to create jewelry that helps measure cardiac data and also helps diabetics administer their insulin.  

This is one of Leah’s feature blends of biotechnology and jewelry. It measures cardiac data and is primarily beneficial for patients at risk of heart attacks. Source: Leah Heiss.

There are many ways in which the two subjects can merge together, making each other stronger and better. As a well-rounded student pursuing Environmental Science and interested dance and writing, I am comforted to know that STEAM can allow me to blend my interests. 

Intricacies of Zooplankton Species Identification

By Donovan Burns, Astoria High School Junior, GEMM Lab summer intern

The term zooplankton is used to describe a large number of creatures; the exact definition is any animal that cannot move against a sustained current in the marine environment. There are two main types of plankton: holoplankton and meroplankton. Meroplankton are organisms that are plankton for only part of their life cycle. So this makes most sea creatures plankton, for instance, salmon, sunfish, tuna, and most other fish are meroplankton because they start out their lives as plankton. Holoplankton are plankton that remain plankton for their whole lives, these include mysid shrimp, most marine worms, and most jellyfish.

I have spent a good deal of time this summer looking through a microscope at the zooplankton we have captured during sampling from our research kayak, trying to distinguish and identify different species. Telsons, the tail of the tail, are what we use to identify different types of mysid shrimp, which are a primary gray whale prey item along the Oregon coast and the most predominant type of zooplankton we capture in our sampling. For instance Neomysis is a genus of mysid shrimp and is one of the two most abundant zooplankton species we get. Their telsons end with two spikes that are somewhat longer than the spikes on the side of the telson.  This look is distinct from Holmesimysis sculpta, the other of the two most abundant zooplankton species we get, which have four-pronged telsons with varying sizes of spikes along the sides of the telson. Alienacanthomysis macropsis is identified by both their long eye stalks and their rather bland rounded telson.

  • Holmesimysis sculpta
  • Neomysis
  • Alienacanthomysis macropsis
Caprellidae. Source: R. Norman.

However, creatures that are not mysid shrimp cannot be identified this way.  Like gammarids, they look like fleas.  We have only found one kind of gammarid here in Port Orford this year, Atylus tridens. There are other types but that is the only type we have found this year. After that, we have Caprellidae, also known as skeleton shrimp. They are long and stalky, and have claws in every spot where they could have claws.

Copepod. Source: L. Hildebrand.

Then there are copepods. Copepods are tiny and have long antennae that string down to the sides of their bodies. We also have been seeing lots of crab larvae. I have also seen a couple of polychaete worms, which are marine worms with many legs and segments. The only reason I was able to identify them as polychaetes is due to my marine biology class at Astoria High School where we identified these worms using microscopes before.

We also have had some trouble identifying somethings. For instance, we have found a few individuals of a type of mysid shrimp with a rake-like tail that we are still trying to identify.  Also, we have captured some jellyfish that we are not trying to identify. When the kayak team gets back in from gathering samples, we freeze the samples to kill and preserve the critters in them. This process turns the jellyfish to mush, so they are hard to identify.

  • Mystery mysid with rake-like tail.

To identify these zooplankton and other critters, we put them into a Petri dish and under a dissection scope, at which point we use forceps to move and pivot creatures.  If a jellyfish had just eaten another plankton, we have to cut it open to get the plankton out so we can identify it.  

Sometimes we have large samples of thousands of the same creature, in this case, we would normally sub-sample it. Sub-sampling is when we take a portion of a sample and identify and count individual zooplankton in that sub-sample. Then we multiply those counts by the portion of the whole sample to get the approximate total number that are in that sample.  For instance, say we had a rather large sample, we would take a tenth of that sample and count what is in it. Say we count 500 individuals in that tenth. We would then multiply 500 by ten to get the total number in that whole sample.

Then there are some plankton that we do not catch, like large jellyfish.  The kayak team has gotten photos of a giant jellyfish that was nearly a meter long.

Jellyfish seen by the kayak team. Source: L. Hildebrand.

All in all, Port Orford has an amazing and diverse population of marine life. From gray whales to thresher sharks to mysid shrimp to copepods to jellyfish, this little ecosystem has pretty much some of everything. 

Fieldwork experience as a GEMM Lab intern

By Anthony Howe, Astoria High School graduate 2019, GEMM Lab summer intern

Murphy’s Law says that “things will go wrong in any given situation if you give them a chance”. This statement certainly applies to research where you never really know what is going to happen when performing fieldwork. You can only try to be prepared for all of the situations. When I arrived at the Oregon State University (OSU) Field Station in Port Orford, I had no idea that it would harbor some of the best educational experiences I have ever had. I had no idea what a theodolite was, nor did I know how to kayak in the ocean, but I learned fast. When we first started being trained on using a theodolite and the program that processes the data, Pythagoras, we had some problems. The theodolite would not stay level, but just as we were learning how to work the theodolite, we also learned how to work as a team. When we finally managed to level the theodolite, which did take a few days, I began to realize the hard work of doing fieldwork. You can be prepared but there will always be something that goes wrong, and that’s okay. I have learned that mistakes happen and cannot be dwelled on. Only learned from. No one is perfect.

