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Dead in the water…

We started the morning bright and early. Finally we were going out after being in for more than a week! We were all set and ready to go when…the engine wouldn’t start. Surely this was just a fluke, we haven’t had any problems this field season! So we tried again…nothing. Just the disheartening sound of an engine desperately trying to turn over and failing miserably. Fortunately the Callisto was going out today as well and were still on the dock as we were attempting to disembark. Two boats tied together and one set of jumper cables later, we had the engine started. Great! We waved to the Callisto as they departed, still yelling our thanks…

…and then the engine cut. Sarah ran to the house to grab the battery jumper we had brought with us, but we were not very confident in how well it was charged. When we tried it though, it worked. And we were off!

We were soon out into the Bay and on our track lines, surveying for any signs of right whales. We stopped for a listening station (without turning off the engine, just to be safe!) but heard nothing. So we continued on until we got that same old call that trusty #3390 and her calf were nearby. We sped off in that direction full speed and eventually came upon a fluking whale not too far off our bow. Great! Got them! We pulled back a little…

…and then the engine cut. Awesome. Grace turned the key to start it back up, and we got no response. Super. We pulled out the battery jumper, and it was dead. Fantastic. It was official. We were dead in the water!

Now when you think about it, being dead in the water is a pretty scary thing. When you lose the ability to move, you also lose the ability to get away from situations that are unsafe or uncomfortable. Luckily for us (and I use the term luckily rather loosely here) the sea state was only a 2 or so and the swells weren’t too large. Otherwise we could have been tossed around like a toy boat in a bubble bath. With waves. Also luckily for us, we had plenty of friends nearby. We quickly called the Nereid to relay our position just in case our electronic batteries died too. Soon after, we got calls from the Callisto, Jupiter, and the Eukita ready to help however they could! Luckily again, we had kept the jumper cables on the boat. One of our better decisions that day, to be sure! The Callisto was the winner, being faster than the Nereid and closer than the other two boats.

And so we waited. At least we had some company.

bird floating on water surface
Our new friend the Greater Shearwater. Photo: Dana Cusano

Finally our help arrived. We tied up alongside the Callisto for the second time that morning and they managed to give us another jump. It was definitely time to get home and we were eager to do so before our engine shut down again. So we set off at full speed to the dock with the Callisto not far behind to help us when we got there, which we certainly would need. Docking is definitely something we wouldn’t be able to do if we were dead in the water again! The engine only cut two more times on the way back (only…) but we were able to get it started up again without any problems. We tied up to the Callisto at the dock one last time and they guided us in gently. We were back! And without any real damage to anyone or anything, except of course the Selkie…

As of yet, we don’t know quite what is wrong. Probably a bad battery, but maybe a combination of other factors as well. Here’s hoping that our last week in the Bay won’t be spent tied up at the dock. More soon…and hopefully good news! If nothing else today was definitely an adventure, and a lesson in the value of always being prepared!

The sounds of success

When we got a call over the radio today that there was a mom/calf spotted not too far from where we were surveying, we sped off as fast as we could towards the location we were given. When we arrived and found a right whale, we were a little surprised. Here was the calf of #3390, but all alone! The calf didn’t seem too concerned and was simply lolling about at the surface, doing slow rolls and lazy flipper slaps. This was a perfect opportunity to get the hydrophones in the water and record some calls!

Well what did we hear, you ask? The beautiful sounds of success. For only the second time this season, we were recording high quality calls, and lots of them! Just in case you have never had the privilege to listen to right whales, here is a short clip of what they sound like. Now you can boast that you know what it sounds like to be in the water with a right whale!

Calls from the calf of 3390

We were with the calf for almost 2 hours before he met up with mom again. We stayed with the pair for a little while longer before they bid their farewell. The sea had gotten pretty choppy and the wind had picked up, making it much more difficult to keep track of the whales. After a VERY bumpy ride back, we arrived home exhausted and pretty pleased with ourselves. All in all, a great day!

Strangers in the Bay…

Well we have been stuck on land now for a few days due to some pretty windy conditions, but last we knew we still only had trusty #3390 and her calf in the Bay. We are hoping the other mom’s are just running a little late and will join in soon! There have been other surprises to keep us on our toes in the meantime though, and I’ll take this day off as an opportunity to share what we have seen. Some interesting species have been spotted this year that are “strangers” to the Bay. Some have not been seen in years, some are seen only every few years, and some have never been documented here at all! (I do note however that just because they have never been documented before does not necessarily mean they have never been here; it may be that they have been here and never spotted, or spotted but never documented. This is always a difficulty when working with animals that spend most of their lives out of our sight. Regardless, it is still very cool!).

