Author Archives: scottveirs

Chinook data needed to interpret orca baby boom

Good national news is rolling in about 5 new southern resident whales and no deaths in 2009, plus one new baby thus far in 2010. Howard, Ken, and Brad allude to looking for correlations or explanations in chinook salmon abundance:

It sounds simplistic, Garrett said, but “the way that we can tag the population fluctuations is directly from the chinook runs.”

Taken as a whole, the runs in the region have held steady over at least the past two years, he said.

It’s not that simple, said Brad Hanson, a wildlife biologist with the federal Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. He said that for much of the year, little is known about what salmon stocks the whales eat and where.

It’s frustrating to me that we don’t have a nice synopsis of west coast chinook populations for 2009, or at least 2008. The strongest correlation between killer whale mortality or birth indices is with 3-year running means of chinook abundance lagged 1 year relative to the KW index (Ford et al., 2009). So, we would need data from 2007-9 to compute a chinook abundance index value for 2008 that ought to explain the low mortality and high birth rate observed in KWs during 2009.

Does anyone have a handle on such chinook data?!

Promise of land-based salmon farms in B.C.

This is a brief letter from Alexandra Morton that cuts to the chase re B.C. salmon farming management. Maybe WA should move it’s pens on-shore, too? Note the connection she draws between Lake Washington sockeye collapse and diseases from B.C. pens.

Land-based salmon farms can work

Researchers call for orca conservation zone in B.C.

Dec 23 Vancouver Sun article about a forth-coming science paper that proposes a conservation zone that overlaps with the proposed orca sanctuary boundaries:

Wildlife researchers have identified the key feeding area for a critically endangered population of killer whales near Vancouver Island and proposed the creation of a unique, miniature conservation zone for the few square kilometres encompassing the animals’ favourite seafood restaurant.

The international team of scientists, including University of British Columbia biologist Rob Williams and colleagues from Britain and the U.S., spent four months in the summer of 2006 painstakingly monitoring the movements of a three-pod population of killer whales in waters off B.C. and Washington state that numbers just 87 individuals — so few that every animal has been identified from distinctive markings.

The researchers found the whales were about three times more likely to feast on Chinook salmon — their preferred meal — in a narrow coastal strip south of Washington’s San Juan Island than anywhere else in their summer range.

In an article published in the latest issue of the journal Animal Conservation, the scientists propose strict protections on this whale-dining “hot spot,” arguing that the no go zone is small enough to establish a practical system for diverting all boat traffic but large enough to guarantee the whales unfettered feeding.

“Protecting even small patches of water can provide conservation benefits, as long as we choose the spots wisely,” said lead researcher Erin Ashe, a biologist at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews, in a summary of the study.

First outer coast hydrophone nearly live

Neptune hydrophone map

Neptune hydrophone map

On December 8th the NEPTUNE Canada cabled ocean observing system started pouring data on to the Internet.  This opens the door for John Ford and his collaborators to listen for killer whales on the outer coast of southwest Vancouver Island.  The Naxys hydrophone is sensitive to 5Hz-65kHz and is located in Folger Passage at 95m depth (see map at right) just outside Barkley Sound near Bamfield, Canada.

It’s unclear whether or not the audio stream will make it to land in real-time.  There is a comment on the web site that suggests that the hydrophone was to go live on December 8th, but I could find no live or archived data.  The following quote from the associated Coastal Marine Ecosystem project page suggests the signals may initially go only as far as Bamfield Marine Station where vessels might be able to respond to acquire photos for species identification:

“The underwater acoustic signal from the Folger Passage Node will be streamed live to the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre and hopefully the internet so that students and marine mammal researchers will be able to listen for their species of interest. The archived broadband acoustic signal will also be freely available for more advanced analyses.”

Hydrophones of the VENUS array (Strait of Georgia, east node; 4Hz-100 kHz. ) provided near real-time data for 6 weeks in early 2009, failed, and were replaced on 9/27/09. You can again view spectrograms and listen to mp3 files (lagged ~10 minutes) at this hard-to-find page — in this example from hydrophone 2 at 170m depth — but no archives beyond 1 hour are available on-line (even after registering for data downloads).

