{"id":98,"date":"2015-04-14T00:10:28","date_gmt":"2015-04-14T00:10:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/?p=98"},"modified":"2015-08-20T11:02:19","modified_gmt":"2015-08-20T11:02:19","slug":"surveying-harbor-porpoises-on-the-oregon-coast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/2015\/04\/14\/surveying-harbor-porpoises-on-the-oregon-coast\/","title":{"rendered":"Surveying Harbor Porpoises on the Oregon Coast!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hello Gemm lab readers!<\/p>\n

Spring has officially made it to the Oregon coast. \u00a0The smells of blooming flowers are lingering in the air at the Hatfield Marine Science Center (HMSC), the seagulls are hovering around our afternoon BBQ\u2019s, the local whale watching tour boats are\u00a0zipping through the jetty’s\u00a0to catch sight of all the whales still hovering in the area, and my team and I are\u00a0right behind them as the field season is upon us in full force!<\/p>\n

My name is Amanda Holdman and I am a master\u2019s student in the Oregon State University\u2019s Department of Fisheries and Wildlife and Marine Mammal Institute. Our lab, the geospatial ecology of marine megafuana, or GEMM lab for short, focuse\"harbor-porpoises_569_600x450\"s on the ecology, behavior and conservation of marine megafauna including cetaceans, pinnipeds, seabirds, and sharks. My research in particular is centered around the cetacean species that inhabit Oregon\u2019s near coastal waters. While the cetacean order includes over 80 species, 30 of which can be found in Oregon, I am specifically targeting the small and charismatic harbor porpoise! I am\u00a0hoping to answer questions about seasonal and diel patterns, and the drivers of these patterns to create a better understanding of the porpoise community off the coast of Newport.<\/p>\n

To accomplish this, I have been using a couple different survey methods! Over the last year or so I have been conducting marine mammal visual surveys with a crew of observers, binoculars, cameras and lifejackets. \u00a0We\u2019ve been very fortunate to work alongside and partner up with a number of labs and projects taking place at HMSC \u2014 including Sarah Henkel\u2019s\u00a0Benthic Ecology Lab<\/a>, Jay Peterson\u2019s Zooplankton Ecology Project, and Rob Suryan\u2019s\u00a0Seabird Oceanography Lab<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 who\u2019ve invited us to share their boat time and join in on cruises to spot marine mammals.\u00a0We had some motivating cruises with last year\u2019s field season (bow riding pacific white sided dolphins and a possible fin whale sighting!) but now that the summer season is around the corner, It\u2019s time to recruit additional observers and get everyone up to date on their safety certifications (at sea safety, first aid, etc.)<\/p>\n

\"10511604_10152778085291070_5111035247949699751_o\"<\/p>\n

\"Porpoise-1\"<\/p>\n

While we currently have about 6-8 boat trips a month, I am not only just looking \u00a0for harbor porpoises, I\u2019m\u00a0also listening for them. To complement the visual surveys, I\u2019ve added an acoustic component to my research, with the help of the Oregon State Research Collective for Applied Acoustics<\/a>\u00a0lab (ORCAA). This allows me\u00a0to survey for harbor porpoises even under the worst sea conditions, when boat trips are unavailable. Odontocetes, such as the harbor porpoise use echolocation to navigate and forage and can be identified acoustically by their frequency range. While a full-depth analysis of last summer\u2019s data hasn\u2019t yet been accomplished, I was able to take a quick peek and MAN IT LOOKS GOOD! Both harbor porpoise and killer whale vocalizations were identified \u2013 you can check out the spectrogram below! This combination of using visual and acoustic surveys will help us answer when the porpoises are in our near waters, and where there primary hang-outs are!<\/p>\n

\"REEF-20140612-231045\"<\/a>
Visual representation of an echolocation clicks emitted by a feeding harbor porpoise<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But springtime isn\u2019t just for fieldwork, it\u2019s also for course work! This quarter, my lab mate Erin Picket and I have enrolled into Julia Jones \u201cArcaholics anonymous\u201d class, an introductory spatial statistics and GIS course that helps us piece together all the hard work we\u2019ve put towards data collection to look for trends of animal distributions across space and time. This is the first time for both of us that we \u00a0get to upgrade our excel spreadsheets into a visual representation of our data! There will be more updates to come soon on how our projects are unfolding, but if you can\u2019t wait til then, feel free to follow along with our class website<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hello Gemm lab readers! Spring has officially made it to the Oregon coast. \u00a0The smells of blooming flowers are lingering in the air at the Hatfield Marine Science Center (HMSC), the seagulls are hovering around our afternoon BBQ\u2019s, the local whale watching tour boats are\u00a0zipping through the jetty’s\u00a0to catch sight of all the whales still … Continue reading Surveying Harbor Porpoises on the Oregon Coast!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5886,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[188686],"tags":[173916,215839,712774,96374,636094,148762,712775],"class_list":["post-98","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-projects","tag-acoustics","tag-amanda-holdman","tag-distribution","tag-habitat","tag-harbor-porpoise","tag-oregon-coast","tag-visual-observations"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5886"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":108,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98\/revisions\/108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/gemmlab\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}