Watching Our Water Ways

When I hear about research taking place in Earth’s polar regions, I often wonder how our amazing ice-breaker ships make it through the ice. Do they just plow forward without hesitation, or do they worry about getting stuck?

Cassandra Brooks, a doctoral student at Stanford University, recently compiled an intriguing video showing time-lapse scenes of the Nathaniel B. Palmer on a cruise just completed in the Ross Sea of the Antarctic.

Cassandra’s narration provides a clear explanation of all kinds of ice encountered by the ice breaker, and she touches on the research itself.

“It was so beautiful,” Brooks told NBC News’ LiveScience. “And it was such a neat experience to be on this crazy boat that was just screaming through the ice.”

The video was part of a blogging project she undertook for National Geographic. The blog includes just seven entries, but each is an enjoyable science lesson for the reader. Take the entries in chronological order (bottom first) to get the full story of the adventure.

Before entering the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources, Brooks worked in both basic research and environmental education, according to the bio she wrote for her own website.

She holds a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and has published articles for both scientific and general audiences.

Casandra informs me that she hopes to write a final closing blog related to the recent cruise and will probably continue blogging about other projects.

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Today is Earth Day and a good time to consider the Earth as a whole. Thanks to an impressive set of videos released by NASA in celebration of Earth Month, we can take a wide-angle view of the entire planet.

The first video serves to demonstrate the many images generated by NASA’s fleet of science satellites and aircraft. The space agency chose to accompany the video with music rather than narration, which ties together the images better than a detailed description. To delve more deeply into the science behind the images, visit NASA’s “Missions” page.

The second video shows the beauty of the Earth as seen from the International Space Station. The third is a blend of Earth images, computer animations and glimpses of the science behind it all. Although these videos are not amusing in a humorous way, I hope you’ll find them worth a look on Earth Day.

If you would like more NASA videos, still images and explanations, check out NASA’s “Earth Month 2013.”

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The Pacific Fishery Management Council decided yesterday that it was time to consider, within its management plans, how large-scale fishing at certain times and places can create ripple effects in the food web.

The council adopted a new Fishery Ecosystem Plan to help manage West Coast fisheries, broadening the view of how fishing can shape the entire ocean community.

“It’s the beginning of a paradigm shift in fisheries management,” Paul Shively of Pew Charitable Trusts told Jeff Barnard, environmental reporter for the Associated Press.

In the past, managers have tried to figure out what level of fishing can be sustainable. Now, in theory, they will also consider how a reduction in the numbers of certain fish can affect marine creatures that might want to eat them or be eaten by them.

“We’ve always managed our oceans on a species-by-species level,” Shively noted. “By developing an ecosystem plan we begin to look at how everything is connected in the ocean.”

Dan Wolford, chairman of the Pacific Fishery Management Council, offered this observation in a news release (PDF 119 kb) from PFMC:

“We now enter into a new era of more sophisticated fishery management. We heard strong public testimony calling for more protection for unmanaged forage fish, and the council’s adoption of this motion today formalizes the council taking this up this as a fishery management action.”

Jane Lubchenco, former director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said the agency has been talking about the ecosystem-based approach since the 2006 renewal of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.

“Taking an ecosystem approach to fisheries management is widely viewed as an enlightened approach to fishery management, because it recognizes that the target species of interest exists within a broader ecosystem,” she said in Barnard’s piece. She is now a visiting professor at Stanford University,

The Fishery Ecosystem Plan does not replace existing management plans, including those for salmon, groundfish, highly migratory species or coastal pelagic species. But it does call for the consideration of more factors before making management decisions, and it mandates an annual “State of the Ecosystem” report.

One initiative connected to the plan calls for the prohibition of targeted fishing for unmanaged forage fish until the impacts are better known. Eight other initiatives will discuss how harvest affects stocks, bycatch, habitat, fisheries safety, fisheries jobs, response to climate change, socioeconomics, and other factors.

For extra reading: I found the discussions about managing krill in the Antarctic to be revealing. See “License to Krill: A Story About Ecosystem-Based Management” on NOAA’s website. It includes this tidbit:

“When fishing reduces the population of one species, there are ripple effects throughout the marine food chain. For instance, if the human species takes more krill out of the ecosystem, the populations of other animals that prey on krill might decline.

“But it’s not just a question of how much krill we take. Where and when we take it are also important. Penguin chicks need to find food when they fledge at the end of their first summer. For certain species of seals, which carry their pregnancies through winter, wintertime forage is critical. By identifying where and when these critical periods occur, scientists can advise fishery managers on how best to reduce the impacts of fishing on the other species we care about.”

