Well good morning everybody it's it's nine o'clock so we're going to go ahead and get
started I just want to welcome you to the 2021 Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine
Sanctuary Sanctuary research symposium. My name is Eden Zang and I'm a research specialist here
at the Sanctuary and I'm stepping in today I know some of you expected to see Ed Lyman today
but he had to step away for a family emergency so I'll be the session chair this this morning
or this afternoon wherever you're watching from and so just wanted to kind of briefly
introduce everybody to what we're doing the over the next couple days so the symposium
our goal is to introduce you to some of the cutting edge research and conservation work
that is happening in our Sanctuary waters here not only by NOAA staff but also by our partners from
the world of academia and our non-profit sector and so there's a lot of really interesting stuff
going on in our local waters here so I wanted to let people know about it and learn a little bit
more and have the opportunity to interact with the researchers that are doing work here in our
Sanctuary waters so this year's participants are actually recipients of the National Marine
Sanctuary Foundation's research mini grants and those recipients include the Hawai'i Marine Mammal
Consortium, the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, the University of Hawai'i at Hilo and Whale
Trust a local non-profit organization and so we're going to kick things off today before we
get into the nitty-gritty of anything we want to introduce a Kalani Quiocho sorry Kalani Quiocho
who Kalani actually serves as the cultural resources coordinator for NOAA's office of
National Marine Sanctuaries and overseeing education policy research and indigenous
and local community engagement for cultural heritage management within the Pacific Islands
Region for the National Marine Sanctuary and for the National Marine Sanctuary of American Samoa
and Papahanaumokuakea marine national monument and of course for our local sanctuary here so
he kind of does it all for the region and we're very excited to have him with us and
he's going to start things off today how we we like to start off our meetings here with
the tradition traditional Hawaiian oli so with that I'm going to go ahead and pass it to Kalani.
Mahalo nui Eden and Aloha mai kakou
Greetings to you all wherever you come from wherever you're tuning into and mahalo for
gathering here in this time and space I'd like to share with you two oral traditions.
The first one here you see the translation and I really want us to gather and think about
on the intentions of our gathering as well as the intentions of our individual and collective
purposes that we are focusing on today I mean health and well-being of not only
the kohola, the humpback whale but all of its relatives and its natural environment
and maybe remember the resiliency and the strength of this this being. The second one
I'll welcome you with the traditional oli aloha which is a greeting chant to all of you mahalo nui.
E ho mai Ka ike mai luna mai e
O na mea huna no'eau o na mele e
E ho mai e ho mai, e ho mai e
E ho mai Ka ike mai luna mai e, O na mea huna no'eau o na mele e, E ho mai e ho mai, e ho mai e
Aloha mai kakou, may you have a successful symposium to aloha nui you all mahalo
Mahalo Kalani thank you so much for for starting us off that way it's always nice to be able to
set the intention for the day and and have that mindset before we get started so just a few
housekeeping things for the session today just wanted to know that during the session
all attendees will be in listen only mode and you are welcome to type questions
for the presenters into the chat and the questions box in the I think it's the bottom of
the control panel on the right hand side of your screen and this is also the same area
that you can let us know if you're having any technical issues and we will be monitoring that
throughout for the incoming questions and any issues you may be having so feel free to use
that to interact with us and hopefully if we have time at the end of each presenter's
talk if we have a couple of minutes we'll take a questions then and then also we've left some
time at the end for questions and then of course I know there's always more questions that we have
than we have time to get to live here so at the end of the presentation if there's any
lingering questions that didn't get answered we will do our best to send those to the appropriate
speakers and then have them address those and then email those out after the presentation.
So we're going to go ahead and get started
first here with some opening remarks from John Armor who is the Director of NOAA's Office
of National Marine Sanctuaries and so we're very excited to have him here with us today and he's
actually served in that role for more than five years now and the National Marine Sanctuary
Foundation or sorry National Marine Sanctuary system spans more than 620 000 square miles
all the way from American Samoa to the coastal to coastal Massachusetts and it's dedicated to
protecting and conserving special areas of our ocean and great lakes for future generations
and John is very passionate about supporting foundational science as well as indigenous wisdom
to support making wise management decisions so he's going to start us off today with just
a couple welcoming remarks so go ahead John over to you. Alrght Eden thank you so much
really appreciate that and Kalani as always really really good way to to set the tone for this
meeting. Allen, I want to thank you also for inviting me as well as as the whole humpback whale
sanctuary team. Let me just start off by saying I wish I was there with you
I really do not just because of the weather and because winter has started to set in here
in the Washington DC area but because I recognize that you know you know these kinds
of meetings really are you know better to do in person and so much more is is able to
get accomplished but I really appreciate your flexibility and your willingness to adapt and to
make sure this really this really important gathering is is pulled off so thank you
for that thank you for taking your time. You know as Eden says science has always
formed a really key part of the foundation upon which the national marine sanctuary is built
along with traditional knowledge and wisdom and community engagement
science really does form the basis for how we carry out our mandate
and and we conduct scientific research in sanctuaries all across the sanctuary system
for really three important reasons at least in my mind we we characterize the places we're
responsible for managing and survey what's there you know gathering baseline data we have
to monitor and detect trends and key resources or changes that are part of larger global processes
and then we have to give give scientific basis for making important conservation decisions
and and and you know in in Hawaiian Islands Humpback whale sanctuary there's so many
great research projects going on right now through surveys acoustic monitoring and tagging
as a community we really are carrying out some cutting-edge research documenting trends in
whales distribution and abundance studying their behavior while they're there in sanctuary waters
and monitoring potential human impacts the health and risk assessment efforts in particular have a
big impact as well as our disentanglement efforts they go way beyond just cutting whales free
there's a great deal of science behind that effort as we try to determine what the entanglement gear
is where it came from how we got the animal got it tangled who gets entangled addressing broad-based
risk reduction for animal industry ocean users etc it's just so important and there's so much great
work going on right now but I have to acknowledge you know we have we have to realize that our need
for good science and supporting this sanctuary and all sanctuaries really for that matter cannot be
addressed by any one entity NOAA can't do this alone and we are a community of organizations
and partner researchers all working towards the same goal and in my mind that is to provide the
best and most relevant information to making smart decisions so let me I'll end it there Eden
and again just thank you for allowing me to just say a few words of thanks at the beginning of this
I look forward to hearing the reports from this workshop and I will turn it back over to you.
So thanks alright great thank you so much John I really appreciate you being here this morning
and being part of the symposium so with that we're gonna actually one more opening remark
before we get into the first presentation and that's going to be from Allen Tom and Allen is the
Superintendent of the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary so over to you
Allen. So mahalo Eden. Aloha everybody so John did a great overview of why we do research and
for the humpback whale sanctuary I just kind of want to go back you know 28 years or
so because I'm looking at the attendees and I see some names of people who were around at that time
and they will remember that the sanctuary designation at that time was not easy it was
difficult people were saying why do you need to protect the whale it's already protected so what
is the sanctuary going to bring to the table and one of the things that we would always say was
that we would help support education and we would help support research. So today's symposium is
about that and I do want to make a quick shout out to Miss Janice Sessing who I see on the
line she is with NOAA she's the one who hired me into this position and I'm still here 28 years
28 years later. I am the superintendent of your humpback whale national marine sanctuary
and I also see Debbie Ferrari on the line she was one of the original researchers out here
and I remember at that time saying that the humpback whale sanctuary will support
other types of humpback whale research going on within the sanctuary waters. So I'm glad that we
were able to do that this year by providing some mini grants through the Natural Marine Sanctuary
Foundation to be awarded to the four speakers that you will hear today and tomorrow that doesn't mean
that there isn't still great research going on within the marine sanctuary waters out here in
Hawai'i as a matter of fact we had nine very good applications and I hope that we were we will be
able to fund them continually through the next couple of years that we will continue this and we
will also be able to continue this symposium. So again this symposium is about getting them
information out to the public on why we are doing research. What is that research going to go for
and I do want to make a note because Kalani's opening was a culturally based opening is that
cultural research is something that the sanctuary also wants to look into in the near future
so with that I just want to say mahalo to all of you for joining us and a big mahalo
to Dr. Marc Lammers, Eden, Ed Lyman and of course Cindy Among-Serrao for really pulling
this symposium together and I will turn it back over to you Eden or is it going to Marc
I will go ahead and take it briefly before I pass it over to Marc. So hi there I am
just the voice from the dark so remarkably which never happens in the science world we're ahead of
schedule which will be good because we might have some time for some questions in there
so first and foremost the first presentation that we're going to be kicking off with today
is actually Dr. Marc Lammers and myself as i mentioned before I'm a research specialist
here at the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary and I managed several
of the sanctuary's research projects including vessel surveys and have been a big kind of
leader with our Sancsound project which you'll hear about more in our presentation so I wanted
to introduce Dr. Mark Lammers though first and he is a research ecologist here at the Hawaiian
Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary and he's also an affiliate faculty member with the
Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology and co-found founder of Ocean wide Science Institute. He leads
the sanctuary's research activities focused on understanding the population ecology and
behavior of Hawaii's humpback whales and today he and I will be speaking about research the research
activities that we're involved in here at the sanctuary so with that I will pass it over to Marc.
Okay aloha andwelcome everybody and so yeah before I get started I want to acknowledge
the rest of the research team here at the sanctuary Eden who you've you already know
and also Anke Kugler and Jesse Kittle and so today I'll be talking to you a little bit about
some of the research activities that we're engaged in here at the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale sanctuary
and we can basically divide those activities into four four general categories one is acoustic
monitoring the other is are the surveys that we conduct both off from our vessel and from shore
the whale tagging work we do to understand whale behavior and then the various collaborations that
we're involved in with partners in academia and the nonprofit sector and other government agencies.
