Aloha mai kakao and welcome it is now 12 noon Hawai'i time. We're pleased to have you join us for Every calf
counts: Hawaii's humpback whale mother and calf pairs in a time of changing climate webinar. This
series is hosted by the NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries and is a way to learn about
some of the exploration, research and discoveries occurring in Sanctuaries. During this presentation
all attendees will be in listen only mode you are welcome to type questions for the presenter into
the questions box in the bottom of the control panel on the right hand side of your screen
this is the same area you can let us know about any technical issues you may be having. We will
be monitoring incoming questions and technical issues and we'll respond to them as soon as we can.
You will also see three PDF's provided by today's speaker in the handout section of
your control panel those handouts are available for you to view and download.
We are recording this session and will share the recording with registered participants via
email when it is available on the Office of National Marine Sanctuary's website.
So I am Cindy Among-Serrao one of your hosts for this webinar. I am contracted
by the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation as the Hawai'i Island program coordinator for the
Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary. My fellow hosts for today is Ed Lyman,
the Natural Resource Specialist for the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary
and Allen Tom, our Superintendent of Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary.
We greatly appreciate any feedback you may have that will help us improve the experience.
So please take a few minutes to complete a short evaluation following this webinar.
okay
oh sorry went too fast at the slides.
Okay so the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries serves as a trustee for a
network of underwater parks encompassing more than six hundred thousand square miles
of marine and great lakes waters from Washington state to the Florida Keys and from Lake Huron
to American Samoa the network includes a system of 15 national marine sanctuaries
and Papahanamokuakea, Rose Atoll marine national monuments there is currently a proposed
Lake Ontario National Marine Sanctuary and so on the map you'll see all the different locations
and we are Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary right here.
So the NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries
is mandated to conduct research, monitoring, resource protection, education, outreach and
of course management of America's underwater treasures to preserve them for future generations.
National marine sanctuaries are living classrooms where people can see
touch and learn about the nation's Great Lakes and ocean
treasures. (apologies for the delay in the next thing)
So the next year is very exciting as the national marine sanctuary system turns
50 on October 23, 2022. Please join us throughout the next year as we celebrate the history
accomplishments and beauty of these incredible underwater parks across the United States
and I submitted the link for you to learn more about the National Sanctuaries as well as the 50th
anniversary and I will talk to you more about the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary
and that link was also put into the chat box as well. So the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale
National Marine Sanctuary was designated in 1992 and is jointly managed between NOAA's Office
of National Marine Sanctuaries and the State of Hawai'i through the Division of Aquatic Resources.
More than half of the humpback whales in the North Pacific seasonally use the waters around
the Hawaiian islands as their principal breeding and calving wintering grounds.
The bottom is a left on the bottom left is a map of the Hawaiian islands and the areas outlined
and shaded are the sanctuary boundaries. The sanctuary includes areas around the islands
of Maui, Lanai and Moloka'i and parts of Oahu Kauai and Hawaii. The sanctuary's
mission is to protect Hawaii' humpback whales and this extremely important habitat through
closely aligned education, research and resource protection efforts. The sanctuary works with the
community and our partners to reduce threats to humpback whales including through enforcement.
And I will pass it now to Ed to introduce our speaker for today.
Thank you Cindy. Aloha everyone. Well it is my esteemed pleasure to introduce
another great speaker and fellow scientist Dr. Rachel Cartwright, to our Ho'i Kohola: Welcome back
to humpback whales month of November events. Now Rachel became fascinated with whales here
off Maui in the early 1990s she took that fascination desire and received her PhD in
conservation biology and for the past 20 years has been studying humpback whales off of Maui
especially those mother calf pairs. Now in 2001 with the help of a group of naturalists
boat captains, friends, she established and became the lead researcher for the Keiki Kohola project
and with that goal of conducting research that focused specifically on ensuring the well-being
and protection of Maui's mothers and calves. Okay back with a focus on the mothers and calves.
she's worked with her colleague Captain Amy Benima a local naturalist boat captains that
connection with the community there on their again their goals to maintain close ties with that
on water community. Now Rachel hails originally from Manchester in the north of England city
famous for music and great football teams so you can you might get a hint of her accent there.
She's a faculty member for the California State University of Channel Islands and after combining
teaching and research for many years Rachel now spends her winters in Hawai'i focusing on
the research, heads to Alaska in the summers where she works as a nationalist and a freelance writer.