Fig 1. Me holding two zooplankton samples after collecting them on the kayak. Source: L. Hildebrand.

Just two days ago I was on our tandem research kayak with Mia Arvizu, the OSU Marine Studies Initiative (MSI) undergraduate intern. When we go out on the kayak, we paddle around our study area and go to GPS-marked “stations” to collect prey samples of zooplankton, test for water visibility using a Secchi disk, and send a GoPro underwater to have a better understanding of what is going on under the surface. While sampling at Station 15 in Mill Rocks I lowered the GoPro into the water using a downrigger. When the GoPro reached the bottom, I began to pull it up, only to realize it had gotten snagged in a crevice. I gave the line to which the GoPro is attached some slack and began to give Mia instructions to move to different spots to try and retrieve the GoPro out of this tight crevice. Unfortunately, I did not realize all of the lines had wrapped themselves underneath the downrigger and as soon as a swell came up, the line broke. My eyes widened as I realized what had just happened. Thankfully, I managed to grasp the last of the remaining line left connected to the GoPro and pulled it back into the kayak using my hand wrapped in a towel since the line is thin and can cut into your hands easily. Only then did I realize that neither Mia nor I had packed a knife in the event we needed to cut a line. We sat and pondered ideas of how to cut the last of the line so that I could reattach the GoPro to the downrigger. Mia came up with the idea to use a barnacle or a mussel, and it worked perfectly. We were proud of ourselves for being resourceful and using nature to our advantage. But as soon as I finished using the mussel to cut the line, Lisa’s voice came over the VHF radio that we always carry with us in the kayak that there were scissors in the First Aid Kit that is stowed in the dry hatch of the kayak. Mia and I looked at each other and could only laugh. The kayak team can be rough at times but it’s made up by the fact that we get beautiful prey samples and stunning GoPro videos of what is below the water.

Fig 2. Mia and myself paddling the kayak across “The Passage”, the approximately 1 km stretch between Mill Rocks and Tichenor Cove, our two study sites. Red Fish Rocks, which is Oregon’s first Marine Reserve, can be seen in the background. Source: L. Hildebrand.

After all of the kayak sampling is done we organize and store our gear, and then go to the lab. In the lab, one person will clean all tools and devices touched by saltwater while the other sieves all of our zooplankton samples. Each sample is individually sieved and then placed in a sample jar with its station name on it and placed into the freezer. We put them in the freezer to increase the longevity of the samples, as well as euthanizing all zooplankton so that they are easier to identify under a dissection scope. After all of that is done we take a 45-minute break before taking over the cliff team job so they can have a lunch break, as well as a rest from staring at the glare of the water all day searching for whales. 

The cliff team generally consists of two people. One person will be on the theodolite, and the other will be on the laptop. The idea is that the theodolite uses the Pythagorean Theorem to get the exact coordinates of the whale we are spotting. This allows us to track exactly where the whales are going, what they are doing, how they’re doing it, and the fashion in which they’re doing it. The fixed points will fall on a plotted map on the laptop. The other job of the person on the laptop is to take pictures when possible so we can identify the whales. For instance, there is a whale named Buttons that has been recorded during past summers in Port Orford. By using the photos we take of a whale, combined with previous data about the whale named Buttons, we can cross-reference the body color and patterns of the whale to be able to re-identify Buttons. We now know that we have seen Buttons for 4 consecutive days feeding in our study area. The camera also acts as a tool to take pictures of whales not just for identity but for rare activity. Today while on the cliff Mia and I spotted a whale in Tichenor Cove (one of our sampling sites) that breached four times! These experiences are rare and beautiful. You never think about how big a whale truly is until you see it almost completely leap out of the water – it is beautiful. 

Fig 3. The post-breach splash created by Buttons. Unfortunately we weren’t able to get a good photo from the cliff because we were too stunned by the fact that we were seeing this rare behavior. Source: GEMM Lab.

I’m sure more mistakes will be made but that’s okay. I have many more experiences to witness, and many more memories to make from this internship, as well as challenges. I couldn’t be more than happy with the team I have to share all of these learning experiences and hardships with. 

Introducing Crew Cinco – the Port Orford Gray Whale Foraging Ecology Field Team of 2019

By Lisa Hildebrand, MSc student, OSU Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Lab

It seems unfathomable to me that one year and two months ago I had never used a theodolite before, never been in an ocean kayak before, never identified zooplankton before, never seen a Time-Depth-Recorder (TDR) before. Now, one year later, it seems like all of those tools, techniques and things are just a couple of old friends with which I am being reunited with again. My second field season as the project team lead of the gray whale foraging ecology project in Port Orford (PO) is slowly getting underway and so many of the lessons I learned from my first field season last year have already helped me tremendously this year. I know how to interpret weather forecasts and determine whether it will be a kayak-appropriate day. I know how to figure out the quirks of Pythagoras, the program we use to interface with our theodolite which helps us track whales from our cliff site. I know how to keep track of a budget and feed a team of hungry researchers after a long day of work. Knowing all of these things ahead of this year’s field season have made me feel a little more prepared and at ease with the training of my team and the work to be done. Nevertheless, there are always new curveballs to be thrown my way and while they can often be frustrating, I enjoy the challenges that being a team leader has to offer as it allows me to continue to grow as a field research scientist. 