So we'll be touching on all of these a little bit so we'll start off by talking a little
bit about the acoustic monitoring so we've been involved in the country's been involved in
acoustic monitoring now for for a number of years beginning in about 2014 we began deploying
acoustic bottom water acoustic recorders known as ecological acoustic recorders off the
West Maui coastline as well as South Maui in both shallow waters and deeper waters and and we're we
do acoustic monitoring because we're interested in monitoring the the song of male humpback
whales and for those of you who maybe are not familiar with the humpback whales and
humpback whale singing this is a short clip of what that sounds like
so we're interested in monitoring humpback whale singing because it can tell us a lot
about the comings and goings of of whales in our Sanctuary waters so for example
when when whales first start to you know come to Hawai'i there's relatively few of them
and there's relatively few whale singing so that produces you know only a little bit of
a hump you know of song in the background but as more whales come in the volume of singing starts
to increase and so we can use those patterns of increase and decreases in in well-singing activity
to basically monitor when when when whales are first arriving when the season is peaking
when when the whale starts to wind down and if we monitor over multiple years we can start to
look at trends from one year to the next in terms of actual you know whale relative whale abundance
and that's what this plot here is is showing you here on the on the left this is showing you the
the chorusing level so in other words all the mind sum total of all the the whale song that we that
we record on the uh on the vertical axis you see decibel levels so the amount of acoustic energy
that's actually in the water and on the horizontal axis you see uh the time of the of the year and
what you can see these are data now for the seven years that we've been monitoring you can see that
there's been quite a bit of variation from one year to the next both in terms of timing but
also in terms of the the actual acoustic energy that we've that we've recorded from year to year
and this matches up quite well with some of the the trends that we've been observing
in in terms of whale abundance so beginning in about um 2015-16 we started to see
a a decline in the number of whales that were coming to the Hawaiian islands and and this was
reflected in the chorusing levels that we that we were we were monitoring that we're recording
and and that trend persisted for for for about three years and then beginning in 2018-19
it started to go back up again and and if you now look at the most recent data so that
hatch line and you compare it to to the the light blue line uh from 2014-15 you can see
that the chorusing levels have have returned back to to about what they were about about six years
ago or so so you know showing kind of a positive trend of you know recovery in terms of the whale
numbers that we're seeing here and so if you're interested in learning a little bit more about
this this work and how we do it we published a paper on this in the Journal Endangered Species
research a few months ago so I would refer you to that if you like to get more details
but monitoring sound in our backyard so to speak is is not the only thing we do
we are also involved in acoustic monitoring of a much larger geographic scale via what's known as
the sang sound project and as Eden mentioned she's very heavily involved in this project as well as
some of the vessel survey work so I'm going to hand it over to her to tell you a little bit more
about these projects so Eden do you wanna go ahead ? Great thank you so much Marc. So as Marc mentioned
actually the Sancsound project has been a big part of our work for the past several years
and what it is is it's a multi-year effort to oh can you go back to that there you go sorry
it's a multi-year effort to monitor underwater sound in our National Marine Sanctuary system
and the goal of the project was to provide some standardized baseline acoustic or data or
information on the acoustic conditions within our sanctuaries and the reason why this is important
is because it helps us to contextualize and to understand what sounds are being introduced what
sounds are being produced in our Sanctuary waters and by what sources and nationwide monitoring
occurred at seven different national marine sanctuaries and one marine national monument so
the large map on the right upper right kind of shows you all the sanctuaries nationwide
and then the small inset of the Hawaiian islands here it's kind of neat because you can see that we
had a quite a bit of coverage in our archipelago all of those red dots are the different monitoring
locations that we had acoustic recorders at and it spanned over 1400 kilometers so
we really had some good coverage here in our region which was exciting next slide please
and so of course being the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale sanctuary we were interested
in how humpback whales were utilizing our waters and the habitat in our region and so we we looked
at the acoustic data to see and this is just one of the many things that we looked at but one of
the only things we can have time to get into today but we looked at the acoustic data to see if any
trends emerged what we could see from the data and in fact we did see several trends from the data
not only over time but geographic differences and uh different trends based on that so the first
Ill kind of direct you to that bottom left slide I know things are kind of small probably
on people's screen but that's data from the Maui recorder that we have and unfortunately
the third year data we had an instrument malfunction so we don't have to compare to that
but you can see that coursing levels like mark mentioned before had quite a bit a
big increase from the 2018-2019 season to the 2019-2020 season so we could see that over time
the the whale song I'm in that frequency band was increasing year over year and then over
on the bottom right over at Hawaii island you can see that actually the peak of the season
was different from year to year so again that two 2020 breeding season it was a later peak in the
season and then this past season that we had it was a little bit earlier so there's difference in
and when the whales are arriving and departing our waters and then finally the the top three
locations it's kind of interesting to see that they're instead of just one peak in the season
we're seeing multiple smaller peaks throughout and so that suggests that these are areas where
maybe the animals are just moving through and not really hanging around like they do here and Maui
as we're seeing off Hawaii island so very different in how we experience it there so you
can see we can get a lot of information from this acoustic data and it's really valuable for us
to be able to understand kind of the behavior and the movement patterns
everything that the whales are doing here so very very interesting to see that next slide please and
so the other project that I lead here are our vessel surveys and the vessel surveys began to
really complement our acoustic data collection and so in 2018 we started these vessel surveys
and they we wanted to be able to visually validate the presence of the whales that we were
picking up on the recorders and so what we do on these transects is we go out and we you can see
on that middle picture there that's our transect lines so we follow those systematic transect lines
and we count the whales along those and during each season we are able to complete about eight to
ten of those and so once that data is collected we bring it back here to the office and then distance
sampling methodologies are applied to that to help us estimate what whale abundance and densities are
here in our water so whale density meaning how many whales are there per square kilometer and
this is helpful to help us track and quantify the whale numbers and in the abundance in
our study area of West Maui within seasons and between seasons next slide please so in total
over the three years we were able to conduct 26 surveys and on the top there you're seeing
density by day and on the bottom you're seeing density by season so in general you're seeing
that yes the the numbers are generally increasing over these past three years however we are seeing
fluctuations in that increase and so 2019 20 does have our largest or highest density of whales
but that's probably attributed to the fact that there was that later peak in the season and so
it could have affected that you know it was it was different from the the previous and the
latter season so again this is just you know super high level stuff but you're if you're more
interest if you're interested in finding out more about this um there is a report that we published
this year and that is located in our conservation series um for noaa and it goes into depth about
more about this survey work so if you're interested we'll either link it in the chat or
send it out with the questions later and with that i'll go ahead and pass it back to Marc.
Okay great thank you Eden. So up just a minute I gotta control my screen here
okay sorry my screen is looking a little little funny on my end but
so the other the other another area that we're heavily involved in is is doing
tagging of humpback whales and so for that we we use instrumented suction
cup tags that we deploy on on the backs of whales using a long pole as like this
and these tags record a wide range of different types of data they they obtain sound so not only
but not only the sound that the whales make also the sound that the whales are exposed
to themselves they record the whale's movement we are what are known as triaxial accelerometers and
magnetometers they record the the whale's dive profile and in some cases they also record video
and I'll be showing you a clip of some some video that was recorded from one of our tags at the end
of the presentation and we use these data to study a wide range of different types of whale behavior
also communication the types of noise exposure that they experience and also how they
use the sanctuary habitat I'm just going to kind of you know just give you an example or highlight
you know one particular you know study that we're we're engaged in and that is looking at just
whale activity while while our whales are here in Hawai'i so as many of you probably uh are well
aware whale engage whales engage in a wide range of activities while they're here on the breeding
grounds you know that range from you know vigorous competition between males for access to females
to various types of displays to giving birth and rearing their young to in some cases simply
resting now it's important to keep in mind that when when they're here they're doing all these
activities while fasting and basically relying on the stored energy that they've accumulated
during the summer feeding months however we know very little still about how whales manage
these resources while they're in Hawa'ii so there are some basic questions like for example you know
how are periods of high activity balanced with rest that we just don't know the answer to we
also don't know simple things like you know do daytime and nighttime activities differ
and you know the the tag data are ideal for you know examining such questions because these
these instrumented tags basically go wherever the whale goes so you know for example you know we can
only observe whales from the surface and we can't observe them at night so so we're not very well
equipped to answer some of these questions but the tags can can give us great insights into entities
into these types of issues so just to sort of highlight just some initial results that we've
obtained so far that are you know already kind of you know really showing some interesting patterns
so over the past three years we've tagged 32 whales in various different types of social roles
that's given us about 174 hours of of tagged data and so we've we look at the the data and we
use different types of proxies you know for to estimate or to estimate whale
activity levels and so we look at things like dive duration the dive depth the breathing rates and
quantity spectrodynamic body acceleration which is basically a measure of the pitch yaw and roll
of of the whale and and we can we can look at all these things and basically infer
you know what you know how active the whales are so on these bottom graphs what you see
are on the on the far left you see the number of surfacings per per minute minute the whale spent
spent diving and on the y on x-axis you see the different hours of the day in the middle you see
this this metric of VeDBA and then on the right you see the minutes of diving below five meters
and what you can see in all these three different metrics is that there seems to be kind of a
behavioral shift occurring right around sunset and so so this is you know it's it's interesting
for us because this is something that we you know we hadn't seen before we couldn't see this before
because you know we're not out in the evenings uh or at night looking at a whale behavior and so
you can see that these tags are already kind of you know shedding some interesting light into
what you know what whales might be doing differently during the nighttime hours or at
least during the the evening hours we can't really speak to the hours after midnight because we just
don't have a lot of data past midnight our tags usually stay on for you know maybe six to eight
hours in some cases they stay on for you know more than 24 hours but but you know we need to
collect more data to to be able to say more about what's happening into the later night hours
so I'll kind of leave the tagging work here we'll go back to it a little bit towards the end
but now I want to kind of switch over to talk about some of the some of the collaborations that
we're involved in with various partners and the first one I'll talk about is the partnership that
we have with the Nature Conservancy, the University of Hawai'i and the State of Hawai'i as well as a number
of different local non-profit organizations and that is to conduct acoustic monitoring in
two marine life conservation districts on Maui and off of Lanai and so for this we've again deployed
these our EARS off of Honolua bay on Maui and then Manele bay and Hupolu bay off of Lanai
and the goal here is to do acoustic monitoring for both human activity in terms of like vessel
traffic and so on but also monitor the presence of spinner dolphins which use these these these
areas these bays for for resting purposes and so what we're interested in and understanding is how
as the COVID restrictions lift and more commercial activity is is starting to take place again and
you know how this might be affecting the the dolphins that are uh that are using these areas
so COVID kind of presented this natural experiment for us where we're able to
look at you know what animals are doing you know during restrictions and and um and
and following the the lifting of these restrictions if you're interested in
learning more about how we're doing this acoustic monitoring I would refer you to a paper that
my PhD student Megan Mcgilligan and i published just recently on some
of the acoustic monitoring that's that's been done in the past in the Maui region.
