Kathryn presents at the American Cetacean Society's meeting

So I'm a couple of months late in sharing this with you, but better late than never.  Kathryn, who was a Beam Reach student in the Spring of 2010, and then stayed on as a summer intern for The Whale Museum, presented her preliminary research findings at the American Cetacean Society's conference in November in Monterey.  She is doing this research as part of her senior thesis at the College of the Atlantic.  It was great to have her helping us at the light house this past summer and awesome to see her making progress on her data.  She is interested in testing what are called Morton's motivational rules in the calls of killer whales.  The basic notion is that when individuals are near each other, they need to be able to convey their intent as friend or foe in a very clear and unambiguous way.  This helps to avoid personal injury (if the other is a foe), or worse.  The theory goes that when individuals are aggressive they use low pitched sounds that are harsh in tone, while if they are friendly or appeasing they use high pitched tonal sounds.  This of course only applies to calls given in close quarters.  This has been tested in a number of species with mixed results, but does seem to hold for some species.  In fact as humans we are often subconsciously aware of these 'rules' in our species and in others.  Think of the sound an aggressive dog makes (low pitched growl) versus the submissive, appeasing sound they make when scared or hurt (high pitched whine).  These canine sounds follow Morton's rules and can tell you, as a human, right away whether the dog is a threat to your own personal safety. 

But back to whales.  Kathryn is finding some interesting results, some of which support Morton's rules and some of which don't (Awe come on, you didn't think that these complex animals would fit nicely into some neat set of rules we made up.  That is one of the things that makes them so fascinating after all).  If you want to read some of the details you can find them in her poster below (We've made the poster large so that hopefully you can read the fine print.  You may also have to zoom in on your web browser).  Kathryn is currently finishing up her analyses and writing up her thesis.  We'll try to update when that process is finished.

More Infrared

A quick update on the infrared work.  Joe is making great progress on the analysis of his data.  He has an automatic detector running that does a pretty good job of detecting a whale from other background objects.  See the video clip below to see it in action.  It is a infrared video of L pod heading north past the light house on 7/7/2010 at around 3:40 in the morning.  There is even a little spy hop that was captured.  The top figure only displays when a whale is detected.  The bottom figure is the actual footage.  When a whale is detected in the image a rectangle appears around the whale and a distance and temperature difference is displayed.



Joe was even interviewed for King 5 news (with a cameo appearance from Scott helping to determine that this was L pod).  See that coverage here.

Splash Cam Update

During the hydrophone maintenance dive in July, we installed an underwater camera in front of the lighthouse in hopes of catching a glimpse of the whales. So far, the murkiness of the water has prevented us from seeing any orcas, but we have had nice views of rock fish, moon jellies, and, for a split second, a harbor seal! Jason recently cleaned off the lens in an effort to improve our visibility, but it seems we might have an underwater ally who is happily doing that job already. In the first part of the video below, what we believe to be some kind of chiton inches along the camera lens, consuming the grime that has built up on the surface. In the second part of the video, Jason does the same job with a quick swish of a towel -- whose cleaning job is better? You can tell how limited the visibility is based on how little time it takes for Jason to disappear once he starts swimming away. We are hoping that if we make recordings during the spring (before algae blooms begin), we'll have better luck filming the whales. More acoustics updates coming soon!

NOTE: Sorry about the yellow hue in this video; it has since gone away...

Whales in the Fog

When I got to Lime Kiln this morning, I didn’t have a good feeling about the day. I had missed the whales by ten minutes, and apparently it had been a very exciting passby. A few minutes later I saw a huge splash on the horizon – the second half of J pod was coming north behind the group I had missed. They passed us slowly and didn’t come very close to shore, but the hydrophones picked up some interesting sounds. Recently, J pod has taken to using a flat-frequency pulsed call that I can’t identify. It sounds something like S16, a common K pod call, and Jeanne Hyde and I are starting to wonder if J pod whales are imitating their K pod relatives. Listen to the clip below and leave a comment if the call sounds familiar to you. I also heard another strange call that I have now heard on three or four occasions. I've dubbed it the “human call” because the first time I heard it, I thought a person was making the sound! Listen to the second clip and let me know if you’ve ever heard this call (turn the volume up all the way to hear).

