Thursday, November 13, 2014

Sperm Whales of Guadeloupe: First Days


The lab is just starting a collaborative project with SPAW-RAC to investigate the behavior and ecology of sea turtles, sharks, and marine mammals in the French Caribbean.  The project, funded by Total Foundation (France), has a goal of advancing science-based conservation of these taxa.  We will be working with many excellent partners and scientists and plan to develop new animal-borne camera technology (or rather Mehdi Bakhtiari of Exeye LLC will) and a high-quality education program (with Symbio Studios’ Patrick Greene)!  We are embarking on our first marine mammal mission – to collect biopsy samples from, and deploy cameras on, sperm whales off Guadeloupe!

We will be updating our websites to give all the background of the project and provide results (and hopefully some really great video) as soon as we can.  For now…here is the story from the field!

I hope you enjoy!

Mike

PS It does get more exciting toward the end…I promise


Saturday November 7th

Stream by our cabin
We arrived on Saturday and drove about an hour through the rain from the airport at Pointe-a-Pitre to our mountainside accommodations along the west coast of the island where we will be searching for sperm whales!  

With all the gear that Patrick, Mehdi, and I had brought we were very lucky that lab postdoc and mission leader Jeremy Kiszka had two cars waiting!  Neither of the cars was terribly happy about the uphill climbs or the rough roads with all the weight!

We quickly got to work settling into our open-air accommodations and we started setting up the camera gear and whale-cams … all to an impressive chorus of frogs...yes loud enough to keep you up at night!  

Mehdi's workshop
It is amazing how far we have come with animal-borne camera technology in the last decade...Mehdi has designed amazing units that are smaller, record longer, can dive deeper, and feature much better video quality than the systems we were using not that long ago! Thanks to the smaller and lighter units we also have a longer and lighter pole, which should help us get many more deployments!  The new, smaller, suction cups will also be a big help – without needing to actively suck the air out of a large cup we should be much more successful and eventually be working with species much smaller than sperm whales!

It is great to have such a fantastic team together! Jeremy and the SPAW-RAC team (who we are collaborating with on this project) are outstanding and Patrick and Mehdi are simply the best at what they do!  I can’t wait to get out on the water


Testing the deployment pole




 Sunday November 8th
 
We were up and on the road by 545 on Sunday and set out with our boat captain, Dany Moussa for a recon mission.  We can’t start tagging until tomorrow but we wanted to see if we could locate the sperm whales and planned to investigate a possible location to start working on sea turtles.  We also had a few things to check out with the cameras, including the critical floatation test (they passed, and quite well too). 


Conditions on the water were not great and we didn't find any sperm whales in the morning, but we did encounter a really nice group of short finned pilot whales.  Pilot whales can dive quite deep, although not as deep as sperm whales.  Some scientists have called them “cheetahs of the sea” because they dive down slowly then make a sprint during the final descent to catch their prey – which is usually squid!  Despite the conditions, we got a set of photos of the dorsal fins (that is how we can tell individuals apart) and even got a quick look underwater. The water here is quite amazing! It is crystal clear ... perfect for the work we are trying to do.



Jeremy photographs the pilot whales
We didn’t find any sperm whales so we headed in shore to snorkel the seagrass beds and coral reefs.  The reef was healthier than many I have seen around the region.  There was a lot of living coral, including soft corals, beautiful sponges, and tons of reef fish.  The nearby seagrass beds were a slightly different story.  Although there was a lot of seagrass, there was a decent amount of a species that is invading the island – and others nearby.  The green sea turtles in the area – and there were a lot of them (we must have seen more than a dozen in a short snorkel) – were happily eating it though.  One interesting thing about the turtles was the size of the remoras stuck to them!  I have never seen such large remoras on turtles…or seen huge remoras swimming around looking for a turtle to latch onto!  Compared to those remoras, our turtle cams are quite small!  That’s a good thing because the turtles seemed completely unconcerned about the remoras.



Green turtle with hitchhiking remora
Monday November 10th

Our first day for possibly deploying a camera came and went today.  We had two boats – our primary tagging boat and one with staff from SPAW-RAC and the national park.  Between the two boats we drove hundreds of kilometers and saw tons of…water!  And that was about it except for one set of surfacings by a group of at least three beaked whales.  We think that they might have been Gervais’ beaked whales, which are incredibly elusive and rarely seen.  Unfortunately, after searching for a while we couldn’t find them again.  Given that beaked whales can easily dive more than 1000m deep and hold their breath for a very long time (we actually don’t really know how long but some species stay down well over an hour), it isn’t surprising.  We also were trying to find sperm whales so that was our focus.

Dany, Mehdi, and Jeremy listen for sperm whale clicks
Working with deep-diving species isn’t easy.  Sperm whales can stay down more than an hour and dive to over 1500m (a mile) deep (yes, Mehdi’s cameras can handle it).  Even though they usually dive for sorter periods and not quite that deep it can make them hard to find.  The good news is that you can use sound to find sperm whales.  By listening to the clicks that the whales make when foraging (they use echolocation in the same way bats do to “see” and find food in the darkness of the ocean depths) or finding their way, you can tell if there are any whales within a few kilometers of the boat.  That’s why we stop every few miles to have a listen.  