Our first stranger of the year was the sperm whale. Up until 2010, sperm whales had not been seen in the Bay of Fundy since the 1980’s. While the Bay is technically included in their home range, sperm whales prefer deep water where they dive down to catch squid. In fact, they routinely dive to depths greater than 1,300ft with some animals off of the coast of Japan reported to dive to almost 2,800ft! This makes a sperm whale sighting here in the Bay very unusual, and very interesting!

sperm whale underwater
Photo: National Geographic

Another stranger is the white-beaked dolphin. While this dolphin is technically not a total stranger, it has only rarely been seen during the many years that researcher’s have been doing surveys in the Bay…that’s 33 years for the New England Aquarium! This obviously makes sighting these dolphins very exciting. Check out the New England Aquarium’s blog for great pictures and even a video!

white beaked dolphin diving
Photo: BBC

The next species on our list is not a whale but just as neat to see…the blue shark! While the Bay is included in the home range of this shark, according to scientists at the Grand Manan Whale and Seabird Research Station there has never been a documented sighting here. Again, this does not necessarily mean they haven’t been here; since sharks don’t need to come to the surface to breath, they are even harder to keep track of than whales sometimes! However this year we are seeing them, and we are seeing quite a few, which is definitely a new thing! While they only get to about 13ft, not nearly as large as the basking sharks that are common in the Bay, they are still very cool to see! I think all sharks are pretty neat though…

blue shark underwater
Photo: Andy Murch

Last but certainly not least, the most unusual stranger we have encountered this year is the bowhead whale. Yes, that’s right, a bowhead! These large baleen whales are actually in the same family as the right whale and even look very similar. One of most notable differences is that bowhead whales lack the callosities that make right whales so distinguishable. The usual distribution of these whales is almost exclusively in the Arctic, although a bowhead was spotted off of Cape Cod earlier this year. That is possibly the most southern documented sighting of a bowhead! No one is sure yet if it is the same whale, but either way this is all pretty amazing! Check out the blog from the New England Aquarium for more details.

bowhead whale underwater
Illustration by AnimalSpot.net https://www.animalspot.net/bowhead-whale.html

Keep checking back to see if we have discovered more rare and interesting species here in the Bay of Fundy and to check on our progress with our mom/calf research!

Welcome to the Bay #3390

Just as we were departing, we got a call from the Nereid: they had a mom/calf pair. #3390 and her calf, to be specific. It took us about an hour to get to where the Nereid was. As soon as we arrived we slowed down to begin our search. We heard a blow and got so excited we immediately started to take photo ID shots: pictures of both sides of the head which we can use to identify each whale. More on that later….After several photos our seasoned right whale expert and captain, Monica, stopped and said “Hmmm.” After consulting our onboard guide, she realized this was not our mom. After so many days of no whales, we didn’t stop to think that there may be more than one around! Luckily Monica knew what #3390 looked like and quickly realized our mistake so we didn’t waste too much time photographing the wrong whale (not that it wasn’t a beautiful whale, of course, just not the one we wanted).

Once we took a step back to regroup we saw a whale watching boat and lo and behold, they were watching our pair. All of our hard work searching over the past few weeks was rewarded with a very energetic and charismatic calf!

After a moment of awe, we snapped into action. We had jobs to do and data to collect! One of the hardest parts of field work is forcing yourself to look away from these amazing animals and get to work…Our Nereid helper today was Kelsey, so she helped out by doing our photo ID work (and taking the lovely photos above). The first thing I needed to do was get the hydrophone array in the water. Not a quick task. We have 100m of cable with three hydrophones spaced evenly apart that we attach to a long pole. The cable stretches out behind us and we tow it along, which is why it is called a towed array. One major problem is that with the array out we can’t stop but we can’t go very fast either. That means we are slow and not very maneuverable. Which is a problem when whales decide they are done hanging around and want to move on. Which of course #3390 decided at that moment. Unfortunately, the next couple of hours were a desperate attempt to keep up going 1.5 knots…that’s about 1.7 mph…

Finally we decided that it would be better to try and get some behavioral data without acoustics than no data at all. So we pulled in the array and sped up to catch our whales. We managed to get 10 minutes of video before mom fluked…and then calf fluked…and they were gone. Yes, the whales outsmarted us again, but it is still early enough in the season to be optimistic! They are here and we have found them, and that is good enough to keep our hopes high for another day.