Around 9:30, we got word that the two J pod groups had met up to the north of us and were heading back down toward Lime Kiln. At this point, a thick blanket of fog had rolled in and we were relying on our ears to detect the whales. By the time they got to us, the whales had fallen into a resting pattern and were tightly bunched together. This is one of my favorite ways to see killer whales, and the experience was made all the more ethereal by the fog surrounding them. Some animals were still active and we could make out their profiles as they breached just beyond our view. It was strange to hear the huge splashes without being able to see what the whales were doing! At this point, the whales were vocalizing very little, as is common during resting. The group (which consisted of J pod and a few members of L pod) turned around one more time and drifted north with the flood tide.

Detecting whales at night with Infrared

I thought I'd share a little about a cool project we helped with at Lime Kiln a couple of weeks ago (July 6-9).  Jim Thomson, Joe Graber, and Brian from the Applied Physics Lab at the University of Washington, came up to Lime Kiln to test out the feasibility of using infrared and thermal cameras to detect whales at night.  During the week they installed 3 cameras; an infrared camera, a web camera, and a black and white camera.

Why, you ask, is it important to detect whales at night with infrared cameras when we have hydrophones that do that?  Well, the reality is that the resident orcas make some awesome sounds, but they don't always make sounds, so it would be nice to be able to detect them even when they aren't calling.  This is most important in regards to marine renewable energy projects.  If new projects are approved there will be a need to monitor marine mammals in their vicinity during the day and night. 

During the week that they were here, the whales obliged by going past the light house several times during the night which allowed for some pretty nice videos and some great data that Joe will be working on for his masters degree.  Watch the video below to see one pass by on the night of July 7th.  There are two animals that surface first, and if you look closely you'll see a calf come up just to the left of the animals.

Maintenance Dive on July 16, 2010

David Howitt. and I did a dive at Lime Kiln to achieve three things.  Install a new hydrophone, grounding cable and an underwater video camera.  We did the dive near high tide and managed to to get everything done, which is not always guaranteed on a dive because you're never sure what you will find down there.  We had good support from shore from David King, Kathryn Scurci and Dino.  This was important because we had a bunch of cables and a rope that we had to pull through our protective pipe that runs through the intertidal.  We needed to install a new hydrophone because one of our hydrophones had failed.  We have five hydrophones just off the light house that we are using to record ships and whale calls to try and determine if ship noise is impacting the whale's ability to communicate acoustically.  This replacement hydrophone is one of the ones that we use for calculating the position of the calling whale.  Below is a picture of how we mounted the hydrophone on the stand underwater.  All the underwater pics were taken by David Howitt.

Don't be alarmed by the knife!  I'm not trying to cut any cables, just the ends off a zip tie so that it doesn't bang against a hydrophone.  The hydrophone stand is an old tire filled with concrete, with a PVC pipe sticking out of it so that we can fasten instruments to it.  The long object on the top is our Reson hydrophone, which is our broad band hydrophone that allows us to record sounds over a very broad range of frequencies (pitch).  Although it's hard to see there are another two hydrophones fastened to the PVC pipe below the Reson.  Yes, it's true, we do a lot of our fastening down there with electrical tape.  It is amazing how it sticks to itself, even under water.  That blue thing on the left is the camera we installed on this dive.  It is was a little tricky deciding how to 'frame' the shot from that camera, especially since we couldn't see the shot (you have to view it from the computer on land).  We decided to try and aim it up and back towards land since that way at least we could see the kelp.  We hope that we might be able to record a few orcas swimming past this summer, but we'll see if we get that lucky.  Below is a short clip I took afterward to make sure the camera was working.  Since the currents were picking up you can see how much kelp fronds oscillate in the current.

The grounding wire was installed to try and decrease the amount of hum that you sometimes get from trying to record sound.  This is usually the 60 Hz hum that you get from the power lines, but we also sometimes pick up stuff that isn't really audible underwater, like radio transmissions.  It's amazing how much of a difference having a grounding wire can make.  We attached our grounding wire to a metal pipe to make sure there is plenty of metal exposed to the water to make a good ground.  This is what the setup looked like.

The dive itself went really smoothly and we actually got to see a lot of stuff around us.  Sometimes that is not the case since we are so busy.  This time around, there were a couple of rock fish that didn't seem concerned about us at all.  In fact they almost seemed inquisitive since they watched us feeding cables and rope through the protective pipe from a distance of only thee feet.  Here is a pic of one of them.