[Update 12/17: the fall-winter 2010 VENUS newsletter states that they are providing data from multiple hydrophones that they are comparing.  “Working to improve the VENUS hydrophone system, our team re-configured the 170m-deep array in the Strait of Georgia. We deployed one of our original hydrophones, the Burns CR100, alongside two new ones — a High Tech HTI-99-HF and a Reson 4032T. We are testing the performance of these hydrophones to assess their long-term stability and acoustic character (sensitivity and response). Each hydrophone has its own web page with audio and spectrograms updated every 5 minutes. Already, we have detected hundreds of ships and ferries, and environmental noise associated with wind, rain and even thunder. Check out near real time audio at www.venus.uvic.ca.” Here are direct links to the data archives 3 types of hydrophones: #1: HTI | #2: Burns | #3: Reson.]

[Update 10/12/2010: It appears that the Burns and Reson are still working nicely, while the HTI is functional but generating a signal with interference when the Burns has it’s automatic gain on (noted on June 10, 2010). Also, there is a link to a multimedia archive (download requires registration), but the temporal coverage is very sporadic and generally out-dated.]

[Update 10/03/2011: VENUS has a new hydrophone player that’s pretty cool, but it’s really annoying how their links keep breaking and it’s unclear how often they really have near-real-time data available.  Today I checked again because the southern residents may have gone north last night, but the “most recent” data was from a couple days ago — 10/1/11.  Here’s a bit of info about the hydrophone data processing.]

Paul Macoun, VENUS Project Engineer, with the VENUS SOG East HydrophoneThere is appears to be some history of security concerns voiced by the U.S. and Canadian Navies.  For example, in a November, 2005 IEEE post about Neptune, author Peter Fairley reported:

In the category of unintended consequences are tensions between NEPTUNE and VENUS management and the Canadian and U.S. navies. What concerns the militaries is the possibility that their foes will employ publicly available data from the systems’ sophisticated hydrophones to identify vessels and track their comings and goings. (Canada’s entire Pacific fleet docks at Vancouver Island, just west of Victoria, while a group of U.S. nuclear submarines calls nearby Puget Sound, Wash., home.)

The VENUS organizers granted the Canadian military the power to squelch VENUS’s acoustic data whenever the navy deems national security to be at risk. That worries some NEPTUNE researchers. “For observatories expecting to have a 24/7 feed, that could be very disruptive to the science,” says Benoît Pirenne, the assistant director of information technology for NEPTUNE Canada, who is designing NEPTUNE’s data and control system.

Such concerns are also alluded to in one slide of a PDF presentation by Svein Vagel (S8_S10_Vagle).  He suggests that the concerns were met by giving the Navy an on/off switch and storing no data locally (presumably because someone might use a sub or dredge to steal the instruments from 170 or 270m depths).  [Update 12/17: see first comment from Dwight Evans, content manager for NEPTUNE Canada web site, confirming that the Navies are filtering the hydrophone signals.]


Other NEPTUNE Canada nodes also have hydrophones.  Pictured at left is the arm of the Canadian remotely operated vehicle ROPOS holding a Naxys hydrophone on a stand that was deployed 10m from the Barkley Head instrument platform (in background).  A instrument spreadsheet indicates another hydrophone was placed 14m from the Barkely Canyon axis node.  These nodes are located on the outer shelf at the latitude of Cape Flattery, so could provide a nice complement to the Neah Bay hydrophone as we try to understand when/how the southern residents leave the Strait of Juan de Fuca and head south down the WA coast.

Locations of hydrophones (m depth, lat, lon):

  • Folger Deep Hydrophone 100 48.8139 -125.2809
  • Barkley Upper Slope Hydrophone 397 48.4275 -126.1747
  • Barkley Axis Hydrophone 982 48.3166 -126.0503

View Salish Sea hydrophone network in a larger map

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+3dB noise reduces ‘effective listening area’ 30%

AE.org - website of the Acoustic Ecology Institute

Jim Cummings of the Acoustic Ecology Institute has posted another great synopsis of an important new bioacoustics paper that has big implications for southern resident killer whales.  After defining a new bioacoustic metric “effective listening area” (which is MUCH more intuitive than “active space”), the authors clarify how slight increases in ambient noise can have big impacts for animals that need to listen to sounds that are normally barely audible.

The authors note analyses of transportation noise impacts often assert that a 3dB increase in noise – a barely perceptual change – has “negligible” effects, whereas in fact this increased noise reduces the listening area of animals by 30%. A 10dB increase in background noise (likely within a few hundred meters of a road or wind farm, or as a private plane passes nearby) reduces listening area by 90%.

