As I’ve alluded to before, we had quite a few problems getting off the ground (as is always the case when mounting a large scale field project). One of the things that I’ve learned since I started working in field biology is that these setbacks, while frustrating and often expensive, can also be unexpected boons for any project.

Take for example our theodolite. To collect behavioral data on whales from the shore we use a high-powered scope traditionally used by surveyors. This scope gives us our geographic bearing to the whale (horizontal angle), and the angle at which we are looking down at our whale from the observation tower (vertical angle).

We connect this theodolite to a computer running Pythagoras, a cetacean tracking program design explicitly for shore based theodolite work. It automatically converts these angles to Cartesian coordinates using trigonometry, the curvature of the earth, and adjusts for tide height. While I’m capable of doing this calculations manually the ability of the theodolite to communicate directly with the computer greatly increases our accuracy in terms of timing, as the computer operator can click a button and instantly store the data from the theodolite.

Without going too far into the details, we had some concerns about the calibration of the instrument we had borrowed, and it was giving us some trouble prior to leaving for the field. In the spirit of prudence we decided not to risk the field season with an instrument that might have (but in retrospect did not) prove to be faulty. I conservatively opted to replace the instrument, and located a replacement theodolite at a good price; only I later discovered that the company was a front, and the deal was a sham. At this point, running out of time, I took the advice of a contractor and began investigating total stations, which are like theodolites, only they contain many more features (none of which we need). I bought one in the nick of time and hauled her up to Alaska.

At the risk of running on too long about the technical details of this last minute equipment swap I’ll jump to the end of the story. The total station didn’t communicate with the computer, the theodolite had to be sent up to Alaska (via what was a pretty comical string of communication and the hard work of my buddy Kevin who happened to be dog sitting for me at the time, and who is unbelievably reliable). The theodolite was calibrated in field, looks to be totally fine, and what we ended up with is one total station – great for surveying, doesn’t talk to computers – and a theodolite that does talk to computers. Double trouble.

The total station is finicky, sensitive, and bulky, she doesn’t like surveying from the tower (which isn’t quite stable enough for her), but she’s super precise, and does the trick if she’s on solid ground. It seemed like a waste not to use the instrument since we had her, so we put the total station down on the beach to see just what would happen if we tried to survey from there. What failed in the tower, seemed to work just fine from the ground. So we decided to keep her, and run her. We call her the TB …. Because she’s a Total Beach.

What we’re doing now is running both instruments simultaneously (something I’ve been dreaming about- remember this conversation Garcia Lab?). From the beach we conduct scan point surveys where we mark every whale in the survey area and record it’s location, group size, and group composition. While we are unable to connect the total station to the computer, we are able to manually input the data into an iPad app called TapForms. The iPad, which is wearing a Lifeproof case, can withstand the rain and weather on the beach, making it ideal for surveying in the elements. We survey in 20 minute intervals and conduct anywhere from 15-21 scan point surveys per day

Meanwhile, in the tower we have our theodolite, which we refer to as the Darling because she’s such a delight to work with (even if her battery does turn off from time to time). We use the Darling to conduct focal follows. We pick a single whale, or a group of whale travelling together, and record their fine scale behavior (blows, surfaces, dives, breaches, etc.) as they forage and move throughout our survey area.

The result is a comprehensive picture of how the distribution of whales changes in the survey area as a single whale moves within it. In my imagination (I haven’t gotten this totally plotted yet) it will look something like this.

Pretty cool stuff right? But we’re just getting started. Once we have this visual picture we overlay our acoustic data to see if we can pinpoint which whale was vocalizing (fingers crossed it was either our focal animal, or an animal that our focal animal interacted with). By having both the broad distribution of animals and the fine scale focal follow data I can begin to investigate relationships between vocal behavior and social context, vocal behavior and foraging contexts (do lunging whales vocalize?), and ultimately I can glean something about what makes humpback whale produce these social sounds.

And it gets better…

Our area is subjected to very little vessel traffic, but we do have cruise ships that pass by predictably twice a day. By building our sampling schedule around these cruise ship arrivals and departures I can effectively ‘control’ for quiet periods and noisy ones. This gives me the opportunity to assess whether noise changes the acoustic behavior of the whales. Which is the ultimate goal of the Acoustic Spyglass project.

As one last added bonus, remember when I told you in my last post how close we’ve been able to get to the whales? This enables us to take fluke photographs as well as dorsal photographs that can be used to identify individuals that frequent our survey area. In many cases we hope to identify our focal animal. The whales in Glacier Bay are subjected to longterm monitoring by Park biologists (like my mentor and P.I. Chris Gabriele); many of these animals are of known sex and age class. While in year one our sample size many not be large enough to glean differences in behavior as a function of age or sex, after a second year of data collection we may have enough representative samples to begin investigating questions of this nature.

