Right. Welcome everybody we're so pleased that you're here to join us today for our National
Marine Sanctuaries Webinar series. We used to do these just once a month and here we're
doing three or four months now or sometimes even two in a week. But we're super excited to
have a great presentation today. Let me tell you a little bit about the webinar series. This is a
distance learning program that's hosted by the National Marine Sanctuaries, our office here and
it's a great way for us to connect to formal and informal educators as well as now during this time
of sheltering at home, we're also connecting to students and even families. So welcome to all of
you, if you're new to our webinar series, we hope you enjoy our program today, Studying dolphins
and whales in the Hawaiian archipelago. If you've been coming to these, we have the same opening
slides that introduce you to our National Marine Sanctuary System, but by now you're all old pros.
So just a little bit of background. Today all attendees will be in listen only mode.
There will be an opportunity for Q and A after our lead presenter's presentation has concluded.
There'll be several ways to ask your question, you can use the raise hand feature in the Go To
Webinar control panel and that indicates that you would like to be unmuted and that you don't have a
lot of background noise and you would like to ask your question orally. Of course, if that's not going
to work for you, you can type in your question to the question box. So the question box is the same
place you can let us know if you're having any technical difficulties, audio issues we'll try
to walk you through any of that. So super excited because with the current circumstances and the
pandemic we continue to see a surge of interest in our distance learning programs. Today we have over
830 registrants which is exciting. We have lots of attendees from the Hawaiian Islands, so
aloha, welcome. We have other people from New Jersey, California, New Hampshire, Montana Tennessee, Wyoming,
South Dakota, I could go on and on so welcome to all of you. We have many countries being
represented today. People are attending from Canada, Portugal, Mexico, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Taiwan
and others. So welcome to all of you, some of those people in other countries will be watching the
recording of our presentation today because the time zones don't work out so well for them
but we're glad that they're interested in this topic and joining us. All right let me talk just
for a second about our National Marine Sanctuary system. The map you're looking here shows you all
of these special underwater parks that are managed by NOAA. Each of those blue dots represents one
of these National Marine Sanctuaries and we have two triangles on the map, one in the South Pacific
which is our National Marine Sanctuary of American Samoa and the Papahanamokuakea Marine National
Monument, so, well I should say Rose Atoll is the triangle in American Samoa, the Monument there.
Anyway, the National Marine Sanctuary System, it protects over 600,000 square miles of ocean and
Great Lake treasures, so we protect these areas from Lake Huron to American Samoa, the Florida Keys
up to our newest site in the Potomac River, the Mallows Bay. So these sites are so special that
often times Congress has us set them aside for reasons of ecological or conservation value,
in some cases for recreational reasons, historical, cultural, archaeological, etc. so there's a whole
wide variety of reasons to set aside these places to protect the ocean and the Great Lakes
now and for the future. We also like to consider them our living classrooms, it's a place where
people like yourselves, if you have the luxury of being in any of these beautiful coastal locations
that you can see, touch and feel these underwater parks and these
treasures of America. So with that let's go ahead and dive into today's presentation.
Studying whales and dolphins in the Hawaiian Archipelago. So I'll start with introducing myself.
My name is Claire Fackler and I am the National Education Liaison for the NOAA
Office of National Marine Sanctuaries. I'm sitting outside on my patio in Santa Barbara, California.
I'm also joined by Andy Collins, who's in Papaiko, no not Papaiko sorry Ahualoa on the Big Island,
he's the Education Coordinator for the Papahanamokuakea Marine National Monument.
Welcome Andy as my co-host. I did want to make note, that today's presentation is actually an extension
of the First Friday events that normally occurs at our new visitor center, it's at the Kauai Ocean
Discovery in Lihue, so we're now bringing those first Friday speaker series to everybody remotely.
And let's talk about our presenter a little bit. So we are so pleased to have Dr. Robin Baird
with us. He is the Research Biologist with Cascadia Research Collective.
This is a non-profit research and education organization that's based in Olympia, Washington.
He first began studying whales and dolphins in the mid-1980s in British Columbia, Canada. He received
his PhD in 1994 from Simon Fraser University. He was studying at the time the foraging behavior
of mammal-eating killer whales, so after spending time working and living in Mexico and Nova Scotia
he made his way to the Hawaiian Islands in 1998, and he has continued his research there ever since.
He primarily focuses now on toothed whales and dolphins. He has published numerous scientific
papers on his research, all of it's available on the Cascadia Research website which we will
be pulling up a link later on, as well as the book entitled "The lives of Hawai'i''s dolphins and whales,
natural history and conservation". This was published by the University of Hawai'i Press
in 2016. And although he works in Hawai'i for up to a few months each year, he still
lives in Olympia, Washington and he'll be giving today's presentation from Olympia. And I have
to let you know Dr. Baird, (Andy go ahead and switch the presentation to him), Dr. Baird, I
had a couple emails come in saying like "You have Dr. Robin Baird as your presenter today ?!"
So there's a lot of excitement that we we caught a big fish that's presenting on our
webinar series today, so we appreciate your time, thank you so much and we'll let you take it away.
Great well, thank you very much. Thanks to Claire and Andy for hosting this event and
the Sanctuaries Program for hosting this webinar. Before I get started I want to mention that the
the work I'm going to talk about involves a lot of different people. We have a big team of
folks with Cascadia Research that work with photo catalogs or tag data in the office
and we have people that are playing a major role in the field. Some that do both.