Figure 1. Crew Cinco tracks a whale in Tichenor Cove. Source: L Hildebrand.

2019 marks the fifth year that this project has been taking place in PO. Back in the summer of 2015, former GEMM Lab Master’s student Florence Sullivan started this project together with Leigh. That year the research focused more on investigating vessel disturbance to gray whales by comparing sites of heavy (Boiler Bay) to low boat traffic (Port Orford). The effort found that there were significant differences in gray whale activity budgets between the heavy and low boat traffic conditions (Sullivan & Torres 2018). The following year, the focus of the research switched to being more on the foraging ecology side of things and the project was based solely out of Port Orford, as it continues to be to this day. Being in our fifth year means that we are starting to build a humbly-sized database of sightings across multiple years allowing me to investigate potential individual specialization of the whales that we document. Similarly, multiple years of prey sampling is starting to reveal temporal and spatial trends of prey community assemblages.

Figure 2. Buttons (pictured above) is one of the stars of the Port Orford gray whale foraging ecology project as he has been seen every year since 2016. Crew Cinco has already seen him three times since the start of August. Source: L Hildebrand.

It has become a tradition to come up with a name for the field team that spends 6 weeks at the Oregon State University (OSU) Port Orford Field Station to collect the data for the project. It started with Team Ro“buff”stus in 2015, which I believe carried through until 2017. This is understandable since it’s such a clever name. It’s a play on the species name for gray whales, robustus, but the word “Buff” has been substituted in the center. Buffs are pieces of cloth sewn into a cylindrical shape, often with fun patterns or colors, that can be used as face masks, headbands, and scarves, which come in very handy when your face is exposed to the elements. Doing this project, we can be confronted by wind, sun, fog and sea water all in one day, so Buffs have definitely served the team members very well over the years. Last year, as the project’s torch was passed from Florence to myself, I felt a new team name was apt, and so last year’s team decided our name would be Team Whale Storm. I believe it was because we said we would take the whale world by storm with our insanely good theodolite tracking and kayak sampling skills. With a new year and new team upon us, a new team name was in order. As the title of this blog post indicates, this year the team is called Crew Cinco. The reason behind this name is that we are the fifth team to carry out this field work. Since the gray whales breed in the lagoons of Baja California, Mexico, I like to think that their native language is Spanish. Hence, we have decided that instead of being Crew Five, we are Crew Cinco, as cinco is the Spanish word for five (besides, alliteration makes for a much better team name).

Now that you are up to speed on the history of the PO gray whale project, let me tell you a little about who is part of Crew Cinco and what we have been up to already.

This year’s Marine Studies Initiative OSU undergraduate intern is Mia Arvizu. Mia has just finished her sophomore year at OSU and majors in Environmental Science. Besides being my co-captain this year in the field, Mia is also undertaking an independent research project which focuses on the relationship between sea urchin abundance, kelp health and gray whale foraging. She will tell you all about this project in a few weeks when she takes over the GEMM lab blog. Aside from her interest in ecology and the way science can be used to help local communities in a changing environment, Mia is a dancer, having performed in several dances in OSU’s annual luau this year, and she is currently teaching herself Spanish and Hawaiian.

Both of our high school interns this year are from Astoria. Anthony Howe has just graduated from Astoria High School and will be starting at Clatsop Community College in the fall. His plan is to transfer to OSU and to pursue his interest in marine biology. Anthony, like myself, was born in Germany and lived there until he was six, which means that he is able to speak fluent German. He also introduced the team to the wonders of the Instant Pot, which has made cooking for a team of four hungry scientists much simpler.

Donovan Burns is our other high school intern. He will be going into his junior year in the fall. Donovan never ceases to amaze us with the seemingly endless amounts of general knowledge he has, often sharing facts about Astoria’s history to Asimov’s Laws of Robotics to pickling vegetables, specifically carrots, with us during dinner or while scanning for whales on the cliff site. He also named the first whale we saw here this season – Speckles. 

Figure 3. Crew Cinco, from left to right: Anthony Howe, Donovan Burns, Lisa Hildebrand and Mia Arvizu. Source: L Torres.

Crew Cinco has already been in PO for two weeks now. After having a full team meeting with Leigh in Newport and a GEMM lab summer pizza party, we headed south to begin our 6-week field season. It’s hard to believe that the two training weeks are already over. The team worked hard to figure out the subtleties of the theodolite, observe different gray whales and start to understand their dive and foraging patterns, undertake a kayak paddle & safety course, as well as CPR and First Aid training, learn about data processing and management, and how to use a variety of gizmos to aid us in data collection. But it hasn’t all been work. We enjoyed a day in the Californian Redwoods on one of our day’s off and picked blueberries at the Twin Creek Ranch, stocking our freezer with several bags of juicy berries. We have played ‘Sorry!’ perhaps one too many times already (we are in desperate need of some more boardgames if anyone wants to send some our way to the field station!), and enjoyed many walks and runs on beautiful Battle Rock Beach. 

