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
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| 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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