Month: January 2016

It’s hard to keep a straight face when you’re trying to write something serious about bubbles

By: Erin Pickett

When I was in middle school I wrote a report about bubble rings but I don’t remember if I had the same problem I do now of trying to sound serious, I was probably less concerned about that at the time. That paper was about individual ring-shaped bubbles, like the kind dolphins (or humans like me) blow underwater. This blog is about the bubble nets that humpback whales create to corral their prey underwater (I have yet to master this skill).

I have just finished auditing about 7.5 hours of video footage that we obtained from the suction cup tag we deployed on a Humpback whale earlier this month. My objective was to create a detailed log of underwater foraging behavior. We were especially interested in recording video footage and collecting fine-scale movement data from the whale during coordinated bubble net feeding events. This video footage is the first of its kind documenting this type of feeding behavior in Antarctic Humpback whales.

I found many occurrences of both bubble net and lunge feeding events, and in some cases the underwater visibility was good enough to observe other whales in the video frames. Throughout most of the 7.5 hours the tagged whale was travelling and foraging with at least one other whale, but at one point up to three other individuals were present. Other notable behavior included vocalizations and pectoral fin slapping on the surface of the water. Krill were frequently observed rushing by the forward facing camera just after lunge events.

Watching these videos over the course of a few days I became kind of committed to this whale’s story, and where each video ended and another began I found a narration running through my head that went something like, “next time on the life of the whale… will he find more food?” When the final video ended I even felt a little sad that I wouldn’t be able to keep following him on his journey.

I’ve included some screen shots below to give you a better idea of what I observed while watching the videos.

A lone Antarctic krill passing by the camera
A lone Antarctic krill passing by the camera
If you look closely you'll see two whales in the top frame (left side of the whale) and one whale in the bottom frame (right side of the whale)
If you look closely you’ll see two whales in the top frame (left side of the whale) and one whale in the bottom frame (right side of the whale)
This frame captured a whale slapping it's pectoral fin on the surface of the water
This frame captured a whale slapping it’s pectoral fin on the surface of the water
Another whale blowing bubbles in the background
Another whale blowing bubbles in the background
This frame looks over the front left side of the tagged whale and you can see the bubbles rushing by. You'll also notice a barnacle stuck to this whale.
This frame looks over the front left side of the tagged whale and you can see the bubbles rushing by. You’ll also notice a barnacle stuck to this whale.

P.S. I named this whale Mr. Opihi man, since the barnacles and the suction cups stuck to his back reminded me of the way Opihi (the Hawaiian word for limpet) stick to the rocks.

Storm Petrel Central: a gathering of birds above a whale fall?

Guest blog entry by: Dr. Doug Nowacek-Duke University (Co PI on Palmer LTER marine mammal project)

We spend a lot of time on the water, which we really enjoy because we get to see not only the humpback and minke whales we are studying but also all the other wildlife (penguins, seals, flying birds) and this amazing environment around Palmer. Just in the last two days (while we haven’t seen any whales!) we have seen this area in several different moods – from bright sunshine to cloudy with very cool lighting to a veritable blizzard! So, while we are doing our surveys for whales and/or krill, we are always on the lookout for animals, ice, or whatever. Sometimes when you’re paying attention, you see things that you may otherwise overlook, and while some of the things you notice turn out to be just a passing bird or seal, sometimes what you notice turns out to be amazing, cool, and interesting.

