Author: torresle

By Florence Sullivan, MSc (GEMM Lab alumni, 2017)

Frustrating. Exhausting. Time-consuming. Repetitive. Draining. De-Motivating. A sine wave of cautious excitement followed by the crash of disappointment at another rejection.  The longer my job search continues, the more adjectives I have to describe it.

Last spring, I got rejected from a marine mammal and bird survey technician position because I didn’t have enough experience identifying birds. I found this immensely frustrating. So, fueled by the desire to prove “them” wrong, I embarked on my journey of revenge. First, I registered for a free online bird ID course at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Then, I got my bird books out, and started paying more attention to the species I encountered in my neighborhood. Next, I attended a training session for the Puget Sound Seabird Survey with the Seattle Audubon Society, and joined a citizen science monitoring team. We are responsible for documenting seabird habitat use at 3 beaches in the South Puget Sound on the first Saturday of each month. Most of my team members have been birding for decades, and they have been helpfully pointing out ID tricks like flight patterns, wing shapes, and color bands to distinguish one species from another. I feel like my marine bird ID is coming along nicely, but there are SO MANY bird species out there…. I know I learn better, and am more focused, when I am working for a team effort, so two weeks ago I attended a training for the Secretive Wetland Bird Monitoring project with the Puget Sound Bird Observatory. We’ll be doing playback surveys for species like American Bittern, Virginia Rail, and Green Herons during three survey windows from April to June. I’m excited for this project because even if I don’t learn to ID the birds by sight (they are secretive after all), it’s a chance to improve my ‘birding by ear’ skills! With all this, I think the next time a job application asks about my experience with birds, I’ll be able to give some more informed answers.

In Summer 2018, I had a rather tumultuous field research experience with a very disorganized project leader.  I ended up leaving the project after a series of poor safety choices by the leadership culminated in the vessel running aground on a well-marked reef.  Several of my colleagues and I were injured in the accident, and it was the first time in my 10 year maritime career that I grabbed my emergency bag and seriously thought I might have to abandon ship.  In this case, we made it to shore, and there was a clinic nearby where we got treated, but what if there hadn’t been?  The more I reflected on what happened, the more I realized how bad the situation could have been.  My revenge on that feeling of helplessness was to sign up for a NOLS Wilderness First Aid Course.  During the course, we practiced patient assessment, discussed the most common injuries when adventuring in the remote areas, and played out scenarios, as both patients and first responders. We discussed proper scene assessment, basic wound care and splints (those were fun to practice), situations like hypo and hyperthermia, and how to make a radio call for help that transmits the most relevant information. After this two day course, I feel much more confident in my ability to manage emergency situations for myself and any team I work with. Handily enough, many field technician jobs list ‘Wilderness First Aid/Wilderness First Responder” in their desired qualifications sections, so I can check that bullet off now too!

One of the best bits of finishing my grad degree has been getting my evenings and weekends back from the depths of homework and research fueled need-to-be-productive-all-the-time depression.  I like making things.  Shortly after turning in my thesis, I traded labor for a sheep fleece & two alpaca fleeces.

An acquaintance needed help shearing his small flock, and I saw the opportunity to try a “Sheep to Shawl” project – where you take the raw fiber, clean it, spin it into thread, and weave it into a shawl. I learned how to weave in high school, but I did not know how to spin my own thread.  I borrowed a spinning wheel from my fiber arts mentor, found a spinning group at my local yarn store, and since January have been spinning my own thread!

I started with some practice wool to figure the whole thing out, and have just started to spin the fleeces I helped to harvest. It’s going to take me a while, but I’m more interested in the process than any sort of speed. There’s an unfortunate cultural dichotomy between “art” and “science”, but I find that the sort of thinking needed to plan how the threads will intertwine to make a solid and beautiful cloth, is the same sort of thinking needed to understand the myriad processes that inform how an ecosystem functions. If you think about it sideways, knitting & weaving pattern drafts are the first form of binary computer programs – repetitive patterns that when followed result in a product. The creativity needed to make beautiful art is the same creativity that helps problem solve in the field, and long term project planning, forethought and tenacity are all necessary in both research and in fiber arts. While the art itself may not be relevant to the jobs I apply for, the skills are transferable, and the actions recharge my batteries so I can keep solving problems creatively.