We also have a lot of collaborators that work with our genetic data sets or our tag data sets
and then a lot of contributions from citizen scientists. And this presentation is going to
be comparing what we're learning in the main Hawaiian islands to what's known about
some of these same species in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and the work in the Northwestern
Hawaiian Islands is really the results of efforts by folks from the Pacific Island Fisheries
Science Center and the Southwest Fisheries Science Center of NOAA fisheries. And I'm also
going to present some work by Marc Lammers of the Sanctuary and some other folks as well.
So just to put the presentation in context, the Hawaiian Archipelago is the most isolated
archipelago in the world. And this google earth image shows the the 200 nautical mile exclusive
economic zone surrounding the Archipelago, that blue line. Now if you look at it from an
oceanographic perspective, measures of productivity come from chlorophyll A in the water column and
chlorophyll A is is produced by phytoplankton. Phytoplankton are the base of the oceanic food web
and these ocean color maps basically show chlorophyll A levels. The bright red areas
are highly productive areas up in the high latitude areas and along the the coastline of the
continents and the bluer waters are relatively low productivity areas and the Hawaiian Archipelago is
located right in the middle of this large blue patch in the Central Pacific.
Now if we zoom in on the Archipelago, you can see that up to the north there is a
a band of fairly highly productive water, it's a transition chlorophyll front.
And that chlorophyll band moves south during the winter and north
during the summer and at least during the winter it actually envelops some of the
northernmost of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, Kure, Midway and Pearl and Hermes.
Now most of the other islands and atolls you can see that there's this increase in chlorophyll,
the ocean color are right around the islands themselves and that basically reflects that the the islands through disruption of ocean currents and upwelling increase the productivity right
around them. And if you look around the main Hawaiian Islands you can also see an
increase in productivity around the main Hawaiian Islands although it's to a much, much lower extent.
Now there's a number of differences between the main Hawaiian Islands and the Northwestern
Hawaiian Islands that I want to, I want to talk about because these have important
implications for the different species of whales and dolphins that use those areas.
With the exception of Mokumanamana and Nihoa, the Northwestern Hawaiian islands are all
relatively low islands, so they're coral reefs and atolls and small sand islands.
Whereas the main Hawaiian islands are high islands and those high islands actually have quite
an influence on the surrounding atmosphere. This is a wind model that that shows just a snapshot of
the winds around the Hawaiian Archipelago and you can see that the main Hawaiian Islands actually
divert the wind and create these calm lees to the west of the islands. And these lees are are
really important because they are effectively what allow us to do the work that we're doing
going out on small boats. We do most of our work on the leeward side of the island because
that's where it's it's calm enough to safely and and effectively work. And the Northwestern
Hawaiian Islands really don't have those lees and that that really influences both the type
of research that's being done up there and the amount of research that's been done up there.
Now the the winds that are diverted around the islands also change the the current
patterns around the islands and in particular the Island of Hawai'i generates a lot of eddies
that that basically spin off the western or leeward side of the island. And these include
cyclonic eddies that actually bring cold, nutrient rich water up to the surface which
increases productivity. It includes anti-cyclonic, clockwise eddies that are downwelling eddies that
basically concentrate all of the phytoplankton along the edges, in the center and these eddies
are really important for a whole variety of ocean organisms whether it be
small myctophids, things that are coming up associated with a deep scattering layer or
or large game fish like Billfish. And there are a number of species of whales and dolphins that
are also responding to these eddies and taking advantage of them as ways of finding food. So these
eddies occur a lot in the main Hawaiian Islands and are much less so in the Northwestern Hawaiian
Islands. Now another difference between the main Hawaiian islands and Northwestern Hawaiian islands
is rainfall. Average rainfall at Midway is about 39 inches, whereas along the the windward sides,
the east sides of the main Hawaiian islands, rainfall can exceed 300 inches and that rainfall
has a, plays a role in how much nutrients are put into the water through runoff and that
that increase in nutrients also increases the local productivity around the islands themselves.
Now another difference between the main Hawaiian islands and the Northwestern Hawaiian islands
are the relatively, the relatively greater amount of of shallow water habitat in the Northwestern
Hawaiian Islands. The islands themselves are very small but they most of them are sitting on
these large pedestals, which are effectively sunken volcanoes that create a lot of habitat for shallow
water species, things like bottlenose dolphins and humpback whales. Now switching a little bit, I
first started working in Hawai'i in December of '98 and when I moved to Hawai'i, I there were
a lot of researchers already working there. Those that were working on on whales with the
exception of Dan McSweeney in Kona, were focusing on humpback whales and those that were working on
dolphins were really focused on spinner dolphins. So I didn't want to overlap with those researchers
or or compete with them, so instead of focusing on either humpback whales or spinner dolphins.
Right from the beginning our work has focused on some of the lesser known species of odontocetes
and that includes bottlenose dolphins, false killer whales and spotted dolphins these are
three species that use the shallow waters off of Maui quite regularly. And first couple
years the work was concentrated off Maui and Lanai and we'd get out into deeper water and
started working with some of the deeper water species, west of Lanai, things like pilot whales.
Now the work is done with, from small boats that have ranged in length from about 14 to 29 feet.
