Susan Parks

Who’s who SEUS 2015

Time for another mom update, filled with info from the New England Aquarium right whale catalog and the North Atlantic right whale DNA Bank at Trent University. Thanks to these organizations, and the funding of NOAA Fisheries, we can look up the information on all of these moms using freely available, online resources. Here is some info on the moms so far in 2015:

#1604: while we don’t know her exact age, this female is over 29 years old. We also don’t know anything about her mother or father. This is her 5th calf.

#1701 (Aphrodite): a 28 year old female, her mother is #1219 who died in 1989. This is Aphrodite’s 6th calf.

#1703 (Wolf): also 28 years old, her mother is #1157 (Moon) and her father is #1516. This is Wolf’s 4th calf.

#2145: a 24 year old female, her mother is # 1145 (Grand Teton) and her father is #1150 (Gemini). This is her 5th calf.

#2605 (Smoke): a 19 year old female, her mother is #1705 (Phoenix, whom we followed here in the southeast with her 2012 calf) and her father is #1227 (Silver). Phoenix has a very interesting story, with her mother genetically #1151, but behaviorally #1004. See the Frasier et al. 2010 paper “Reciprocal Exchange and Subsequent Adoption of Calves by Two North Atlantic Right Whales (Eubalaena glacialis)” for more on her story. This is Smoke’s 3rd calf.

two whales just above the surface of the water
#1705 with her 2012 calf close to the beach. Photo: Pete Duley

#3646: a 9 year old female, her mother is #1946 (whom we followed with here in the southeast with her 2013 calf). Her maternal grandmother is #1246 (Loligo) and her maternal grandfather is #1037. This is her 1st calf.

That’s all for now, but hopefully I will have more moms to report on soon!

Familiar friends

It is back to Fernandina Beach for our final Florida field season on the mom/calf project. While that is a bit sad to think about, it is great to have Alex on board again and Pete will be joining us shortly – a great team to finish off with. And those aren’t the only familiar friends down here! Also spotted recently was Eg #4092, our dear friend from last year (see blog post “Curious encounters of the whale kind” written last year by Nathan).

Yesterday was our first day out for the season. After tracking with the plane for a short while I noticed a fluke waving at me just 1/2 mile away from the center of the sun’s glare. It couldn’t have been more perfect. As we arrived on the spot, we stopped around where we thought the whale would come up and we waited for it to reappear. After just a moment, not 5 meters from our stopped boat, a massive right whale head slowly broke the surface of the water to take a look at us, then slipped back below the surface. A few seconds later, on the other side of the boat, up pops that face again. This behavior, and that beautiful lumpy face, were more than enough to let us know that #4092 was making herself known yet again!

calf head above water
The beautiful 4092. Photo: Lisa Conger

For comparison, here is a photo I took last year. You can easily tell her by the scars on her chin.

close up of whale calf chin
Photo: Dana Cusano

She wasn’t quite as interested in us as she was last year, so our encounter was short, but I like to think maybe she remembered our big orange boat. No mom/calf pairs for us yet, but the season is young. Maybe we will even get another close encounter with our friend 4092! She needs a name, don’t you think?

The North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium – 2015

This past week three members of the lab, Dana, Jessica and myself, travelled to New Bedford, MA to attend the 2015 North Atlantic right whale consortium meeting at theNew Bedford Whaling Museum. The right whale consortium is a group of individuals interested in the conservation of the highly endangered North Atlantic right whale, and it consists of academics, researchers, veterinarians, representatives from government and statement management agencies, non-profits, and students, and the meeting provides an annual opportunity for us all to come together and update the current status of the population, highlight ongoing research, and to discuss the current conservation issues and upcoming threats to the recovery of this species.

whale skeletons hanging from ceiling
A view of the magnificent whale skeletons at the New Bedford Whaling Museum

This meeting marks my 17th consortium meeting, and it has become a bit of a reunion of old friends and colleagues that I look forward to each year. This year marked the first that I was nominally ‘running’, as the current Chair of the North Atlantic Consortium Board. I have to say, despite being at 16 previous meetings, I neglected to notice the fine details of how the sessions worked and who made all of the announcements (turns out, the chair). So I got to do a lot of standing up to make announcements, like, “Please don’t bring food or beverages into the auditorium” and had the pleasure of thanking everyone who actually organized the meeting and made sure it ran smoothly, most notably the staff at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, Bob Rocha, and Heather Pettis, from the New England Aquarium. They made my job extremely easy and I got to enjoy the meeting as an eager audience member for the most part.