I discussed the ecosystem plan briefly in the latest installment of a series of stories dealing with Puget Sound’s ecosystem and indicators chosen by the Puget Sound Partnership. We call it “Taking the Pulse of Puget Sound.”

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A research project that involved tracking the travels of K pod for more than three months in the Pacific Ocean apparently has ended, as the transmitter seems to have run out of battery power, according to research biologist Brad Hanson.

“This has been a phenomenal deployment,” Brad told me yesterday after it appeared he had logged the final transmission from K-25. “It has been a quantum leap forward for us in terms of understanding what is going on.”

K-25 is a 22-year-old male orca who was implanted with a satellite tag on Dec. 29. The battery was expected to last for 32,000 transmissions, and it actually reached about 35,000, said Hanson of NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center. No data arrived yesterday during the normal transmission period.

The three months of satellite tracking data will be combined with fecal and prey samples from a 10-day research cruise to serve up a wealth of information about where the Southern Resident killer whales go and what they eat during the early part of the year, Brad said. Until now, this has been a major blank spot in the understanding of these whales, he noted.

The information gathered over the past three months should prove valuable in management efforts to protect and restore these orcas, which are familiar to human residents of the Puget Sound region. After the data are analyzed, federal officials should be able to say whether they have enough information to expand “critical habitat” into coastal areas for the endangered killer whales. If not, we should know what additional information may be required.

Brad says he feels a high level of anticipation from his fellow killer whale experts who are eager to learn of the research findings, especially the results of what the whales are eating.

“We have a tremendous amount of data, and we’re trying to push it through as quickly as we can,” he said.

Brad says he won’t release the findings until the analysis is further along. But he did dangle this intriguing tidbit in front of me: The whales are NOT eating chinook salmon exclusively.

The tracking project has another benefit, Hanson said. It will bring new meaning to more than three years of acoustic data (recorded sounds) picked up by hydrophones dispersed along the Washington Coast. Until now, it was not possible to determine the locations of the whales from their sounds alone, because the sounds could be picked up from many miles away. Now, thanks to tracking data, the intensities of their calls and echolocation clicks can be correlated with distance to a greater extent. Researchers are developing a computer model to identify possible locations from as much as seven years of hydrophone data in some places.

The tracking project began on Dec. 29, when K-25, named Scoter, was darted with a satellite tag near Southworth in Kitsap County. K-25 and presumably the rest of K pod then moved out into the ocean. Check out the tracks on NOAA’s satellite tagging website.

“We were extremely lucky to get that tag at the end of the season,” Hanson said.

It was K pod’s last trip into Puget Sound for several months, he noted, and it is a real challenge to get close enough to dart a killer whale, especially when only certain ones are candidates for the tag.

By Jan. 13, the whales had reached Northern California, where they continued south, then turned around at Point Reyes north of San Francisco Bay. They continued to wander up and down the West Coast, including Northern California, into early March. After that, they began to stay mainly off the Washington Coast with trips into northern Oregon. They seemed to focus much of their attention near the Columbia River, where early runs of salmon may be mingling.

The research cruise, originally scheduled for three weeks, ran from March 1 to March 10, cut short by the federal budget sequestration. By following the whales, researchers were able to collect 24 samples of prey (scales and/or tissues of fish) plus 21 fecal samples from the whales themselves. Shortly before the cruise, K pod met up with L pod, probably off the Washington Coast.

The ability to track the whales and the fortune of decent weather were major factors in the success of the research cruise, Brad said. In contrast, several previous cruises had netted only two prey samples and no fecal samples.

“We are ecstatic about the amount of data we collected in such a short period of time,” Brad told me. “If we would have had 21 days instead of 10, just think what we could have done.”

Tagging the whales with a dart, which penetrates the skin, has been controversial among whale observers. Some contend that we already know that the whales spend time in the Pacific Ocean, and maybe that’s enough.

But Brad says many detailed findings from the past three months were never known before — such as how much time the whales spend off the continental shelf and how much time they spend in and around canyons at the edge of the shelf.

The sampling of fish scales and fish tissues should reveal not only the species of fish, but also specific stocks of salmon as well as their age, Brad said.

“Are they actually targeting the larger and older fish?” he wondered. “Some fish are resident on the continental shelf. Are they targeting those? Are they going after the ones they can easily detect, which means not going after the smaller fish?”