Another collaborative effort that we engaged in this summer was to characterize the acoustic
signature of so-called e-foils and if you're not familiar with what an e-foil is it's basically
kind of a surfboard that has a hydrophobic and a um and a small electric motor and people can
you know ride these and you know kind of ride them almost like a like a hovercraft basically
and these have become quite popular here in Maui there's a couple of companies that
are renting these out to tourists and you know not surprisingly you know some concerns have
arisen about you know how these might affect you know whales and potentially other you know
other wildlife and so what we're interested in doing is characterizing the the acoustic
properties of these e-foils because we just didn't know much about them they're pretty pretty novel
and so we did is we conducted a kind of a simple study where we deployed a temporary acoustic
mooring off of Maaleaa Bay and then we we ran both our own vessel the bus the research vessel and
the efoil at sort of predetermined distances from the acoustic mooring so that we could characterize
what both of them sound like and so just to kind of not to get into the details too much but
you know the take home is that you know the or the more traditional outboard driven vessel has
a very broadband energy spanning you know a wide range of frequencies
whereas the efoil has much more narrow band acoustic properties so it's much more tonal the
acoustic this acoustic energy is focused in very specific frequencies so they do sound different
now whether efoils are somehow you know a problem more bothersome to to to whales than than vessels
that we don't know at this point yet so that we'll have to take you know we'll have to do some
follow-up studies or you know that'll have to be looked at you know more closely down the road
another collaboration that we've been involved in for the past couple years is
work working with our partners at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography this is work led by
Dr. Aaron Thoad and his recently graduated PhD student Ludo Tenorio and also Greenwich
sciences as well as some local partners that have helped greatly with with logistics and here we
are using what are known as DASAR's these are directional autonomous seafloor acoustic recorders
and they're very similar to the ears and that they record they sit on the bottom and they record
sound but in addition to recording sound pressure they're also vector sensors meaning that they can
provide the bearing or the direction of the sound source and being able to have the the bearing of
the source kind of opens up a whole new dimension in terms of understanding um you know things like
you know humpback whale singing which is what we're interested in so we've deployed you
know three DASAR's over the past two seasons along the west Maui coast and what I want
to show you is is sort of what we can learn from from these types of from these types of data so
in the middle there you see again a spectrogram showing whale song so this is you know
you have frequency on the on the vertical axis time on the on the horizontal axis
and the color of the of the of of the the song units in the case sort of intensity and you know
from this you can see that there's you know a lot of whale song but you can't really tell you
know how many whales are singing or or where they really are relative to one another but because the
destars provide bearing information we can create what's known as an azigram so this is now the
same data and the same song units except now the color instead of you know revealing intensity
reveal the bearing so the distance the the direction sorry the direction from which
the the the sound is coming from so you can see on the right you see that
that color that color scale it you know each different color indicates a different bearing
and so from this you can see that the the from just looking at the different colors
that there are about you know five or six whales that are contributing to to this whale song now
as I mentioned because these are vector sensors and can you know provide bearings we can also
use triangulation with these sensors and you know if we deploy them in this array fashion like
we have and when you do that you can you can start to you know recreate you know the the
same activity in in time of these humpback whales so here you can see kind of
an animation these are actually the real data of of of how whales were singing in that
area for for for you know for a certain period of time and you can see from this that there are you
know if they're five whale singing four of them were relatively stationary which is pretty
typical whereas one was was basically a traveling singer he kind of traveled to the southeast and
this this you know this kind of information is is really you know is really amazing to us
because it now is allowing us to look at you know humpback whale singing behavior in a whole new way
and so we have a lot of different questions that we'll be interested in you know sort of asking of
these data to try to help us understand you know some of the dynamics of whale singing
and then the last two collaborations that I'll just quickly highlight are collaborations that
are looking at just whale acoustic behavior the first is a a project that we're involved in
with a PhD student from Syracuse university and her mentor Dr Susan Parks as well as Dr Adam Pack
at the University of Hawaii Hilo and what we're interested in here is to try to understand how
juvenile males learn to sing so you know at some point males begin to display for song
and some you know often times that's before they become mature but we don't know at this point
whether you know one day the whale just you know just starts to sing and knows how to sing and sort
of it's ingrained in it or whether there's some sort of a learning phase like there is for many
other animals that are learning you know new behaviors and displays and so on so so we're
using tagging to to basically understand and tagging of juvenile whales to understand what
that acoustic learning process might be the other study is looking at the social signaling behavior
of different social groups and here this is a collaboration with a master's student Jessica
Carvalho at the University of the Algarve in Portugal as well as Dr Adam Pack and here we're
interested to understand you know how social calls are used in different social groups and so she
actually just submitted her master's thesis and so you can see this plot on the lower right
hand corner it these are the various different types of calls social calls that she was able to
to find in in the data and you can see the different circles represent the different types
of social compositions so dyads or pairs or whales competitive pods and mother calf escorts and you
can see that there are some calls that are that are shared among all you know three different
social groups whereas others are only shared by two or in some cases they're only produced in
within one type of you know social pod so so these kinds of data are starting to kind of
give us more insight into into types of signaling these social calls which we know still very little
about and it's starting to help us understand more you know the context in which they're occurring
and with that I just want to I'm going to finish up by showing you a brief video
as I mentioned earlier about some of the some of the information that we're able to start
gleaning from these video enabled tags and so I just want to kind of go through you know just a
few minutes of the deployment to kind of show you some of the highlights and I'll kind of talk talk
my way through it so here here the tag is still on the pole and it's being deployed on the rail
so here we go so this this was a tag deployed on uh the primary escorts with a mother and calf
there was a you can see the calf there in the upper right there was a a secondary escort there
and in fact here you'll see our our primary escort is giving them some warnings to to
to back away you can see them kind of you know try to chase them off and the secondary escort
there kind of you know beating a bit of a retreat but that wasn't I guess enough
of a warning and so now you see our primary escort get more agitated starting to blow bubbles
you can also hear some sounds social sounds that I'll be described and and then he finally
finally had enough and he just goes in and and you can see this is this is not gentle touch
this is you know these are pretty heavy body blows that they're you know that you've given them
and you know and eventually that was that was enough for the secondary escort and he ended up
you know on the peeling off and and so then we were left with our our primary
and in the mother calf you can see my sequence here of them um swimming along the bottom
and you can see that you know things are starting to kind of you know mellow out they're still you
know you know traveling and here this is an interesting shot you can see the female
actually kind of do this this little past by the by the primary escort
upside down and you know you know it could be that the the female is passing this way and
with her genitals basically pointing away from the from the primary escort perhaps as a message
to tell her that you know tell him that you know she is just not receptive right now but that
is of course you know open to interpretation this is an interesting sequence that I
wanted to show because this is when the animals are resting and this is to illustrate the point
that these whales are basically just floating and swimming ecosystems you know they have a lot of of
fish of these you know pillows and other types of fish that are swimming along with them and these
fish are are are eating the the whale's dead skin and um and and so when you combine that with you
know things like the the placenta that the females produce you know when they give birth or you know
um that can be then consumed by things like sharks and so on it it it really kind of tells you that
you know when these whales come to Hawaii they're not simply just you know taking up space you know
they're actually you know very much part of the ecosystem and this is an interesting sequence here
our tagged whales went to check out some kayakers and and so these guys got a pretty pretty
amazing view of this whale you know the rules of why of course is that you're not allowed to
close it closer than a hundred yards but in this case these these tires are fine because the whale
actually you know approached them and so they weren't making any effort to to get closer
to the whale and then the whale even came over and sort of you can see me in the on the distance
just kind of checking out the boat and so on and this is the last sequence that I wanted to show
it's it just kind of shows you just how quickly things can sort of change in a way
here we have another one of these situations where there's just a lot of mellow behavior you
know kind of resting type of behavior you can see a nice shot of the the mother and the calf kind of
just sort of cruising by and you know everything looks you know looks just you know
very mellow and and relaxed but then what you see here all of a sudden just out of nowhere
and and miraculously our tags stayed on so you can see these suction cups are pretty good
and then he does a few a couple more heads and I just you know so this is really the
end of it so I wanted to just show you this just to illustrate you know the power of having video aboard
these tags we can learn we can learn about you know whale behavior of course by observing
them from you know from vessels we can learn a little bit more by putting tags on them without
but boy you know being right there with the whale and you know and having this video
information kind of opens up a whole new dimension so we're very excited moving forward about
you know how we can use these tags to learn about humpback whale behavior
and with that I just want to finish off by thanking a small army of
people that basically make this work possible for us we have our staff of course our vessel captains
and then our scientific collaborators um that we were very very grateful for working with us
on these science projects and then and then a whole bunch of volunteers that over the years
have just made this work possible we would not be able to do many of the projects that we do
without their help and so we're just very very grateful for for our volunteers and with that
I want to say thank you to all of you for your attention and let's see if we have a little
time for questions now if not then we'll just wait till until the end of the symposium.