At the end of the day, we heard sperm whales making clicks off in the distance.  Using a hydrophone that only hears sounds from a particular direction we were able to get closer to the whales – but we still didn’t see them.  Both boats worked hard to find the whales, but we lost their calls as the waves grew higher and we had to call it a day when it got too late to put a camera on one (for our first trial we don’t want the camera on for days).

 We’ll give it another try tomorrow! 

Tuesday, November 10th
Pan-tropical spotted dolphins.  Young individuals don't have spots.
Any hopes of this being an easy mission were starting to dissipate today.  Luckily, the whole team has three more weeks but Patrick has to leave Thursday and I am out Saturday evening the clock is ticking for us.  No sperm whales today, again.  We put in hundreds of kilometers and moved between waters 800-1500m deep – prime sperm whale habitat.  We did have a really fun encounter with several large groups of pan-tropical spotted dolphins.  There must have been more than 500 individuals between the groups.  One reason they are probably in such big groups is for protection from predators (like sharks).  There isn’t anywhere to hide in the open ocean so it is all about safety in numbers.

We took as many photos as we could for identifying individuals and enjoyed watching them ride the

bow of the boat, socialize with each other, and then bow ride some more.  The dolphins actually were with us for quite a while as we tried to look for sperm whales. We actually couldn’t use the hydrophone to listen for sperm whales because the dolphins were so loud clicking and whistling. 

We ended the day testing the VHF (radio) signal that the camera transmits when it floats to the surface.  The signal in these new cameras is very strong and without much trouble, we were able to find it after leaving it floating behind us.  The test made us confident we will be able to get the camera back once it releases from the whale at the programmed time and floats to the surface.  Of course, first we would need to see the whales.  And then get very close to them.

Mehdi predicts we will see sperm whales at 1030 on Thursday.


Wednesday, November 11th
Ugh.  Another day of very nice weather and no whales anywhere to be found.  We heard a distant sperm whale or two as soon as we got out on the water but never could find it.  There was a lot of boat traffic – including ships - in the area, which made it very hard to hear.  We drove a lot of miles and listened to a lot of ocean, but no whales.  Towards sunset we helped Patrick get a few nice scenic shots and had to call it a day.  We are going to miss having him on the boat and wish the whales had been around for him!  But, maybe tomorrow will be our lucky day.  Mehdi says he is wearing his lucky shirt and I (accidently) sacrificed one of my favorite pairs of sunglasses to the ocean.  One of those has to work…
This is what we are trying to find....

Thursday, November 12th

Unfortunately, Patrick had to leave today to go to a shoot in California.  We were sorry to see him go but headed out on the water with our two boats early…and maybe a little less packed with gear.  Admittedly, we were getting a little desperate so we headed south of Guadeloupe into an area with rough seas but steep slopes underwater that might be good spots for sperm whales (or any whale or dolphin for that matter)!  We check the hydrophone but no luck.  Mehdi’s 1030 guess and lucky shirt were not looking like they were going to come through.

So close
But then Dany got a phone call.  Another boat was with two sperm whales off the northern portion of the west coast!  We immediately started the 30 minute run to get there, hoping that we wouldn’t be too late and the whales would slip away from us again!  We soon got out of the choppy seas and were skimming across flat calm waters, raising our hopes that today would be the day!

Suction cup tag on whale
As we approached the boat that was waiting for us we could see spouts.  I think the whole crew was relieved and excited at the same time!  The whales dove just before we got to the other boat and after a quick chat, we started looking in earnest.  It was a long ten minutes before we saw it surface again and began to head towards it (this was at 10:12, so you be the judge if Mehdi was right).  Before we got too close, the whale dove again and we started trying to slowly drive to where we thought it would resurface.  As we scanned the horizon, we realized whales surrounded us!  There were individuals and small groups in almost every direction.  At 10:28 the whale resurfaced and we moved in, ready with the camera. Mehdi says the 10:30 guess was for when we would get our first deployment attempt, and we got very close.  The whale dove just a couple feet out of my reach with the pole.  

A nice view to end the day
Mehdi at home in the local hardware store...wearing the lucky shirt!
We spent hours moving from group to group with the help of the SPAW-RAC crew, trying to ease in close enough to a whale to get the camera on.  By 2:00, we’d had a lot of very close calls but never a whale close enough to try putting the camera on.  We were pretty much out of time – any later and we might have the camera come off in the middle of the night.  We tried one last whale, and we got the camera on its dorsal fin!  A successful deployment!  The suction cup worked better than we had hoped – the first major question of the trip.  We have a few tweaks to make to have the systems perfected but we have the camera back and Mehdi is hard at work right now.  We will be ready for another deployment tomorrow…if the whales are still where we can find them!  Even if they aren’t, I am confident that over the next two weeks the team will be able to collect the data we had hoped to for this first field trip! 

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