The cruise also collected all kinds of information about the ecosystem, ranging from ocean depths to zooplankton to the kinds of birds seen in the area. All that information will feed into a description of the essential habitat the whales need during their winter travels.

During the cruise, another whale, L-88, a 20-year-old male named Wave Walker, was tagged as an “insurance policy” to allow the whales to be tracked if K-25′s transmitter failed. A shorter dart was used on L-88, and the tag apparently fell off about a week later.

The ocean environment is very different from Puget Sound, where the habits of the whales are well known, Brad explained. In the San Juan Islands, groups of whales are rarely far apart compared to the scale of the ocean, he noted.

In the ocean, the orcas were generally grouped up during resting periods. Sometimes Ks and Ls were together; other times they were apart. When they were foraging, however, the individual animals might be spread out for miles.

Brad said he expects to put the new information into some kind of agency report, probably followed by a peer-reviewed journal article.

“We have put a lot of time and effort to get to this point,” he said, adding that the researchers feel a sense of accomplishment now that the effort has paid off.

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I really love this picture by Araminta “Minty” Little, a seventh grader at Fairview Junior High School in Central Kitsap. Her picture shows an octopus grasping trash that has been thrown into the ocean.

Apparently, the judges in the annual Marine Debris Art Contest also liked Minty’s picture. They named her one of 13 winners nationwide out of more than 600 students from 21 states who entered the contest, which is sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Minty’s drawing is a fine piece of work, but she also got high marks for her concept, which carries a message about the dangers of marine debris. As part of the contest, she was required to write a bit about the problem. As quoted on the Central Kitsap School District’s website, she explained:

“The picture I drew depicts a sea creature surrounded by garbage. The octopus … is wrapping its tentacles around stray trash preparing to throw it all back onto land. In the top right tentacle is a sign reading ‘S.O.S.’ in parody to … an old sailing term.”

To see all the 2012-13 winners, check out the slide show on the Marine Debris Blog.

The contest is open to students from kindergarten through eighth grade. The 13 winning entries will be used to create a calendar scheduled to be printed in a few months.

“You wouldn’t believe the talent of some of these students,” said Dianna Parker of NOAA’s Marine Debris Program, which has conducted the art contest since 2010.

The next contest opens to entries in September.

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A research team led by Brad Hanson of NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center has been tracking K and L pods off the coast of Oregon and California, most recently offshore of Washington’s Willapa Bay.

Satellite transmissions from two killer whales, K-25 and L-88, show their pods crossing the Columbia River this morning.
Map by Robin Baird with NOAA data

The team left Newport, Ore., on Friday aboard the 209-foot research vessel Bell M. Shimada. The crew caught up with K pod the following day with the help of a satellite transmitter attached to K-25, according to reports. Most if not all of L pod was seen swimming with the K pod whales near Cape Blanco, off the southern coast of Oregon.

The research team attached a new satellite tag to L-88, a 20-year-old male named Wave Walker. The new tag will provide another method of following the whales if the tag attached to K-25 should fall off, as expected sooner or later. It has already stayed attached for more than two months, about twice the average life of the satellite tags.

I have not yet connected with Brad Hanson, but I talked to Robin Baird of Cascadia Research, who has been getting reports from the crew. Robin told me that the researchers have been able to obtain multiple fecal and/or fish-scale samples on most of the days they have been at sea.

Those samples will aid in meeting the primary goal of the cruise, which is to figure out where the whales are going and what they are eating during the winter months while away from Puget Sound.

The satellite tags have allowed the research ship to stay with the whales even when the weather and their lack of vocalizations have made them hard to find, Robin said. As a result, this research cruise has been more efficient than past ones in terms of both time and fuel.

The research trip, which was scheduled for 21 days, will be cut in half because of the federal spending cuts related to the sequester, according to a statement issued by this afternoon by the Northwest Fisheries Science Center.

The travels of K-25 over the past two months are shown in an animation produced by staff at Northwest Fisheries Science Center. (In my browser, the north and sound portions of the map are cut off even in full-screen view, but the movements shown are still amazing.)

The latest report shows both tagged whales swimming offshore of Willapa Bay on the Washington Coast, having crossed the Columbia River mouth this morning. The full trip can be viewed on maps posted on the website called Southern Resident Killer Whale Satellite Tagging.

