A Whole World of Whales!

Along the upper Sunshine Coast, catching a glimpse of a pod of orca or a humpback whale can be a total thrill. The opportunity to learn more about the marine mammals that travel our coastline takes place November 16 and 17 at Evergreen Theatre in Powell River Recreation Complex.

World of Whales 2018, hosted by Wild Ocean Whale Society (WOWS), features workshops and multimedia presentations open to residents of all ages, and much of it free of charge. It provides a great opportunity to learn from marine experts, according to WOWS founder Susan MacKay.

Presenters from Vancouver Aquarium Marine Mammal Rescue, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) and Hatfield Marine Science Center at Oregon State University will be in attendance. Friday’s daytime workshops will be aimed at students of all ages, while an evening presentation will be geared toward more advanced adult learners, said MacKay.

Saturday is a full-day event and requires preregistration and a $25 fee, which goes toward the cost of a catered lunch and insurance for the venue. WOWS has been a registered charity since 2013.

Saturday workshops will focus on whale identification and issues of safety and entanglement….
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Five Canadian conservation groups petitioned the Government of Canada in January to ban commercial vessels from pursuing the whales that make their summer feeding grounds in the waters off Washington state and B.C.

Now, a task force created by Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has recommended a three- to five-year moratorium on commercial and recreational whale-watching on the southern residents.

The noise generated by small motors interferes with communication between whales and echolocation, which the orcas use to find their prey, said Misty MacDuffee, a program director at the Raincoast Conservation Foundation, one of the groups pressing for a ban.

Whale-watchers were caught off-guard by the announcement, said Pacific Whale Watch Association executive member Brett Soberg, co-owner of Eagle Wing Tours.
"We are surprised to see this option emerge at the 11th hour, without a review of the science and no public comment," he said.
Whale-watchers voluntarily avoided the southern residents this past season when other whale-viewing options were available, and implemented a new larger buffer zone before it became federal law, he said.

In creating the task force, Inslee sought specific actions to address threats to the southern residents, including prey availability, toxic contaminants and disturbance from noise and vessel traffic.

While Canada has pledged to co-ordinate its actions closely with agencies in the U.S., the government has shown no appetite for an outright ban on whale-watching.

In their January petition, Raincoast, the David Suzuki Foundation, the World Wildlife Fund and others sought an emergency order from Ottawa that would have allowed for immediate measures to save the orcas from "immediate threats" to their survival. Their demands included a full ban on whale-watching for the southern residents and restrictions on harvesting south-migrating chinook that sustain the southern residents.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) instead closed parts of the southern residents’ critical feeding areas to commercial and recreational fishing, curtailed the chinook fishery by 35 per cent and this summer increased the whale-watching buffer zone, from 100 to 200 metres.

Conservationists argue that the extended buffer zone makes little difference to the disturbance caused by whale-watching boats.

"They’ve taken some positive steps with fishing closures, but failed to recognize the role that whale-watching plays in disturbing (the southern residents’) behaviour and their ability to locate prey," said MacDuffee. "They didn’t even close (critical feeding) areas to whale-watching."…
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The federal government has declined to issue an emergency order under the Species at Risk Act that would further protect the endangered killer whales off British Columbia’s coast.

An order-in-council issued Thursday said the government has already taken several measures to ensure the recovery of the southern resident killer whales.

Fisheries Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said in a statement Friday that the government “carefully weighed various options” to protect the whales, and it does not believe an emergency order would be helpful.

Misty MacDuffee, a conservation biologist at the Raincoast Conservation Foundation in B.C., said the emergency order would have allowed the government to do certain things it currently doesn’t have legislation or powers to do.

Five conservation groups, represented by the environmental law group Ecojustice, had teamed up to launch legal action aimed at protecting the endangered whales in September.

Lawsuit demands federal departments act to protect southern resident killer whales
In a statement, the groups said they are “deeply disappointed” by cabinet’s rejection of what they believe is the best tool to help the recovery of the whales.

The designation would have allowed the government to cut through red tape and bring in wide-ranging protections for species at risk, it said.