  • Crew Cinco in awe of the Redwoods
  • Crew Cinco’s blueberry harvest
  • Crew Cinco after their kayak paddle & safety course South Coast Tours

The next four weeks will not be easy – very early mornings, lots of paddling and squinting into the sun, followed by several hours in the lab processing samples and backing up data. But the next four weeks will also be extremely rewarding – learning lots of new skills that will be valuable beyond this 6-week period, revealing ecological trends and relationships, and ultimately (the true reason for why Mia, Anthony, Donovan and myself are more than happy to put in 6 weeks-worth of hard work), the chance to see whales every day up close and personal. Follow Crew Cinco’s journey over the next few weeks as my interns will be posting to the blog for the next three weeks!

References

Sullivan, F.A., & Torres L.G. Assessment of vessel disturbance to gray whales to inform sustainable ecotourism. Journal of Wildlife Management, 2018. 82: 896-905. 

Our GEM(M), Ruby, is back in action!

By Lisa Hildebrand, MSc student, OSU Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Lab

Every season, or significant period of time, usually has a distinct event that marks its beginning. For example, even though winter officially begins when the winter solstice occurs sometime between December 20 and December 23, many people often associate the first snowfall as the real start of winter. To mark the beginning of schooling, when children start 1stgrade in Germany (which is where I’m from), they receive something called a “Zuckertüte”, which translated means “sugar bag”. It is a large (sometimes as large as the child) cone-shaped container made of cardboard filled with toys, chocolates, sweets, school supplies and various other treats topped with a large bow.

Receiving my Zuckertüte in August of 2001 before starting 1st grade. Source: Ines Hildebrand.

I still remember (and even have) mine – it was almost as tall as I was, had a large Barbie printed on it (and a real one sitting on top of it) and was bright pink. And of course, while at a movie theatre, once the lights dim completely and the curtain surrounding the screen opens just a little further, members of the audience stop chit-chatting or sending text messages, everyone quietens down and puts their devices away – the film is about to start. There are hundreds upon thousands of examples like these – moments, events, days that mark the start of something.

In the past, the beginning of summer has always been tied to two things for me: the end of school and the chance to be outside in the sun for many hours and days. This reality has changed slightly since moving to Oregon. While I don’t technically have any classes during the summer, the work definitely won’t stop. There are still dozens of papers to read, samples to run in the lab, and data points to plot. For anyone from Oregon or the Pacific Northwest (PNW), it’s pretty well known that the weather can be a little unpredictable and variable, meaning that summer might not always be filled with sunny days. Despite somewhat losing these two “summer markers”, I have found a new event to mark the beginning of summer – the arrival of the gray whales.

Their propensity for coastal waters and near-shore feeding is part of what makes gray whales so unique and arguably “easier” to study than some other baleen whale species. Image captured under NOAA/NMFS permit #21678. Source: Leigh Torres.

 

It’s official – the gray whale field season is upon us! As many of you may already know, the GEMM Lab has two active gray whale research projects: investigating the impacts of ocean noise on gray whale physiology and exploring potential individual foraging specialization among the Pacific Coast Feeding Group (PCFG) gray whales. Both projects involve field work, with the former operating out of Newport and the latter taking place in Port Orford, both collecting photographs and a variety of samples and tracklines to study the PCFG, which is a sub-group of the larger Eastern North Pacific (ENP) population. June 1st is the widely accepted “cut-off date” for the PCFG whales, whereby gray whales seen after June 1st along the PNW coastline (specifically northern California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia) are considered members of the PCFG. While this date is not the only qualifying factor for an individual to be considered a PCFG member, it is a good general rule of thumb. Since last week happened to be the first week of June, PI Leigh Torres, field technician Todd Chandler and myself launched out onto the Pacific Ocean in our trusty RHIB Ruby twice looking for gray whales, and it sure was a successful start to the season!

Even though I have done small boat-based field work before, every project and field team operates a little differently, which is why I was a little nervous at first. There are a lot of components to the Newport-based project as Leigh & co. assess gray whale physiology by collecting fecal samples, drone imagery and taking photographs, observing behavior patterns, as well as assessing local prey through GoPro footage and light traps. I wasn’t worried about the prey components of the research, since there is plenty of prey sampling involved in my Port Orford research, however I was worried about the whale side of things. I wasn’t sure whether I would be able to catch the drone as it returned back home to Ruby, fearing I might fumble and let it slip through my fingers. I also experienced slight déjà vu when handling the net we use to collect the fecal samples as I was forced to think back to some previous field work that involved collecting a biopsy dart with a net as well. During that project, I had somehow managed to get the end of the net stuck in the back of the boat and as I tried to scoop up the biopsy dart with the net-end, the pole became more and more stuck while the water kept dragging the net-end down and eventually the pole ended up snapping in my hands. On top of all this anxiety and work, trying to find your footing in a small RHIB like Ruby packed with lots of gear and a good amount of swell doesn’t make any of those tasks any easier.