Stop, look, listen…

The weather is finally beginning to clear up. Even though it was overcast, the sea was calm and we left the dock at around 0715 with high hopes. We followed some survey track lines for a while without much luck. So we decided to stop and do what’s called a listening station; we stopped the boat, shut off the engine, and simply listened. After 10 minutes or so we finally heard a blow. A whale was somewhere nearby, so now all we needed to do was find it! Everyone looked in the direction of the sound and we waited for the whale to take its next breath while we all held ours. When we finally heard it again, we couldn’t see anything. The overcast sky along with the light drizzle of rain and the fog in the distance were hiding the whale we knew was there. Finally someone saw the flukes of a right whale…good news, and bad. Yes we found the whale, but it was several miles away and it fluked. Usually when a whale shows its flukes as it is diving, it is heading down for a longer dive. For right whales, they usually go down for about 12 minutes on such dives, but the New England Aquarium’s boat the Nereid followed a right whale just a few days ago that was doing over 25 minute dives! We headed in the direction that it went down, but we had lost it.

We started up again and followed more track lines with no success. When we stopped for lunch we shut off the engine and heard another blow. We are quickly learning that sometimes it is better to just sit and be patient, and let the whales come to you! We tried to catch up with it but we only got a few photos of it before it too gave us the slip. At least we finally got to see a right whale up close!

At around 1700 we got a call from a research vessel that tags basking sharks. They had a mom/calf pair! Unfortunately, that mom/calf pair was pretty far away. It took us an hour just to get there and by that time the mom and calf had disappeared. After searching for about an hour, the sun was starting to set and we needed to start heading for shore. We may not have seen many right whales today, but we definitely know they are finally here! The weather looks good for tomorrow, so we will head out again with even higher hopes.

First day out

We took advantage of our first nice day to take out the boat, set up the gear, and test it all out. Good news is we seemed to have worked out most of the kinks. Bad news is we have no whales still. The weather doesn’t look great for the foreseeable future, but hopefully that will change. Some right whales would be nice too!

Welcome to Lubec, Maine

The easternmost town in the United States. Also home of a well known lighthouse on West Quoddy Head which is the easternmost point on the U.S. mainland. For those of you who may question, Lubec is not the easternmost city as that would be Eastport. One thing is for certain: it is definitely very far east. It pretty much sits on the border of Maine and Canada. You can even see Campobello Island, New Brunswick just across the FDR Memorial Bridge. Well…most days. Actually, not even today. I am quickly discovering Lubec has a bit of a fog problem…

Anyway, beautiful Lubec Maine is also situated near the Bay of Fundy, just on the other side of Campobello Island. And that’s exactly why we are here. What makes the Bay of Fundy so special to us, you ask? Right whales. More specifically, right whale moms and their calves. Our study looks at the behavior between right whale mom/calf pairs to figure out why they are so susceptible to collisions with boats. We mainly look at vocal behavior and calf vocal development. In order to make our study more valuable, we need to study the mom/calf pairs from birth to weaning. This requires us to travel pretty far! All right whales give birth down in the southeast U.S., but they don’t all come to the Bay of Fundy in the summer. Which means there aren’t always a lot of mom/calf pairs here. Add that to the fog problem and you understand why we need all the time we can get up here to give us a fighting chance for some data!

Even though we couldn’t go out today, I did get a chance to do some hiking. Luckily for you I brought my camera so you can see just how lovely (and foggy) Lubec can be. Fingers crossed for tomorrow though!

river between mountains with slight fog
Quoddy Head State Park. Photo: Dana Cusano
lighthouse with water in background
West Quoddy Head Light. Photo: Dana Cusano

The mother lode

The past three days we spent out near Chatham, docking there for Thursday and Friday night. When you are out for 12 hour days for many days in a row (I still feel like I am on a rocking boat when I close my eyes), your days tend to mush together…but I will try to sum it up as best as I can.