So while the first few weeks of our field season were… rocky. I’m happy to report that this rocky start has effectively doubled the amount of data that we’re able to collect on any given day, while simultaneously allowing me to collect behavioral data on multiple spatial scales.

While I hope this has been informative for those of you reading through this blog, I realize that the only pictures I’ve posted so far are cartoons. So, to scratch the photo itch check out the slide show of beautiful moments from our field season to date that I posted here. As lovely as these photos are, I assure you they don’t come anywhere near to the reality of just how spectacular this place and these animals really are.

Your Alaskan Correspondent,

Miche

*Note- we have not yet had any negative encounters with our neighborhood bear, though she has been visiting a little more frequently. Meanwhile our Oyster Catchers are raising a family (we have two new additions on the island) and our vole community (not pictured) is thriving.

Research of this scale cannot be conducted in a vacuum. I am not capable of running a theodolite, a total station, a hydrophone, a data computer, and an iPad simultaneously, no matter how good a scientist I may be. To this end field biology is by necessity collaborative. Bringing a team into the field is unbelievably rewarding (and challenging), but the nature of studying charismatic megafauna in a place like Alaska means that expectations must be managed.

My master’s advisor Dr. Andy Szabo of the Alaska Whale Foundation, who imparted on me many words of wisdom as we’d sit waiting for the weather to break so that data could be collected, once told me that the science that was the least exciting to collect was the most valuable to have. I’d remind myself of this as I’d strain to locate a whale from my lighthouse perch that was in fact foraging four miles away, or as I sat with my soggy headphones in a 3-meter skiff in the pouring rain waiting for a whale to call. I’d remind myself that the beauty of using these methods (land based observations and passive acoustic monitoring) was that I was in no way changing the behavior of the whales.

These are the sorts of stories I told the Acoustic Spyglass field team prior to disembarkation into the field. We learned how to spot blows, because we may be too far away to identify the backs of the whales, we learned how to use a theodolite to finely measure location and behavior from miles away, without ever interacting with the animal. I like to think that I ingrained in my team a sense of humility when thinking about the reality of these whales existing not for us, but despite us. We were prepared to watch, and listen, quietly from a distance.

But the whales came to us.

In the nine summers that I’ve been coming to Alaska to work with whales I’ve never been as close to a humpback whale as I’ve been, repeatedly, here in Glacier Bay while standing on shore. We are woken up to the explosive breath of humpback whales foraging outside of our tents, we rinse our dishes under the mist of humpback whale exhalations, sitting on the beach writing this blog post I’m not more than fifty yards away from a pair of humpback whales cruising through the intertidal zone. In fact, one blew so loudly a moment ago, that it startled Kate as she made her way across the rocks to begin a survey.

It’s four A.M. and someone is shaking my tent; David tells me that I have to get out of bed there are three whales in our intertidal zone, and one just beyond breaching. It’s ten P.M. and Luke and Kate and I are a puddled mess on the floor of Kate’s tent, moments away from being fast asleep, when David yells from the beach. There’s a whale lunge feeding right off of the shore, and then another; so close that you could count their baleen. Yesterday we cancelled our surveys for fog, again. Sitting disappointed on the beach we watch four whales scattered between the peninsula where we conduct our surveys and the point directly south of us, all of them within 50 yards of the beach – and then one breaches. Years on the water in Alaska and the closest I’ve ever been to a breaching whale was standing ankle deep in the intertidal zone. We have animals so close to the shore with such frequency that Tom coined the term “Drive By”, and the whales do in fact drive by multiple times each day.

I never expected this. I expected tiny teakettle spouts across the ocean (and we have no shortage of that), but I never expected to grow so accustomed to whales on our beach that I’d assume we would see at least one up close everyday. It is a great gift to stand on this shore in awe of these creatures, and content myself with that same knowledge that got me through my master’s degree, that this interaction (which appears to be a one-sided one… whether the whales even know we’re here is unlikely) is not harming these animals or changing their behavior, yet they are still close enough that I can see their muscles flex under
their own locomotion.

It is an even greater gift to be able to share this experience with my team, who came to Alaska never having seen a humpback whale. There is a saying about Alaska that I used to quote everyday when I worked on the boats in Juneau, it’s a version of a John Muir quote about coming to Alaska, that goes “for the purpose of sightseeing, if you are old please come. But if you’re young, stay away. For the beauty and the grandeur of a place so huge could ruin you, and it never bodes well in life to see the finest first.”

I fear my team may be ruined.

It’s been two weeks since our research team met up in Gustavus Alaska to begin our 2015 field season. While Chris, Holger, and I have been working for over a year to get this up and running, our newly formed field team is reaping the benefits of hundreds of pages of proposals, permits, emails, and budgets. Now that we’ve made it to the island I can say wholeheartedly that ever word that was put to paper was worth it. Now, my four interns and myself, are trying to live up to the promises that got us here.