And I've had the great honor of working alongside Dr. Rachel Cartwright for many years now and can
certainly attest to her passion helping the animals and as an example that someone mentioned
that Rachel and our team there at Keiki Kohola project have been a big part of our entanglement
response efforts so big kudos their big shout out to Rachel. Now I hope everyone will give
us a big Aloha to Dr. Rachel Cartwright who will speak to us on those humpback whales and mother
calves and the changes specifically climate change that might be affecting the animals
and her title her talk today every calf counts hawaii's humpback whale mother calf pairs in a
time of changing climate. So please please welcome Dr. Rachel Cartwright and I'll pass it
on to Rachel. Thank you. Alight. Hi Ed thanks for those kind words I really appreciate it.
It's making me sound very old can we establish I must have started this when I was
very young so anyway I just want to say thank you so much for the invitation to present the
work of our organization the Keiki Kohola projects it's very much a locally based group we're all
ex or current people who are working on the water and in the local community so I
really appreciate bringing that up and yeah we are always very very pleased when we can
help with Ed's efforts in entanglement such a big part of what makes Maui such a
special place for whales is the fact that we can look after the whales so well in this area so
and again thank you so much the Sanctuary for the introduction I really appreciate it.
So okay with that I will begin the presentation so hopefully you can see that right now okay
oopsies okay so the presentation today that I put together is entitled "Every calf counts and
it's very much fits with the theme with the work that we're doing now I think it's it's
really interesting when you've been involved in a long-term project like this to see how it changes
and develops over time we've certainly gone from a very small focus as you'll see today to a
a very much larger issue that I think whales can fill in our current natural systems
and I'm hoping that I can explain that larger context to you today as part of
this presentation. So with that I'll I'll just jump right in here and as I say
hopefully I'll be able to introduce you to the work we've been doing
and how we hope it will contribute to the larger health of our marine systems.
Okay so as I mentioned the Keiki Kohola project. Keiki Kohola means baby whale in Hawaiian or young
whale and our little group was founded back in 2000 I think 1999-2000 we got going as a 501c3
we are very much a locally based group though and we all got together with a really clear
intent to provide management based information to do research that address key management issues so
that we could help and support the work of the Sanctuary. So it's especially welcome when
we get this chance to present our work in this in this context and and to you today and to
the Sanctuary as well so we really wanted to do that management-based applied research that could
really address current issues and concerns we have around the health and protection well-being
of humpback whales mothers and calves when they come to Hawaiian waters. And this first picture here I
always really enjoy this picture it just shows that connection between the whales and the place
as Cindy mentioned over 50 percent of the whales from across the North Pacific head to the waters of
Hawai'i each winter and and populate these waters in a way that I haven't seen anywhere else in the
world and I think I'm probably speaking to a lot of the converted when I say there's no no feeling
quite like that this surface dive in the water in the in the winter time when you hear the whale
sound and echoing underwater and just remind you what a truly special and unique place now he is
and the Hawaiian Islands in general is a sanctuary for humpback whales. So as I say this picture
I've always felt there's a great connection between the place and the whales that come
here. I did want to introduce our team because while I'm the one here chatting away today
we have a great team and that we all feel fill different roles in this team
and I think our diversity is our strength let's say that so this is myself and
my co-investigator here Amy Venema and the two of us have been involved in this
project since it's it's since its beginning and Amy is very much the local coordinator
the the person with all the on water experience that she brings to the project is invaluable and
Amy drives whale watching boats and and she's the main captain at Ultimate
Whale Watch which shout out to Lee James the owner there who gives a great deal of support to our
projects and Amy you couldn't wish for a better boat watching captain. So do consider that if
you're heading out or if you're coming over to Maui or heading out on the water this year that's
a great way to go. Rob Hawes the gentleman right next to Amy and I right there joined our
project right from the get-go. He's a graphic designer in fact but he provided a lot of the
sort of business acumen that was lacking between Amy and I. So Rob has been helpful throughout
our throughout our time in making sure we stay on the good path and he's part of our Board and
helps with our decisions if you're looking for Rob you'll find him now on the web as Tiki Rob
and he is an artist and makes Tiki mugs absolutely beautiful so take a look on instagram
if you need some Christmas presents those are a perfect choice. John and Dan Cessory,
the Cessory brothers and they provide beautiful underwater photography I'll be showing here today
mainly been in the project for 15 years now. Amy is sorry Vanessa there is one of our main captains
