SEA Blog

Tags on briefly, then too much wind

We started in the shaddow of beautiful Santa Cruz island this morning and picked of the flying fish we had been watching around our boat last night off the deck.  Conditions were reasonably favorable south of Santa Cruz and Anacapa and we searched in deeper waters for some of the focal odontocete species like beaked or sperm whales or Risso's dolphins, but did not locate any.  

So we continued back toward the mainland and began to work in several canyons where we encountered large numbers of blue and fin whales last year.  Around mid-day we managed to tag two blue whales, but the tags detached after a short time.  After a short period of trying to find additional subjects, conditions became unworkable for tagging or controlled sound experiments so we are heading into port to re-group.  We hope to find better conditions tomorrow in some of these areas around Palos Verdes.  Later today we will have a guest blog on one of the new systems we are integrating into our overall efforts for SOCAL-11 - stay tuned... 

Blue whale CEE -- interupted by a sea lion

We pushed off from Pt. Sal at dawn in a cool mist - it's a small and uninhabited point north of Vandenberg AFB that we shared with a colony of sea lions for the evening.  On the way out we saw a number of them and a harbor porpoise, then several groups of humpback whales.  This included the mother and calf pair in the pictures below that were both repeatedly breaching in turns while the mother was slapping her pectoral fins on the surface.  [Note: these pictures, like any others of animals taken for SOCAL-11 and posted here or on the SOCAL-BRS.org website, were obtained and are displayed according to the conditions of NMFS permit #14534.]                                                                           

   

Humpbacks are not among the focal species for SOCAL-11, however, and we had to search around a little bit for a good candidate animal of one of our focal species.  We managed to tag an adult blue whale by mid-morning and once we had done our baseline monitoring and met our pre-exposure conditions we began transmitting the experimental sound in the water.  Eighteen minutes into our intended 30 min sound sequence a California sea lion began swimming directly at us to investigate the sound source.  When this adult male came inside our 200m exclusion zone we ceased the transmissions as a required shut-down measure.  Like two sea lions last year, this guy seemed curious about the sounds we were projecting rather than bothered by them.

We are steaming down the Santa Barbara Channel at the moment in less ideal weather conditions.  We will be working around the northern Channel Islands part of tomorrow and then working our way south.

SOCAL-11 Day I -- Picking up where we left off

Short post here as we are in pretty spotty coverage off shore, but wanted to note that we succeeded in tagging two individual blue whales off Pt. Arguello just north of Point Conception today.  Favorable offshore weather and good concentrations of animals enabled us to find multiple possible groups and attach a suction cup tag from each RHIB.  After about three hours of baseline behavioral measurements and finding the right location to deploy the sound source in the right proximity to the whales but away from non-target animals.  Quite a bit of time was spent getting away from a large number of sea lions, but we found the right spot and succeeded in completing a full controlled exposure experiment focusing on the tagged blue whales. 

We will be anchoring offshore overnight tonight in a relatively remote harbor and hoping to work our way back south tomorrow.  The offshore forecast looks to be deteriorating a little later tomorrow, but we wanted to be able to try up in this northern end of our operational area and were glad today worked out as it did.  We had a few other interesting observations, including some sea lions eating large rockfish, a dead sea lion with a huge shark bite taken out of it, and a massive dead floating sunfish with birds walking all over it.

Great to start off with a double tag-out and a full CEE sequence while surveying in a new spot!

SOCAL-11 Behavioral Resonse Study to Begin: Mobilization

We are about to kick off the most recent phase of our biological and behavioral response studies of marine mammals in southern California. SOCAL-11 is second field season of a multi-year (2010-2014) interdisciplinary study, more generally referred to as “SOCAL-BRS” (Behavioral Response Study), of basic behavior and responses to controlled sound exposures in a variety of marine mammal species. The overall objective is to provide a better scientific basis for estimating risk and minimizing effects of active sonar for the U.S. Navy and regulatory agencies. SOCAL-BRS is part of a larger international collaboration to measure the impacts of noise marine mammals using opportunistic and experimental approaches (including controlled exposure experiments, or “CEEs”).

A scouting leg to survey marine mammal distribution and abundance in our possible operating areas was conducted over the last two weeks and a number of promising locations were identified and positive  identifications made.  For the past two days, we have been mobilizing gear and people about the R/V Truth in Santa Barbara, California.

For more information on the project, please go to www.socal-brs.org
You can also find a simple public summary for SOCAL-11 at: http://www.sea-inc.net/resources/SOCAL11_summary.pdf
 
Regular posts on our progress will be made here as much as possible when we are close enough to shore to have access to the internet.  Thanks for all the interest and positive feedback over the past year on the project and the implications of our work.

Brandon Southall,

Chief scientist on behalf of the SOCAL BRS team