It’s an easy trap to fall into – the idea that learning only happens in the classroom, and that once you’ve finally finished school and thrown off the trappings of academia you’re done and never have to learn again.

But never learning anything new would get boring quickly, wouldn’t it?

I may be frustrated by how long it is taking me to find ‘a career’, but I can’t regret the lily pads that I have landed on in the mean-time, or the skills that I have had the opportunity to pick up.

Exciting. Inspiring. Educational. Opportunistic. Expanding my network. Hopeful. A sine wave of disappointment followed by renewed determination to keep trying.  The longer my job search continues, the more adjectives I have to describe it.

By Paul Lask

Paul Lask teaches writing at Oregon Coast Community College, and is a faculty fellow with Portland State University’s Institute for Sustainable Solutions. His writing can be found at prlask.com. 

I pulled my kayak down to the beach, where a woman stood pointing toward the ocean. A fin rose from the water about a hundred yards offshore.

“It’s an orca,” she said.

“Naw,” the man beside her said. “That’s a gray.”

I recalled a documentary scene of a group of orcas spy-hopping near a seal marooned on an ice chunk. After their pogoing taunts, they left it alone. Another clip showed the orcas band together and charge forward, pushing a big wave over the ice and knocking the seal in.

I brought myself back to the beach. I wanted it to be a gray. It was one of my first solo ocean paddles, and I stood in my dry suit, PFD and helmet, having checked my weather and swell apps, having spent many hours in pools and bays learning rolls and rescues, and many dollars on courses, gear and guidebooks, now arguing a dubious fin into goodness.

It had to be a gray.

I dragged my boat to the water. Small dumping waves sucked back dark gravelly sand. The fin flopped over.

Aspiring rough water sea kayakers are trained in safety and rescue. We learn about dealing with battering surf, longshore currents, T-rescues and re-entry rolls. We don’t learn about sea life. I grew up in northern Illinois, where the nearest sea animal was a river dragon fashioned out of a downed tree that got painted annually, and TV specials on Loch Ness.

I stuffed myself into my boat, suddenly remembering the shark story an instructor told me: They were out near Pacific City when the bad fin emerged. My instructor had a Go Pro on his helmet. His buddy dared him to roll to get a shot of their follower. My instructor declined.

Sealing my spray skirt over the cockpit, I focused on launch prep. I checked my radio. Made sure my extra paddle was secure. Confirmed I hadn’t sealed the skirt over my skeg rope. Here at North Fogarty Creek beach there was a gap between where the fin had been and a rock the size of a two story house. I waited for a set of waves to pass, then pushed off.

I saw the gray whale’s back split the water, heard the great sigh. A misty rainbow evaporated. I darted past the whale into the open sea. Other puffs dotted the horizon.

In time I would learn the kelp forest I had just paddled through hosted galaxies of tiny shrimp-like zooplankton. The gray was “sharking,” a foraging behavior in shallow water wherein it lays on its side with half its tail sticking out. Of the 20,000 gray whales that annually migrate from Mexico to Alaska, about 200 mysteriously break away and feed nearshore in Oregon. Scientists don’t know[i] for sure why this occurs, but the abundance of those shrimp-like animals is one theory.

The mavericks are good for the tourism industry. From late spring through summer Depoe Bay is a frenzy of camera clicks and selfie sticks. A gauntlet of vehicles cram both sides of Hwy 101. Whale watching boats enter and exit the “world’s smallest harbor” through a bottleneck I’ve heard can be sketchy for kayakers.

As I paddled I toyed with wishful thinking—because I was a non-motorized vessel, the whales might better appreciate my presence. I was not there to photograph them. I just liked being in the sway of the water. “No cradle is so comfortable,” Rudyard Kipling wrote, “as the long, rocking swell of the Pacific.”[ii] Especially on an uncharacteristically calm day like this.