This meeting also marked another first for me, advisor to one of my student’s presenting their independent research to the consortium. Jessica gave an excellent presentation on her research investigating the individual distinctiveness of North Atlantic right whale “upcalls” and the potential for these sounds to aid in monitoring and detection (and counting!) right whales in the wild. Jessica did an outstanding job, and at the end of the meeting, I was very proud to announce that her presentation received the top score from a panel of judges, and that she would be receiving the NARWC Endangered Species Print Project Student Presentation Award.

This was a great end to a productive meeting and the lab is traveling back to Syracuse to dive back into more research next week.

– Susan

sign warning mariners of whale presence
A sign developed to warn mariners of the presence of right whales to potentially reduce the risk of ship strike

Until next year

With the impending stretch of bad weather, the utter lack of all things right whale, and the end of the season drawing near anyway, we decided to call our 2014 Bay of Fundy field season officially over. I will be heading back to Syracuse not entirely empty handed, though with admittedly far less data than I had hoped…anyway, that’s it on the right whale field work until January, so check back then!

Oh hi, cachalot

While our team spotted no right whales in the Bay yesterday (the other teams combined found 4-6) I finally got my sperm whale encounter! Granted all I saw of it were its flukes, and I didn’t even get a picture…so here is one from Arkive.

fluke up terminal dive of sperm whale

From as far away as we were, and being that the flukes were pretty unremarkable, we weren’t positive at the time that what we had was in fact a sperm whale. Well considering they can stay down for over an hour, we were either going to have to assume that it was (which is bad form) or we could do what we do best and drop a hydrophone over the side of the boat to listen. And that is what we did. And this is what we heard.

Using a spectrogram, we can visualize what we are hearing as well. Here is a spectrogram of the above audio clip.

spectrogram of sperm whale clicks

This animal was likely a male – mature male sperm whales forage at higher latitudes, often alone, while the larger pods consisting of females, calves, and juveniles spend all of their time in the tropics and sub-tropics. Sperm whale social vocalizations include stereotyped, repetitive patterns of clicks called codas. The solidarity of the males in these higher latitude habitats means that their vocal repertoire is different than that of the female/calf/juvenile social groups – codas are not heard here. The clicks we were hearing from our whale were therefore likely being used for echolocation while the animal was searching for food. Pretty neat, yes? Yes.

So while we are bummed about the paucity of right whales, I got to hear a sperm whale that was somewhere below me. I’ll take it.

Right whales, great friends, and…pirates?

This has been a great past few days and for two very different reasons!

Thursday started out like any marginal boat day: getting up early and looking at the weather, then looking at it every 15 minutes to see if it has changed or not, for better or worse. We had just made the decision not to go when Marianna came dancing (quite literally) into the kitchen. The folks from Grand Manan Whale and Seabird Research Station had called on the radio and were out in the Bay with a potential mother/calf right whale pair! Just to brag a bit, from the time we got the call until we were on scene was only about an hour and 15 minutes. We were on our GAME. And obviously more than a little excited to finally have an opportunity to do what we came for: tag a right whale mom or calf.

When we got there we expected just a mom/calf pair. What we found instead were 5-8 right whales all in the same area, even grouped up together at times. We saw the animal the GMWSRS team said could be a calf, and although it was a bit bigger than the calves usually are around here, it was definitely a young animal. The pretty big swell we were in was making it very difficult to even see all of the whales around, so we knew we needed to really act fast in order to get a tag on. We really were on our game. We got our tag on and the placement was perfect. Not that we expect much less from Alex of course. No sooner did we get our tag on though did the whales dive, and were gone.

collage of whale being tagged
Still shot pulled from the GoPro of our successful tagging. Photos: Alex Loer

That’s the problem with whales. They can disappear. I have mentioned this before, and I will say it again for those disbelievers, it is so easy to lose a whale. And that swell we were in? Oh that does not help, not at all. We had all of our tracking equipment out and were getting hits from our dear tag (it was of course Scoby), however if we were in the bottom of the swell we were obscured from the transmitter on the tag and it was difficult to get a “hit”. We equipped the Nereid with our other set of tracking gear and had Heather Koopman and Andrew Westgate from GMWSRS keep an ear out on their equipment too just for good measure. Turns out Andrew, one of their senior scientists, is not only very VERY good at tracking, he LOVES it. Guess who found it first…it is always nice to have great friends that are willing to help out in the name of science. First round is on us guys.