This boat here is a 24 foot rigid-hull zodiac and is one of the boats that we've
used over the years. Cascadia doesn't own any boats in Hawai'i, so we we end up chartering them
but this this type of boat a 24-foot rigid hull zodiac with the bell pulpit that we add on
has is basically our standard, best case scenario for boat operations it allows us to
get fairly far offshore safely and comfortably and and from a very stable platform that we can
accomplish our goals. Now the most of the work in the Northwestern Hawaiian islands has
actually been done for much larger vessels and that goes back to the the point I brought up a
couple minutes ago about the lack of a good lee in the Northwestern Hawaiian islands. This is one
of the NOAA vessels, the Seti, and these vessels have been used for longer trips so we go out
on day trips in the main Hawaiian islands, the NOAA cruises typically are three to five weeks long
with a big crew of people as well as visual observers they do have the potential to launch
small boats when the conditions are good and most of these surveys are towing hydrophone arrays
so that they can acoustically monitor whales and dolphins as well as visually document them.
Now I'm going to show a little video that gives you an example of some of our different research
methods, this a couple things you'll see in here there's three different photographers
on board so we've got lots of people trying to get photographs. This particular camera that
you can see has two lasers or green dot lasers, mounted on this housing on on top of the camera
and they project two green dots onto the dorsal fin of the animals, we can measure the animals from
the lasers and then you'll also see someone standing in the bow of the boat with an air rifle
and this will show deployment of one of these limpeted satellite tags onto the dorsal fin
of a false killer whale. Now I'll play the video and and talk a little bit about what's happening.
So this is a false killer whale off the southwest side of Kauai, there you can see the
the tagging, this is the species that I'm going to talk more about later but they're they're often
very interested in boats. This one comes right over the boat, goes under it. The nice thing about these
tags and you're going to see a tag deployment in in just a second as it comes up on the other
side of the boat, is even though we're restricted to working in the leeward sides of the islands,
once we get a tag on an animal those tagged animals can go and roam around the islands,
they can roam offshore, these tags stay on in false killer whales, they stay on an average of about 45
days but we've had them on as long as 200 days on a false killer whale, even longer on a pilot whale.
So they give us quite a good picture of what the animals are doing over longer periods of time
and unconstrained by where we're able to work due to sea conditions. Now this has been a
long-term study over the last 21 years, we've had survey effort off all the main Hawaiian islands.
19 years in a row now off of Kona. 12 different years off of Kauai and Niihau. Six years off of Oahu
and eight years off Maui Nui. The days really add up over 1100 days and 8 000 hours on the water.
144 000 kilometers of survey track line and in all of that time we've had over three thousand
encounters with tooth whales or dolphins, odontocetes of 18 different species of odontocetes.
And then, three different species of baleen whales. So it's it's a fairly long-term
and and rich data set to start to understand how the animals are using the islands.
Now this shows the entire Hawaiian Exclusive Economic Zone and and it includes our effort
around the main Hawaiian islands but it also includes the survey effort from the larger NOAA
vessel surveys. And each one of these squiggly yellow lines that are basically running through
typically represents one day of effort. The vessel will be coming along and then at night they'll
go off effort for visual observers and then continue back on effort again. If the lines are
straight they probably didn't see much and if they deflect a bit that often represents that the the
boat is turning to approach a group of animals to confirm the species and confirm the the group size.
And these surveys have been run in a number of different years this map shows through 2016 but
but NOAA had a another large vessel survey in 2017 and another one earlier this year as well. Now
many of the sightings from these large vessel surveys are fairly distant sightings and
are usually relatively brief. This happens to show one of those rare calm days up offshore in
offshore waters but most days are are quite rough as well and the large vessels do have the option
of launching small boats when the conditions are right and when they encounter a high priority
species. So they also do a lot of the same kinds of things that we do from our small boat surveys
which include photo identification, collecting biopsy samples for genetic studies and satellite
tagging and some of the satellite tagging results that I'm going to show you are are combined
our tag deployments and tag deployments through Pacific Island Fisheries Science Center.
Now for those of you who've seen my presentations in the past, typically I spend most of my time
talking about toothed whales things like false killer whales and other species and I'm going to
end the presentation with that but I'm actually going to talk about a couple species of baleen
whales first, And I picked two species one you may never have heard of before and the other one which
is is the focus of a lot of attention in Hawaiian waters. And I picked these species because
information from the Northwestern Hawaiian islands and the main Hawaiian islands are showing
different things or or creating some interesting stories. Now the first species is a poorly known
species but it's the only species of baleen whale that's resident in Hawaiian waters year round and
this is the Bryde's whale. Bryde's whales are about the same length of a humpback whale but much more
streamlined, they're closely related to blue whales and fin whales and sei whales and minke whales.
They are a bit difficult to tell apart from one other species from the sei whale
and to confirm species often you need to get a good photograph of the head. Bryde's
whales have three of these ridges on the head, whereas sei whales just have a single ridge.
So there are some sightings of this species in Hawai'i that are never confirmed to species
simply because people didn't get a good look at the head or a good photograph of the head.
Now if you look at sightings from all sources, so this includes all those NOAA vessel surveys, it
includes our efforts and some published published reports, there's an interesting pattern here
most of the the sightings of Bryde's whales are not around the main Hawaiian
islands even though there's been a tremendous amount of effort around the main Hawaiian islands.
They're in offshore areas, they're through throughout the Monument and the sightings
that are around the main Hawaiian islands are now all off the northern sides of the islands
where where we really have almost no effort. And that reflects what one of the things I
mentioned there they're resident Hawaiian waters year-round and so they're feeding in Hawaiian
waters and so they tend to be feeding in the more productive areas and the more productive areas
tend to be further north and as you saw in that ocean color map the chlorophyll A map.