Thursday we left the Sanctuary dock bright and early and spent 4 hours or so getting back to where the whales (and the Foster) were. Once we found them both, we got Elliot on board to map some prey. We also tried to photo ID as many whales as possible, which really helps to keep track of a tagged animal if it is in a group. Really the girls from the Whale Center were in charge of that but I like to think I helped. We keep track of tagged animals not only by their flukes, but also with a VHF transmitter which beeps every time the tag comes out of the water. Think glorified TV antenna when TV’s used to have antennae. The bad part about the day was that an entangled turtle, humpback, and grey seal were all sighted. The Song of the Whale was dispatched to help out with the turtle, but I never found out how that went. I will report back if I do.

Yesterday we got the luxury of sleeping in and left the harbor at around 0700. Once we found the Foster I was picked up in the Luna and got to learn all about using the laser range finder and behavioral following. I also learned that being surrounded by bubble nets and lunge feeding whales when you are practically eye level with them is just plain amazing, but seeing bubbles coming up right under your tiny little RHIB is quite frightening…but still pretty neat. The tagged animal we followed in the Luna ended up keeping her DTAG on for a record 24 hours, the maximum time it was programmed for. So I also got to see the retrieval of said tag.

Today was by far the best day of the trip though. Once underway, we received instruction from Dave to, and I quote, find the mother lode. Of whales that is. So after searching around for a while and following a few different groups, we noticed that they all seemed to be headed in the same direction. Naturally, we followed. Suddenly (or so it seemed) we were surrounded. Humpbacks and minke whales everywhere you looked, in any direction. Some were as close as a couple hundred meters and some as far as a kilometer or more. We had found the mother lode. They weren’t just lazing around either, they were breaching, kick feeding, lunge feeding…there were bubble nets everywhere, and some with more than 9 animals to the same net! As Captain Bob says, no refunds today! We had to leave a bit earlier than we would have liked in order to make our 4-hour trek back to Scituate, but before we left they got a tag on a female whose calf just happened to be the one that I got several wonderful photos of. Elliot also hopped on board for a bit to get some good data on all that prey swimming about. We managed to leave just in time to pass through a lovely thunderstorm on our way home, complete with lightning and 5ft. seas. Quite the experience.

So the Auk is officially done with her part of the cruise. Good luck to everyone still out on the Foster and Song of the Whale! Hopefully I will be back next year!

 

Where have all the whales gone?

Oh that’s right, they are still down south where we left them. So yesterday we stayed around Stellwagen hoping to find some whales, but alas there were only a few loners and a couple mom/calf pairs. One of the goals is to tag a mom, but one of the females we found was very emaciated and her calf didn’t look too great either. Definitely not a candidate for tagging…also definitely not worth the trip up here for the Foster when there are so many whales to choose from where we left her. They even managed to tag a whale with both a DTAG and a Crittercam!

Today though the Foster came to Stellwagen anyway in a last ditch effort to find some whales here. It is, after all, the proposed site of the study. Unfortunately, the whales still don’t agree that it is the place to be. Tomorrow we are both headed back south and we will likely spend two nights moored in Chatham to be closer to the action. I did spot a pair of basking sharks and we got to go over and take a closer look. Half the length of the boat and mouths wide open to filter feed, they were quite the sight.

 

Let the games begin!

The Auk left the dock this morning at 0630 to rendezvous with the Foster on Stellwagen Bank. Unfortunately, the whales had other ideas on where they wanted to be today… and apparently we didn’t get the memo. The Foster was unable to move for a bit (a right whale decided now was a good time to snuggle the ship), so we were sent off to find where all the whales had gone. Four hours and many miles later…we found them. We had to go past Cape Cod Bay, around Provincetown, and back south down towards Chatham, but we found them. There were a good 20-25 whales or so feeding in small groups, just the right criteria for tagging. We stayed with the whales until the Foster arrived, but soon after we already had to head home. We had a nice long 4-hour ride back to Scituate to make.

The water was a little too choppy yet again today, so Elliot didn’t make it over to calibrate. Maybe tomorrow…The tagging team had some success at least. They managed to get a couple of tags on, though I think one of them was breached off fairly quickly. It’s only day one, so there will be (hopefully) plenty more chances.

 

There is some concern that if the whales stay where they are, they may be too far away for the Auk to be useful. An 8-hour transit time for 4 hours of searching for and following whales is not the most ideal situation. One idea is to dock in Chatham for the night, but I guess it all depends on what the whales do tomorrow. If only they’d cooperate!