I have met paddlers who are indifferent to our resident grays. One referred to them as squirrels. Another claimed he got too near a spout, and was covered in the slime geyser, which he’d found disgusting. Others want to get close. A friend is interested in bringing snorkeling gear out next season, and a non-paddling acquaintance wants to get a kayak so he can sneak up and swim with one.

Dr. Roger Payne, the biologist famous for discovering that humpbacks sing, discusses Baja’s “‘friendly gray whale phenomenon’, wherein gray whales come so close to whale-watching boats that the tourists can reach out and pat them.”[iii] Grays weren’t always treated like housecats. When whaling was in full swing, Dr. Payne continues, they were referred to as “devil fish” by whalers in Scammon’s Lagoon in Baja. The whales were being routinely harpooned, so they fought back, earning a fierce reputation. Their numbers plummeted. Federal protections helped them recover, and in 1994 eastern Pacific gray whales were removed from the U.S. Endangered Species List.

U.S. federal law requires people keep a hundred yards away from whales. Natural law supports this precaution. Once paddling through my shark and orca anxiety, I developed an ambivalence about my proximity to the grays. It was not fear of aggression, but indifference. I was sneaking around the living room of 35-ton animals. Despite their boxcar bulk, they moved with quick snaky grace; regardless of my attempts at putting a football field between us, what was to keep one from accidentally rolling over me or smashing me with its tail?

With shipwrecks in mind, Herman Melville pondered the power of a whale fluke: “But as if this vast local power in the tendinous tail were not enough, the whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof of muscular fibers and filaments, which passing on either side of the loins and running down into the flukes, insensibly blend with them, and largely contribute to their might; so that in the tail the confluent measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point. Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it.”[iv]

Whale-caused shipwrecks didn’t end in the nineteenth century. Contemplating how his sloop went down, Steven Callahan, a sailor lost at sea for 76 days, recalls how his nineteen-ton, forty-three-foot schooner and a heavy cruiser were both sunk by whales in the 1970s.[v] Dr. Payne also has boat breaching stories. “There’s a woman who works in my laboratory who had a whale breach directly on top of her boat. Not a glancing blow, but a direct hit across the bow. The boat was totaled…”

In 2015, a 33-ton humpback breached onto a tandem kayak in Monterey Bay, California. Reanalyzing video footage, Tom Mustill, one of the struck kayakers, believes he can see the whale “sticking its eyes out and taking a look at us while he’s in the air.” He speculates that the whale may have calculated its landing so as to avoid full body impact. Mustill is currently making a BBC2 documentary about the incident titled “Humpback Whales: A Detective Story.”

How whales behave around vessels is still an open scientific question. OSU whale mammologist Dr. Leigh Torres asks: “Are there behavior differences based on boat traffic and composition? Whales might react to some boats, but perhaps not others based on speed, approach, motor type, etc.”[vi] The ocean is also getting noisier. One study shows that over the last sixty years ambient noise in the ocean has increased about three to five decibels per decade.[vii] To what extent is this noise stressing out whales, and what kind of reactions will we begin to see?

***

            Dr. Torres told me whales were like a gateway drug for getting people hooked on marine ecology. Since that tricky fin at Fogarty Creek I’ve given them a good amount of thought. It’s partially their size that inspires awe and reflection. Writer Julia Whitty gets at their enormity by thinking about their deaths, comparing whales to old growth trees. She describes whalefall beautifully:

“…the downward journey takes place in the slow motion of the underwater world, as the processes of decomposition produce buoyant gases that duel with the force of gravity in such a way that the carcass rides a gentle elevator up and down on its way down” (178). Once the body hits the ocean floor it provides a “nutritional bonanza of a magnitude that might otherwise take thousands of years to accumulate from the background flow of small detritus from the surface.” A gray takes a year and a half to be “stripped to the bone by the scalpels and stomachs of the deep.” A blue whale can take as long as eleven years. [viii]

But I don’t think it’s just their size that hooks us. They’re mammals, nurse their young, sing to one another. “Flowing like breathing planets,” Gary Snyder writes,[ix] we can only wonder what a whale might know.

As I continue exploring our coast by kayak, I occasionally talk to whales. It no longer seems strange to want to hug one. I attempt to maintain the lawful distance, though now and then one rises close enough to see the individual barnacles studded among old scratches and scribbles. This wordless poetry is like a map into deep time. I realize I want to keep being humbled and a little afraid. I realize I’m hooked.