The the waters around the northwestern Hawaiian islands are more productive than
the waters around the main Hawaiian islands. It's fairly abundant species estimated abundance from
NOAA survey in 2010 was over 1700 individuals and that didn't include individuals that were either
Sei whales or Bryde's whales that couldn't be confirmed for one species or another.
Now this is a species that was hunted by both Soviet and Japanese whalers in Hawaiian waters
in the early 1970s until whaling was excluded from U.S. waters.
There were over 300 individuals killed up in the very northern part of the
Hawaiian exclusive economic zone and if you, if you look at this distribution of sightings
in the inset of animals that were killed, in the inset, you'll see that basically maps that
high productivity area that I showed you earlier, so it reflects that the abundance up in the highly
productive waters is probably a lot greater than it is lower down in the less productive waters.
Now we've never seen a Bryde's whale in any of our work although there have been
a couple reports of of groups of small baleen whales. Bryde's whales sometimes are found in
groups of 20 or 30 individuals and those reports have been off of Kona but the people finding them
or observing them never got photographs to confirm which species so it's something that folks
who are spending time on the water in Hawai'i at any time of the year should be on the lookout for
don't assume that any baleen whale that you see off shores is just a humpback whale it could be
it could be a Bryde's whale or one of the other species that are that are found in Hawaiian waters.
Now the other species that I'm going to talk about of course is the humpback whale and
and obviously it's the most well-known species of baleen whale in Hawai'i and one of the most
well-known in the world. Hawai'i has been a center of research on humpback whales since the 1970s
and more known about humpback whales in Hawai'i than in most other populations of whales
or or most other populations for humpbacks in other areas. Now I mentioned earlier that the
Northwestern Hawaiian islands have a lot of relatively shallow water and a modeling exercise
published in 2007 by Dave Johnson and colleagues looked both at the prevalence of shallow water in
the in throughout the Hawaiian Archipelago and warm waters because humpback whales are show a
preference for warm shallow water for for breeding grounds and found that about two-thirds of the
suitable habitat for humpback whales in Hawaiian waters are actually in the Northwestern Hawaiian
islands. So suggesting that even though we we know and have known for a long time that the the main
Hawaiian islands are extremely important breeding area. The Northwestern Hawaiian islands could have
a large number of animals as well and potentially even more than in the main Hawaiian islands.
Now a few years later Marc Lammers and colleagues published a paper using acoustic recorders these
are called EARS: Ecological, Acoustic Acoustic Recording Systems they deployed these on the
bottom at French Frigate Shoals, Maro Reef, Lisianski, Pearl and Hermes, Midway and Kure.
Left them out for a period of time, then recovered them and the acoustic recordings revealed humpback
whale's songs throughout throughout this area although there was a lot more consistent song
activity between Lisianski and French Frigate Shoals. The pattern of humpback's singing in
in these areas basically was the same as the the pattern off of Oahu, suggesting that the whales
were arriving early in the season and and a lot of singing activity throughout the season and then
dropping off afterwards. So further evidence that the Northwestern Hawaiian islands may be a very
important humpback whale breeding area. And then most recently the Pacific Island Fisheries Science
Center had a winter cruise in a very short winter cruise in the Northwestern Hawaiian islands in
April of 2019 and in just in a very short period had sightings of about 180 individuals spread out
between Middle Bank and part of French Frigate Shoals. They also detected whales singing
quite regularly throughout that area as well and and these three different lines of evidence are
all showing that that the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands are probably a really important breeding
area for humpback whales, the fluke matches from this is from a presentation last December by
the Science Center, fluke matches were found between those animals to British Columbia to
Washington state to Russia to Alaska as well as matches among the the main Hawaiian islands
or with the main Hawaiian islands. So the whales and the Northwestern Hawaiian islands may be doing
similar things in terms of their migratory routes to whales elsewhere in the main Hawaiian islands.
Now if you remember that chlorophyll front that's up in the northern part of the area
means that there's a lot more productive waters and there's always been questions
over the years about how much feeding behavior occurs by humpback whales and
Hawaiian waters. The answer is that probably not very much because if if animals eat they also
poop and defecation behavior is not something that's seen very often
although there are examples of it. But one of the predictions that if you look at both
the humpback whale habitat and the productivity of that habitat in the Northwestern Hawaiian
islands, one of the predictions that follows is you're likely to see a lot more feeding behavior
in the Northwestern Hawaiian islands than is ever being documented in the main Hawaiian
islands. And that's something that could be tested by even monitoring defecation rates.
So now I'm going to switch to odontocetes. This includes the tooth whales and the dolphins.
There's actually 18 different species of odontocetes that have been recorded in Hawaiian waters
and there's at least a couple more that are probably present based on acoustics that have
just never been visually documented. I'm obviously not going to talk about all 18 species although
I'd like to and then and instead I'm going to focus just on some of the resident
species. There's actually 11 different resident species of tooth whales and dolphins in the
Hawaiian archipelago and I'm not going to talk about all 11 of those as that would take up a
lot more time than we have, but I'm going to focus on on five different species. That includes two
relatively poorly known species, Pygmy killer whales and melon head of whales. One extremely
well known species bottlenose dolphin which means studied in many areas around the world.
