Shipmate Update - Students Set Sail!In this September, 2007, edition:
- Orcas surfaced right next to our boat! Orcas surfaced right next to our boat! "....the whales took a dive and the front few surfaced right next to our boat! It was incredible! We cut the engines, there were about 8 individuals and we could see the white on their bodies as they were about 2m under the surface of the water. They surfaced again this time right under the forward starboard section of the cat, less than 2m from where we were standing! It was incredible to see their almost 6ft tall dorsal fins protrude out of the water with such grace. I told myself that while I'm up here out on the boat I really want to all of a sudden see the orcas surface right beside the boat, and it happened the second day I was on the boat! It was bloody awesome and I'm sure if you videoed me I would have looked like a little kid getting excited when he opens his xmas presents. Mind you, we were all extremely pumped and adrenaline was rushing. It truly was an exhilarating experience to be that close to such a large graceful creature, one that I will treasure forever I'm sure. I got a couple of good photos and a video of the experience but my excitement missed some good shots. Can you blame me?! The whales headed in a different direction to where we were due to moor for the night, so we cruised on into Prevost Harbor on the NW side of Stuart Island and set up "camp" for the night. It was an awesome day, witnessing one of my favourite creatures in their natural habitat and being soo lucky that they chose to change path and appear right next to the boat I was on. Days like this make me realise how lucky I am to be here." -- Tim Hunt, Beam Reach 071, read Tim's blog Students Dive In! Phew, they all passed the swim test. It's not really a test, you just jump in and jump out. But you've gotta do it before you can set sail. So, like the intrepid folks before them, they all jumped. (if your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too...)"....the swim test is something that will always stick in my head as a memorable moment. There was so much hype and build up so it was just funny to watch everyone jump in and scream about how cold it was, and jumping off the dock was fun too!" -- Liz Hetherington Beam Reach 071
First ever mother/calf recording! An amazing scientific feat was accomplished during the first week of the fall 2007 program. At the end of the first deployment of our hydrophone array, a mother and calf were recorded vocalizing on the west side of San Juan Island. While orca calves rarely leave their mother's side, this calf seemed adventurous. It left its mother and another female foraging along a tidal front, approached the hydrophone array we were towing, made an underwater turn to parallel our heading, surfaced close off our port bow, and then diverged from our course to rejoin its mother.
Luckily, the Beam Reach team was already effectively collecting data when this rare mother/calf separation occurred. Most of us were watching and listening carefully enough to remember the course of events. Todd was helping Sam take bearings on the orca calf with a hand-held compass and Shannon was taking photographs to help identify the whales. I was writing down the bearings and GPS-synchronized times, noting when good calls were heard (listening through the deck speakers). Val's computer was recording the data from each of the four hydrophones in the array. Mike was doing a good job of being Whale Wise and maintaining a steady heading (to keep the array straight).
The localization results tell us a lot. It is clear that the calf's calls are interspersed with the calls of the two nearby adults (mother or brother). This is the first documented call/response interaction of southern resident killer whales! While we have long suspected that the residents call and respond to each other, it isn't clear which animal makes which sound when listening through a single hydrophone. The array enables us to learn that different animals are making the calls. It also allows us to assign particular calls -- and even voices -- to specific individuals. So, now we know what one calf's call sounds like, and we have an opportunity to compare its voice with its mothers voice. This is a fledgling, but critical, first step to voice-recognition in the southern residents. A final breakthrough is being able to visualize the trajectory of the calf underwater. By combining such "passive localization" techniques with acoustic fish tags and bleeding-edge 3-D active sonar technologies (at frequencies above killer whale hearing), we will soon be able to observe how the whales navigate within their complex ecosystem and interact with other animals, their prey, plankton, and the rest of the environment. So, the fall 2007 program has already made a great technological leap. Congratulations all around! Let's hope the Beam Reach class continues to have such great luck. Clearly, we are poised to learn a lot more about the southern residents this year with the array system. Read more about science feats in Scott's blogbook ...
What do you do when whales aren't around? "I had a really great science-experience today....Unfortunately, we didn’t see any whales today, but perhaps what we did accomplish was more important; we not only started planning out our group methods, we actually did a pretty good practice run too.
Sam and I need the hydrophone array for localization purposes, and Ash has volunteered to help us out with that. We have a whole complicated arrangement; after we’ve all worked together to deploy the array into the water (which was an enormous operation because of how tangled the cable was) Sam is taking bearings with the compass, Ash is taking pictures of the orcas, and I'm going to completely ignore the orcas so I can count and ID all the boats in the area. The array is going to be used with Val’s computer and the orange box, which we were trying to name earlier. ....Someone needs to be on the computer too, that’ll probably be me since boats really don't take that long to count. And 400 meters, the radial limit I was originally considering, is actually VERY small! I might have to reassess that distance simply so that I can have a more reliable data pool. Tim and Anne are using the high frequency hydrophone....
....we got some pretty good recordings and data there too. So we practiced methods for orca calls, echolocation clicks AND boat noise. We may not have seen orcas, but I still think today was really great because we were a lot more structured than we tend to be when orcas are around, maybe it’s because it was the first week but it would seem to get a little chaotic whenever orcas were sighted. ....Another important thing about today, now when we DO see orcas, we'll be ready and know exactly what to do."
Fall 2007 (071) classTo learn more about the 10 current students, check out the 071 home page and the 071 blogbook.
Beam Reach and The Whale Museum receive NOAA grantBeam Reach has just been granted funds from the National Oceanic and atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to help expand the Salish Sea Hydrophone Network and use it to raise awareness about underwater sound. Led by The Whale Museum, the project will utilize about $58,000 to maintain the current network, add a monitoring station in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and integrate archived sounds and the live hydrophone streams from http://orcasound.net into learning activities at the Seattle Aquarium, Port Townsend Marine Science Center, and the Makah Cultural and Research Center.
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When the array data were analyzed with software that allows us to "localize" sounds recorded on all four hydrophones, the locations of the calls corresponded well with the visual bearings Sam took and the general sequence of events we all remember (and wrote down). This is remarkable because we have struggled for two years to get all of the technologies functioning together. Courtney (2005) and Peggy (2006) will certainly appreciate how lucky we were to have the ability to localize the calls that were made during this unusual mother/calf interaction.
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