We know that most commercial ships and recreational boats raise the ambient noise levels near killer whales by 20-30dB for periods of ~30 or 3 minutes, respectively, as the vessels and whales pass by each other.  Clearly it is time to articulate in what common situations the southern residents need to perceive barely audible signals — like distant inter-pod communication signals or echolocation returns from prey — and to model the reduction in listening area during typical noise exposures.  This paper suggests the results may be disconcerting even though southern residents are keystone predators (though one has to wonder if transients appreciate the advantage of the acoustic cloak a noisy freighter offers when trying to pick off a resident calf).

Scientific literature reference:
Barber, Crooks, Fristrup. The costs of chronic noise exposure for terrestrial organisms. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 2010.
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Kalimari for orcas, or another salmon predator

(Chris Henry | Kitsap Sun) Mike Henry of Port Orchard caught this Humboldt squid while fishing for salmon off Sekiu in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Ron Hirschi, a local marine naturalist, is reporting Humbolt squid being caught on salmon gear in the central Strait of Juan de Fuca. Will they come all they way in in 2010?

11.30.09

Recreational salmon fishers are now catching them as far east as Sekiu in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Watch for further reports as they invade the (now officially named) Salish Sea (aka Puget Sound, Hood Canal, Admiralty Inlet, etc).

Catches of the big squid are on standard salmon gear – cut plug and whole herring trolled or mooched. This is all much to the culinary delight of local fishers.

Ron Hirschi
Squid Watcher, Marrowstone Island, Washington State

The photo demonstrates that they are swimming in a habitat where they could decimate orca prey (salmon) or become orca prey themselves. There is some sparse evidence that residents orcas eat eight-armed squid. One squid beak has been observed in the stomach of a stranded transient killer whale. And offshore orcas in the Pacific are thought to feed on squid in addition to sharks.

This article by Chris Dunagan states that the Humbolt squid are known to move with schools of Coho and consume both forage fish and salmon smolts. It will be very interesting to observe the net effect of the squid on the Salish Sea ecosystem.

How NZ orcas hunt sharks

I was most impressed by this underwater photograph taken by Ingrid Visser of a New Zealand killer whale pursuing a mako shark. The associated article from the Daily Mail describes hunting techniques that smack of likely Southern Resident tactics: collaborative herding and stunning blows from the flukes. I wonder: does she have recordings of the vocalization and echolocation that occurs during these attacks? CREDIT: Ingrid Visser / SpecialistStock RIGHTS: Worldwide excluding French territory and UK magazines CAPTION: Orca and Mako shark

Salmon court fallacy: we must spill or spew

There are some great observations and quotes in the liveblog of Matthey Preusch during the Nov 23, 2009, Salmon Court. This first one suggests a slight of hand or an ignorance of the primary findings of the Bright Future report
— that we do not necessarily have to choose between spilling water for salmon in the summer months and spewing carbon dioxide from more fossil-fueled power plants.

Now the judge is questioning the government of [on] the substance of the supplemental plan, such as why the government won’t continue to spill extra water over power-producing dams even though court-ordered spill has been shown to help fish.

The spills “look like they worked,” said Redden. “Why change them?”

“Your honor, that comes with a cost,” answered Howell, attorney for the government. “And I’m not talking about financial cost. I’m talking about carbon. The more we spill, the more we are going to have to offset that with natural gas and coal.”

The bright future scenario includes replacement of the dam’s 1 GW mean annual power supply with salmon-and-orca-friendly clean energy, NOT new or re-powered of coal and gas power plants. This is perhaps the most damning indication that the government is not thinking clearly about the fundamental “change we need” (and the southern residents and salmon need) here in the Pacific Northwest.

Personally, I believe with compelling public education about what values are really at stake, we can exceed the assumptions about potential conservation. As usual, no one wants to talk about the projected growth of energy demand (1.7%/yr) and its connections to population/economic growth and consumer/conservation ethics.

Also very noteworthy was Lubchenko’s statement that she stands “100% behind the science” in the Biop. As a marine scientist, I am eager to see just what she is behind. Thankfully, we may ultimately get the chance if we are to believe the statement by Howell, lead attorney for the government, who:

offered in an exchange with Judge Redden earlier this morning to make public documents from the administration’s review of the science behind the Bush-era salmon plan.

That’s something the government’s critics have been asking for for some time.

“We will release those documents,” Howell said.

How to: share salmon or orca news

I’ve been enjoying using orcasphere.net as a forum for sharing breaking news about southern residents, salmon, and related environment issues.  In the hopes of inspiring others to join me, this post is the first in a series that describe how I interact with the Orcasphere.  I’m even going to try screen-casting some demos!