However, as it turned out, none of my fears came to fruition. As soon as Todd fired up Ruby’s engine and we whizzed out and under the Newport bridge, I felt exhilarated. I love field work and was so excited to be out on the water again. During the two days I was able to observe multiple individuals of a species of whale that I find unique and fascinating.

Markings and pigmentation on the flukes are also unique to individuals and allow us to perform photo identification to track individuals over months and years. Image captured under NOAA/NMFS permit #21678. Source: Leigh Torres.

I felt back in my natural element and working with Leigh and Todd was rewarding and fun, as I have so much to learn from their years of experience and natural talent in the field dealing with stressful situations and juggling multiple components and gear. Even though I wasn’t out there collecting data for my own project, some of my observations did get me thinking about what I hope to focus on in my thesis – individualization. It is always interesting to see how differently whales will behave, whether due to the substrate we find them over, the water depths we find them in, or what their surfacing patterns are like. Although I still have six weeks to go until my field season starts and feel lucky to have the opportunity to help Leigh and Todd with the Newport field work, I am already looking forward to getting down to Port Orford in mid-July and starting the fifth consecutive gray whale field season down there.

But back to Newport – over the course of two days, we were able to deploy and retrieve one light trap to collect zooplankton, collect two fecal samples, perform two GoPro drops, fly the drone three times, and take hundreds of photos of whales. Leigh and Todd were both glad to be reunited with an old friend while I felt lucky to be able to meet such a famous lady – Scarback. A whale with a long sighting history not just for the GEMM Lab but for various researchers along the coast that study this population. Scarback is well-known (and easily identified) by the large concave injury on her back that is covered in whale lice, or cyamids. While there are stories about how Scarback’s wound came to be, it is not known for sure how she was injured. However, what researchers do know is that the wound has not stopped this female from reproducing and successfully raising several calves over her lifetime. After hearing her story from Leigh, I wasn’t surprised that both she and Todd were so thrilled to get both a fecal sample and a drone flight from her early in the season. The two days weren’t all rosy; most of day 1 was shrouded in a cloud of mist resulting in a thin but continuous layer of moisture forming on our clothes, while on day 2 we battled with some pretty big swells (up to 6 feet tall) and in typical Oregon coast style we were victims of a sudden downpour for about 10 minutes. We had some excellent sightings and some not-so-excellent sightings. Sightings where we had four whales surrounding our boat at the same time and sightings where we couldn’t re-locate a whale that had popped up right next to us. It happens.

 

A local celebrity – Scarback. Image captured under NOAA/NMFS permit #21678. Source: Lisa Hildebrand.

 

An ecstatic Lisa with wild hair standing in the bow pulpit of Ruby camera at the ready. Source: Leigh Torres.

Field work is certainly one of my favorite things in the world. The smell of the salt, the rustling of cereal bar wrappers, the whipping of hair, the perpetual rosy noses and cheeks no matter how many times you apply and re-apply sunscreen, the awkward hilarity of clambering onto the back of the boat where the engine is housed to take a potty break, the whooshing sound of a blow, the sometimes gentle and sometimes aggressive rocking of the boat, the realization that you haven’t had water in four hours only to chug half of your water in a few seconds, the waft of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, the circular footprint where a whale has just gracefully dipped beneath the surface slipping away from view. I don’t think I will ever tire of any of those things.

 

 

Digging to uncover the roots of scientific writing and publication: how much (if anything) has changed?

By Lisa Hildebrand, MSc student, OSU Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Lab

In our most recent lab meeting, the GEMM lab discussed a recent paper about how blue whale migrations may be driven by memory and resource tracking (Abrahms et al. 2019). Most of our discussion was about the choices made by the authors in terms of their analyses used and the figures produced, as Leigh always pushes us graduate students to think critically about the scientific papers we read. However, a portion of our discussion focused less on the actual science behind the paper, but more on the language used. This change in direction was initiated by myself as I mentioned how much I liked the phrase “goldilocks zone”, which the authors used to describe an area between 15-17ºC that blue whales tended to occupy for the majority of the annual migration cycle.

The classic goldilocks tale vs. the blue whale version of goldilocks. Source: Slideshare.

What I liked so much about using this phrase was that the authors were using a childhood fairy tale that probably every 5-year old kid knows of to explain some pretty complex science and analysis. Our team then proceeded to go down a rabbit-hole for
a few minutes where we discussed uses of creative words in scientific writing. Although during our meeting we got back on track quite quickly, my mind has still continued down this rabbit-hole for quite some time. I started to wonder about the origins of scientific publication, when and why the structure and style of writing became so rigid, and when and why authors have decided to become a little more creative or colloquial in their writing since then. So, sit back and delve into the history of scientific writing with me…

Humankind has made scientific observations for thousands of years. Perhaps the earliest known culture to have done this are the Mesopotamian peoples who recorded observations of their surroundings around 3,500 BC in Sumer, which is now known as Iraq (Rochberg 2004). Most of the observations relate to astronomy, however there is some evidence to suggest that the Mesopotamians had recognized the existence of Pythagorean triplets (3, 4, 5; 5, 12, 13), long before Pythagoras himself was alive (Hoffman 1999).

