Tag: LTER

The finale: the Rosenthal Islands

Erin Pickett-

The Palmer LTER 2016 research cruise has come to an end and I am back at Palmer Station. In addition to a fantastic espresso machine, Palmer Station also comes with the added benefit of more internet bandwidth and a phone to call home. I thought while the memories are still fresh and my friends and family are beginning to ask, I’d better write down a few of my favorite field adventure moments.

Thinking back, there are a few common themes that all of these favorite moments have in common, and they are; high winds and snow stinging my face, dramatic cliff faces and rocky islands, shoes covered in penguin guano, sightings of whale spouts, and seabirds I have never seen before.

Overall, there were far fewer whales seen on this cruise than there have been in the past. Luckily, I was able to keep busy anyway, because when we weren’t finding whales I was assisting the seabird team in their pursuit of penguins. Toward the end of the cruise most of the science projects happening on the ship were wrapping up and the birders and whalers were given more freedom to direct the show. This meant we were able to work with the captain of the ship to chart courses to areas where we thought we might find whales and to rarely visited islands with colonies of Adelie, gentoo, and chinstrap penguins.

The first group of islands we visited were just east of Prospect point, called the fish islands. We used a handheld GPS and hand-drawn maps to navigate around a group of small rocky islands collectively named the minnows. Carrie and Darren (the “birders”) and I hopped on and off our skiff to count the chicks and adult penguins on each island. Meanwhile, our boat driver was keeping an eye on the wind and the icebergs surrounding us so that we wouldn’t find ourselves trapped in the bay if the sea ice became packed in by strengthening winds. Our ride back to the ship that day was quite wet due to a lot of wind chop, and we spent the rest of the afternoon drying our gear out and warming up so that we would be ready to return back to the minnows that evening to collect Adelie penguin diet samples.

Giovanni Fattori (https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11939457)
Prospect point is colored in red in the center of the peninsula, with Anvers Island and the Gerlache straight to the North. Image credit: Giovanni Fattori (https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11939457)

Diet sampling is a critical part of the birders work during the LTER cruise. Collecting diet samples from Adelie penguins over a long time period and over large geographical distances allows us to monitor how changes in sea ice along the peninsula are impacting top predators and their prey. We had a successful trip back to the minnows that evening and collected fresh diet samples from five Adelie penguins that had just returned home from foraging trips.

Two days later we arrived at the Rosenthal islands, which are located on the west side Anvers Island. Our goal at the Rosenthal’s was to census the local penguin colonies. The Rosenthal’s were unlike anywhere else I have been yet, with jagged islands set dramatically near the base of a large glacier and waves crashing over nearby shoals and icebergs. Southern giant petrels and skuas glided over our heads while groups of penguins porpoised around us. At the first island we came to we got to see a king penguin, a rare sighting in this area.

Luckily there were six of us to count the thousands of Adelie, gentoo and chinstrap penguins that were scattered in colonies all over the islands, but it still took most of the day to complete our counts. After one last trip through the Gerlache straight at sunset, we arrived back at Palmer Station.

I hate to admit that I didn’t have my camera with me at Prospect point and at the Rosenthal’s, so until I get a few from the rest of the field team here are a few from the last week of the cruise…

A visit to Rothera Research Station

By: Erin Pickett

We had an eventful weekend on the LMG, visiting a British research station on Adelaide Island on Saturday and nearby Avian Island on Sunday. We arrived at Rothera Station early Saturday morning and traded most of our LTER team for a group of British scientists. The British base was very welcoming and had a full of day of crevassing, skiing, hiking and boating activities planned for us. Meanwhile, their scientists took advantage of the use of our ship for a few offshore science projects.

We “whalers” took advantage of the free time and good weather and spent the morning looking for Minke, Humpback and killer whales in the vicinity of Rothera. We had hoped to put a stop to our long streak of days without whales but unfortunately there were no whales to be seen. Despite this, we had a great morning taking photos of the many icebergs, leopard seals, Wilson’s storm petrels and blue-eyed shags in the area.

Sunday was a beautiful bluebird day and we had a gorgeous transit from Rothera around the south end of Adelaide Island to Avian Island. We left two of our LTER colleagues on Avian and they will be camping there for the week. They will be studying the island’s population of Adelie penguins, conducting diet studies and assessing reproductive success by weighing, measuring and counting Adelie chicks.

Spending a week each year on Avian Island is an important aspect the seabird component of the LTER program because Avian Island serves as a sort of “control” study site, to compare to the more rapidly changing Palmer site. The differing physical and biological conditions at each of these two sites allow scientists to assess how things like local sea-ice conditions and biological productivity affect each of the local penguin populations. There are around 80,000 Adelie penguins on Avian, so you can imagine that we could smell the krill-colored guano long before we landed on the island.

Hello from the straights of Magellan!

The R/V Lawrence M. Gould departed Punta Arenas, Chile yesterday, marking the beginning of the annual Palmer LTER research cruise. Myself (Erin Pickett) and my lab mate Logan Pallin, are looking forward to sharing our adventures and research with you over the next three and a half months! Logan and I are graduate students at Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute. While on the cruise and at Palmer Station, Logan and I will be working with our graduate advisor, Dr. Ari Friedlaender, and with Dr. Doug Nowacek from Duke University. Ari and Doug are two of the Principal Investigators leading the cetacean component of the Palmer LTER project.

The work that we will be doing over the next few months is part of a long term ecological research (LTER) program based out of Palmer Station, Anvers Island, along the Western Antarctic Peninsula. Over the next few months our whale team will be conducting cetacean surveys and collecting acoustic-based prey measurements of Antarctic krill.  Much of our effort will be focused on humpback whales, and we will be using methods such as photo identification, tagging and biopsy sampling to understand more about this species recent recovery in this area and to learn more about the ecological roles that these large baleen whales play in the marine ecosystem along the peninsula.

We are especially interested in learning more about the foraging ecology of humpback and minke whales, how their behavior is influenced by their primary prey (Antarctic krill), and how their population demographics (genetics, sex, hormones) may change over time.  Many of the region’s top predators share this prey resource, which is declining as a result of sea ice loss. A central objective of our research is to understand how climate induced changes in this polar marine environment are affecting these top predators.

Until we reach the northern boundary of our study area where we will begin our official surveys, we will be occupying ourselves on the ship with a bit of bird watching. I’ll be teaching Logan how to distinguish a duck from a petrel, and a “freaking huge bird” from a Royal albatross. So far in addition to a couple of royal albatross we’ve spotted white chinned petrels, black-browed albatross, and South American terns. It’s nearly tropical outside this afternoon, breezy and 11.2˚C, and a group of Peale’s dolphins are riding our bow wake, so enough writing for one day!