Alright great thank you so much Marc yeah I think we have time let's do just a couple
minutes of questions if we have any so Marc and I will stay on the screen and then Cindy did any
questions come in? Yeah so folks are probably still thinking of questions after that amazing
footage definitely a lot of praise for that footage and research going on so thank you both
one just kind of a logistic question folks are asking if these sessions or the symposium is being
recorded yes it is both days are being recorded and eventually once we make it accessible it
will be housed on our website in the future so just give us some time to get it accessible
other than that one question came in where do the whales go if they don't come to Hawaii that's
a very good question so there's there's a couple of different possibilities of course
now I think we'll hear a little bit later Dr. Adam Frankel will talk about some of these trends
as well and that occurred a few years ago so I don't want to go into you know too many
too many details there but you know one of the possibilities is that whales simply
decided not to come to the breeding grounds and so spent more time feeding and perhaps just
overwintered on the feeding grounds and this may be due to the fact that they just need to you
know spend more time feeding and replenishing those reserves that they that i mentioned
earlier in the talk you know if you don't have enough fuel in the tank to make the migration
then you know you just can't do it the other possibility of course is that they're are going
somewhere else and and breeding somewhere else so you know if especially if they're having to look
for food in other parts of the the feeding grounds they may be making decisions about about
perhaps going other places to to breed as well so one of the areas that we've been very interested
in in understanding whale presence is the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Eden showed some
data from the sang sound project where we're doing acoustic monitoring up there and and so there's
the possibility of course that these whales may be um you know choosing to go to other places to
to breed but you know these are speculations at this point so we can't say for certain
exactly what they're doing it's a big ocean and you know there's a lot of places they could go so
excellent and more questions are coming in now so one question is are the recorders
recovered yes we have to recover the recorders these are not streaming
data you know that would be great if we could get to that point one day that kicks
everything up in terms of cost and logistics and everything so these are recorders that we deploy
usually at the beginning of the season and then they recover and sometimes in some cases
we keep them going year round so we have to refurbish them you know every six months or so
excellent and I think we have time for one more question can you talk a bit more about
the whale band is there a lead singer are they reacting to one another
the the the whale band well it's I've never heard it put that way so that's a I'm gonna
have to start using that you know we're listening to the whale band um to our knowledge there aren't
you know those kinds of relationship where you have you know a lead singer and and backups
and and so on you know they're they seem to be displaying all sort of individually but that said
it's been very difficult for us to understand some of the dynamics that occur between whales
because you know you know unless we're working with instruments like these DESAR's
that I mentioned you know for us the ability to to know what one whale is doing versus another
is very limited you know whale sound is such that you know it it's very difficult to to sort I
of determine which whale is doing what unless you have some of these types of sensors that I that I
mentioned and other or other types of ways to to localize the singer so so we don't have a
lot of insight in terms of the the dynamics of you know whale singing although I should mention that
one of our next speakers Dr Adam Frankel he did his dissertation work looking at some of
these aspects and looking at spacing of whales relative to each other and so on so you know you
might have something else to say about it maybe we can you know revisit during our discussion
great well thank you for all those really great questions and I see that there's a
lot more we will send those out to the speakers and try to get you some
answers and send those out afterwards but we do want to continue on with some of the the
presentations that will be for the rest of the day and so thank you mark thanks so much and
right now I'm going to introduce Martin van Aswegen and he is a third year PhD student
at the Hawaii institute of marine biology's marine mammal research program and since 2018
Martin and his advisor Dr Lars Bejder have been using drones to measure the size and condition
of humpback whales off Maui and southeast Alaska today he's going to be speaking to us about d
using aerial photogrammetry to quantify humpback whale body condition
across the breeding ground and the feeding grounds so with that I will pass it over to you Martin.
Sure thank you very much Eden I just want to make sure you can see my
my powerpoint presentation here yes we can see it excellent so Aloha everyone I'm really
excited to be here and present some of this work some of it's fairly new and we haven't
really shown too much of it just yet because we've been so busy in the field but
as I begin I just want to say a big thank you to the Sanctuary and Foundation folks for
providing us with these these funds it's not a cheap thing to work in Maui as many people
will know so every little bit counts and we're hoping to continue this work into the future so
this work is part of a massive collaborative effort right so it's not just us at some marine
mammal research program we have collaborators both in Hawaii and southeast Alaska including Pacific
Whale Foundation, Alaska Whale Foundation we have UH Hilo, Dr. Adam Pack involved we have Christie
West Glacier bay folks University of Alaska southeast and University of Alaska Fairbanks so
I'd like to acknowledge all of these collaborators who've really helped out with this work we
couldn't have done it without them and also the assistants who've assisted along the way
so we'll present some of the preliminary work that we've found but initially
why are we doing this work so the this Hawaii DPS was delisted in 2016.
so following this at around the same time there's actually a 76 percent decrease and
Rachel Cartwright published on this showing mother calf declines there's also a recent work
showing a 50 decline in the non-calf abundance so pretty major shifts in a species that's pretty
somewhat stable they have pretty predictable trends for the most part
so troubling signs there but also in Glacier Bay in the feeding grounds it was a 72 percent decline
in abundance so both locations showing signs of instability and certainly these have kind of
been on and off since then so in response to this questions were asked why was this happening
right so one of the suspects at this point is this trifecta of oceanographic conditions that
happens around the same time between 2014 2016 including one of the largest marine heat waves
ever to hit the north pacific this was linked up with a very strong el nino phase and a strong
shift in the pacific decadal oscillation so essentially all of these came together and
produced really hot really hot water and this has affected the prey and the idea is
that potentially the humpbacks were affected by this so one of the questions that we ask is how
do humpback whales respond to this how did their prey respond to this at this stage we don't even
know what normal variation and body condition is in the humpback whale so this is kind of what this
project is leading into so in the 2018 workshop that was done there were a bunch of priorities
listed to look at the trends in response to these trends so everything from distribution to health
demo graphic trends you have prey abundance and environmental factors this work today we're
looking at is primarily focusing on health metrics so body condition would be the the one that we are
focusing on and then potentially at the end of the presentation we'll talk a little bit about how
we aim to link these trends up with potential environmental factors on the feeding grounds.
Alight so as we know the hardback wales in Hawaii it's a bit of a melting pot of animals from
the entire north pacific right so you have animals from Russia the Aleutians northern gulf of alaska
southeast Alaska and British Columbia coming and going from these Hawaiian islands at any um
given time so it's this melting pot for the north pacific and each of these locations have
a different migratory distance involved as well for this talk for our work we're
essentially looking at the Hawaii animals as well as southeast Alaska and this project we
are looking at body condition across the feeding grounds and the breeding grounds
if we can we have the ability to access feeding grounds and breeding grounds in
the same year up to eight to ten months of the year which is pretty awesome
so for these whales and southeast it's about 8 700 kilometer round trip so one of the longest
migrations out there and so again it comes with a whole bunch of different stresses in both of
these locations depending on if you're an adult a mother with a calf a juvenile these kinds
of things but today we'll pretty much talk about mothers calves and adults just to keep it simple.
Alright so for adults in Hawaii Marc touched on this a little bit these whales are fasting so
there's little to no prey resources for your your typical non-lactating adults your adult
that's not going to be giving birth or lactating calf there's a long migration to and from these
feeding grounds involved and there's also the possibility of really intense competition that's
quite energetically stressing on males and even mothers and calves to some extent so all of this
is happening while whales are fasting so in terms of body condition data we would expect
adults non-lactating adults to lose mass while they're here in Hawaii
back in southeast alaska these adults have one thing in mind that's locating and consuming their
prey and they need to be getting enough prey on a regular basis to offset what they've lost during
the breeding season and migrations so at this point these whales have just
trying to get as much food as possible and if they are doing well
if there are enough prey around the data would suggest that
they're going to be gaining mass this is what we would expect to see in the body condition data
for mothers they have a pretty tough time they are pretty incredible animals and what they're
able to do following in 12 months gestation period there's they head to Hawaii they go
through the same migration at the same time as they're fasting they're also lactating or giving
birth and lactating with this calf so we're providing this calf with really nutrient rich
content of milk and we would expect to see the stresses on these females
to be higher than the regular adult just because of lactation and the costs associated with it
back in southeast Alaska these mothers and calves even though they are still
lactating and they are still producing milk and transferring energy from mother to calf
we initially expected to see a an increase in body volume on these mothers in southeast
Alaska based on them getting enough food to eat enough sufficient prey to offset these costs
so in this case it's something we would expect to see mothers to gain
mass in Hawaii also in southeast Alaska but we'll show you what the data suggests later on
in calves they have a pretty short period of time in Hawaii to gain body length and body
mass so they need to basically get prepared for this migration back to cooler waters they need
to be able to avoid predators in case they come about things like killer whales on route and back
in southeast Alaska so they need to be somewhat robust and this requires a lot of mass and size
coming directly from the mother so these initial few months that they're in in Hawaii if that
we were expecting these carbs to be exploding in length and mass essentially they are at their most
accelerated growth phase at that point so this is what um we would be expecting to see in Hawaii
back in southeast these animals are starting to shift diet after about six to ten months
so we would expect to see some slowing down on these growth rates
but to some extent maybe not in body volume and we'll show you what this looks like in the data
as these animals become a little bit more robust over time you'll see the body width
to length ratio kind of changes a little bit and we're hoping to see that in the data
as you see here next one all right so just to talk about what we've been doing
we started this work in in Hawaii in January of 2019. so we've been coming
here to to Maui and hawaii since then a January to April effort working with Pacific Whale Foundation
Uh Hilo, Kristi West Shannon Atkinson looking at body condition through
drone work as well as biopsy so at this point we have three months of the year
across three years and we're hoping to continue this work in the future as well
in terms of our sample size to date we've done over 1200
drone flights at this point and just over 2 000 measurements have been collected on approximately
1750 individuals from juveniles calves lactating females and adults
as an example you can see the plot there shows our effort from the 2021 season
approximately 1500 measurements and this spans from beginning of January through to the very
end of march so this is the kind of effort we're hoping to replicate this coming season
in southeast Alaska we started in july of 2018 and the aim was to work across
spring summer and four months during the feeding season from the very beginning
middle to end which is up to eight to ten months of the year access to a feeding ground like
that even though conditions can be tough they are still relatively good compared to other places so
an excellent opportunity to sample the same population of animals
across the breeding grounds and feeding grounds and especially if we can do it for 10 out of the
12 months of the year it's um that's pretty neat so this work is with Alaska Whale
Foundation Glacier Bay university of Alaska southeast and university of Alaska Fairbanks
and this work we typically start around april all the way through to end of September and then we go
back in November to continue sampling just before animals migrate back south
and the sample size here we've done just about 850 drone flights in southeast Alaska
It's just over 1100 whales have been measured at this point just about 113 cars so a bit more
difficult to find calves in southeast Alaska than it is here here in Hawaii we sampled over 650 pairs
but this is not necessarily the case in on the feeding grounds so this is something we've been
trying to continue on every single calf counts and one of the neat things about this work is
we've been able to sample the same individuals across the feeding grounds of breeding grounds
for example this year we had almost 44 of the southeast Alaska animals we measured in Maui
we re-measured in southeast Alaska a few months later so that's pretty cool
and something that's I didn't think was possible but luckily
every whale counts as I say and it makes up less than one percent of our total sample size so
there's something to look forward to in the future as we get more measurements.