References

[i] Oregon State University. (2015, August 4). Researchers studying Oregon’s “resident population” of gray whales. Retrieved from                 https://today.oregonstate.edu/archives/2015/aug/researchers-studying-oregon’s-“resident-population”-gray-whales

[ii] Kipling, R. (1914). The Jungle Book (p. 145). New York, NY: Double Day. Retrieved from          https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=LO88AQAAIAAJ&rdid=book-LO88AQAAIAAJ&rdot=1

[iii] White, J. (2016). Talking on the Water (pp. 25-26). San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press.

[iv] Friends of the Earth. (1970). Wake of the Whale (p. 71). San Francisco, CA: Friends of the Earth, Inc.

[v] Steven, C. (2002). Adrift (p. 37). New York, NY: First Mariner Books.

[vi]Oregon State University. (2015, August 4). Researchers studying Oregon’s “resident population” of gray whales. Retrieved from

https://today.oregonstate.edu/archives/2015/aug/researchers-studying-oregon’s-“resident-population”-gray-whales

[vii] Lemos, L. (2016, April 6). Does ocean noise stress-out whales?. In Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Laboratory.       Retrieved from http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/gemmlab/2016/04/06/does-ocean-noise-stress-out-whales/

[viii] Whitty, J. (2010). Deep Blue Home (pp. 178-181). New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

[ix] Snyder, G. (1974). Turtle Island. New York, NY: New Directions Publishing Group. Retrieved from                 https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/mother-earth-her-whales-0

By Dr. Leigh Torres, Director of the GEMM Lab

In our modern world we often share space with people, but never really interact with them. Like right now, I am on a train in France with a bunch of people but I’m not interacting with any of them (maybe because I don’t speak French…). This situation extends to our efforts to understand the bycatch of marine predators in fisheries.

Productivity in the ocean is patchy, so both fishing vessels and marine predators, like seabirds and dolphins, may target the same areas to get their prey. This scenario can be considered spatial overlap, but not necessarily interaction because the two entities (predator and vessel) can independently chose to be in the same place at the same time. Also, overlap can happen at larger spatial and temporal scales than interaction events, which typically must occur at small scales. Again, consider me on this train: all my fellow passengers and I are overlapping on a 500 m long train for 2.5 hours (larger scale) but I only interact with the passenger in the seat 1 m across from me for a minute (smaller scale) while I explain that I don’t understand what they are saying.

Distinguishing overlap from interaction between seabirds and fishing vessels is important to help managers determine how to best direct their efforts to reduce bycatch. Different management approaches can be applied depending on whether seabirds are using the same habitat as fishing vessels (overlap) or are attracted to vessels for feeding opportunities (interaction) and then incidentally caught/injured in the fishing gear. Furthermore, if we can describe discrete interaction events we may also be able to identify the individual fishing vessel, fishing gear used, country of origin, and other such specific information that can help direct bycatch reduction efforts.

However, studying the spatial and temporal relationships between seabirds and fishing vessels is challenging, and highly dependent on the quality of data we have, or can collect, about the movements of birds and boats at-sea. Tracking the movements of seabirds has evolved rapidly with the development of tagging technology and miniaturization, so that over the past 10 years seabird ecologists have collected a large amount of high-resolution GPS data of seabird foraging. While these data reveal fascinating patterns of seabird ecology, our ability to relate these seabird distribution data to fishing vessels has remained limited due to limited access to fishing vessel location data. Historically, fishermen have not wanted to divulge their fishing locations for fear of losing their ‘secret sweet spot’ or regulatory infractions. So, where fishing vessels fish has often been a mystery, at least fine scales. For a long time fishing effort data was only released at scales of 5 x 5 degree grid cells and monthly scales (Fig. 1) (Phillips et al. 2006), which is only broadly useful for assessment of overlap and not useful for assessing interaction events. The situation has improved in some countries where Vessel Monitoring Systems (VMS) data are available but even these GPS data are often too coarse to reveal interaction events (although it’s much better than what was previously available!). In fact, I wrote a paper about this topic in 2013 called “Scaling down the analysis of seabird-fisheries analysis” that called for higher resolution vessel position data to better evaluate and manage seabird and fishing vessel interactions (Torres et al. 2013).