The Cuvier's beaked whale which is a deep diving species that there's a
resident population off of Kona. And lastly false killer whale which is is my favorite species. So
now just a little bit about the first four species.
Pygmy killer whales are actually one of the least known species of oceanic delphinids in the world
but the population in Hawai'i is the best known of all. It's the only only area where pygmy killer
whales have been have been the subject of a long-term photo identification study we've also
tagged some individuals and collaborating with researchers at Southwest Fisheries Science
Center on a genetic study. You can see in this map that there's a lot of pygmy killer whale sightings
in particular off of Hawaii island and Oahu and we actually know from photo ID that there
are resident animals, two different resident communities, one off Oahu and one off of Kona.
But a relatively lack of sighting in offshore waters and throughout the Northwestern
Hawaiian islands. Now this is a species that that based on this lack of sightings and and
I'll show you some other examples in a few minutes, that show that the contrast is probably
only resident to the main Hawaiian islands and not to the Northwestern Hawaiian islands
with the caveat that even though we have a resident population there are very cryptic species. They are typically in fairly small groups and they're they're not very active during the
day they spend a lot of time just just floating at the surface during the day
so they're easy to miss. So there's still potential for for being a lot more of them
up in the Northwestern Hawaiian islands but the lack of sightings suggest they're not resident. Now
on the lower half we have melon head of whales. We've tagged a lot of melon head
whales in the main Hawaiian islands. You can see the tracks here moving into offshore areas
these are the only sightings through 2016 of melon head of whales in offshore waters through those NOAA cruises. And there's no sightings in the Northwestern Hawaiian islands. So
we do know for example that off of Kohala on Hawai'i island, there is a relatively small
resident population with a very restricted range but this lack of sightings suggests that there may
not be the only resident populations in the Hawaiian archipelago maybe the one around Kohala.
Now keep in mind the relatively small number of sightings of each of these two species as we as
we move on to bottlenose dolphins. And you can see here in the map that in the Northwestern
Hawaiian islands there are a lot of bottlenose dolphin sightings. You can see the bottlenose dolphin
sightings around the main Hawaiian islands, we know from a combination of genetics and photo ID
and satellite tagging that there are small resident populations of bottlenose dolphins
around the the various main Hawaiian islands. There's a resident population off Hawai'i island.
Maui Nui resident population. A Oahu resident population and a Kauai, Niihau one.
Each numbering between perhaps one and three or four hundred individuals.
And even though the photo ID and tagging work hasn't hasn't really been done in the
Northwestern Hawaiian islands, if you look at the large number of sightings and the concentration
in these very shallow water areas this to me provides pretty good evidence that
once more data is available that it it'll demonstrate that there are also probably numerous
small resident populations of bottlenose dolphins in the Northwestern Hawaiian islands. So if you're
if you're looking for graduate school projects and you have access to a big boat, I think that
would be a great project to to work on. Now the next species that I'll talk about is a Cuvier's
Beaked whale and for those of you who have seen Cuvier's Beaked whales or read about Cuvier's
Beaked whales, you know that they're much harder to spot than something like a bottlenose dolphin. They
this species has the longest dive duration of any species of whale or dolphin.
They regularly dive over an hour at a time and they can die for up to two hours.
They're typically found in very small groups. So to have this many sightings from the relatively small
amount of effort in the Northwestern Hawaiian islands and in offshore areas. But this cluster of
sightings throughout the Northwestern Hawaiian islands really suggests that there are probably
resident populations in the Northwestern Hawaiian islands. And if you look down at the the far
eastern part of the chain to Hawai'i island there's a lot of sightings we've tagged a number
of individuals and the tagged individuals have remained strongly associated with Hawai'i island
and and the the southeastern part of Maui Nui so we know there's a resident population off Hawai'i
island and and yet with far less effort there's a really a tremendous number of sightings up here.
You'll see this big gap in in sightings of Cuvier's Beaked whales we have no sightings from
our work off Kauai, Niihau we've had one now off of Oahu that was prior or it was after this map
was produced and none in the Maui Nui area and so there's a lot of habitat there where there's just
no Cuvier's Beaked whales or they're extremely rare. And I actually think that that reflects that
this species is is quite susceptible to anthropogenic disturbance. It's the species that's
most likely to strand in response to Navy sonar. It's a species that moves away from areas that
when sonar is being used. And a lot of the Navy sonar activity in Hawai'i is concentrated around
Kauai, Niihau and Oahu and I think that this this may reflect or may be responsible for
for why Cuvier's Beaked whales are just really not seeing around those areas or just avoiding
those areas because of the the Navy sonar. Now the last species I'm going to talk about is
the false killer whale. I'm going to spend a bit more time with false killer whales.
They are they were given the name false killer whale not because they look anything
like killer whales they different body shape different pigmentation but they were
originally described from a sub-fossil skeleton and in particular a skull and teeth and there's
tremendous similarity between the skull and teeth of a false killer whale and a killer whale.
So all that although they don't look, alike they do actually share a lot of other traits. They're
both long-lived and slow to mature, females first give birth around 10 years of age
they may live probably into their 60s or 70s. They only reproduce very irregularly. The calving
rate or inter-birth interval is thought to be six or seven years. So over their lifespan they may
only have four or five calves and the calves stay strongly associated with their mothers in
the same way they do with killer whale calves. We have genetic evidence and photo ID evidence that
suggests that these bonds are probably permanent between a false color whale mother and her calf.