With only 74 animals remaining, southern resident killer whales are in crisis, they said….
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Fisheries and Oceans Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said Wednesday the government wants to establish new areas of critical habitat off the west coast of Vancouver Island for southern resident killer whales.

The protected areas of Swiftsure Bank in the Juan de Fuca Strait between Vancouver Island and Washington state, and La Perouse Bank off Tofino, B.C., will be areas that the whales can call home, he said.

“We are in the process of consulting on those new critical habitat areas and expect to be able to move forward on them in the next couple of months,” he said.

“We are also talking about creation of killer whale sanctuaries, which essentially are within the areas of critical habitat … which means that we can prohibit a range of different activities, not simply fisheries, where you can regulate that ships cannot go.”

The government previously announced $167.4 million would be spent to improve prey availability and reduce disturbances for whales.

Wilkinson said the government will take a closer look at enhancing food sources for whales by putting money into a new hatchery to increase the stock of chinook salmon.

While there have been calls for a ban on chinook salmon fishing, he said the government “hasn’t gone there yet.”

“We’ll certainly be looking at the needs of the southern resident killer whales and trying to ensure balancing economic issues with environmental issues,” he said….
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An underwater hydrophone at Bush Point on Whidbey Island is transmitting the noise beneath the surface of Puget Sound right now. Scientists installed it to pick up sounds from the Southern Resident Killer Whales (SRKW), and those sounds are being streamed live for the rest of us to hear.

“Their clicks that they use for hunting are even more powerful,” said OrcaSound Hydrophone Network Coordinator Scott Veirs. “They’re also directional. So, you will hear a killer whale clicking at least hundreds of meters away, probably kilometers, through this microphone.”

A hydrophone is very sensitive. The one on Whidbey Island is now connected to a soundboard that is transmitting the sounds it records with only a few seconds of delay.

“Just the tapping of a finger or the walking of a crab over a hydrophone will make a sound for us,” Veirs said. “Sometimes we hear kelp rubbing over the hydrophone. It sounds like that.”…
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Two sperm whales spotted near Pond Inlet, Nunavut, are a sign of underlying shifts in the High Arctic ecosystem, according to a scientist who saw the pair when out with an Inuit guide at the end of September.

The group was out at Eclipse Sound, about ten minutes by boat outside of the community, when they saw a pair of dorsal fins and thought they had spotted killer whales.

It was only when they got closer that Pond Inlet guide Titus Allooloo realized it was a kind of whale he’d never seen before.

“They’re not known by us, we don’t know too much about them,” said Allooloo, adding that the whales are not traditionally seen near his community.

“It’s only the second recorded observation of sperm whales in the region. Back in 2014 local hunters spotted them,” explained Brandon Laforest, a World Wildlife Fund scientist….
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A comprehensive aerial survey of whales and dolphins off the coast of South Africa supported by a range of organisations including Fauna & Flora International (FFI) has recorded an astounding 1,106 southern right whales, including 536 calves, an all-time record.

Now in its 39th year, South Africa’s annual survey of southern right whales and other cetaceans is conducted by the Whale Unit at the University of Pretoria’s Mammal Research Institute. Spread over an eight-day period in early October, this year’s survey involved over 36 hours of flying time, during which an eye-watering 20,000 photographs were taken – many of them while hanging (securely) out of a helicopter.

The survey team recorded every whale and dolphin species encountered, but focused specifically on southern right whales, counting every individual along the stretch of coastline from Nature’s Valley to Muizenberg. Photographs were taken of every female accompanied by a calf (each whale can be identified by the unique pattern of callouses on its head). Over the coming months, these images will be analysed with the aid of a computer-assisted image recognition system and cross-referenced with the Whale Unit’s existing catalogue of southern right whales, which comprises visual data on over 2,000 recognisable adults recorded during the previous 38 surveys….
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The oceans are loud and getting louder all the time. And marine mammals must live in the din. These animals take different approaches to the noise: Dolphins perform the equivalent of shouting. Humpback whales, when competing with a nearby boat, go silent.