who comes out and helps us on the water and Stacy Worthington the the blonde lady right there she
is a bit of a maestro with UAV's and so as we expanded our work into aerial monitoring
and photogrammetry. Stacy's been able to guide us along with that and at the bottom there you see
our little boat, it's just a small research boat but it's been a platform from which we've been
able to do hopefully some very useful work so and the official name of the boat is Miss Emily
but we always go as Trophy Research on the water because it says "Trophy" right down the side of the
boat and it just is just how we got got to be known on the water so that's something so that's
our little boat right there. Okay as Ed mentioned in the introduction I've actually been
a faculty member back at Cal State Channel Islands. California State University Channel Islands, its in
in Camarillo, California and I worked there for around 15 years teaching biology and biostatistics
and just environmentally based biology classes as part of that we were able to include a lot of the
research that I was involved in on Maui we ran some specific courses on aerial photogrammetry
and we've got students to Maui and here you can see they're thoroughly excited by this opportunity
to get to go to Maui. They come out with us on the boats there we are within the Aloha Kai which is
so generously donated to the project for our youth when we have students in town by Lee James
with Ultimate Whale Watch and and the students are involved in all aspects of the research so
they get a real good feel for what's involved in the project like this as well as contributing
to the work that we're doing and just I think we can safely say that the students for the
students for undergraduate students getting this kind of immersive experience is invaluable and you
really see it shape their outlook and their career choices so we're looking forward to welcoming the
next group of students in January and it really is one of the most rewarding aspects of the work
we're doing just seeing that next generation hopefully of environment environmentally
based biologists finding their feet in the field is thoroughly rewarding has to be said.
Okay so and as Ed mentioned I'm eventually from the north of England so one might wonder what
how on earth I ended up in Hawai'i studying whales. Manchester where I come from it's quite an
industrial city and probably like many people listening in today I first came across whales in
Alaska. I had accompanied a friend on a backpacking a backpacking trip up there and we were on a ferry
just sailing into Juneau. I'm sure quite a few people listening might know that exact spot
we're heading heading up the Gastineau Channel towards Juneau. I saw a whale off in the off against
the shoreline and we were we're on one of those really old state ferries where you can sleep
outside if you're really short of money and so it was about four in the morning or so but of course
it's Alaska so it's light and I was so excited when I saw this whale that I thought I should
definitely let everybody know and not everyone appreciated it of course because if you live in
Alaska you see a lot of whales so but it was my moment my moment of seeing whales in the wild
and it was just this feeling of wilderness that was truly captivating. On the rest of our trip
around Alaska I soon realized that whales were right at the heart of the ecosystem there
and we were lucky enough to see just in that first trip to see whales feeding in Alaska and
that's definitely a memory I'll I'll carry with me and so at the end of the summer
in the last year as it started to get cold I heard that these whales headed down to Hawai'i
on their migration and that seemed like a really good idea at September in Alaska so I came
down here to Hawaii got a job on the water and from there got really interested in whales. So
hopefully what I the reason I like to mention this is so that for those of you who are listening
who are wondering how to get started in a career on the water or working with marine mammals
field experience is a fantastic way to start and for local people on Maui you know you
can get involved in this and make difference and make it and you know contribute to the work that's
ongoing so if that's something you're interested in you'll see my contacts at the end and if I can
help you at all be moving forward on that we just let me know. So I followed the whales from
from Alaska down to Hawaii and of course meeting whales in Hawaii is captivating in an entirely
different way for some reason right from the get-go working on the water I was drawn
to mother and calf pairs and of course you know the waters of Maui are really
a center for those groups some 85 percent of the mothers and calves that are moving through
Hawaiian waters will come through the waters right there off of West Maui and the Auau channel so
and it was a great place to get into this research and so in terms of the research I'll be talking
about today I'll start by just reviewing a little bit of what we found out during our
research. You know we've taken the Keiki Kohola project some of our findings then I'll
be talking about some of the urban legends I'd like to address and a little bit of background
information maybe to help some of the naturalists who are heading out on the water to guide our
watching trips this year and then finally I'll be talking about our new findings and how I think
they may fit into the role of our the health of our larger ecosystems and the role that whales
may take in future years as we as we head into this time with a truly changing climate and
a challenging time for sure. So that's the basic outline of the talk of the presentation today.