Okay so using these drones that we have they have these customized altimeters so we can fly over the
whale with these customized altimeters we have a resolution and accuracy of about half an inch
and using that we can just hover over the whale the whale doesn't know we're
there we measure the length and body width across the um the body length of
the animal giving us around 20 different width measurements using some fancy maths
we can then convert these two-dimensional images into three-dimensional cylinders
and from that we can estimate a body volume for every single animal based on its total length
and then it's important to link this body volume information this length information
to known individuals so happy well as many people here will know has been a revolutionary
a thing for us saving us a lot of time matching these flukes so by linking these measurements with
known age sex reproductive status we know that body condition varies
greatly across these different classes so it's important for us to know who's who
how old is an individual is it a mature individual and where are they coming from in terms of
feeding grounds as you see the bottom left it's about 500 whales we sampled this year in 2021
the Happy Whale output and you'll see the widespread there from Russia
all the way through to British Columbia so this is very important contextual information for us
so in order to look at the body condition side of things we need to first establish the relationship
between length and body volume we need to know what are these what's considered to be
normal for an animal of a particular length just because the there's a strong relationship here
and we can't say well we can't just use body volume purely because it is very strongly tied
to length so what we do is we play we split this up based on the demographic classes that we have
as well as the locations you see here where calves juveniles in both Hawaii and southeast
adults and lactating mothers so just as an example of this variation we see here in mother's
an animal of about 12 meters in length right at a given point in time can vary from 20 to 33 cubic
meters and this can be normal so these humpback whales undergo massive changes in body volume
depending on what they're doing whether they're lactating or if they're just regular adults
it's something that that's quite surprising and you'll see a bit later on
what these females go through um to raise these calves and how energetically taxing it can be
so once we know what the length of an animal is and what the expected body volume is we can then
say does this whale that we just measured does it have a body volume above or below what we would
expect for this animal at this point in time in Hawaii or southeast Alaska based on its length
so usually using this line here we can say anything above this line in the green
is going to be considered to be above average it's going to have a positive value
anything below it didn't quite meet that standard so that means it's an animal
that's below average body condition and you'll see this index being used later on.
Alright so we're talking about how females may be losing body condition
I think we're good yeah so maybe considering how females lose body condition right so in
the Hawaiian breeding grounds we can say females are losing about 0.9 to 0.18 cubic meters a day
that's pretty substantial right so at around 0.9 cubic meters a day that's roughly my body weight
that these lactating females are losing on a given day um and if they're spending up to
50 30 to 50 days on their breeding grounds that's a pretty substantial loss in energy
while these females are fasting so that's why they have such a limited period here because they need
to get back to the feeding grounds to replenish these stocks that they're losing so quickly
when you compare these two or these losses to the non-lactating adults
they're losing roughly a third to half that of a lactating female on a given day so typically
these will be males that are staying a little bit longer so this is not a particularly surprising
result but it's good to have these estimates at this point so we can look at these in the future
an example of this is a female that we sampled in off Maui mid-February and then later again at
the end of March and over that time that female lost approximately 11.5 percent of her her body
volume which is pretty drastic so she was losing approximately I mean my body weight which is
gonna be around 180 pounds so there's pretty major changes there in body condition and this
calf on the other hand it exploded in body length and volume so it increased in body length by
upwards of 46 percent but the body volume was the really interesting one there it almost
tripled in body volume over those uh 38 days between mid-Feb and mid-March
now if you look at the non-lactating females in southeast Alaska as expected these are
non-lactating adults were gaining mass again throughout the feeding season as expected
that's that's their job and then what we didn't expect to see was the difference between
non-lactating adults and lactating adults so these females were plateauing at best we saw very few
females actually gaining weight with the calf throughout the feeding season
and this is over between may and the end of September so a good chunk of the season
almost five months if anything they were still slightly decreasing in body volume
here's an example of one of these females that we sampled in Hawaii this year and then again 171
days later in southeast Alaska a female called Zero time she was sampled mid-February and then
again early August which would be about mid-season and over this period she was about 12 percent
had 12 percent less body volume than she initially had so this is actually a fairly modest
reduction some of these females that we've seen were about between 21 and 28 percent
lighter than what they were four or five months before that so many major changes in
these body volume estimates that we're getting here and the calf on the other hand you can see
as expected at the uh 5.8 meters to 8.5 that's roughly 46 but on top of that the body volume
increased from 3.3 cubic meters just to over 11 cubic meters which is about 236 percent increase
over the 171 days which is pretty neat and you'll see the change in the the proportions of
the animal size there so from skinny sort of long lanky way calves down to these almost balloons
with tails as you see them up there some of them are so round that they struggle to maintain their
level buoyancy it's pretty impressive um you can see just visually the differences and the the
body widths of both the mother and the calf there so these kind of instances are quite rare but
really important to have these to ground through some of the modeling that we're doing to show
that hey we can measure the same animals across across both locations but also show you absolute
changes over the same same year several months apart it is a needle in a haystack situation
we only have maybe five to ten mothers and calves that we've sampled
in both locations in the same year out of over 700 so certainly not an easy thing to do
now as expected carves in in Maui were rapidly increasing in length and body volume so increasing
at about two centimeters a day in total length while in body volume they're increasing roughly
0.03 or essentially one percent in their body volume per day so this is pretty accelerated
stuff so they must be drinking milk on a pretty regular basis so as the calf is maintaining this
high level of energy transfer the female on the other hand is losing essentially all of this
energy at the same time while fasting so that's why we're seeing such a massive decrease in mother
body condition while the calves are reaping the rewards from this and as I said earlier
it's important to note that these calves are on the timeline to become robust enough for migration
and for predator avoidance to make it back the almost 3 000 miles just to get back to southeast
Alaska so again fairly expected results and if you look at southeast Alaska on the other hand
we see a slowing down of almost 50 percent um in the growth rate in carbs in total length
however the interesting thing here is it seems like body volume the rate of change
of body volume stays fairly constant so this is why we're seeing carbs almost 400 percent
heavier than what they were in Maui which is pretty cool so it seems to be in in Hawaii
the calves are roughly three and a half to four and a half meters in length at birth
and by the time we sample them in southeast Alaska they're almost
eight eight and a half meters in length so certainly increasing at a very strong rate
now just to illustrate these points I'm going to show you a female that we sampled in March
of 2020 a female with a calf off Maaleaa we sampled them she was looking pretty good in pretty good
body condition at around 13 above average we were lucky enough to find her again her and her calf
again in Maui this year almost about 10 months later and had you asked me beforehand I would have
said she would have gained most most of that weight back that she spent on lactating the calve
so instead what we found was a 24 decrease in body volume even though she went through a full season
of feeding in on the feeding grounds we're not sure where she came from but you can certainly see
the difference in the body proportions there even a full year after that calf was was born and this
will explain why this calf absolutely rocketed in size it went from 3.6 cubic meters to over 17
and in terms of length it went from about 6 meters to almost 10 meters in length
in less than a year so all of that energy was transferred from the mother to the calf
and you can visually see that not only in the numbers but at the same time and the images here
so it's a 375 percent increase in body volume and roughly 60 bigger increase in the total length of
the animal so really interesting stuff that we didn't necessarily expect I believe
Adam Pack will be talking about some of this in his presentation tomorrow we'll be linking different
stress hormones to these kinds of situations to see what the stress is like on these females.
Okay so the other part of this is to look at body condition variation across years
in both Hawaii and southeast Alaska on the left hand side you'll see Hawaii there
with the body condition index on the left axis and it shows 2019 was the relatively worst
year in terms of body condition for almost all of the different classes that we have
so this is likely a reflection of what was going on in the feeding grounds the previous summer
and this is something that we want to be tracking over time spending enough time there not only to
see the differences between or within the season but also between years because we know not every
single year is the same there's different timings different things going on so this is one of the
other aspects that will be really powerful once we start to get a few more years under the belt
for the right hand side is southeast Alaska and here we show the blue which is 2021
was almost consistently the worst year for most of these different classes the more data we put in
i was thinking it was going to change the signal but we kept on seeing by August and
September animals were not nearly in the same condition as what they were so I'll point out
both of these plots were done in one month only so Hawaii was in March and southeast
Alaska was under august so mid-season so as you can see there the adults for southeast Alaska
by the end of august which is towards the latter side of the feeding season animals were still
below that that zero line that average line for body condition whereas in previous years they were
five six seven eight percent above average and then if you look at the lactating females it's
it's telling the same story so it's important to get these um different variations and to see how
things can change year to year but also showing us what is a normal variation for a humpback whale
over that period of time especially right now where things are still not really quite stable yet
so with this in mind we now know that body condition varies
across different classes in Hawaii and not every single animal we sample in Hawaii is from the
same feeding ground so we have animals as I said from Russia across the Aleutians northern gulf of
Alaska southeast Alaska and British Columbia so one of the next steps here is to see if we can
assign feeding grounds to specific individuals using Happy Whale information
utilizing these long-term data sets and citing histories to then assign age or sex as well
and then to say can we compare body condition on individuals across feeding grounds because we know
in hawaii we've compressed the animals in terms of time and space the whales are all there roughly
the same time over those three months from various points in the north pacific so the idea here is to
compare body condition across these groups but also can we then look at
different environmental factors to explain any variation we may find so looking at things like
biometrics chlorophyll A is a proxy for productivity phytoplankton fisheries data but then
the abiotic as well so I mentioned earlier how sea surface temperature was heavily affected by a heat
El Nino and Pacific Decadal oscillation so looking at all these different things as well as
climatic data this is going to tell us a little bit about potentially why we're seeing
variations in body condition across the different demographic classes so this is something that's
going to take some time there's a lot of data involved but I'm really excited to explore this
and another season in Hawaii should give us roughly 3 500 measurements to utilize and hoping
to find animals that we can assign to different feeding grounds it'll make it a lot more powerful
otherwise that's that's that's my talk thank you very much for listening.