"A lot of people imagine that underwater is this really quiet place, but it isn’t," said biologist Helen Bailey, who studies marine mammals and sea turtles at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. Ocean sounds are more than just crashing waves. Sharp noises, like sonar used in oil exploration or explosive Navy war games, can damage whale ears. Busy cargo lanes thrum with ship traffic. And as the Arctic warms, allowing more ships and industrial developments in previously ice-locked regions, northern marine mammal populations are exposed to more noise.

Increasing ocean noise was identified as a potential problem more than 20 years ago. Near California, the loudness of ship traffic has roughly doubled each decade since the 1960s. But the specific effects of this human-made cacophony are still being pieced together….
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Listen to this BBC Interview with UK scientists who have demonstrated the practicality of counting whales from space.

The researchers, from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), have been using the highest resolution satellite pictures available.

Even when taken from 620km up, this imagery is sharp enough to capture the distinctive shapes of different species.

The team will soon conduct an audit of fin whales in the Mediterranean.

The first-of-its-kind assessment will be partly automated by employing a computer program to search through the satellite data.

Current numbers on big species such as blue whales are very sketchy

Waters north of Corsica, known as the Ligurian Sea, are a protected area for cetaceans, and the regional authorities want to understand better the animals’ movements in relation to shipping to try to avoid collisions.

Previous studies have played with the idea of spotting whales from orbit, but with limited success….
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Researchers are using drone technology to bring whale research to completely new heights.

On Sunday, the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa Marine Mammal Research Program (MMRP) released incredible aerial footage of humpback and gray whales that’s being used for important conservation efforts.

The population of humpback whales that migrates to Hawaii was delisted from the endangered species list in 2016. However, in recent years, researchers have noticed a decline in humpback whale sightings around the Hawaiian Islands, and it’s unclear why.

The new project from will help investigate the possible causes of this apparent decline.

“Marine mammals, they are charismatic animals and people really care about them,” Bejder says in the video. “Some of the studies that we are carrying out will allow us to provide information to conserve these animals. Very importantly, they are also sentinels of ecosystem health and this is really important, because they can help raise concerns with the general public about concerns that we have about the ocean health today.”…
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Google and a group of game cetologists have undertaken an AI-based investigation of years of undersea recordings, hoping to create a machine learning model that can spot humpback whale calls. It’s part of the company’s new "AI for social good" program that’s rather obviously positioned to counter the narrative that AI is mostly used for facial recognition and ad targeting.

Whales travel quite a bit as they search for better feeding grounds, warmer waters and social gatherings. But naturally these movements can be rather difficult to track. Fortunately, whales call to each other and sing in individually identifiable ways, and these songs can travel great distances underwater.

So with a worldwide network of listening devices planted on the ocean floor, you can track whale movements – if you want to listen to years of background noise and pick out the calls manually, that is. And that’s how we’ve done it for quite a while, though computers have helped lighten the load. Google’s team, in partnership with NOAA, decided this was a good match for the talents of machine learning systems….
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In a study released Wednesday in PLOS One a team of Japanese scientists reveal that male humpback whales that live around the Ogasawara Islands are changing their tune because of the sounds emitted by a passenger-cargo liner that sails past them once per day. With the help of underwater acoustic measurements, the scientists determined that the whales reduced their singing after the ship passed. At some times, the whales even stopped singing altogether.

Whale-song, ship noises, and the location of the whales were measured between February and May 2017, their breeding season. The scientists determined that fewer male humpbacks sang in the area within 500 meters of the shipping lane than elsewhere, and whales within 12,000 meters of the lane paused their singing or stopped singing altogether in the moments after the ship passed. The whales that stopped singing didn’t begin to sing again until at least 30 minutes after the ship had gone.

"Humpback whales seemed to stop singing temporarily rather than modifying sound characteristics of their song under the noise, generated by a passenger-cargo liner," the scientists write. "Ceasing vocalization, and moving away could be cost-effective adaptations to the fast-moving noise source."…
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