So one of the things you'll first notice when you're out on the water around about
around humpback world calves is the great deal of variation that we see in them essentially
from watching over the years we estimate that the calves are staying on our waters not very long at
all maybe somewhere from four to six weeks and during this period they go through such a a fast
rate of such a fast and varied amount of development this physiological development is
morphological development they're developing motor skills swimming skills at the same time as
growing and increasing your girth so they're going to be able to make this massive amount of
migration that's ahead of them some 3000 miles three thousand kilometers twenty five hundred
miles up to their feeding areas around the North Pacific and they're gonna start on that migration
probably at four to six years four to six weeks old so it's a really key and important time this
early development that they go through on Maui what we noticed pretty soon is there's a
great deal of variation we were able to find a way of working out that that was age-based the way
we do this we still use this method now initially what we used is a photo of the dorsal fin when
the calf 's in utero that dorsal fins flat right right over the top of the dorsal then
the calf could pull actually a neutral as well like this way and that way and so the dorsal fin
lies flat and once the calf is born that dorsal fin rises up quite uniformly. What we were
able to do is document that and photograph it and measure measure that angle on a photoshop very
precisely. We found that it matched breath hold capacity which we know just an age-based
indicator and we realized at that point that we had a little key that we could really start
to age the calves that we were seeing at that time and by splitting them up by age then we were able
to identify very specific developmental stages that they go through that as the calf matures
and what we found with the younger calves is that they spend most of their time
actively swimming. So the red bar that you can see on the graph right here is the portion of the
time budget they spend actively traveling and they really do spend maybe you know usually over 90 percent
of their time is spent in active travel so swimming along by mom and moving over and on to
the top of her at times so it is assisted swimming in some in some cases and interestingly enough
there's an awful lot of activity that comes in early you'll see young calves. If you're out on Maui
if you've been out with us I'm sure you'll see you'll often see those young calves flapping their
dorsal fins sorry flapping pectoral fins and doing lots of tail slaps and then often you'll see
them going into these breaching activities where they'll reach not once but multiple times in a row.
Now this was always a real conundrum to me because having trained in England was a bit of a classical
sort of ecology idea that you know costs and benefits energetically are always going to
always go into balance if you see an animal using energy and that therefore would be a
costly activity therefore there should be a benefit associated with it so watching these
calves breach and breach and breach, clearly extending a lot of energy there's a bit of a conundrum because
we know that the mother has swum away from Alaska while pregnant she's given birth somewhere
in and around Maui waters we believe and she's produced this you know substantially sized baby
and she is not feeding, she's fasting the whole time so we know that our females are always on a
very tight energy budget especially the maternal females raising the calf on a very very tight
energy budget so to see the calf and using that energy up we thought there must be an explanation.
So what we were able to do is really put this together and working with a cell a cell
biologists back at Cal State we really were able to build up a story and get to understand what was
going on and in fact this high level of activity seems to have a real function and one of the key
things that the calf has to build up is the ability to hold its breathe and when the calf dives down
obviously it's got to you've got to maintain a sufficient supply of oxygen. Now one of the ways
adults do that they have something called myosin in the tissues myoglobin is to muscle tissue
what hemoglobin is to blood it's an oxygen carrier and adults have around 16 milligrams of
myoglobin per gram of tissue but when we you when we looked at the muscle tissue of calves calves
that were all obtained during strandings and then sampled you know as the calf was examined
this was in association with Kristi West over at University of Hawai'i, she was really
helpful and Jim Rice was super helpful too over there at University of Oregon supplying us with
these tissues and what we found was our humpback whale calves had very little myoglobin. This one on
the right here is actually controlled this is harbor porpoise but these two here you can see
there's barely any red coloration to it what we found was exceptionally low levels of myoglobin in
our humpback whale calves and it turns out however that exercise produces calcium in the muscles just
the right type to trigger a biochemical cascading reaction that ends up with myoglobin being
produced right there in the muscles the myoglobin then can be used as an oxygen storage allowing
the calf once it's exercised and produce that myoglobin and got things going it's going to be able
to grab hold so there is a real benefit so when you see that calf breaching and breaching breaching
over and over again it turns out there is definitely a benefit for that increased
breath hold capacity is going to make swimming more energetically efficient and it's also going to
allow the calf to rest the resting periods come as the calf mature and in Maui waters at least
we found they spend about 60 percent of their time resting once they're in that second phase so these parts
are about maybe three weeks old and you'll see very typically the mum will go down and the calf
will go down rest and then come up and do a little circle and dive back down to her and that's a very
typical activity in a more mature calf and that has a breath-hold capacity that they can stay down for a
little while and also that maturity seems to give the mom a little bit more confidence to let
the calf head to the surface by itself safely as well so that separation in this stable circling
class are our older calves about 60 percent of their time 50 60 percent of their time is is spent at rest
and it's during those rest periods that we think that they grow and we're working on this with the
photography that we're doing but it's it it makes sense that growth will be prioritized during a
period of rest because the the metabolic rate will drop a little bit all the resources can be powered
into growth and if you have if you're raising little ones you'll know for sure that you know
it's while kids are resting that they tend to grow growth and rest go hand in hand so that second
phase may be really really important to maintain the high levels of growth that we see in calves in Hawai'i.