To add to our good mood and high spirits, yesterday was the annual “Pirate Invasion” where the town of Eastport “invades” Lubec. In other words, everyone from both towns dresses up as pirates and those from Eastport head over by boat, motorcycle, and sea plane where we attempt to fend them off with water guns and water balloons. We inevitably fail, and then there are festivities to be shared by both Lubecers and Eastporteans alike. Being such a windy day, we were on land for it again this year and were able to partake.

team members posing while dressed as pirates
Me, Kelsey, Liz, Grace, and Dan dressed in our finest pirate garb!

We won’t be out tomorrow, but Tuesday looks promising. Hopefully the whales have stuck around! Until then, insert cliche, cheesy pirate goodbye here – something using the words “arr”, “matey”, and “Davey Jones’ locker”.

A day trip to Harvard Forest

I like to think of myself as an outdoorsy person.  I try to get away from it all a couple times a week.  Mostly I go mountain biking, but I also run and hike on forest trails.  In addition to the enjoyment I get from these activities, I like to listen to the environment.  I enjoy being in an area where I cannot hear human activities.  Where the dominant sound is contributed by something – insects, birds, frogs, wind, rain or whatever happens to be around – that is not “us”.  Hearing plays a large role in my perspective of a location.  There is currently a disconnect between my eyes and my ears when I walk into the lab.  I walk into the lab and I see desks and workbenches, but I hear a meadow in summer.  Actively listening to one’s environment can have a profound impact on the way in which we experience our world.  As we welcomed the students back to campus, I have noticed the sheer number of individuals who walk around actively isolating themselves from the sounds in their environment.  I don’t care for the sounds of cars driving by, emergency vehicle sirens blaring, or the constant hum of HVAC equipment – but at what cost are we drowning out those sounds with our personal playlists.  Perhaps it is the curmudgeon in me, but the number of people walking around with headphones gives me trouble.  There is a wonderful world around us, we just have to open our eyes, ears, and minds and experience it.  It is this perspective that makes me grateful for the opportunities I have to experience nature.

This week, Hannah and I headed out to Harvard Forest to service the acoustic recorder deployed there.  It was my first time going to the site and I was surprised.  Rural Massachusetts is beautiful country.   From the colonial style houses to the pastoral views, and the turkeys hanging out in the road, the drive to the site was quite enjoyable.

These turkeys were taking their time crossing the road. I wonder why.

Harvard Forest is a research forest administrated by Harvard University.  Since 1907 researchers have been using the forest to study the ways various physical, biological, and human systems impact the earth.  We have deployed an acoustic recorder as part of the NEON project and I will be spending the next year trying to extract as much information about the acoustic activity of birds, frogs, and insects as I can.  Most of my effort is made from the “comfort” of an office.  As an acoustician, most of my time is spent in front of a computer, analyzing recordings and writing up my findings.  So I relish every chance I get to go into the field.

Fisher museum sign in front of trees
Research offices for Harvard Forest

We first stopped off at the Harvard Forest research offices to grab the charged batteries.  Once we got the batteries, we headed to the recorder.  When we arrived at the path to where the recorder is deployed, the first thing we noticed was the presence of a work crew.  Perhaps some new sensor was being deployed, so the work crew was installing the instrumentation and some new wiring.  The elevated path/gangway had some of the grates missing, making what would be a really easy walk into a really easy walk with some sections of balance beam practice.

microphone attached to tree
There should be a windscreen on this microphone

After our harrowing journey through the balance beam gauntlet, we got to the recorder.  Everything looked ok from a distance, but upon closer inspection, the recorder was not on, and the microphone windscreens (the foam covers for microphones) had seen better days.  As it turns out, those windscreens won’t quite make it through a year.  The recorder was off because the data cards were full.  We switched out the data cards, changed the batteries, put on new windscreens, and changed the gain (the record volume).  It sounds like a lot, but it went really quickly and we were back on the road in no time.  We drove back to Syracuse and despite the long day of driving I was thankful for the opportunity to get into the field, if only for a brief while.

metal walkway running through forest
The walkway to our recorder. Construction crews working on a new instrument made passage more challenging

-Sam

Why sperm whales are bad news

Well, for us anyway. And squid. And Captain Ahab.