Each and every time Logan and I would pass the corner of Cormorant Island in the southeast corner of the boating area (see the Palmer Station Area map), we would see a small to medium sized grouping of Wilson’s storm petrels, sometimes joined by a few southern giant petrels (GPs). The first time or two I noticed the gathering of petrels, I didn’t think much of it, but then I realized that every time we passed that location (which has been often as we search for these bloody whales!), the birds were there. The storm petrels, as they do, would be flitting about and ‘dancing’ on the surface of the water collecting food. Well, we noticed this phenomenon enough times that we thought there must be something to it, but what could be attracting the petrels to the same spot all the time? Yesterday we did some echosounder surveys for krill in the area, and we decided to head to ‘storm petrel central’, and if the birds were again in that spot, we would run the echosounders over the area to see if there was a big krill patch. When we arrived, the birds were there as always, probably 20 storm petrels and 4-5 GPs. We approached slowly with the echosounders on and planned to do a couple loops around the spot; the GPs took off, but the storm petrels hardly knew we were there as they kept dancing around on the surface, presumably grabbing food. Well, the echosounders showed nothing in the water column…but, as we glided over the area we noticed two things (in addition to the birds!) at the surface. First, we saw small oil droplets coming to and breaking at the surface and quickly dissipating. Second, we smelled a smell that relatively few people in the world have smelled…dead whale!! We stayed for several minutes, while Logan took ~200 photos! And we continued to see little oil droplets and the storm petrels going nuts, with some of them actually diving beneath the surface, which is rare for them, I believe. The birds would change locations a bit and dance along the surface 30-40 feet from what seemed to be the center of the action, but the activity was very much centrally located to our spot and our presence did not deter them in the least.

Could there be a dead whale at the bottom here? And as it decomposes releasing little tasty bits for the birds? We went back today with the Station doctor after he joined us for some more krill surveys. The birds were most certainly there, maybe even more storm petrels today, and we actually saw some very small white chunks come near the surface and get snatched up by the little ‘butterflies of the sea’, as they are called in French. We also saw a good bit more oil hit the surface, and that unmistakable smell was in full force!!

Storm petrel central has been one of those cool experiences we didn’t expect to have, but will be an indelible memory of our work this year. And, who knows, if the Station gets an ROV soon, maybe someone could go have a look at our suspected dead whale!

 

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.

Weather has us at a standstill

By Logan:

The last three days have been pretty tough. We had not seen any whales since the 20th. The weather has been pretty unforgiving, and the winds have pushed a lot of ice in the inlet making it hard to get the zodiacs away from the pier. The weather finally let up today and we were fortunate to travel within the extended boating limits with the bird group to dream island and Biscoe bay.

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A spiky iceberg
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Light shines through the thin parts of the ice making the blueish glow
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A large tabular iceberg sits about 2 miles away
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A large tabular iceberg we estimated to be 10 stories tall
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Brash ice that blew into the harbor making it hard to get out in the zodiacs

We sampled three whales today, but probably seen some where around half a dozen in total. The many icebergs within the boating limits make it hard to follow and see the whales at distance. We have collected 13 biopsy samples thus far. So far it has been a pretty slow year. We also had two Adélie penguins jump into our boat today while we were sampling.

We photographed one whale, presumed female because it was accompanied by a juvenile, which had intense scarring on the left side near the dorsal. We are unsure what may have caused it, but it looks as if it is from a potential fishery line interaction. We have yet to have a re-sight within the palmer boating limits, which is a sign that the whales are moving in and out of the area quite rapidly. This is good for us, as it means we will get a sample from a wider range of individuals.

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Humpback whale with large scar on left anterior side
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Fluke of large female whale

The weather is supposed to be good for the next couple day so hopefully we will be able to get some more echo sounder surveys in and look for krill biomass, and of course get some more whale samples. We were able to see some large mountains today as the sky began to open up.

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Mt. Williams 4,965 feet

 

Will post again soon!!

25-mm sample – 45-foot whale

By: Logan

We learn a huge amount about the humpback whales we study from tiny samples of skin and underlying blubber. We use a specially designed remote biopsy dart system, which we fire from a crossbow, to obtain a tiny sample from each whale we identify in the field.

Each sample measures about 25 mm in length and 5 mm in diameter and weighs only a few grams. In contrast, the whales are about 15 meters long and weigh 40 to 50 tons. The best analogy we can think of is that it’s like a mosquito bite to you or me.