Introducing the crew:

Our team is made up of a diverse group of undergraduates from Oregon State University, all whom I met when I was a teaching assistant for a field sampling class. We’re a diverse bunch to say the least, with complimentary skill sets, all of which have held us up through the rocky first few weeks of the field season (the first week of any large field season is a little rocky, this one is no exception). Everyone is expected to survey for whales from our 15-foot observation tower, and to listen for whales from our kayak, but other tasks have been divvied out according to desire and ability. Tom, our resident Texan, is quick with a joke or a story if you don’t beat him to it, and took up the bulk of our photography training. The plan was to use a spotting scope to photograph whales and seals across the survey area (a plan that regretfully doesn’t seem to work); when that fell through – much to Tom “I never stop working” Plank’s chagrin – Tom happily trained everyone up on ORCAA’s dream machine camera, and has personally taken over 500 photographs to date.

Kate, native Oregonian through and through, came with instruments in tow and cooking skills to match. Aside from her keen attention to detail and organization, having another woman in science around has turned out to be more important to me than I’d originally realized. Of my fifteen previous field technicians only once was there a gentleman on the team. Similarly, our deployment team for this project was made up exclusively of women as well. It’s refreshing to have Kate on the team, not just to represent ladies in science, but to share the perspective of being a strong undergraduate woman in science.

Lucas, recently dubbed “Pioneer Man”, is working on a senior thesis under my supervision. So in addition to his daily survey duties he and I have been brainstorming the next steps in his personal project. What we hope to do is to build on the legacy of acoustics work that’s been done in this area to see if humpback whales are using sound shadows to avoid being inundated with the noise produced by passing ships. This question, which was originally posited in the late 1980’s when the impact of noise on humpbacks in Glacier Bay became a topic of great concern, was addressed with a smaller population of animals and a quieter ocean. During our next stint Lucas will kayak throughout our survey area taking recordings in various spots that we will later quantify using acoustics software to assess variation in the noise levels as a function of ships. He will then use our visual survey data to map out how humpbacks are using the spaces during periods with passing cruise ships. He’s also fond of daily swims in the frigid 38 degree ocean, and holds a personal record of 13 minutes in the water (shoulder deep). This record was beat only yesterday by Kate and myself, the pioneer women on the team (who hold a 20 minute record, but only waist deep).

Lastly we have our Whale Whisperer, David. David, who is also doing a senior thesis with me, has an unbelievable talent for spotting whales. It didn’t take long before the student outdid the teacher; he’s now able to find whales further away and faster than any of us, for which I am grateful and admittedly humbled. His electrician skills have come in similarly handy as we stumble through an enduring love-hate relationship with power supplies. David’s thesis, which investigates diel trends in humpback whale vocal behavior, is going well. Thus far David has navigated the 3:30 AM surveys without complaint as the rest of the team snooze through the early Alaskan sunrises.

Our camp is set up and well organized. I’ve had to move my tent twice, both times due to the proximity of my sleeping quarters to bear habitat. Yes. We have bears. Up until a few days ago I’d grown quite comfortable with Teddi, our neighborhood black bear. She’d been a good neighbor, only coming around the beach twice a day to gaze from afar at our camp. When I interrupted Teddi eating salmon berries a few hundred yards away from my tent, however, I decided to move further into the spruce thicket. This morning David had a close encounter with a second bear on the beach, I’ve yet to see him, but unlike Teddi (who is a shiny black bear), Pete appears to be a large cinnamon bear (or possibly a small brown bear). We haven’t encountered Pete enough to determine a routine, but he hasn’t yet visited the camp.

We’re able to hear the whales breathing from our tents at night, and at least once or twice a day they’ve been swimming about 10 yards off of the beach, usually during high tides. It’s frequent enough that the team has coined the term ‘Drive By’ to describe it. We’re now familiar enough with the sound of breathing whales that not only can we tell which direction the whales are in, but also whether or not they are on our side of the channel or the opposite.

Also on the island we have humming birds and hermit thrushes, Swainson’s thrushes and crows, a pair of nesting bald eagles, and a colony of voles. The ocean is thick with harbor porpoise, stellar sea lions, and (Leanna you’ll be so pleased) with harbor seals! 

Perhaps the best news of all? The whales are calling and the seals are roaring all around the array. We’ve yet to drop the hydrophone and hear nothing. When the hydrophone is near shore the roaring seals dominate, but when you drift mid-channel the swops and whups of whales can be heard. I couldn’t be more pleased.

There will be much more to come, including the trials and tribulations of our research (so many things that haven’t worked, so many things to carry up and down through the intertidal without breaking them), but for now I’ll leave you with the mental image of five happy, damp, researchers, watching whales from the shores of Glacier Bay. Signing off.

Your Alaskan Correspondent,

Miche