Now they share another trait with killer whales in that they're they're both top predators. False
killer whales are in the Hawaiian ecosystem with the exception of killer whales which are pretty
rare. False killer whales are at the top of the oceanic food web they're feeding on a lot of other
predatory fish. So these photos show one eating an opah. In the upper left an ono. In the upper
right a very large mahi mahi. In the lower left and a broad build swordfish in in the lower right.
And as well as these pelagic game fish they also feed on reef associated game fish. So they're
one of the few species that really bridges the coral reef ecosystem and the pelagic ecosystem in
Hawai'i. This is a giant trevally, an ulua, one being consumed off of Kona and they also feed on
species like bonefish and various other jacks, uluas in Hawaiian waters.
Now if you look at the distribution of sightings of false killer whales throughout the entire
Exclusive Economic Zone again this is from a combination of our small vessel work and the large
vessel surveys of the Fisheries Science Center. The sightings are both near shore and offshore and
both around the main Hawaiian islands and around the Northwestern Hawaiian islands. So they're
widely distributed species. All of these sightings so obscure the the strong population structure
that's been documented through a combination of photo ID genetics and tagging.
The first population of false killer whales that was recognized in Hawaiian waters was the
main Hawaiian islands insular population. This was recognized over 10 years ago and was estimated to
number more than 400 individuals in the 1980s. The most recent estimate based on photo identification
is the collaborative project with the Science Center and a lot of citizen science contributions.
The most recent estimate is just about 167 individuals. So evidence of a large population
decline. They were, NOAA Fisheries was petitioned by the Natural Resources Defense Council to list
this population as endangered in 2010 and they were listed as endangered in 2012. So this is
this is the most endangered population of whales or dolphins in Hawaiian waters. And the reason why
they're endangered, goes back to what they were feeding on. I showed you all of these
high trophic level game fish that they're feeding on. This photo here shows a juvenile big eye tuna
being consumed by this false killer whale. These fish both are high on the food web themselves
so they false killer whales accumulate high levels of persistent organic pollutants things like PCB's
and flame retardants. But they also are species of fish that are consumed by humans and
and fishery interactions is thought to be the main threat facing this population.
Animals getting accidentally hooked and potentially drowning or dying from hook ingestion.
Now we've been satellite tagging false killer whales throughout the main Hawaiian islands
and this just shows one individual that was tagged over a hundred day period it was
tagged off of Kauai in 2014 and this shows that even though it was tagged off Kauai, it moved
around Oahu, around Maui Nui and around Hawai'i island and this reflects really well
that the range of the main Hawaiian island population. Individuals in the population
move throughout the main Hawaiian islands. Now this map which is zoomed out to show the entire
Exclusive Economic Zone, so I can compare the the ranges of some of the other populations.
Shows 38 different groups of false killer whales that we've tagged over the years and the Science
Center has tagged over the years around the main Hawaiian islands and you can see that they're
they're basically they obscure the islands there's so much so many records. They do move occasionally
as far off shores about 120 kilometers but those are appear to be relatively short
excursions. Now by comparison four groups from the Northwestern Hawaiian island population have been
tagged. This group has been found to be closely related to the main Hawaiian island population,
genetically although there's no interchange between them and and they range at least from Kauai
Niihau, up to Gardner Pinnacles and this shows the track of of one of those individuals
I think actually this is the one that I showed you the video of that was tagged off of Kauai.
It moved from Kauai, up to Nihoa, Necker, French Frigate Shoals and Gardner Pinnacles which basically
covering the whole known range at this point for for the Northwestern island population.
Now the third population that's been identified in Hawaiian waters is a pelagic population.
We know from genetics as well as photo ID that the this population rarely or if ever
interbreeds with the insular populations, there's some evidence that they interbreed more with
the Northwestern Hawaiian islands population than with the main Hawaiian islands population.
This is just four different groups tagged by the Science Center and and ourselves and shows
their movements are are extremely different compared to either those insular populations.
So they're ranging broadly offshore thousands of kilometers offshore and even though
these animals spent the majority of their time inside Hawaiian waters are also trans boundary,
they're spending a lot of time in international waters. And this is the population that's received
a lot of attention because of their bycatch in the longline fishery in Hawai'i. There's a good
observer program on the Hawaii-based longline fishery so we know what the bycatch levels are.
But the Hawaii-based fishery once you get out of the international waters represents just a
small proportion of the total fishing effort and the observer coverage on those other vessels is
minimal. So inside and outside the U.S. waters these animals are subject to a lot
of interactions and and bycatch with with longline fisheries. So just to sum up some of the species
like Bryde's whales that are found in Hawaiian waters are actually much more likely to be
found in the Northwestern Hawaiian islands and around the main Hawaiian islands and that reflects
that they're here year round to feed, rather than just like humpback whales are are here to breed.
So they're they're spending more of their time in highly productive areas. Some odontocetes that are
resident to the main Hawaiian islands are likely not resident in the Northwestern Hawaiian islands
like pygmy killer whales and melon headed whales and keep in mind I mentioned there's 11 species
of resident dolphins and whales around the main Hawaiian islands and I only talked about five
so there are others that may fall into this category. Some species likely have resident
populations in both areas but more research is needed and that includes Cuvier's Beaked whales
and bottlenose dolphins and and a couple of others that I didn't cover. And and that's a difficult
thing to do because of the logistics of working in the Northwestern Hawaiian islands, they have very
productive waters but but not very calm waters and that really influences the ability to to do
the types of detailed small boat work. So if anyone who's watching happens to have a large vessel
and is looking to do a trip up there where we could launch a smaller vessel from then
please contact me. And false killer whales have island associated populations in both the main
Hawaiian islands and the Northwestern Hawaiian islands. We know from the genetics that this
these two populations probably originated from the same colonization event in the islands.