However, formal publication of scientific observations is still a relatively new occurrence compared to when the Mesopotamians first started to note down their observations since such documentation of science first occurred in 1665. Interestingly, the birth of scientific publication was achieved by not one journal, but two; Journal des Sçavans in France and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in London. Even though Journal des Sçavans beat out Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society by publishing its first journal two months before the other, it ultimately lost the fight since it ceased publication in 1792, whereas Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society is still in print, making it the world’s longest running scientific journal.

 

Journal covers for the first editions of Journal des Sçavans and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society from 1665. Source: Wikipedia.

Early publications were descriptive by nature. Instead of planning experiments, carrying them out, detailing results and interpreting them, authors described observations they made about their surroundings. An example is by a certain Mr. R.W. S.R.S from 1693. The opening lines of his publication entitled ‘Some Observations in the Dissection of a Ratt’ are as follows:

“The fore-feet of a Rat resemble those of the Castor. The Hair is also some fine, some course; as in that Animal. The Tail scaly, with Hairs between every Scale, like the Castors, which shews these two Animals to be something akin; and indeed the Water-Rat comes very near to the Beaver, and makes it’s Holes in the bank-sides of Ponds after the same manner.”

While not all publications were as purely descriptive as this example, those that did undertake experiments discussed them in a very chronological and almost basic manner. An example is by Allen Moulen in his publication ‘Some experiments on a black shining sand brought from Virginia, suppos’d to contain iron, made in March 1689’. An excerpt of the paper is as follows:

“6. I flux’d another parcel of it with Salt-Peter and Flowers of Brimstone, without being able to procure any Regulus. 7. I pour’d good Spirit of Salt on a parcel of this Sand, but could observe no Luctation thereby produc’d. 8. I pour’d Spirit of Nitre both strong and weakned with Water on parcels of the same Sand, without being able to discover any Conflict.”

Publications continued to be written in this nature for quite some time, however by the second half of the 19th century, science and the publication thereof distinctly changed and a lot of this can be credited to Louis Pasteur.

Louis Pasteur. Source: Wikipedia.

When Pasteur first had breakthroughs that provided evidence for the germ theory of disease, he was met by a lot of criticism by fellow scientists that were firm believers in the theory of spontaneous generation. As a way to prove that he was right, Pasteur started to document his experiments in extreme detail. This situation and Pasteur’s recognition of the importance of methodology resulted in the idea of reproducibility and essentially in the IMRaD structure we still follow today.

IMRaD stands for Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion, which for scientists nowadays is probably as comforting as a cuddly blanket or a hot chocolate on a cold day. We find comfort in this structure because in a way it makes writing scientific papers less daunting because it tells us exactly what we need to do. It’s like a checklist with boxes that we can neatly tick off as we fill in the details of each section.

While IMRaD was first initiated during Pasteur’s era, it became widely adopted in the late 1950s when there was a strong boost in scientific output as more money was being funneled to the sciences. The result of this boost was strong pressure on scientific journals and their editors as authors were submitting papers at a never before seen rate. In an effort to keep up with the influx of submissions, editors felt the need to become more stringent and so enforced strict rules on article length, organization and structure, in order to weed out papers that didn’t make the cut right off the bat. This included IMRaD becoming more widely used in journals as a way to bring conformity to the sciences. This resulted in strong pressure on authors to be concise in their writing, which means that there isn’t much room for creativity.

The topic of creativity in scientific writing has long been debated and many suggest that the writing style in publications should be as objective and frank as possible in order to avoid masking the science (Massoudi 2003). However, it has also been suggested by many that by limiting the creativity in scientific writing, you might actually be limiting the creativity going into the scientific process (Bohm & Peat 1987). While I do believe that objectivity and clarity in scientific writing is important, I do not see the harm in authors trying to be a little creative in the communication of their work. Sir Peter Medawar, a Nobel Prize winning biologist summed up this sentiment very nicely in his book ‘Advice to a Young Scientist’ published in 1979:

“Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidier-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics. What sort of mind or temperament can all these people be supposed to have in common? Obligative scientist must be very rare, and most people who are in fact scientists could easily have been something else instead.”

I don’t know whether there is a right or a wrong answer on this matter. What I do know though is that I always give an emphatic nod of approval when I see a word not typically seen in scientific writing used creatively in a scientific publication and it often conjures a smile on my face and makes the paper more memorable to me.

