Orcasphere

The idea that a virus may play a part in the unpredictable Fraser river sockeye returns is (month) old news, but this article in Scientific American is the first to mention chinook that I’ve seen.  Perhaps the fate of the southern resident killer whales (who specialize on Fraser chinook in the summertime) is more connected [...]

Live blog of a talk by Joseph Graber on “Land-based Infrared Imagery for Marine Mammal Detection” at UW/APL on March 10, 2011. Admiralty Inlet tidal currents can exceed 3 m/s and is therefore a valuable prospect for tidal power generation.  The Inlet is also a migration corridor for marine mammals, most importantly southern resident killer [...]

Live-blogged notes from a UW Water Seminar talk by Rick Keil’s student Brittany Kimball Spicing Up the Sound: Cooking Spices and Aberrant Chemicals in Puget Sound and How They Get There Sound Citizen collects water samples from around the region to understand the transport of common household chemicals from human sources into the marine environment.  [...]

Thanks to Jim Cummings of the Acoustic Ecology Institute, some news caught my ear in this article from the Times Colonist on the hydrophones deployed off the Fraser River delta.  There’s also a good bit of supposition without much science to back it up… The key news I gleaned is that the hydrophones will be [...]

Using next generation sequencing to generate whole mitochondrial genomes for population genetics and phylogeography of cetaceans Dr. Phillip Morin, Protected Resources Division, Southwest Fisheries Science Center Abstract and bio Live blog notes: Hoelzel et al 2002 found extremely low genetic diversity in control region (1000 base pairs): only 13 haplotypes from 100 samples from global [...]

Tonight reporter Gary Chitten and cameraman Pete Cassam from King 5 Television broadcast a nice story about the successful first test of a FLIR camera for detecting killer whales at night.  The pilot study was designed by Jim Thomson of the UW Applied Physics Lab, his Master’s student Joe Graber, and his other staff.  In [...]

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 Rails and [...]

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 5Hz-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 [...]