Great thank you so much Martin that's it's always interesting to hear and I need to see
some of that new stuff that we hadn't seen yet so very cool stuff that you guys are working on
and excited that you have some more funding now to continue this great work
so awesome we probably can take about maybe one or two questions Cindy and then
we need to move on to Dr Frankel's talk so just maybe one or two questions
Alight so we did have a few questions come in one question I think we could answer is do you
think lactating females should be expected to lose body volume during feeding season
or could this be a heat wave slash abnormal ecological effect yeah good question
so this is as I was saying earlier we don't necessarily understand these dynamics well
enough to say what is normal so at the moment we started this work following this massive decline
that we saw in 2014-16 so I wish this work was started earlier it would be really informative
but unfortunately at this point we're just starting to see what is the new normal if it
has changed we don't know what the baseline was before that so at this point it's going to take
a few more years to tell us if other years females are actually improving in condition
in years where prey resources are more abundant but at this stage it's way too early to say
and there's it's probably more complex than than what I'm making it out to be at this point
good question okay so if you guys don't mind I think we can go ahead and transition to Adam
right now and then we'll have Martin if you're able to stick around at the end of
Adam's presentation we'll have about 10 minutes and even a little bit more people want to stick
around to kind of discuss more questions so with that I want to introduce thank you again Martin.
I want to introduce Dr Adam Frankel and he is a senior bioaccuisition for marine
acoustics and also the vice president and scientist for the Hawaii Marine Mammal Consortium.
He has conducted research in the field of marine bioacoustics for nearly 30 years and has helped
teach undergraduate and graduate level courses and workshops on the topic for the past 20 years he
was speaking today about the decades of data that he has off of the for humpback whale
distribution and abundance off the Kohala coast of the Big Island so with that I will pass it to you
thank you thank you very much and thank you all for showing up the choice of a title
was sort of apropos I'll be talking about oh by the way the QR code that's shown here
will be on the final slide but it's a link to the paper I'll be discussing in detail today
if we are of course in Hawaii but more specifically on the north Kohala coast
and we've been working there since 1985 and in response to
Marc's comments I'd quickly drug up a couple of old figures
to try to speak to the things he was asking or mentioning again many many years ago we did
put in our own hydrophone array and these were real-time broadcasting
sono buoys that were anchored and we were using not the kind of technology in the DESAR's but
something called time of arrival differences to locate whales and track them as they sang and
one of the things we came across was again these animals swimming you know four animals singing
and swimming at the same time changing direction and as I made the point a long time ago some of
these animals could be drifting but with this many different directions some of them have to
be actively swimming at the same time and mark also mentioned and someone had been asking about
differences between individual humpback whale singers and one of the things we're able to do
because we can we're able to track individual singers for hours at a time was actually do
comparisons of the units of the song between different animals within a two week period
and were able to show that yes indeed there are significant measurable differences between
the sound production of animal a animal b and animal c and so on so with that just
in response to Marc's very gracious um suggestion let me move on to the topic of
or what I had planned to talk about again everyone has should be aware by now that our
north Pacific population and Martin showed this in his slides a minute ago are moving
between the summer feeding grounds and winter breeding areas in Hawaii and as we've seen
before or as Martin has shown us very nicely they spend a lot of the summer time feeding
building up resources or trying to build up resources um so that they can come down and make
little babies which will help with the population in general so what we have been doing is
for the last 20 plus years now we have been doing scan sampling estimates
I'm trying to look at local distribution and abundance and this particular shot shows three of
my co-workers and co-authors Chris Gabriel, Suzanne Yen and Susan Rickards as well as her daughter
and again we've been going up to that same shore station and using very precise
scan sample methods where only one observer scans in that case the behavioral observer in this case
Chris Gabriel in the pink shirt and only that one observer can identify a whale and that's
done to fix the amount of effort because it would make sense or it does make sense that if you have
more observers you're going to see more whales so we fixed the amount of effort we fix the
of observation efforts so that these samples would be comparable within the year and across years
and that gets us our counts and then we also fix the animals when possible with the theater
light to try to look at distributions and we've been aiming for four samples a week
or 20 samples per year and again we've got 19 years of data that i'll be presenting here
so it should come as no surprise at this point that yes I'm going to talk about climates and what
ha what has happened to our beloved population but I want to go ahead and introduce what some of
these climate indices are there's something called the north Pacific gyre oscillation and that's very
strongly correlated with chlorophyll in the Gulf of Alaska and I should mention that we are looking
only at climate indices in the summertime for that area in Alaska because we're really trying to use
these as a proxy for prey availability the north Pacific index again is a measure of
atmosphere to ocean heat transfer and generally and this will come up again cooler waters
tend to be more productive because you have better circulation from the bottom
up to the surface so you're bringing that upwelling or circulation brings
the nutrients up into the photic zone which gets phytoplankton which makes
which are then available for zooplankton and finally the the last one the Pacific Decadal
oscillation is something that Martin mentioned and again that's very strongly tied to ocean
surface temperature again on the gulf of Alaska and as an illustration over on the left you've got
you know a cold zone which are you know cold up in the middle of the gyre but actually up in Alaska
you've got a very reddish warmish area and over here you've got a green blue which is fairly cool
and so the warmer colors are positive
and the negative colors are or the cooler colors are negative for Pacific Decadal oscillation
so now that we've met the players what have we seen and this is a story kind of in three phases
and this includes um a data point from 1988 which was taken from DaveHellweg's master's thesis
and he started doing scan samples as part of that part of his degree and we picked
up that methodology and have carried it forward but from 88 through 2001 through
2010 these are the happy years things are just going up and up and up and up
and over this time period you did not need statistics to see the increase in animals
and then for the next couple of years it was sort of stable a little more of variation especially
between 2010 and 2012 but nothing particularly dramatic and then as you've heard before
we have the blob from 2014 to 2016 this huge heat wave throughout the north Pacific
and as I mentioned before when we have warm waters that sort of cuts off the circulation of water up
to the surface water doesn't go up as far so less nutrients reach the top layer and that makes for
less primary productivity less plant life in the waters which reduces the foraging
a bit you know forage for the zooplankton which then works its way up the food chain
and as a result of this there were fish die-offs there were bird die-offs and whale die-offs
and you know it extended all the way through the north Pacific so this
led to what we saw and what everyone saw in 2016 was a dramatic drop in numbers
um just a stunning drop and our numbers dropped to levels that we had not seen since 2001.
and from 2016 to 2019 hints of a recovery and we'll get to that
further in a bit but again not only was it the number of animals that was dropping this is
here it's labeled calf proportion it's also called crude birth rate basically it's the
number of calves you see divided by the number of animals you see and again from 88 through
2015 it's you know remarkably constant it look doesn't look like there's very much of a change
at all but again in 2016 it just plummeted to the lowest value ever observed and as
of 2019 we still have not got anywhere close to what our calf numbers were prior to these
events so having seen all this can we explain this can we use
what we the other data we've collected to try to explain or predict the calf numbers or the whale
numbers so with that since we're going to get into statistics we have statistics for non-scientists
so most of us are probably familiar with the idea of a linear regression
that's where you have some sort of dependent measured variable on the y-axis and some sort
of predictive sorry predictor variable or independent variable on the x-axis and
you're looking for a linear relationship between those two a good example might be
let's say non-lactating whale length to non-lactating
body volume there's probably a nice linear relationship between that
not necessarily but not to get it you know
if you can accept that and that's got some statistical assumptions the next step up is
something called generalized linear models which sort of loosens up the restrictions on what this
area distribution of your variables can be and we won't worry about that for the moment
but the next step after that is something called a generalized
additive model which is what I'll be talking about and I'll be presenting
and what that allows is a non-linear relationship between those two sets of variables so all of
these tests are trying to find a relationship it's just that generalized additive models or a gam
will allow a non-linear relationship instead of a simple linear relationship
so
the first thing we did was to establish the base model and what we did was
again sorry if numbers of whales and sorry crude birth rate is what it should say there I
apologize and we asked how much can year day of the year which who you know who's observing
what's the visibility of that day and the time of the day can any of those explain or how much
of the variability in our observed whale numbers and birth rates can we see that it's explained
by these variables and when you look run the tests and then asks well which ones are significant
for wales it's year day of the year an observer for calf birth rate it's just year
so to that we then added those the values of those three different climate predictors
the north pacific index the north pacific gyre oscillation and the pacific decadal oscillation
and since we are interested basically in a food based hypothesis we lagged those either six months
or a year and a half or one and a half years and used a keiki information criteria to select
which of those nine or actually twelve well nine best nine models has the best explanatory power
and the one in green is the winner negative numbers are good in this case so
what it's telling us is that the pacific decadal oscillation is explaining more of the variability
in our whale numbers than just those base local variables so what does that tell us
and this is why I went into statistics for non-scientists because the shape of these curves
are important they tell us things and these are this you know these are statistically significant
curve fits so not surprising from everything we've seen before whales
well numbers go up and then they come down and within the day of the year
anyone who knows about humpbacks in Hawaii we start off low we have a seasonal peak
usually in late February to early March at least off the big island and then it drops down
okay it all makes sense that I'll make you know measures up exactly with what
what one would expect and what one can see with their very own eyes
but this very boring looking slide is perhaps the most important slide in the entire presentation
because it's showing a very believe it or not a very strong relationship between
negative pdos in the summer and a half years ago before the time in Hawaii and increased numbers
of whales so what this is telling us is that when you have a good cold some summer you should have
high productivity and a year and a half later you should have good numbers of whales in Hawaii
and when you look at crude birth rate you get the same pattern for a year but the pattern for
day of year is completely different and again this makes perfect sense because
as whales females show up they're having calves and so
the percentages of calves should increase over the course of the season
and when you look at the climatic effects on crude birth rates these are the three best models
and north specific index the statistics tell us this is the best model but i can't
make much of that pattern so i'm going to the second and the third best models
both of which are telling us that in this case higher values is cold waters for npgo and here
we have higher number of higher birth rate with negative pdo numbers both of these are telling
us birth rate should be higher a year and a half after a good cool summer up in Alaska
so what's next
we have continued this work scan samples were collected in 2020 as normal they were collected
2021 by very brave and physically but not socially distanced folks who either lived locally and were
not and were willing to fly before vaccines I was not one of them I am not that brave
we need to include those two years of data in to the data set and redo
these analysis bottom line is those were better years than 2016 through 2019 so our
you know the early look at the data jibes with what people have said before today
that in 2019 and 2020 we've seen a continued recovery and next year and thanks to the
sanctuary we're going to be adding an acoustic recorder or monitoring to augment our visual
monitoring so we're going to be deploying a bottom mounted acoustic recorder very much like an EARS
that Marc described earlier and one of the nice things about acoustic monitoring is it's a lot
easier to do than visual monitoring you can simply place a recorder at the beginning of a season
leave it there pick it up at the end and hopefully you've got the entire season's data
and then we want to compare our acoustic data with our visual scan samples and we'll be doing
that in a couple of different ways we'll be doing a hand analysis in RAVEN which is a traditional
spectrogram analysis program that will give us very fine resolution and time and we
you know a trained analyst aka me will go through it and try to count how many singers are on those
recordings and see how well that matches up with the numbers of whales that we've seen