What are those levels of growth current estimates are about 30 centimeters a month so yeah that's
a lot 28 kilograms a day maybe in terms of being mass as well so growth is extreme and we
do think most of it most of the girthiness as well is increasing in that second areas.
So maternal energy stores have to supply both the mother and calf during the time in Hawai'i
essentially the calves can get all the resources they need through lactation
and you know nursing with the mom and she is going to metabolize her energy resources to provide that
milk for the calf. Now this is one of those urban legends I mentioned we want to to address because I'm sure
if i was to ask what have you read in terms of how many gallons of milk a month produces a day
there are some crazy numbers out there and it's it's a quick google search you might even
find estimates up to 100 gallons a day and that's something that just never made any sense to me
so and certainly some time ago now we put some numbers into that I just want to share those
with you so we clarify this so what we wanted to work out is how much milk does a humpback whale calf consume
to give us a starting place to work out this milking within the mums and we can
start this by thinking about the calories in the milk and this is pretty interesting to dive into
what we're actually using here is an awful lot of whaling data actually really old data
can provide some interesting and useful background details so as you see it's a paper in 1946 by
Tomlin who actually calculated the calorific value of milk he looked at fins and blue whales we
had to recalculate that based on the fact that humpback whale is probably about 20 percent fat
while in the nursery areas according to Octgall's work another guy working with a lot of whaling
data the amount of fat increases over the first six months of the calves life which kind of makes
sense so that when the mom is actually back on the feeding ground and still lactating the amount
of the amount of fat in the milk actually increases just a little bit so in the early stages
on Maui based on the work of Tomlin and Octagall we can say it's about 20 percent fat we use Tomlins
calorific values based on blue and fin whale milk and we can get that to about 2 624 that's a
little accurate over accurate isn't it of course but that's a ballpark for the calorific value of
the milk then we have to think what the calves are using it for basically metabolism activity
and growth of the 3 key activities and so let's look at the first one there metabolism
again using some there it is using some whaling data that dates back to this is Lockyears data
it's been estimated that calf weigh in around 1200 kilometers at 1200 kilograms of birth
and they grow around 28 kilograms per day so a three week old calf would weigh in
around about 17 1 700-1 800 kilograms there's an equation called cubist cleavers Fire of Light
that we use for working out the metabolic rate based on the body mass it's a very standard one
and then it's generally agreed that in mature animals metabolism runs about twice as fast as an
adult so we'll put all that together and we come up with a kilocalorie count for the calf
in terms of its basal metabolic rate now remember it hasn't gone anywhere yet
when we add swimming and some breaching activity in there too we know that the three
week old calf is going to be about 60 40 in terms of that time budget based on our work we know the
speed of travel and put all that together in equations that were derived by a very experienced
energetic biologist Terry Williams at U.C. Santa Cruz and we used her equations and then we added
on a few breaches that actually Dr White had Paul White had one of the most famous researchers
in sperm whales he he was doing something about humpback whale stuff in his early days and calculated the
the cost of breaches to put all that together we can work out how many calories the calf needed a
day for activity. For growth as I mentioned when we're looking at growth rates in these calves
it does come out to about 28 kilograms a day that was calculated first by Lockyear
in 1976 and then also by Breakaway in 2016 so you know more an estimate based on whaling
data and more recent estimate too. They all came out around with about 28 kilograms a day
in terms of weight increase for the calf certainly substantial and and then we know the value
of the calorific value of whale meat from whaling days again so we can put that together
figure out how many calories we need for growth and finally put all that together
for a total of around about as you can see 100 000 calories or more needed for growth metabolism
metabolism and activity we also have to figure in a little bit of spill you know a little bit
of spilt milk is lightly and a little cost of ingestion ingestion all this comes together to
give us this value here this is the calories required for our three week old calf. Now I'm
sure you're getting you know a little over all the figures by now but bear with me you put all this
together and we come up with a number it might be surprising it really seems that calves are only
going to need about 12 gallons of milk a day to support their metabolism growth and activity so
