Well that about does it for this field season. It was one of the strangest ones on record for those that have been doing this for decades – this was the NEAq team’s 34th year in the Bay! We ended the season having no sightings on board Selkie. In fact, this was the first time Grace has been to Fundy and not seen a single right whale, and she has been coming here for 20 years…but negative data is still data, as they say, and this year proves that despite all that we do know we still have a lot to learn. It will be very interesting to see where/when the whales show up next!
Right Whale Mom/Calf
Eubalaena, where art thou?
Seals and sharks
Puffins and porpoise
Minkes and fin whales
They hide not from us
But where are you, right whale?
It is you that we seek
Who numbers so few
Whose future seems bleak
Eubalaena we’ve watched you
And followed you close
All whales need saviors
But you need us most
For thirty-four summers
Why, even this past
You have gathered in Fundy
You have gathered en masse
But this year is different
This year is odd
There is scant food to be found
Scarcely one copepod
This year you’re gone
You found a new place
And we cannot find you
You left us no trace
Eubalaena, where art thou?
If you are not here
No one can find you
Our hearts fill with fear
Eubalaena, where art thou?
Come back to the Bay
For we cannot protect you
Now that you’ve gone away
Not the *right* whales
When looking at the weather forecast last night as we always do, it looked like today might be good for at least a half day out on the water. The winds were light in the morning and would blow 10-15 later in the day. Since we haven’t had much of an opportunity to go out this season, we decided to go for it. When checking the weather again this morning as we always do, the forecast had changed. For once, though, it changed in our favor. It was now going to blow light winds all day with calm seas and not pick up until the evening. Could it be? Could we get a full day in?!
Nope. The channel was a bit choppy, but that doesn’t necessarily indicate what the Bay is doing. When we got out of the channel however, we immediately noticed it was not smooth flat seas with light winds. It was about a sea state 2 already, which is definitely workable but not the calm state we were expecting/hoping to see (see our previous blog post, A Lesson on Sea State, to get an idea of what the sea states look like). Will soon spotted some blows, and even though they didn’t look like typical right whale blows, we are always willing to investigate anything and everything. Especially when there are so few whales around, during this season for example! When we made it over to the whales we quickly realized they were three humpback whales, resting at the surface.
Shortly after, only about half an hour from these photos, we were in a sea state 3 and it wasn’t even 11 o’clock! Grace called up the Nereid to see what they were experiencing farther out in the Bay and they also had quite a nasty sea state. They have the ability to check the weather on their boat and the forecast had indeed changed. Now they were calling for 15 knot winds in the afternoon going to 20 knots later on this evening. That’s a far cry from light winds and way too windy for us to work comfortably and safely on our exposed little Selkie.
We decided to call it a day after only 3 hours out. We cast the CTD for good measure and headed home. By that time it had already turned into a sea state 4…we had a bumpy ride back, albeit a short one thankfully. We have a windy few days ahead of us so we won’t be back out into the Bay for a little while. Hopefully next time mother nature behaves a little better and does what the meteorologists think she will!
Perhaps the fog is lifting?
Figuratively, anyway. After a very slow month, as in zero right whales spotted by either team in the Bay, a mom/calf pair has been spotted! Last Wednesday reports came in that there was a mother and her calf in the Lubec Channel. The Nereid crew rushed to the scene, which didn’t take long considering they were so close…
Very few right whales have ever been spotted in this area, and while it is pretty neat to have them so close to shore, it was also pretty nerve-wracking for us. Just past the bridge from Lubec to Campobello there is a lot of lobster/fishing gear in the water which would put them at a high risk for entanglement. Luckily they headed in the opposite direction toward Eastport where they likely (hopefully) headed back out towards more open water. They haven’t been spotted in the area again, and we haven’t had a good day to go out and survey the Bay to check for them. I can only hope they stick around for when we can make it out next. It would be great to finally get some BOF 2013 data! Read more about the Nereid’s experience on the New England Aquarium’s research blog.