and the idea is that if there's a relatively fixed percentage of whales that are singing that we can
come up with that relationship between numbers of whales heard and numbers of whales seen
and if that relationship comes true or is found to be true
then it opens up the possibility of being able to perhaps add some additional interpretation
to the larger data set of recorders that Marc described earlier in the symposium
we'll also be using a program called Manta which does long term spectral averages and this is an
automated program that just does these minute by minute spectrograms and spits it out
for your statistical and analytical pleasure and this is one example this is one day of a
sound trap we had in the water a couple years ago and not only do we have the full ltsa spectrogram
and you can clearly see where all the humpback whale singers are and
something very interesting happening here perhaps a storm and then it gets kind of quiet here
at the same time we can also integrate this energy to reproduce the same metric that Marc was
describing and for the sound sanc project where they're looking at the 20 hertz to 1500 kilohertz
or 1500 hertz band and for the same time we've got that exact same band plotted minute by minute
so our potential outcomes that we're hoping for again is the a meaningful
relationship between visual counts and acoustic counts and that's been established in some other
studies this is a comparison of of the number of whales seen in aerial surveys compared to
numbers of up calls for northern right whales and these data also will be available for
visual and acoustic density estimations and we can compare between those as well as soundscape
characterization so in summary the 19-year time series have shown us the rise fluctuation and fall
of humpback whale numbers and then hopefully the re-rise and I think we've been able to show that
again cool productive waters in the Alaska regions will lead to increased numbers in whale numbers
in Hawaii and we're hoping that the addition of acoustics thanks again to the Sanctuary Foundation
will increase our ability to interpret these data as well as look in between our scan samples our
little point samples because we'll have a continuous record from the acoustics
and we may be able to do more with those data as well and finally
again there's the QR code I promised for our paper and I'd be delighted to have
take any questions now that I've overrun my time thank you.
So actually yeah you're you're actually early so that's good so we have some more time for
yeah so okay Cindy if you want to hop on you can see if there's a any questions for Adam
yeah so one question that came in was
how will whale populations be impacted due to climate change more specifically any
comparisons based on a business as usual climate model versus limiting warming to 1.5 degrees
well I again would argue that our data are telling us that cool
oceans especially in high latitude regions where most of our whales feed are very good for primary
productivity and secondary productivity in making food for whales and when we have
warming oceans like the blob we get a decrease in productivity we have observed die-offs across a
wide variety of taxa again birds, fish, seals, whales in 20 you know during the blob week that's when
we had literally California Sea lions crossing the highways and going into restaurants looking
for food I'm not making that up and i would predict I think our data are telling us that
the that climate change matters to whales and that the more we can do to limit the
impact of climate change the better it will be for whales and if we do business as usual
it will be very bad for humans for whales and probably just about everything on the planet
you actually feel very yeah i think we have to start
doing more and doing it now all of us every one of us to do what we can to help
I'm buying an electric car.
Alright another question came in are ocean temperature variations likely to affect metabolism
it we know that that affects metabolism in pokilothermic or cold-blooded animals
for example you can look at the frequency of fish calls and they increase in frequency as the water
warms up because the fish is able to metabolize better but with humpbacks being homeothermic or
warm blooded i really don't think it's going to do much to affect metabolism because they're sort of
keeping you know they do all they're pretty good at keeping their internal temperature
fairly constant and one of the ways that they do that is they have this counter current system
where the arteries in the veins and they're in the basis of their fins um run back run right past
each other and so if an animal needs to keep heat it can sort of close those down and you know it
will the heat of the arterial blood will transfer to the venous blood coming back to the body
whereas if an animal needs to dump eat like say it's a nice rotund calf in Hawaii then it can
open that up and just let the warm blood flow out to the flippers and then the flippers turn into
effectively radiators so I think it's not metabolism i think it's really more the prey
that we need to worry about but again all good questions
and we have another question would you recommend quiet marine parks to
study marine life in Hawaii nothing would make me happier and again
we I think we're very lucky in that over in Kawaihae bay we have very little commercial
traffic just a few barges very little whale watching traffic we have much less boat traffic
than you find off of Maui and so you know that sets up some very nice potential for comparisons
but also the Sancsound project has got
recorders all throughout the island chain and up into the leeward islands so again that also
offers the ability to do comparisons between noisy environments and quiet environments
but you know these animals evolved
with that propeller noise and I I'm sure they would be happier and
without propeller noise and something that I'm sure Adam Pack will mention tomorrow
much like covid 19 offered an interesting opportunity there were some folks up in the
Bay of Fundy studying studying right whales and looking at stress hormones in the right whales
and they had measurements before and after 911 and that you know
of course right after 9 11 basically everything shut down vessel traffic shut down air traffic
shut down everything shut down and the stress hormone levels in those right whales dropped
very quickly after 9 11 I think that very clearly shows that anthropogenic activity
and anthropogenic noise do does cause stress in at least some marine mammals and probably almost
all did I answer your question but it was again a very good one yeah that that covers it I think
that's all the questions that are currently coming in for Adam thank you but I'll pass back to Eden
okay thank you so much cindy and thank you adam for that it's always so cool to see
that historical record of the data that you guys have collected over there so excited that
you'll be able to keep collecting it and adding some of that acoustic work as well so look forward
to seeing all the results and good work that you guys are doing over there and continue to do so
thank you thank you very much yeah and so you know real briefly we're just kind of going to be
wrapping it up here in a little bit I did want to just thank again all the presenters today
Marc for giving us you know a great overview of some of the activities that we're conducting
as NOAA staff in our Sanctuary waters and then highlighting some of our collaborations that we
we work with or work on and then also Martin. I with his information sharing his work using drones
to understand the body conditions not only here in Maui but in the feeding grounds off southeast
Alaska. I think that's really cool work and I think really valuable to be getting
that baseline information and hopefully even when he graduates hopefully somebody else will
take it on and keep that record going and then of course like I just mentioned with
Dr you know Frankel and and his team over at the Hawaii marine mammal consortium they've
been doing work over on the Big Island for for many many years and uh really fortunate to be
able to partner with them and to have that that really great data set for so long and
so great to hear from all the different partners and these mini grant recipients from
the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation so we thank you guys for applying and for being able to
continue to doing this kind of cutting edge work and conservation work in our waters it's really
important so thank you for that I did want to just put in a quick plug we are continuing our
symposium tomorrow so if you can join us it's 9 a.m Hawaii standard time again and we'll be going
to 11 a.m and tomorrow um we have speakers lined up from Whale Trust Haley Rob and then we also
oh thank you Cindy for putting that up there and she'll be talking about assessing female humpback
whale reproductive status and then Dr. Adam Pack we'll be talking about the pressures of
humpback whale motherhood in Hawaiian waters and so it's nice because a lot of these these talks
are building on one one another and giving us some context as to why we're studying this and then
hopefully Ed will be able to join us and talk about some of his health and risk assessment
monitoring efforts here in the Sanctuary and then we'll have we also be joined from Kris Sari from
the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation and then some opening remarks from Uncle Sol Kaho'ohalahala
from our Sanctuary Advisory Council and a kupuna from the island of Lanai so very excited to have
those folks on deck for tomorrow and we hope that all of you guys can join us and even if
you can't like we said it'll be recorded so you'll be able to watch it at a later time so for all
of you that do have to leave we really appreciate your time and your attendance today all the great
questions that coming in we are going to stay on and we have this until 11 so we can go ahead
and take questions for any of the speakers and then at least Marc and I will be able to stay
on at least a little after 11 if there are some more questions after that so but like we said
we'll anything that doesn't get answered today we'll send out and send it to the speakers
and then send out to the registrants with the email that you registered with so mahalo
everybody and Cindy any other questions that that came in that we didn't get a chance to get to
yes so we did get a lot of questions earlier as well let me shuffle through
there were a few questions on hydro foils for example are there any
precautionary rules for the hydrofoil board using use during whale season
yeah Marc if you want to jump on and then I also I forgot to mention tomorrow Jeannine Rossa from
DLNR is going to be on she's our Sanctuary co-manager from the state of Hawaii and she's
been working with Marc on this but she'll she'll be on tomorrow too and she's she can probably
provide some insight on that as well but Marc, I'll pause pass it to you yeah sure so you know the
you know the effect of e-foils on on whales or any other kind of type of marine life is really still
kind of an unknown for us right now so we are to my knowledge there are no efforts to kind of
take sort of you know precautionary measures to to to regulate them any differently than than other
types of vessels there's been a fair bit of you know community outreach and communication with
them so that you know they're aware of of course all the rules associated with operating
around whales and are informing their customers that rent these e-foils uh but it is something
that we are you know we're very interested in trying to understand better and so as you know as
time progresses we'll be you know we'll be keeping an eye on on the effects that e-foils as
you know as well as other vessels may have on on humpback whales so it's we're still very early
on they've only been around for for a couple years and so for now we've just been trying
to understand you know acoustically speaking you know what they what they produce and the next step
would be to try to understand if there's really an actual effect on on on whales potentially
thanks Marc and another question that I believe was during your presentation how
far out can you triangulate whale position from your vectored acoustical sensors
yeah that's a that's a good question it really depends on the
a number of different factors including sort of the the aperture of our array meaning that the
distance that these these different recorders are spaced apart and because they they
kind of send out um sort of bearings you get to a certain point where the the error becomes
you know the the ambiguity of it becomes too great to really make a a very
you know very accurate localization so if you if you remember the little animation that I showed
with the the different singers moving there was one that was kind of moving across the array and
as it got to one end you saw some circles and they turn into kind of ellipses because that's the the
area of uncertainty and you get to a certain point where you know you can get a localization but
you just don't have really very much confidence in it so so it really kind of comes down it's
not just how far but also the angle away from you know from the sensors that that matters but you
could see that you know you know I didn't have a scale on the map but you know we could localize
whales out to you know multiple kilometers out but even even if you go straight out there's going
to come a point where the bearing lines start to kind of you know join you know and almost parallel
one another and then they and then the accuracy of the localizations just becomes you know just very
questionable so it's not a hard sort of distance it's sort of a little bit more qualitative in the
sense that becomes a certain point where where um the accuracy just you know becomes unreliable
Thank you Marc. Okay another question and I believe this one was during Martin's presentation
so how did you go about deriving the relationship between width and volume
at each particular segment of a measured whale
are there differences in the proportions of animals depending on sex and age
yeah good question so the way we did it was we assumed a circular cross-section of the whale
now there is some work that's been done by Dr Pedro Christensen looking at the height and width
ratio of the animal so you can kind of naturally compress the cross-section to a more true state
but for us we're using at this point a circular cross-section to go from the two-dimensional to
the three-dimensional and at this point we know for sure calves initially for the first six
months the head length is fairly short and this skull kind of starts to extend over um
month six to twelve I would say where you see more adults kind of the eyes are 25
from the rostrum whereas for carbs it's around 20 so in terms of proportions based on age certainly
things like head length I would say is is a key one that we can look at in trying
to derive how old a calf is we also look at the relative width or the relative length of the calf
versus the length of the mother so if an animal is 30 of the length of its mother it's fairly young
and as it gets to the end of the breeding season it's approaching 55 percent
45 to 50 percent and then in Alaska it goes from 55 through to to about 70 percent
by the time animals come back as yearlings so those would be the key ones for sure.