We just had our first two days out in the Bay for the 2014 season, and while we saw many species, we only saw 3 or 4 right whales. None of which were a mom/calf pair. The other two teams had similar luck, with a combined total of less than 10 right whales between all three of us over a two day span. We surveyed pretty much everywhere we could in the Bay too so it seems, for the moment at least, the right whales have left the party. That isn’t to say they won’t come back of course, but the sperm whales have moved in…cue creepy music.

Why is that so bad? Sperm whales are cool, right?? Well sure, but here in the Bay of Fundy it means that things are changing. Up until just a few years ago, only a single sperm whale had been documented here since 1980. And it was just a few years ago that we started to have such a drop in right whales sightings here in the Bay. It isn’t that the sperm whales are driving the right whales away, but they definitely do seem to move in as the right whales move out. Since these guys eat squid, not copepods like right whales, our scientist colleagues think it likely indicates a shift in the entire food chain, and not mere coincidence. Eek.

Anyway, I still haven’t actually had the opportunity to ever SEE a sperm whale, so I am still hoping to get that chance this year. Bad news or not, they really are pretty neat. I imagine seeing one will obviously go something like this:

sperm whale crushing wooden boat
Insert big orange safeboat instead of wooden boat…

Species list for the first two days out: right whales, fin whales, humpback whales, minke whales, Atlantic white-sided dolphins, harbor porpoise, basking sharks, ocean sunfish, grey seals, one bald eagle, puffins, and countless other seabirds that I am lumping together for lack of any solid personal interest…

One more round

I arrived back in the Bay of Fundy Thursday night for our last field season here on the mom/calf project. The New England Aquarium has been here for about 2 weeks and have had much greater success than last year already (read all about it in their blog). There have been a couple of sightings of mom/calf pairs but these reports are over a week old now. We are still very, very optimistic that this will turn out to be a great season full of whales though! Considering our team didn’t see a single right whale last year in the Bay, I think the odds are high.

Although, in the words of Han Solo, never tell me the odds…check back soon!

The Parks Lab at the Animal Behavior Meeting

This past week, Dana, Hannah and I travelled to Princeton, NJ for the 51st annual meeting of the Animal Behavior Society. It was only my second time attending the meeting, and a first for both Hannah and Dana. The setting at Princeton University was beautiful, though it did take a day or so to orient to the circuitous routes around campus. The first day I felt as thought I was inside some sort of 19th century maze.  My niece and nephew are current students at Princeton, and my brother and his wife both attended, so it was fun to see where they all went to school.

entrance to building with lion statues on sides

For those not familiar with the Animal Behavior Society, it is an organization founded in 1964, to study all aspects of Animal Behavior in all species. For example, at this meeting, there were scientific presentations on a range of topics from gene expression related to behavior in swordtail fish to documentation of an infanticide attempt in dolphins. The species covered the full range from small insects (even a talk on mosquitos) to some of the largest animals on the planet (elephants and our presentations on humpback and right whales).

lab members standing next to their posters

 

The meeting was much larger than the last one I attended, with 5 concurrent sessions of talks running most of the day, and poster sessions from 7-9pm in the evenings. It made for long days with lots of science.  We all had great interest in our posters, sticking with a Syracuse University theme to link our three posters together.

One of the highlights of the meeting for us was interfacing with the members of the Schul Lab at the University of Missouri. Two of the groups’ graduate students had posters directly across from ours leading to long discussions about our forays into insect research. We picked up several very useful tips. For example, Meadow Katydids like to eat horse meat (NOT what we’ve been feeding them) and katydids are easiest to catch at dusk in the evening when they aren’t actively moving behind vegetation to hide from would-be katydid catchers in the field. Dana and I also, sadly, had to mostly claim ignorance for the scientific names of our study species (a faux pas in any field of biology, but doubly so with insects!). Hannah made us proud though, with her encyclopedic knowledge of scientific names. We’re excited about staying in touch with this research group as we venture into the world of katydid research.

-Susan