Echosounder

Beginning in 2008, Beam Reach partnered with Ballard/Seattle-based Biosonics Incorporated to conduct hydroacoustic surveys in the critical habitat of the southern resident killer whales. Mobile surveys of potential prey (salmon) were first conducted during the spring 2008 Beam Reach program using a 200kHz downward-looking split-beam echosounder. Through a collaboration with The Whale Museum, the same system was deployed horizontally on a fixed tripod to observe passing fish and cabled to a remote monitoring station housed within the lighthouse at Lime Kiln State Park.

• Mobile survey screenshots
• Flickr photos
• Related Beam Reach blog entries
• DT-X Echosounder system description
• Field notes from fixed survey

Preliminary results from the 2008 deployments were presented as posters at the 2009 Puget Sound Georgia Basin Conference in Seattle (Feb 9, 2009). Digital copies of the posters will be available after the conference:

• Hydroacoustic assessment of the prey field for killer whales in Haro Strait (Scott Veirs*, Brian Moore, Bob McClure, Robert Otis, Jason Wood and Val Veirs)
• Continuous, real-time acoustic observation of orca and salmon at Lime Kiln State Park (Bob McClure*, Brian Moore, Scott Veirs)

More analysis was presented in a talk at the spring 2009 meeting of the Acoustical Society of America:

• Killer whale habitat use and prey fields from remote hydrophones and echosounders (Scott Veirs, Val Veirs, Jason Wood, Brian Moore, Bob McClure, and Bob Otis)