Humpback whale biopsy. Skin is black and blubber is pink/white.

We work hard to ensure that we identify each whale before attempting to sample it. We try to not resample an individual within a field season. We do this by comparing pictures of an animal’s fluke, which is unique to the individual, with our current biopsy/fluke catalog, which is stored on an iPad that we bring onboard. We are able to utilize the pigmentation and scarring of the flukes to identify individuals. If the whale is new to us, we move our Zodiac alongside the whale and fire the biopsy dart at its flank when it arches to dive, usually from a distance of 10 or 15 meters. We are extremely careful throughout the entire sampling process as to not get ahead of the whale or get directly behind its fluke. So far Doug is an excellent driver, and if not for today, I would have a 90% shooting rate, but now am sitting back down around 50%.

Fluke of Mn16_017B_P. Has killer whale rake marks on fluke.

 

 

 

Female humpback that had a calf. Biopsied animal Mn16_017B_P.

 

 

The tiny samples provide an enormous amount of information about each whale we sample, including its sex, recent dietary history, reproductive status, and health. We also use genetic markers to infer which breeding population the whale comes from.

Part of my master’s work will be to conduct progesterone assays on the blubber from our samples to determine if female whales are pregnant. We have successfully now documented variations in pregnancy in our samples from 2010, 13, and 14. We are really excited to look at 2015 and this year’s samples over the summer.

Whales! Whales! Whales! Whales! Whales!

By: Logan Pallin

So it has been an exciting few days here at Palmer Station. We happened upon our first humpback whale while out calibrating the echo sounders (fancy fish finders), which are an adventure of their own. Doug and I spend most of our working days here at Palmer Station floating around whales in our trusty Zodiac. Most of the time it is a comfortable quaint little office, with space for all of our equipment and, importantly for the work we do, a very good platform to approach whales.

Cruising in the Zodiac. I am in the front of the zodiac ready to collect a biopsy.
Cruising in the zodiac. There is a humpback whale in between us and JD, the photographer.

We work in quite hostile environments, so safety is paramount. We have survival equipment on board and there are caches with tents and stoves on some of the islands in our study area, just in case the weather comes up quickly. And it really can come up quickly. One moment it’s calm and pleasant and the next we are in the middle of a blizzard. We keep in touch with the Station by calling in our position every 30 minutes on the VHF radio.

We were out sampling on Sunday when we happened to come across a mom and her calf. Then out of nowhere, a large ominous dorsal fin came up just to our starboard side. It was huge!! It was a large bull killer whale (Orca). Next thing we know we are in a group of 7 killer whales. It was quite spectacular.

Female Killer Whale
Bull (male) killer whale

We have 6 biopsies so far. We were fortunate to go outside the boating limits today to Dream Island. We were accompanied by the birder group who was counting skua chicks and eggs on Dream. We saw three more humpbacks today and a minke whale, that disappeared after about 10 seconds. One of the humpbacks, whom I named the fat pig, was surface lunge feeding. It was amazing to witness. This particular whale would dive and releasing a net of bubbles to concentrate its prey, we call this phenomena bubble net feeding. The animal would then lunge up through the center of the ring of bubbles, opening its mouth and filling his large bucal cavity with water and krill. It would then roll over on its right side, lazily like and slosh its pectoral and fluke fins around for a while. This series of actions was repeated several times.

Humpback whale lunge feeding
Humpback coming up for air

There is still a lot of ice around which makes getting in and out of the boat ramp quite difficult. Also makes sighting whales quite challenging as well. The crabeater seals are quite pleased with the amount of ice however. Doug and I will be going back out tomorrow to finish the echo sounder calibration so we can start prey mapping (looking for krill).

Will post again soon!!

A Piece of Ice Floating in the Harbor Raft of Crabeater Seals Ice Berg in the Harbor

Photos!

I’ve just finished uploading some great photos of the past week on the ship, here.