They all share or most of them share the same mitochondrial haplotype even though they're
differentiated with nuclear DNA. So at some point in the distant past false some oceanic false
killer whales basically found and decided to make the the main Hawaiian islands their home
and and there appear to be isolated from those pelagic false killer whales.
I also want to mention as I did before we we get a lot of information on different species from
citizen scientists, folks who fish on the water or play on the water or work on the water in some
way. So if you've got some free time in your hand and and photos on your computer that you
can go through and and and see if if you have something that may be useful please contact us.
We have photo ID catalogs of two different species of baleen whales, fin whales and sei whales
and eleven different species of odontocetes, so a lot of different a lot of different species. Also if you're interested in more information on our work
this QR code that mentions publications will take you to our publications page. We put all of our
reports and publications online as PDF's so folks can can get the the the details if they'd like
and when we do go out in the field we post field project updates every few days with
with photos and and information on what we're seeing on more on a day-to-day basis and all of
those are archived if you're if you're interested in seeing those. So I think I think that's it
for my presentation and and I guess we'll we'll see about time for some some questions.
Great thank you Dr. Baird we appreciate it lots of comments, lots of questions coming
in. People are really impressed with some of those photos of the whales eating large
pelagic fish, so thanks for sharing that. We thought maybe we would run one quick poll
question the last one Andy, at the end to just reiterate how people can get involved
with helping cetacean research in Hawai'i. So we'll go ahead
so that poll question is launched up go ahead Andy. How can I help cetacean research in Hawai'i ?
Go for it. Answer your questions. If any of you happen to be in full screen mode you're probably
not seeing the quick poll, so hop out of full screen mode and it'll show up and you can register
your your vote. Yeah my apologies I didn't I did I I forgot to mention the the other poll question so.
It's no problem we want to have time there's lots of questions that have come in that
are really intriguing so once we're done with this we'll go into the Q and A session so
gives us more time for that. Okay we got about half it's coming in slow I think
people are digesting all the information you gave them.
All right we got about half. I say close it and we'll move on. Yeah so about most people did say
Both. 96 percent said they can help with both taking pictures and sending photos to
researchers. All right great let's go ahead and get into some of our
questions so Andy if you want to keep your web camera on we can just tag team. Sure let's
let's see lots of good ones have come in yeah. So
the first question that came in
was: Have any changes been made to the main Hawaiian islands False Killer whale survey methods
since the 2018 publication by Bradford, you and others indicating it was a small population ?
Yeah well the abundance estimation for main Hawaiian island False Killer whales is done
through photo identification versus the pelagic population which are coming from line transect
methods from the large vessel surveys and really how effective those or how precise, how accurate
those abundance estimates are really comes it depends on how many photos are obtained each year.
The methods haven't really changed other than that over the years we have
learned to find false killer whales more effectively so when when we have
funding that's targeted for false killer whales, we can go and work in areas where we know we have a
much higher probability of encountering them but we've also spent a lot of effort
trying to encourage citizen scientists to take photos and contribute photos because
as part of that publication that came out in 2018 it showed that the estimates
were a lot better including all of those citizen science contributions.
Yeah that follow-up question this is from so this is from Sharon, Shannon Barber. I
can't see your whole name, Barbara Mayer. Any notable recent change in their population ?
Yeah the population well it's there's too much variability associated with the estimates
in recent years to say whether or not it's stable or increasing or decreasing. So we can't we can't
really say we we know there was that large decline from the 1980s to the 2000s and 2010s but we
can't really say with any confidence whether it's increasing or decreasing at this stage
I will say that they seem to be reproducing fairly well when we we do see a fair number of calves
and the calves that we see tend to be fairly robust and that's obviously a good sign it means
that there's there's enough fish for them to catch. You know you compare that to southern resident
killer whales in in Washington state and British Columbia and that population is declining because
there's not enough fish and and that's reflected in the low calving rates and and in animals
that are emaciated so so even though we don't know the trend we can we can say that some
things are probably not really affecting the population. So. Great. I have an interesting one
Andy This came in on the early side so, many people saw that there was big news report about
killer whales or orcas spotted off of Kona, on the island of Hawaii a few days ago
and so there's kind of a couple questions related to that. Is your group able to study them right now
how many orcas actually reside around the Hawaiian islands ? Do you have some information on that ?
Yeah. So so killer whales are rare but regular visitors to the Hawaiian archipelago.
They're they're probably in Hawaiian waters if you if you include that whole exclusive economic zone
they're probably in Hawaiian waters all the time but around the main Hawaiian islands they probably
visit the main Hawaiian islands and and I'm just guessing here but probably every month whether or
not they're spotted on the other hand is another question. Sightings in Hawaiian waters tend to be
in deep water so they they rarely ever go close to shore or through any of the narrow shallow
channels and there's obviously a lot less boaters offshore than there there is near shore.