Mahalo Martin and another question that was sent during your
time period drones have been fitted with thermal infra red cameras to test thermal properties of
whales related to their body condition in Stellwagen Banks National Marine Sanctuary by Gina of
the University of New Brunswick have you thought about incorporating this into your research
we've certainly discussed it as I think the technology is getting better and better
every year and getting cheaper too at this point we've looked at it to some extent but
we haven't had the opportunity to to purchase that equipment or test it out
in the field it would be really powerful to link up with these custom altimeters
to give us a little bit of extra information so definitely not ruling it out at this point
but certainly something we're thinking about as we continue with this work in the future
excellent and I think I had one follow-up question from our previous question
is there an average of how much body weight a lactating female loses
per pound of gain in the body weight of her calf
um
I mean I haven't looked at that specifically yet we know the length of a calf is kind of
dictated by the length of the mother as well and the condition of the mother so
essentially we're seeing a half a meter increase in a calf's length so every meter increase in the
female when she gives birth so at the moment we haven't looked at the actual mass side
of things yet but that's something that i will be exploring with the dissertation good question
Alight thank you looks like you're oh sorry Cindy
no no go for it you know I was gonna pass it to you oh perfect okay so yeah it looks
like we're at our 11 o'clock Marc so again I want to be respectful of everybody's time
and just say mahalo nui loa to everybody for joining us today if you want to stick
around and we can stick around for another you know 15 minutes or so if you'd like
but for those of you that have to take off we'll see you hopefully tomorrow have a good day
Alright Eden so there are some other questions that you guys can probably tackle
one in particular is what is the status of the monitoring plan for the humpback whales with such
poor body conditions and continued climate stressors it seems logical they be realistic
let's see Marc would you feel comfortable tackling that question
sure I can I can certainly try so when the humpback whales were delisted at least I
should say that the Hawaii distinct population segment was de-listed from the endangered
species list there was also a post-de-listed monitoring plan that was that was you
know required basically as part of that process and so you know we are you know in the process
of of engaging in that post enlistment monitoring plan it took a little while to to get going
I think as as Martin mentioned we in partnership with the NOAA's pacific island
regional office held a workshop in 2018 to to discuss some of these trends that were happening
you know because because there's been you know a kind of period of fluctuation so we
saw you know trends kind of you know numbers in Hawaii and other places going down but then you
know coming back up there hasn't been any you know any real serious discussion about re
you know re-listing this population because the the numbers even though they are fluctuating
they are you know they're not you know continuing to go down and so so there's
there's of course a lot of interest in in following the trends and in understanding
what the trajectory is but to some extent you know the population kind of going up and down
is especially after a period of you know of of increase you know is somewhat to be expected
regardless of whether you know things like climate change and so on are are having an effect and so
so you know that's all to say that I think you know right now there's just going to be continued
monitoring of the situation and and if certain triggers are triggered you know relative to
you know to to you know numbers you know proportional you know calf mortality and you know
and so on and so forth then then those kinds of discussions I think could really pick up steam but
for the time being I think we're we're sort of in a wait and see mode as far as that's concerned.
Thanks Marc and then I believe one other question is there any evidence of
adjustment of whale song in the frequencies generated by watercraft in the frequency
generated by watercraft so like noise
yeah okay so yeah so I mean that's a it's it's an interesting question in terms of you know
whether there's an adjustment in frequency so animals can respond in a few different ways
to increases in noise I think what the question is asking whether it's whether
whales are somehow shifting the the song frequencies either up or down to kind of avoid
noise of you know interference from from vessel noise
we don't see any direct evidence of of anything like that vessel at least the vessel noise that
these whales tend to be exposed to in here or from relatively small vessels that's fairly
broadband so it covers a wide range of frequencies um you know whales can also adjust not just by
shifting their frequencies but by also maybe producing their song louder so to try to overcome
the masking effect of noise we currently don't have any evidence that that is taking place but
it certainly could it would be you know it would be very interesting study to look
at to see whether whales adjust their the amplitude of their of their singing
in different acoustic environments there is some evidence though from different
you know parts of the world and we've seen some of that here locally as well that
noise can you know interrupt or interfere the whale's singing to some degree and you know one
of the ways that animals deal with increased noise is just to simply stop singing so if it's if it
you know reaches a certain point and they can't compensate by either increasing or decreasing the
frequency or canning can increase the amplitude of their singing then then they just stop so
that is certainly something you know another adaptation that can that can take place
and I don't know you know if Adam is still on perhaps he has some additional
thoughts about this you know he's he's a very experienced marine bio acousticians and
knows whale song very well if you're still on do you want to say anything about this
trying to think of what I can add you've done a very good job of covering the
kinds of compensatory mechanisms that animals can use
and one of the things that complicates us trying to look for evidence of changes in frequencies
that have been seen in other whale species that have stereotyped calls is because humpbacks keep
learning they're called you know the song year after year after year and it's constantly changing
that constant change sort of makes it hard to look for a simple
increase out of the noise the other point that and again sorry thinking on my feet here the other
good point that mark made was that again most of the outboards are very very broadband so they're
noisy in all the frequencies that humpbacks are typically using whereas right whales which for
example have been shown to increase their calls are more typically exposed to large vessels which
are predominantly low low frequencies and so there it seems like they're very clearly shifting upward
out of the noise band and the other thing that's very curious is a lot of the open
ocean whales like blue whales and fin whales seem to be shifting their frequencies downward
so yep things are going on in the ocean and things are changing but it it may be
that the simple near constant production of sound allows them to overcome the relatively low levels
of vessel noise we have here in Hawaii yeah I think it's a very good point and you know
from all the acoustic recordings that have been made uh by us and and and you Adam and others
it's pretty evident that you know humpback whales are by far the the largest or the most
significant sources of acoustic energy during the winter months they kind of swamp everything
out and so although there are of course contributions from vessel noise they tend to be
you know more sort of temporary or you know instantaneous where a vessel is going by
the even the contribution of all the vessels in an area like Maui tend to be sort of masked by
all the whale chorusing that we pick up and that's what we're exploiting basically when we're looking
at the the temporal trends right we're actually looking at just how much the you know the the
the volume of singing is changing and so because of that it's very difficult to try to you
know pick apart you know any you know any either you know especially very subtle kind of changes
that that might be resulting from you know from things like bustle noise because like I said
and like Adam mentioned whales or humpback whales are constantly changing their song or year to year
and and also they're just they're the ones that are producing the most acoustic energy of all
yeah and I just wanted to say too it's kind of a tangent on this as well but for the Sancsound
project you know of course our recorders are recording everything in the soundscape
within the frequency range that we sample in and so you know it's just a matter of what
you have time to parse out of that but we are in addition to looking at humpback whale song
we are looking at other factors as well we have done some vessel detector work to kind
of quantify the presence of the vessels in our on our sites as well as other detectors for
other species like dolphins things like that so there is additional work we just today only could
do the very high level on topic theme of back whale chorusing but the great news is that that
data is there and that we can continue to look at that for different things that interest us.
Excellent thank you guys. I think our incoming questions have kind of come to a halt
so maybe we can wrap it up for today perfect okay well yeah I think everybody great questions
thank you for being so attentive and sending those in and being patient while we got to those
we'll go ahead and wrap it up and hopefully we will see you tomorrow so have a great day aloha