Researchers are tracking K and L pods aboard the NOAA vessel Bell M. Shimada. Click on the image and insert the ship’s name to view its recent travels. / NOAA photo

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Changes are coming rapidly to the Elwha River, as massive amounts of sediment shift around in the river channel and flow out into the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Phoebe Tyson, a Student Conservation Association intern, joins in planting efforts in the former Lake Mills to help restore a natural forest. / Photo courtesy of Olympic National Park

Over the past few months, researchers have documented the formation of new beaches and the growth of the delta at the mouth of the Elwha. I described these latest changes in a story in Sunday’s Kitsap Sun.

The new information came out of an annual workshop of the Elwha Nearshore Consortium, which has a special interest in the river, especially its effects on the coastal reaches along the strait.

It’s exciting to hear about the transformation of the river, and I would like to congratulate the scientists for the monitoring work that allows us to talk about “before” and “after” dam removal — although the “after” part will be an ongoing story for decades. Many research organizations are involved in the Elwha, and I hope their funding holds out to tell a more complete story from a scientific perspective.

Meanwhile, many writers, photographers and videographers are telling their own stories about the restoration in various ways, and new books and documentaries are on the way. I’ve talked about some of these in the past and will continue to do so as new works are released.

The human connections to the river, particularly those of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, have been widely recognized as an integral part of the restoration story. Many Klallam elders have been gracious in sharing their culture and traditions.

Although the Elwha Dam removal is far from the only restoration effort taking place in Western Washington, it may be the one place where nature is working at an extraordinary pace to put things back the way they were.

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Scientists and artists generally see the world in different ways, but a new collaborative project has resulted in some unique creative expressions, along with new ways to connect people to the wonders of science.

The project, called Synergy, was conceived in 2012 and involves an affiliation between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Check out the first introductory page, which includes the following:

“For all of their apparent differences, artists and scientists share a fundamental goal: to explore the edges of human knowledge and experience. Through our artist/scientist collaborations, we aim to reveal how both creative and analytic thought are present across all disciplines, and to demonstrate how crucial they are to a fuller understanding of our world.”

I suggest you check out the page called “Ocean Stories: A Synergy of Art and Science,” where you can click on images to review eight collaborative art projects via videos, still photos and written descriptions. Each one addresses a different aspect of ocean science.

The eight projects presented on that page are now on display through May at the Boston Museum of Science.

If you’d like to dig a little deeper into this project, you can listen to the half-hour radio interview by Heather Goldstone of public radio station WGBH in Boston, or read blogs by Cassandra Willyard of Studio 360 or by Lonny Lippsett of Oceanus magazine.

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This year’s encounters between Japanese whalers and Sea Shepherd Conservation Society appear to be the most violent of any year so far — and the whaling season is not yet over.

As I described in the previous entry in Water Ways, which I just completed, legal action against Sea Shepherd has caused few substantive changes in these high-seas confrontations. That’s because Sea Shepherd has transferred all such operations from its U.S. organization and to its Australian organization. The move effectively removes jurisdiction by the U.S. government, according to Sea Shepherd reports, mentioned in the previous blog post.

So let’s catch up on actions so far this year in the Southern Ocean between Sea Shepherd and the Institute of Cetacean Research. As I reported in January (Water Ways, Jan. 4), Sea Shepherd has added the 184-foot SSS Sam Simon, a former Japanese government ship, to its flotilla. The fleet now includes four primary vessels: the Sam Simon, Steve Irwin, Bob Barker and Brigitte Bardot, as well as several unmanned surveillance aircraft.

(more…)

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“You don’t need a peg leg or an eye patch,” begins Judge Alex Kozinski, launching into a scathing ruling against Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which the judge calls a “pirate” organization.

Kozinski, chief judge for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, concluded in a ruling today that U.S. District Judge Richard Jones had made “numerous, serious and obvious errors” when he declined to issue an injunction against Sea Shepherd for its high-seas battle against Japanese whalers.

The three-judge panel ordered that the case be removed from Jones’ jurisdiction and turned over to another Seattle district judge drawn at random.

Meanwhile, the Institute of Cetacean Research — the Japanese whaling organization — continues its effort to get a contempt-of-court citation issued against Sea Shepherd, which has increased its efforts to disrupt Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean.

Sea Shepherd remains under a U.S. Court of Appeals injunction, which requires that the organization’s ships operate safely and stay 500 yards away from the Japanese vessels.

I’ll provide an update on Sea Shepherd’s activities in a separate blog post, but let me first tell you more about Kozinski’s ruling (PDF 238 kb), which finds nothing commendable about any of Sea Shepherd’s actions.

(more…)

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