It’s interesting to muse about the direction in which scientific writing is heading now. We are still seeing a proliferation in papers that are being submitted and published, and journals being established. However, I think we are starting to see a shift in how strict scientists are in the language that they use for their publications. That is not to say that manuscripts are now submitted filled with colloquialisms, poor grammar and punctuation, but I think there is a certain flexibility in how much creativity can be incorporated into publications. The extent of this flexibility is, I believe, still largely dependent on the journal. Journals that provide very limited word count and space on the page for a publication, like Nature for example, may limit the creative capabilities of authors. However, some of the more “liberal” journals (liberal in terms of length and space), like PLoS ONE, may allow authors to explore their creative writing abilities to a greater extent. In my personal opinion, I would quite like to see more authors take creative risks in their writing.

 

References

Abrahms, B., et al., Memory and resource tracking drive blue whale migrations. PNAS, 2019. 116(12): 5582-5587.

Bohm, D., & Peat F.D. Science, Order, and Creativity.1987. Bantam Books, New York City.

Hoffman, P. The Man Who Loved Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth. 1999. Hyperion Books, New York City.

Massoudi, M. Can scientific writing be creative? Journal of Science Education and Technology, 2003. 12(2): 115-128.

Medawar, P. Advice to a Young Scientist. 1979. Basic Books, New York City.

Moulen, A. Some experiments on a black shining sand brought from Virginia, suppos’d to contain iron, made in March 1689. By Allen Moulen, M.D. and Fellow of the Royal Society, since dead. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1693. 17: doi.org/10.1098/rstl.1693.0009.

Rochberg, F. The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture. 2004. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

S.R.S., R.W. Some observations in the dissection of a ratt, communicated by Mr. R.W. S.R.S.Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1693. 17: doi.org/10.1098/rstl.1693.0006.

Signs you’re an ecologist – you don’t spend nearly enough time geeking out about your study species…

By Lisa Hildebrand, MSc student, OSU Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Lab

This past week has been very busy for me as I gave three quite important, yet very different, presentations. The first was on Tuesday at the Pacific High School in Port Orford, near my study site. The aim of the game was recruitment – my quest for two eager local high schoolers to be my interns for this 2019 summer field season has begun (read blogs written by our 2017 HS interns Nathan Malamud and Quince Nye)! I was lucky enough to be given an entire class period to talk to the students and so I hope that the picture I painted of kayaks, gray whales and sun will be enough to entice students to apply to the internship.

The second was a short presentation in one of the classes I took this term, GEOG 561: GIScience II Analysis and Applications. The class focuses on developing and conducting geospatial analyses in R and throughout the term each student develops a small independent research project using some of their own data. For my research project, I decided to do a small cluster analysis of the zooplankton community data that we have collected from the kayak net samples.

The third and final presentation of the week happened on Thursday and marked one of the big milestones on my Master’s journey: my research review. The research review is a mandatory (and extremely helpful) process in the Department of Fisheries & Wildlife where the student (in this case me), the committee (Dr Leigh Torres, Dr Rachael Orben, Dr Kim Bernard and Dr Susanne Brander) and a department representative (Dr Brian Sidlauskas) all assemble to discuss the student’s research proposal, which lays out the intended work, chapters, analysis and timeline for the students’ thesis. My proposal (which currently bears the title: “Tonight’s specials include mysids, gammarids and more: An examination of the zooplankton prey of Oregon gray whales and its impact on individual foraging patterns”) proposes a two-chapter thesis where the first examines the quality of zooplankton prey, while the second looks at potential individual foraging specialization of gray whales along the Oregon coast. While my entire committee agreed that what I have set forth to do in the next two or so years is ambitious, they provided me with excellent feedback and confidence that I would be able to achieve what I have planned.

Now that it’s the weekend and I’ve had some time to sit back and think about the week, I realized one major commonality between all three presentations I gave. None of the Powerpoints featured more than one image of a gray whale. How could this be?! It is after all my study species and I spend so much of my summer looking at them – how could it be that so little of what I showed and talked about was the thing that I am most passionate about and is so central to my research?

In the course of doing research, it’s easy to get wound up in the nitty gritty and forget about the big picture. While the nitty gritty is also imperative to conducting the research (and ultimately getting results), I sometimes forget about why I do what I do, which is that gray whales are AWESOME. Looking into the past, it seems that some of my lab mates have had the same realizations about their study species before too: see here and here. So for this blog, I want to bring it back to basics and share some of the things that I think are most fascinating about gray whales.

  1. Gray whales are the only baleen whale that feeds benthically. This behavior is facilitated by the shorter and tougher baleen that gray whales possess in comparison to other baleen whale species (Pivorunas 1979). The majority of the Eastern North Pacific (ENP) gray whale population feeds benthically in the Bering Sea where they eat ampeliscid amphipods, which are a type of benthic invertebrates (Nerini 1984). It is estimated that gray whales must regain 11-29% of critical body mass during the feeding season (Villegas-Amtmann et al. 2015) in order to obtain the energy stores they require for the entire year. Besides the personal benefit of sea floor foraging, by using this feeding tactic gray whales create depressions in the soft sediment that benefit other species besides themselves. The highly disruptive nature of this action can increase the biodiversity of the seafloor and initiate scavenging events by lysiannassid amphipods on other infauna (Oliver & Slattery 1985). Furthermore, Grebmeier & Harrison (1992) documented that a variety of seabirds including northern fulmars, black-legged kittiwakes and thick-billed murres feed on benthic amphipods brought to the surface by this unique foraging behavior performed by gray whales.
  1. Gray whales are essentially acrobats. A preference for benthic prey goes hand in hand with a preference for shallow, coastal waters, as for example Pacific Coast Feeding Group gray whales tend to forage within the 5-15 m depth range (Weller et al. 1999). With female adults ranging between 13-15 m in length (females tend to be slightly larger than adult males) and weighing anywhere between 15-33 tons (Jones et al. 1984), I am continuously fascinated by how gracefully and slowly gray whales can navigate extremely shallow waters.