Progress was made in 2016 with the release of Global Fishing Watch (globalfishingwatch.org) that has significantly increased transparency in the fishing industry and revolutionized our ability to monitor fishing vessel activities (Robards et al. 2016). Almost every fishing vessel in the world is required to use the Automated Identification System (AIS) that pings GPS quality position data to satellite and shore receiving stations around the world. AIS was originally developed to increase maritime safety by reducing collision risk, but Global Fishing Watch has developed methods to acquire these AIS data globally, distinguish fishing vessels (from cargo ships or sailing vessels), classify fishing vessels by fishing method, and disseminate these data in an accessible and visually understandable able format (de Souza et al. 2016; Kroodsma et al. 2018). When I saw the Global Fishing Watch website for the first time I actually let out a ‘Woohoo!’ because I knew this was the missing piece I needed to move from overlap to interaction.

So, I assembled a great team of collaborators including Dr. Rachael Orben – seabird movement ecologist extraordinaire – and colleagues who have collected GPS tracking data from three species of albatross in the North Pacific Ocean. Another important step was acquiring funding to support the research effort from the NOAA Bycatch Reduction Engineering Program, and to establish a collaboration with Global Fishing Watch.  Fast forward a year and through many data analysis and R coding puzzles, and we have made the jump from overlap to interaction, with some preliminary results to share.

We compiled GPS tracks representing foraging trips conducted by Laysan (Phoebastria immutabilis) and black-footed (P. nigripes) albatrosses breeding in the Hawaiian islands, and juvenile short-tailed albatross (P. albatrus) from Japan. First we identified overlap between bird and boat at daily and 80 km scales. Next, we quantified encounter events at scales of 10 minutes and between 30 and 3 km, which was the assumed distance at which birds are able to perceive a boat. Finally, interaction events were identified when birds and boats were within 3 km and 10 minutes of each other.

At an absolute level, short-tailed albatross overlapped, encountered and interacted with many more fishing vessels than black-footed and Laysan albatross. However, it is important to point out that these results may be biased by the temporal sampling resolution of the GPS tracking data (how often a location was recorded), which we have not accounted for yet. Nevertheless, what is interesting is that when the percent of interaction events that derived from encounter events is assessed, black-footed and Laysan albatross demonstrate much higher rates of fisheries interactions. These results indicate that when a black-footed albatross encountered a fishing vessel engaged in fishing, nearly 50% of these opportunities turned into an interaction event. This rate was 39 and 26 percent for Laysan and short-tailed albatross respectively. This species-level difference between absolute and relative (percentage) interaction with fisheries may be due to the overall distribution patterns of the different albatross species, with short-tailed albatross using areas that overlap with fishing activity more frequently (coastal margins). Furthermore, these results indicate that short-tailed albatross may be more ‘vessel-shy’ than black-footed and Laysan albatross. The high black-footed albatross percent interaction rate aligns with the high by-catch rate of this species, and emphasizes the need to better understand and manage their interactions with fishing vessels.

While these results from our novel analysis are an interesting start to helping inform bycatch mitigation efforts, perhaps the most illustrative (and coolest!) output so far are the below animations that show the fine-scale movement tracks of an albatross and fishing vessel (Fig. 2 and 3). Both animations are a 24 hour period and show an albatross (red dot) and a fishing vessel (yellow dot). But, Figure 2 illustrates an overlap event, where the bird and boat clearly overlap spatially and temporally but do not interact. However, in Figure 3 we see how the albatross flies directly to the vessel and the bird and vessel remain spatially and temporally linked, demonstrating an interaction event. Our next steps are to improve our ability to distinguish these interaction events (assessment of duration and trajectory correspondence) and to describe the driving factors (e.g., albatross species, fishing vessel method and flag nation, environmental variables) that lead an albatross to move from overlap to interaction.