You’ll notice this is the same blog post from yesterday on a different website. You can find photos at the end of the most recent post. I encourage you to read more of the blogs on that site, which is the blog site for the Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna lab at Oregon State University.

-Erin

I don’t know if it was sunrise or sunset, but it was beautiful

By: Erin Pickett

Yesterday someone said to me, “I don’t know if it was sunrise or sunset, but it was beautiful” So it goes on the LMG, the surrounding scenery is incredible but the general work schedule on this research ship makes it difficult to remember what time of day it is.
Here on the Antarctic Peninsula, the sun never really sets and our daily schedules are dependent on things like the diel vertical migration of krill, the current wind speed and the amount of sea ice in between us and our study species, the humpback whale. For these reasons, we sometimes find ourselves starting our workday at odd hours, like 11:45 pm (or 4:00 am).
We are about one week into our journey and so far, so good! We have spent the last four days transiting between various sampling stations around Palmer deep, which is an underwater canyon just south of our home base at Palmer station. When conditions allowed, we loaded up our tagging and biopsy gear into a small boat and went to look for humpback whales. We’ve been incredibly successful with the limited amount of time we’ve had on the water and this morning we finished deploying our sixth tag.
We brought a few different types of satellite tags with us to deploy on humpback whales. One type is an implantable satellite tag that transmits location data over a long period of time. These data allow us to gain a better understanding of the large-scale movement and distribution patterns of these animals. The other tag we deploy is a suction cup tag, named for the four small suction cups that attach the tag to the whale. These multi-sensor tags measure location as well as fine scale underwater movement (e.g. pitch, roll, and heading). They are also equipped with forward and backward facing cameras and most importantly, radio transmitters! This allows us to recover the tags once they fall off the animal and float to the surface (after about 24 hours). The data we get from these tags will allow us to quantify fine-scale foraging behavior in terms of underwater maneuverability, prey type and the frequency, depth and time of day that feeding occurs.
When we deployed each of these tags we also obtained a biopsy sample and fluke photos. Fluke photos and biopsy samples allow us to distinguish between individual animals, and the biopsy samples will also be used to study the demographics of this population through genetic analysis.
Now that we’ve deployed all of our satellite tags and have recovered the suction cup tag just in the nick of time (!), we are starting our first major transect line toward the continental shelf. We will be continuing south along these grid lines for the next week.
Right now we don’t have a good enough internet connection on the ship to post photos, but I’m hoping to get around that and have a few up for you soon!

Torgersen Island Adelie Penguins

Logan: Today I had the pleasure of visiting the Torgersen Island Adelie Penguin colony. We can see the colony from station at a distance. We circled the island in the zodiac and I admired the tall peaks of jagged rock that these penguins somehow managed to traverse to get to the nesting sites. Unfortunately we had to approach the loading zone down wind of the colony, an area you do not want to be if you have a weak stomach. Immediately my stomach began to churn as I smelled the distasteful odor of Adelie guano that lined the rocky terrain in a pink shear.

We landed on the island and I quickly began to traverse the rock terrain to the peak of the island near the colony nesting sites. We were instructed earlier in the day that the chicks had already hatched and that we were to remain at distance as to not distract the parents with chicks. The Brown Skua, a large predatory bird, takes advantage of unprotected chicks, carrying them away from the colony to feed on the tiny brown fluff balls. I managed to find a good spot to sit on the rocks and turn on my GoPro and just sit and observe the activities of these beautiful birds. The noise that this colony could produce was outstanding. I watched these birds interact with each other in many different ways. Some would raise their necks high into the air as a sign of what I believed to be courtship, while others were just laid on the ground trying to stay cool. This particular colony is in decline. These penguins are an ice dependent species, and as the climate in this area continues to warm, this colony will likely disappear.

Erin, Ari, and Doug are still out on the LMG trying to place our suction cup tags on nearby humpback whales. Have not heard from them yet, but hopefully I get a call that a tag has been placed. That is all for today!!!