We've tagged, satellite tagged one group in the Pacific Island Fisheries Science Center. Satellite
tagged one group and the group we tagged over I think a 28 day period moved almost 2000 kilometers
west of Hawaii island, past Johnson Atoll and we're about halfway towards Wake when the tags
stopped transmitting, so the tag data tend to suggest that killer whales and Hawaiian waters
are using a broad area of the Central Tropical Pacific. That said the the encounter the other
day that was was reported, we have got video from the folks that saw them were able to get
screen grabs from the video and and identify the individuals and and a couple of the individuals in
that group having have matched to our catalog from a group that was seen both in 2016 and 2017
so so even though they're not around very often they do come back to the islands even though they
may be covering a huge area. I will say if people have the option of if they see animals
getting above water photos with a digital SLR is much more effective than in water video or from
a GoPro, you know water clarity really in really influences your ability to see the subtle markings
on on any animals so if someone if someone's on the boat even if they're going to get in
the water if they have an opportunity to get photos above water first that'll be a lot more
valuable for for comparing to our catalogs. Great and we can take one question from somebody
on audio. I'm going to unmute Rick Gaffney. Hey Rick. If you want to ask your question. You there Rick ?
We always run the risk right so if your hand is raised in the control panel that's
indicating to us that you would like us to unmute you so you can ask your question
maybe try another name on that list. I'm going to try Larry Raymondi and I'm going to unmute you.
Larry do you have a question ? Larry so Larry you're supposed to okay there you go. My question
is you know I've we've been I've been studying a lot on whales and I've noticed a lot of the
information about shipping sounds which are bouncing off whales and causing
migrations to be not on the same path of their normal paths. Is there an issue going
still on with these kind of noises and issues especially around the Hawaiian islands ?
Yeah if you if you compare shipping traffic around the Hawaiian islands compared to a lot of other
areas it's actually relatively limited and and that that can be done with the AIS tracks
from the vessels. If you compare to the West Coast of North America you know the tanker and
freighters they're just probably several orders of magnitude higher than what's happening in Hawai'i.
That said certainly the large shipping traffic
produces a lot of very low frequency sounds and those vocabulary sounds probably influence the
stability of the whales communicate over large distances so it means they have to vocalize louder
or or it reduces their range of which they'll be able to hear con specifics, vocalizing so it
probably affects their communication. So it's I think it's it's definitely an issue but
probably not one of the more important issues in Hawai'i compared to some other some other areas.
Yes. Ok. Claire are we going in time ? Yeah I think you know we are actually out of time for questions
but I tell you what, there's probably another 20 or 30 questions that have come in so we're gonna
graciously ask Dr. Baird to spend some time if it's okay in the next week or so to respond to
those questions and you'll get a response over email so anyone that's asked a question that's
something that Dr. Baird can handle, you'll see the question the response it'll all come out of her
email. So sorry to have to cut Q and A short when there's so many interested folks but let's go
ahead I'm going to take over control and show the last few slides to wrap us up for today
so with that.
Let's see get my screen up all right, so for those of you that
are always asking if there's recording we do record our webinar presentations they are
found in the archive page, not to worry that's a long government URL which is typical for us
but you'll get that linked directly in a follow-up email.
If you have any questions the sanctuary.education@ noaa.gov is a great way to reach out to us.
We also do send out a certificate of attendance for all attendees that participate live in our
series. For those that watch the recording of this if you got to this point in the recording and you
would like to request a certificate, go ahead and send an email to the sanctuary.education@
noaa.gov we'll get that typed into the box for you. Now I'm really excited we're trying to now
cross promote some of our other live interactions and distance learning programs that are available
through NOAA, so my colleague Hannah Mcdonald, who often is a co-host with me
she's now starting these live interactions with Exploring by the Seat of your Pants, which is super
exciting there's three next week I'm just giving you a snapshot of one of these and we will put
that web address into the box for you to make a direct link but these are interactions that
are appropriate for anyone interested in the topic but also specifically students. This will be diving
into our Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary which is known as Shipwreck Alley in Lake Huron.
Also excited to let you know that another part of NOAA, these are our partners at the NOAA Ocean
Today, so our video group as well as the Ocean Exploration and Research group they're doing some
new distance learning programs and they have great hands-on activities for children and students. They
have a watch party next week so every full moon is a series that as you can imagine once a month
comes out and so they're going to be hosting this free webinar for all who love the ocean and
there's going to be more information there on the link that we send May 7th at 11 a.m Pacific time.
And then the next in our actual webinar series the next one that's scheduled for right now is
May 14th where we're gonna have our videographer, Nick Zacker and Shannon from the Sanctuary team
coming to debut a bunch of our great Earth is Blue videos. This is about your National Marine
Sanctuaries, these underwater treasures that are protected now and for future generations.
So they're the next presenter on our series and then for those of you that are new to our
webinar series, we do ask that you take about one minute to answer four quick questions
that help us evaluate today's program. We take that information seriously, calculate all the data after
every webinar to get a good sense of any lessons learned or ways we can improve so please do that
when you close out of the webinar and for those of you that are formal or informal educators we
do have a more detailed survey that we would love, if you haven't already done this the link is in
the short survey that comes with our webinar series but it's this multimedia distance learning
survey we want to hear from you our target audience: teachers and informal educators on
like what kinds of materials do you want from NOAA to bring into your classroom or facility
down the road. So with that thanks everyone. Thanks Andy for being co-host. Dr. Robin Baird
it was a pleasure to meet you virtually and have you as one of our great presenters in the series.
Thanks to everyone that participated live and with that this concludes today's webinar.