Figure 2. Fine-scale animation of overlap between the movement path of a Laysan albatross GPS track and the AIS track of a fishing vessel, overlaid on bathymetry. While the bird and boat overlap at this scale, the animation illustrates how the bird and boat do not interact with each other.

Figure 3. Fine-scale animation of overlap between the movement path of a Laysan albatross GPS track and the AIS track of a fishing vessel, overlaid on bathymetry. This animation illustrates how the bird and boat act independently at the start, and then the bird travels directly to the vessel’s location and the movements of the two entities corresponded spatially and temporally, demonstrating a clear interaction event.

References

de Souza, Erico N., Kristina Boerder, Stan Matwin, and Boris Worm. 2016. ‘Improving Fishing Pattern Detection from Satellite AIS Using Data Mining and Machine Learning’, PLoS ONE, 11: e0158248.

Kroodsma, David A., Juan Mayorga, Timothy Hochberg, Nathan A. Miller, Kristina Boerder, Francesco Ferretti, Alex Wilson, Bjorn Bergman, Timothy D. White, Barbara A. Block, Paul Woods, Brian Sullivan, Christopher Costello, and Boris Worm. 2018. ‘Tracking the global footprint of fisheries’, Science, 359: 904-08.

Phillips, R. A., J. R. D. Silk, J. P. Croxall, and V. Afanasyev. 2006. ‘Year-round distribution of white-chinned petrels from South Georgia: Relationships with oceanography and fisheries’, Biological Conservation, 129: 336-47.

Robards, MD, GK Silber, JD Adams, J Arroyo, D Lorenzini, K Schwehr, and J Amos. 2016. ‘Conservation science and policy applications of the marine vessel Automatic Identification System (AIS)—a review’, Bulletin of Marine Science, 92: 75-103.

Torres, Leigh G., P. M. Sagar, D. R. Thompson, and R. A. Phillips. 2013. ‘Scaling-down the analysis of seabird-fishery interactions’, Marine Ecology Progress Series, 473.

By Erin Pickett, M.Sc. (GEMM Lab member 2014-2016)

Field Assistant, Kaua’i Endangered Seabird Recovery Project

I heaved my body up with both arms, swung one leg up and attempted to muster any remaining energy I had into standing on the ridgeline of the valley that I had just crawled out of. Soaked from the rain, face covered with bits of dirt and with ferns sticking out of my hair I probably resembled a creature crawling out of a swamp. I smiled at this thought knowing that my dramatic emergence from the swamp might have been captured on a nearby motion-sensing trail camera.

I surveyed my surroundings to gain my bearings. I was searching for seabird burrows in a densely vegetated valley called Upper Limahuli Preserve in the mountains of Kaua’i, Hawaii. I was looking for the nests of the endangered Hawaiian Petrel (or ‘Ua’u in Hawaiian) and the threated Newell’s Shearwater (A’o), Hawaii’s only two endemic (found nowhere else in the world) Procellarid species. I registered the trail, the nearby fence line and the two valleys on either side of the ridge I was standing on. If a drone had photographed me from above, the scene of lush green mountains, waterfalls and rugged cliffs would not only look like the views from the helicopter arrival scene in the movie Jurassic Park, but indeed was the same Nā Pali coastline.

When I finished my graduate program at Oregon State University in 2017, I began working for a project called the Kaua’i Endangered Seabird Recovery Project (KESRP). Our work at KESRP focuses on monitoring Kauai’s populations of breeding a’o and ‘ua’u, mitigating on-land threats through recovery activities and conducting research (e.g. habitat modeling & at-sea tracking) to learn more about the two species.

An estimated 90% of the Newell’s Shearwater population breeds on the island of Kaua’i, as does a large portion of the Hawaiian Petrel population. Both populations have declined rapidly on Kaua’i over the past two decades, where radar surveys found a 78% decrease of Hawaiian Petrels and a 94% decrease in overall numbers of Newell’s Shearwaters (Raine et al., 2017). Light pollution, collision with electrical power lines, and invasive vertebrate predators represent primary threats to both the a’o and ‘ua’u while on land during the breeding season. As with all seabirds that nest on islands, the a’o and ‘ua’u are easy prey for invasive species such as feral cats and black rats, thus, there is a large effort within our study area to alleviate the threat of these predators.

