Orcasphere

Here’s a glimpse into the future of killer whale sound archives. Steven Ness and collaborators at the University of Victoria have created the Orchive — a suite of open-source, web-based tools for listening to and annotating the recordings of northern resident orcas made by Paul and Helena Spong at OrcaLab. Using Ruby on [...]

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 [...]

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 5hHz-65kHz and is located in Folger Passage at 95m [...]

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 [...]

I recently learned about a new initiative that is wirelessly networking environmental sensors on buoys around the Salish Sea.  Developed by a wireless company called Intellicheck/Mobilisa in Port Townsend, most of the buoys provide real-time weather data, video, and/or surface water measurements.  The NPB-1 buoy, however, offers real-time profile data from north-central Puget Sound (temperature, [...]

Yesterday the U.S. Global Research Program announced the publication of a report that summarizes the science and the impacts of climate change on the United States. The chapter on the Pacific Northwest is ominous reading for salmon and orcas. Two disconcerting predictions are: because precipitation is shifting from snow to rain, peak [...]

Pete for Steve Rafferty, epidemiological and pathologic findings
Only 10/81 confirmed SR deaths and 4/142 of NR were beach cast and available for post-mortem examination.  Infectious pneumonia is most common reported cause of mortality (60% of those necropsied).  We now have a standardized protocol for doing necropsies (available at http://seadocsociety.org)  Since 2002, Steve and Joe Gaydos [...]

Just got an exciting email from Dr. Marla Holt, bioacoustician on the NOAA cruise that aims to understand how the southern residents utilize the outer coast of Washington. They departed last Monday and are scheduled to return April 9th, making for a significantly longer cruise than in past years.
Since big ocean-going research boats like [...]

I usually say that 20 ships per day transit Haro Strait, but this is the first time I’ve seen a sound budget estimate from Jeff Nystuen’s data. This article quotes him as saying that ships dominate the sound budget, making noise about 60% of the time his PALs were deployed. That’s pretty [...]

Not sure what this means for southern residents and funding for their researchers, but this is surely good news for beaked whales, as well as killer whales when they may transit Navy training areas in the Salish Sea or off the Washington coast. Thanks to Val Veirs for the tip on this press release.

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