we are reckoning somewhere between 12 and maybe tops 14 gallons a day is the likely requirement
in terms of milk for our calves on Maui and this actually fits in quite well because Christina
Lockyear looking at whaling data came up with an estimate of 18 gallons of milk a day being
the most that a whale could a female well could provide daily and still have the resources to
get back to the feeding areas and make that trip successfully and breathe weight
we confirmed that as well and she also using some really complex conservation energetics
came up with came with in complete agreement with that. So Fin whales are larger of course
than humpback whales so scaling down a little from there is not surprising so that's our number
and I'd be very interested to get any feedback on that but it certainly does seem that it's
around about 12 around about 12 gallons and it's just released you know we've seen it a
couple of times in the water but not too often so and the delivery of that milk is something
probably that we are not so sure of yet yet we just generally see her we do see streams
of milk in the water occasionally it's like sort of heavy cottage cheese or something
very very occasionally you'll see these strings of milk in the water the calf comes up nudges on
the genital slit and and connects there and the milk is delivered in a very very efficient way
very little seen in the water as I say just some small amounts on occasion so yeah so nursing is
an interesting one in terms of seeing nursing very rare very rare that we see nursing when
we're in the water with whales and I think the work that's being done by UH with tags on calves
is certainly going to be the work that reveals a little bit more about the nursing dynamics of
our calves so we'll go back to that in a few minutes. So as we started to establish our work on Maui
one of the things we also wanted to address was the idea that mums and calves are predominantly
in shallow waters and when we were working out on the water that wasn't what we saw whether we were
working or and involved in research we saw mum's and calves right across the entire channel so
once we've done that early developmental work we moved on to look at habitat we were able
to really work out the favorite areas for mums and calves in our four you know in our sort
of West Maui waters so our aim was just to take a sample and get an idea of what depth the mums and
calves were at and certainly this this work that we started off in 2008 we found one's in
about 40 to 60 meters of water so that's you know 120 to 180 feet so that's much much deeper than
mums and mom and calve humpback whales pairs are found in other parts of the world so that was pretty interesting we
definitely found them about two to four kilometers offshore and again I think the Whale Foundation
and Stephanie Stacks have done some lovely work on this and I think they found quite similar
similar trends in terms of the favorite depth for our moms and calves so mums and calves may
be in shallow waters at times but those are not the only areas we find that this is really
important from the management perspective because you know when we look to where areas
we're going to protect and where are we going to focus our concern for the whales we've got to
realize that those moms and calves are right across the channels and not just in the shallower waters.
So one of the one of the shortcomings of that research though was it was mostly concepted in the
second half of the season and that was just around my teaching commitments at the time
and so when I got a chance to come back on sabbatical to Hawai'i one of the things
I wanted to do was just to see whether there was any difference between early mid and late season
and it was one of those research projects that didn't heal very much because there was that
there was no there wasn't a lot of difference at all and we really didn't see a great deal of
difference we ran transects continually to keep a very sort of quantified approach to looking
at these seasonal trends and these these transects yielded encounter rates across the
lines of the grid that we've shown that I showed you right I showed on the slide just previously
and so we had rates for whales in general and mom and calf rates along that line at the time it didn't
seem really didn't seem too consequential we saw a nice increase in terms of our overall encounter
rate. We saw our numbers going up from 2008 to 2014 as you can see that's pretty good trendline
we saw a little drop in 2014 but we've had such a big year in 2013 that it didn't seem
an issue at the time but of course you know hindsight is 20/20 isn't it. By 2015
changing times we're coming to Maui I'm sure lots of you who are familiar with our
you know or whales in our community part of our you know whale watching and our whale research
community well aware of this. We saw those first numbers dropping about 2015 as you can see here
you know the first headlines the first comments came in I believe you know Ed got some of the very
first calls then as the first go-to is to maybe he might have some insight as to what was happening.