The purpose of my burrow search effort on this day was to find suitable candidate burrows for a translocation project that KESRP has undertaken since 2015. This fall, we will attempt to relocate via helicopter up to 20 a’o and ‘ua’u chicks from the mountains of Kaua’i, where they are vulnerable to invasive predators, to a predator-proof fenced area located within nearby Kīlauea National Wildlife Refuge. The ultimate aim of our translocation project, a critical component of the Nihokū Ecosystem Restoration Project, is to establish successful breeding colonies of a’o and ‘ua’u within the protected boundaries of a fence that is impermeable to rats, cats, and pigs.

On Kaua’i, the imperiled a’o and ‘ua’u nest on verdant cliffs amid native Hawaiian uluhe ferns and ‘ohi‘a lehua trees. Both species raise their chicks in burrows that can only be located by humans after an extensive search effort that involves scanning the densely vegetated forest floor for tiny feathers and guano trails, and following the musty scent of seabirds until an underground tunnel is found, sometimes with a bird nestled inside.

My afternoon of burrow searching had been strenuous, and being day three it had already been a long week in the field so I sighed and started heading in the direction that would lead me back to our field camp. Though, after a few steps I caught the musty smell of seabird in the air and immediately stopped walking. Like an animal, I followed my nose and turned my head over my right shoulder and sniffed the air. I climbed over the fence that separated the trail I was hiking on from the 3,000 foot drop into the valley below, carefully positioned my feet on the fragile cliff side and lifted a large tuft of grass to find a freshly dug hole that smelled unmistakably like a seabird.

Either a prospecting Hawaiian Petrel or Newell’s Shearwater had broken ground on this new burrow the night before. The birds had been busy digging into the cliff side while I had been conducting an auditory survey a few hundred meters away. The auditory survey had begun at sunset and over the course of the next two hours I listened for and recorded the locations of seabirds transiting overhead, heading from the sea to the mountains and calling from their burrows nearby. Ideally, this auditory survey would help me pinpoint locations of ‘ground callers’ who’s raucous would lead me to their burrows the next day.

Finding a burrow is not often as easy as pinpointing the location of a ground caller, catching a whiff of seabird near that location and immediately locating a hole in the ground. Yet, finding a burrow that is ‘reachable’ and that is reasonably close to a helicopter landing zone, is even more difficult. And this task is one of our objectives throughout the field season this year.

If you’re interested in keeping up with our progress you can follow KESRP on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kauaiseabirdproject/

Reference(s):

Raine, A. F., Holmes, N. D., Travers, M., Cooper, B. A., & Day, R. H. (2017). Declining population trends of Hawaiian Petrel and Newell’s Shearwater on the island of Kaua‘i, Hawaii, USA. The Condor, 119(3), 405-415.

By Julia Stepanuk, PhD student, department of Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook University

Hello GEMM Lab blog readers! I’m a PhD student in Lesley Thorne’s lab at Stony Brook University in New York and I spent this past week with the GEMM Lab learning their protocol for drone flights and gaining experience flying over whales. I saw my first gray whales just off the coast of Newport, Oregon and assisted with the GEMM Lab’s summer field research. We luckily had 4 days of great weather in a row, so I got tons of experience conducting research that integrates drone flights that I can bring home to our lab. It was really exciting to observe and learn from the well-oiled machine that is the GEMM Lab. Information about their gray whale project can be found here and here, but I want to focus on how my experiences here in Newport can translate to my research interests off the coast of Long Island.

Our lab in New York has a range of interesting projects currently underway: we study everything from decadal trends in sea turtle diets to how frequently herring gulls visit urban habitats for food around New York City. My research focuses on the whales around New York, specifically humpback whales. Humpback whales are very well studied in many parts of the world, especially in the Northwest Atlantic. The initial photo-identification studies were conducted in the Gulf of Maine in the 1970s (Katona et al., 1979), and the North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catalogue is still going strong with over 8,000 individual whales catalogued! Recently though, many people have reported humpback whales in a new area: the waters around New York and Long Island. Yet, we don’t understand how these whales fit in with the rest of the humpback population in the North Atlantic. We do know that they feed along the shores of New York City and Long Island, and they are primarily consuming menhaden (also known as bunker or pogy), a forage fish that is vital to both our economic and environmental systems in the Northeast U.S. (see: Six reasons why menhaden is the greatest fish we ever fished).