    However, it is more than just simple navigation – the behaviors and moves that some gray whales display while in the shallows is phenomenal too. Last year Torres et al. (2018) documented this agility through unmanned aerial systems (UAS) footage that provided evidence for some novel foraging tactics including headstands, side-swimming, and jaw snapping and flexing.

  1. They sure are resilient. Commercial whaling of gray whales began in 1846 after two commercial whaling vessels first discovered the winter breeding grounds in Baja California, Mexico (Henderson 1984). Following this discovery, the ENP were targeted for roughly a century before receiving full protection under the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling in 1946 (Reeves 1984). Through genetic analyses, it has been estimated that the pre-whaling abundance of the ENP population was between 76,000 – 118,000 individuals (Alter et al. 2012), which is roughly three to five times larger than current estimates (24,000 – 26,000; Scordino et al. 2018). While the gray whale populations that once existed in the Atlantic Ocean were not as fortunate as those in the Pacific (Atlantic gray whales were declared extinct in the 18thcentury due to extensive whaling; Bryant 1995), the ENP has definitely made a strong comeback. Additionally, gray whale resilience is not only evident on this long temporal scale but it can also be seen annually when gray whale mothers fight relentlessly to keep their calves alive when under attack from killer whales. A study on predation of gray whales by transient killer whales in Alaska reported that attacks were quickly abandoned if calves were aggressively defended by their mothers or if gray whales succeeded in reaching depths of 3 m or less (Barrett-Lennard et al. 2011).
  1. For some unimaginable reason, gray whales appear to feel a strong connection to us. For many, gray whales might be best known for actively seeking out human contact during their breeding season in the Mexican lagoons. I find this actuality particularly interesting because of the bloody history we share with Pacific gray whales.

Those are just some of the things about gray whales that make them so fascinating to me. I look forward to potentially discovering one or two more things that we don’t know about them yet through my research. Even if that doesn’t turn out to be the case, I feel so lucky that I at least get to spend so much time with them during their feeding season here along the Oregon coast.

 

References

Alter, E.S., et al., Pre-whaling genetic diversity and population ecology in Eastern Pacific gray whales: Insights from ancient DNA and stable isotopes.PLoS ONE, 2012. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0035039.

Barrett-Lennard, L.G., et al., Predation on gray whales and prolonged feeding on submerged carcasses by transient killer whales at Unimak Island, Alaska. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 2011. 421: 229-241.

Bryant, P.J., Dating remains of gray whales from the Eastern North Atlantic. Journal of Mammalogy, 1995. 76(3): 857-861.

Grebmeier, J.M., & Harrison, N.M., Seabird feeding on benthic amphipods facilitated by gray whale feeding activity in the northern Bering Sea. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 1992. 80: 125-133.

Henderson, D.A., Nineteenth century gray whaling: Grounds, catches and kills, practices and depletion of the whale population.Pages 159-186 inJones, M.L. et al., eds. The gray whale: Eschrichtius robustus, 1984. Academic Press, Orlando.

Jones, M.L., et al., The gray whale: Eschrichtius robustus. 1984. Academic Press, Orlando.

Nerini, M., A review of the gray whale feeding ecology. Pages 423-448 inJones, M.L. et al., eds. The gray whale: Eschrichtius robustus, 1984. Academic Press, Orlando.

Oliver, J.S., & Slattery, P.N., Destruction and obstruction on the sea floor: effects of gray whale feeding.Ecology, 1985. 66: 1965-1975.

Pivorunas, A., The feeding mechanisms of baleen whales.American Scientist, 1979. 67(4): 432-440.

Reeves, R.R., Modern commercial pelagic whaling for gray whales. Pages 187-200 inJones, M.L. et al., eds. The gray whale: Eschrichtius robustus, 1984. Academic Press, Orlando.

Scordino, J., et al., Report of gray whale implementation review coordination call on 5 December 2018.

Torres, L.G., et al., Drone up! Quantifying whale behavior from a new perspective improves observational capacity.Frontiers in Marine Science, 2018. 5: doi:10.3389/fmars.2018.00319.

Villegas-Amtmann, S., et al., A bioenergetics model to evaluate demographic consequences of disturbance in marine mammals applied to gray whales. Ecosphere, 2015. 6(10): 1-19.

Weller, D.W., et al., Gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) off Sakhalin Island, Russia: Seasonal and annual patterns of occurrence. Marine Mammal Science, 1999. 15(4): 1208-1227.