At the very least, the Orcasphere is a place I can return to (or send my student to) when I’m trying to recall the details of that interesting talk or article through a sleep-deprived fog. The WordPress search window is always ready to help job my memory, as are my tags and categories…

At the very most, the Orcasphere could be a place where a team of like-minded conservationists aggregate news and information.  It’s really silly to all run the same searches, read the same papers, and go to the same talks and then each report separately about them on our respective web sites.  Through a collaborative site I’m sure we could still serve our audiences, but would all be more efficient, learn more, miss less, and have some time to discuss with each other the interesting bits that we gather.

Tools are emerging rapidly to streamline both aggregation of information and the dissemination of the results.  In future posts, I’ll compare blog facilitators I’m testing (Flock, scribefire, clipmarks, press it/this, posterous) and some nifty ways to embed orcasphere.net posts within your web site (either the combined Orcasphere RSS feed, or just the RSS feed associated with a single Orcasphere category).

But for now, here is a quick screen-cast (my first!) that walks you through creating a new post.

Orcas not in the NW Power Plan

Council members at Seattle public hearing (Fall 2009)

Council members at Seattle public hearing (Fall 2009)

Today’s the last day for killer whale advocates to ensure that the southern residents get some consideration in the power plan that guides the Pacific Northwest on a 20-year horizon and won’t be reviewed for 5 years.  Currently, the complete plan PDF itself does not even include the words “orca” or  “killer whale.”  Clearly the established connections between west coast salmon abundance and SRKW survival are not on the Council’s radar!

The public hearings (photo link) are over, but you can still contact Council members and other decision-makers to ensure a strong final 6th Northwest Power and Conservation Plan.  The Northwest Power and Conservation Council will continue to accept written comments on the draft Sixth Plan until midnight tonight, November 6, 2009.  Start your weekend off right by submitting your comments online at http://www.nwcouncil.org/energy/powerplan/6/comment.asp

A search of the Council’s web site — nwcouncil.org — for “orca” and “killer whale” turns up a grand total of 17 hits.  Only ~10 of them are relevant and none clearly articulate the science linking killer whales and Chinook salmon populations from big river systems like the Columbia and the Fraser.

Feel free to model your comments after the inspirational ones (revealed by searching for SRKW terms atsite:nwcouncil.org).  Both are appended:

“Bonneville should meet its fish and wildlife obligations.” (BPA-6)

What the hell sort of guidance is that?  How about endorsing a cogent analysis of the costs and benefits associated with the lower Snake River dams?

“The Council will work with fish and wildlife managers and regional power planners to; 1) develop a curtailment plan for fish and wildlife operations in the event of a power emergency, 2) prepare a contingency power operation in the event of a fish and wildlife emergency, and 3) develop a plan for continued improvement in our ability to forecast and operate the system to reduce the likelihood of emergencies.” (F&W-2)

The listing of our regional icons — salmon and orcas — as endangered is an emergency!  We don’t need a contingency plan, we need to take action to recover these populations.  And “recover” does NOT mean one-more-fish-than-last-year; it means get them back to their ecological baselines: 100-200 SRKWs and Columbia/Snake salmon populations of XX million — adequate for feeding killer whales and human fishers alike.

http://www.nwcouncil.org/energy/powerplan/6/view_comment.asp?id=660 — We need to put saving the salmon/steehead from extinction as a top priority. I would pay more for power if we removed dams to support this desire; even during these tough economic times. This fish is an icon of the Pacific Northwest, but it is so much more, and it is irresponsible to continue to use huge dams and let the fish suffer the consequences. Look at the Columbia river Chinook: almost gone and orca’s are down in numbers and the spring chinook was their biggest food source. Tribal, Commercial, and Recreational groups all seem to agree that we have to make tough choices, sacrifices, for the sucess of the species. We need to make up for the dumb things we’ve done in the name of cheap power. I grew up in the late 60’s/70’s, fishing with my Dad for fun and for putting food on the table, and i also fished commercially in the 80’s, for profit. Nowadays i’m a volunteer WSU Snohomish County BeachWatcher, and i’ve volunteered almost 500 hours since we began here in my area in 2006. Projects i work on help preserve and protect the fragile ecosystem that is Puget Sound, or the Salish Sea, and i hope i can give back to what i’ve taken from. Shall we all do that? Thank you for your time.  Sincerely, Joan Douglas