The habitat use and behavior of humpbacks in this part of the world is important for two reasons: 1) this population of humpback whales has recovered from the detrimental population-level impacts of industrial whaling in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and thus was recently delisted from the endangered species list; and 2) humpback whales in the Northwest Atlantic are at-risk from ship strikes and fishing gear entanglement, so much so that NOAA declared an unusual mortality event for 2016-2018. In fact, 4 humpback whales washed up dead on the shore of Long Island in the last 30 days! These facts lead to my motivation for my PhD studies: where are humpback whales in the vicinity of New York City and how do they use the environment around Long Island? I specifically want to investigate the trophic relationship between humpback whales and menhaden.

There are a number of studies where researchers have used photogrammetry from drones to document the body condition of marine mammal species (Burnett et al., in press; Christiansen et al., 2016; Christiansen et al., 2018; Dawson et al., 2017; Perryman and Lynn., 2002), which I plan to extend to the humpback whales around Long Island. I will conduct photogrammetry of the humpback whales off Long Island and will document the individual whales, their behaviors, and their prey sources. Because scientists are now documenting and monitoring body condition of humpback whales in many parts of the world, we can compare the overall health and body condition of humpbacks in New York to those in other habitats. Further, by documenting the schools of menhaden they are consuming, we can better assess the trophic relationship between humpbacks and menhaden in a foraging habitat adjacent to one of the largest cities on the planet.

I am so grateful to the GEMM Lab for sharing information and skills with me over the past week and am excited to bring my new skillset back to our lab at Stony Brook! Aside from drone skills, I learned that gray whales are very flexible, and their mottled skin is absolutely beautiful! I also learned that my peanut butter and jelly sandwich making skills are passable (you have to find a way to keep the jelly from leaking through the bread on a hot day on a boat!) and I learned how to collect fecal samples from whales (put a net in the water, and scoop up the pieces of whale poo). I am also now hooked on the FIFA World Cup matches and will be losing lots of sleep in the next few weeks while I diligently follow my new favorite teams. Thank you again to the GEMM lab for being so supportive and welcoming! For an influx of east coast megafauna research, follow the Thorne Lab blog as our many spatial marine megafauna projects get underway, and follow me on twitter as I pursue a PhD!

References

Burnett, J.D., Lemos, L., Barlow, D.R., Wing, M.G., Chandler, T.E. & Torres, L.G. (in press) Estimating morphometric attributes of baleen whales with photogrammetry from small UAS: A case study with blue and gray whales. Marine Mammal Science.

Christiansen, F., Dujon, A.M., Sprogis, K.R., Arnould, J.P.Y., Bejder, L., 2016. Noninvasive unmanned aerial vehicle provides estimates of the energetic cost of reproduction in humpback whales. Ecosphere 7

Christiansen, F., Vivier, F., Charlton, C., Ward, R., Amerson, A., Burnell, S., Bejder, L., 2018. Maternal body size and condition determine calf growth rates in southern right whales. Marine Ecology Progress Series 592, 267–281.

Dawson, S.M., Bowman, M.H., Leunissen, E., Sirguey, P., 2017. Inexpensive Aerial Photogrammetry for Studies of Whales and Large Marine Animals. Front. Mar. Sci. 4.

Katona, S., B. Baxter, 0. Brazier, S. Kraus, J. Perkins AND H. Whitehead. 1979. Identification of humpback whales by fluke photographs. Pages 33-44 in H.E. Winn and B.L. Olla, eds. Behavior of marine animals. Current perspectives in research. Vol. 3: Cetaceans. Plenum Press. New York.

Perryman WL, Lynn MS. 2002. Evaluation of nutritive condition and reproductive status of migrating gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus) based on analysis of photogrammetric data. J. Cetacean Res. Manage. 4(2):155-164.