Slow start
We finally managed to get out on the water on Monday (as you may recall from last year the weather here is not overly cooperative) but it seems we were not missing much…we saw a couple of minke whales, a bunch of harbor porpoises, and a fin whale. The Nereid (the boat used by the New England Aquarium’s research team) went out as well and they saw a few humpback whales to add to the list of cetaceans in the Bay. But as for the right whales? Conspicuously absent. The Nereid surveyed a good portion of the Bay already this year and the right whales just aren’t here yet. In fact, the New England Aquarium has decided to take a small team offshore to look for right whales in Roseway Basin and Lurcher Shoal, off of the coast of Nova Scotia. They left this morning and will be at sea for 6-10 days. Hopefully they come back with news of lots of whales, preferably headed this way of course!
Our day out wasn’t all disappointment however. Not only did Tricia get to see a whale for the first time, but she got to see a breaching basking shark! Not many people can say that! Unfortunately as soon as I got the camera out he promptly disappeared, but check out the website for our friends at the Shark Identification Network, founded by the Grand Manan Whale and Seabird Research Station, for great photos and information about the sharks in the area.
The weather for the weekend looks promising, so hopefully my next post will be filled with great news about all the mom/calf pairs that have shown up! How is that for optimism?
Getting Settled
Nestled against the Canadian border, at the tippy top of the U.S. East Coast, lies the tiny town of Lubec. This town effectively marks the beginning of the Bay of Fundy, a region known for having the largest tidal range in the world (up to 50 feet in some places!). Lubec’s tides range about 18-22 feet, which is still enough to make a dramatic difference in the landscape every 6 hours or so.
I suppose the rain is good for being productive inside, and it did manage to stop long enough for a light-hearted game of soccer. Today’s weather features pea soup fog along with the rain, so we’re still waiting to go find some moms and calves for our project. Given the bumper crop of calves and our luck in Cape Cod and the Southeast this year, we’re hopeful for some good data from the Fundy feeding grounds!
As a parting note, I’ll leave you with a couple of neat comparisons:
AND…
And just like that…
…they are gone. The PCCS (Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies) team flew their final aerial survey of the season yesterday and found only one lone right whale outside of the Bay. It’s pretty amazing actually. One day there can be a hundred individuals (pretty impressive since there are only about 500 in the entire population), and in a matter of days they are all gone.
What are they doing and where are they going? A large number of the population will now head north into Canadian waters near the Bay of Fundy and the western Scotian shelf. These waters remain cold even during the summer, providing rich feeding grounds. However, just like in Cape Cod Bay, not all individuals will be seen in those areas. Where the remainder of the population is, both now and in the summer, is unknown…
Although we are done in Cape Cod for the year, we will meet up with the right whales in the Bay of Fundy in August for two months of dedicated research. Check our B.O.F. blog to keep up with us and the whales!
Also check out these websites for more information on right whale behavior, habitats, and current research:
Copious copepods in Cape Cod Bay
Well Jess and I went for another “whirlwind tour” of Cape Cod this past weekend and this time there seemed to be even more whales than before. In fact, the day before we arrived 113 right whales were reported in the Bay, including 5 mother/calf pairs! That is a lot of whales…
Right whales can be found in the Bay all year round but April is usually when we see the highest numbers (Jess and I can now vouch for that). Well what are all of these whales DOING in the Bay you ask? I will tell you! They are eating their preferred prey, tiny little crustaceans called copepods.
In CCB right whales often do something called skim feeding where they open their mouths and swim through swarms of copepods, using their baleen to filter out the water and leave only the tasty little crustacean morsels. The whales do this for hours at a time taking a break now and then only to nod their heads, which may either be them using their tongues to push food back in order to swallow or a general appreciative gesture. Either way, it’s neat.
So Jess, Grace, Pete and I spent Saturday and Sunday amongst a horde of skim feeding right whales, searching for mom’s and calves. They can be difficult to track in the Bay compared to the southeast both because they are much more mobile and because there are often many other whales around. Saturday was pretty straight-forward but this was very much the case on Sunday. When we found our mom/calf pair there were also at least 20 other right whales skim feeding in the area. It can be a little tricky to collect data in such a situation, but being surrounded by 20+ right whales skim feeding around your boat is definitely one of the coolest ways to spend your day.
Jess and I are back in Syracuse for the moment, but if the whales stay in the Bay and the weather continues to cooperate, we may be back out for more adventures soon! Check back often!
Welcome to Cape Cod, Massachusetts
The Cape Cod field season is different from other field seasons because of one important fact: there is no field station. That is, the team and all of our equipment are spread out in several places, making everything a bit more challenging. This year I am staying in Syracuse and only driving up to Cape Cod when we have a weather window. As I have mentioned in previous posts, it is often very difficult to predict when the weather will cooperate…that being said, when Grace called on Saturday and said “tomorrow and Monday look good”, I wasn’t too surprised at the short notice. Unfortunately it was too late to get there in time for Sunday’s boat day but I could easily manage getting there for Monday. Susan couldn’t make it, but luckily Leanna and Jess were able to rework their busy schedules and join me. So Sunday came and we departed for what Jess called “a whirlwind tour of Cape Cod” 🙂
Sunday, being the first day out this season, ended up being more of a dry run which was alright since there weren’t any mom/calves sighted and Leanna, Jess, and I weren’t there yet anyway. Come Monday though we were ready and headed out early in hopes of better luck. We quickly found several subsurface feeding right whales and took some time to take photographs. The afternoon rolled around and neither us nor the plane had found any mom/calves yet. We were all beginning to wonder if all of the moms had taken their calves and left the Bay already…that would definitely put a damper on our data collection this season! We finally got our call over the radio around 1500 hrs: two mom/calf pairs! Phew. They were both pairs we had seen and recorded with in the southeast which was even better. After unsuccessful attempts to biopsy one of the moms, we decided to follow the other pair for our data collection.
All in all we had a great day. We collected all the data there was to collect (other than tag data obviously since we did not tag) and got to see 15+ right whales subsurface feeding throughout the day. Not a bad Monday, not bad at all.
Jess and Leanna headed back to Syracuse very early the next day (early as in 0400 early) to make it to class that day (such good students), but I was able to stay a little later and get all the data organized before heading back to the ‘Cuse. Now we wait for the word and our next whirlwind Cape Cod adventure!
Closing out the season
Overall this season has been a resounding success. The number of right whale calves for the season has reached 20, with new mothers still being sighted in mid-February. We have collected behavioral and acoustic data from a good cross section of the population, got a glimpse into underwater behavior from a tag attachment and even have more than one follow for some mother-calf pairs, giving us insight into how the pair’s behavior changes as the calves mature.
I’m excited that I was able to return for the next to last week of the season to check in with the field team. I’m also excited to get another short break from the winter weather in Syracuse. It was 70 when I left Florida in January, and 7 degrees when I arrived in Syracuse. Although this past week has been relatively cool in Florida, the sun, sand and ocean are a nice break from clouds, salt and snow.
I managed to get out on the water for 2 days out of the 5 that I was in Fernandina, which is very unusual for me. For the past few years, I typically get out < 1 day every two weeks in the field. We had great luck out on the water. The aerial survey teams were able to direct us to mother-calf pairs both days, and we were able to collect behavioral and acoustic data. The entire field team is working together well and I was mostly an extra set of hands while they ran the show. Both mother-calf pairs approached the vessel when we were drifting with the engine shut down, recording both the sounds in the environment and the behavior of the whales. Here is Dana’s nice picture of one of the mothers approaching the boat that I photobombed at the last second.
Our time in Florida is winding down, the team will be packing up all the equipment and heading North soon, where the research will continue in Cape Cod Bay when the whales start migrating up the coast. Check out the NOAA Northeast Fisheries Service website to follow North Atlantic right whale sightings.
-Susan