Through 2016 luckily you know we have lots of people focused on the whales in our
in Maui waters and so the whale count that was conducted by the Whale Foundation
was also looking at the number of whales right there in the Aoao channel and they
came up with similar numbers they were seeing a drop in numbers between 2015 and 2016. So as we
got into 2016 we saw that this wasn't just a blip it was maybe over a couple of years at that point
we were able to pull out those surveys that we did and those surveys that didn't yield
a great deal of new research at the time we were able to go back and revisit and
so we repeated the protocol we used very precisely in 2017 and 2018 we did seasonal
seasonal surveys in exactly the same time windows running exactly the same transact lines
so that we could see how the numbers were changing between 2013 and 14 and 2017 and 2018. and as you
can see you know our survey was very focused on you know we're on the West side sorry we're
on the East side of the Aoao channel just off of West Maui and we're going up as far as
as Mala and as far south as just south of Oluwalu so we're really looking in that
focal area we're not a larger survey but even in that area we saw really quite dramatic declines
between between and 2013-14 and between compared to 2017-18 overall our encounter rates
were dramatically down you know we saw an almost an 80 percent decline in those two and two-year
periods and adults and adults in that area we saw a the trend was the same but it wasn't quite
as pronounced and I know that Anke Kruger done some great work now with monitoring underwater
and using acoustics and I believe that she found very similar trends too so we all saw that saying
drop in numbers and of course to see a drop so dramatic in numbers was quite a concern.
Looking into it though you know we had a workshop with the all the researchers
gathered together in Honolulu to talk about what's happening in the North Pacific in general
and although there were lots of lots of possible explanations to consider what happened was
generally the whale watching community seemed to hone in around this idea that it was really the
conditions in the North Pacific the warming of the North Pacific we had The Blob which caused
local warming in the waters off of Southern California originally and then that moved up
to the waters off of Alaska and then it was compounded by a a flip in the Pacific decadal
oscillation which is an underlying current which can lead to warmer waters and then an El Nino on
top with really warm waters what happens is those warm waters will cap the upwellings
in the areas where the whales normally feed and so the nutrients aren't circulating the same way
the productivity drops and because the water's warm the phytoplankton will adapt so the
phytoplankton free floating they will move to the water that's their normal preference and they
will be replaced in this case being phytoplankton from from further south unfortunately those
replacing phytoplankton didn't have the calorific value of the ones that left the area because
it was too warm and the food chain really just sort of rolled in on itself and lots and lots
of impacts were seen we saw impacts in seabirds we saw algal bloom in other areas we saw
real crashes in some of the fishing stocks and the food that we think supports our whale stocks
is what disappeared for the humpback whales. This is not an isolated incident unfortunately
this is being reported in quite a few different places now we are starting to see this
this trend towards lower lower reproductive rates and it seems to be quite possibly related to
to feeding and to nutritional stress there is a direct line between the physiological health
of the female and the likelihood that she's going to go into a reproductive cycle so these
declines that are seen in so many other places are likely indicative of about the same thing.
Okay. Glacier Bay was one of the places was still the most pronounced decline and in 2016 they had
no calves seen. You see you can see here they normally see between 12 and 20 calves in those
waters and those are whales that migrate from from Hawai'i you know we estimate about 90 percent of the whales in
Southeast Alaska come to Hawai'i so that's our our basic group and the wonderful work being done
by Chris Gabriel and John Nielsen keeping such a close eye on those whales in Glacier Bay and
tracking year to year was able to really show the type of decline that we were seeing so we really
saw some drops in the number of calves produced so the feeling was that it was nutritional stress
and to get to this we launched our aerial work and so this was back in 2017 when we started this
and so we were working at the start of this sort of new technology so we used a fairly low
low grade entry I think you could say using a using a simple phantom UAV we measured the we
measured the length of our boat at multiple multiple heights in every flight because it turns
out the background the background barometer reading changes with with the air pressure
and so you have to take that into account into account you can't choose the altimetry from the
UAV so we worked out this calibration method using our boat using multiple images of the boat, producing
a line of best fit that allowed us to convert pixels to lengths what we did as well is rather
than relying on raw lengths we used body condition index working basically like a bmi so we took the
length of the whale and the visible surface with the idea we'd do it consistently so we could get
an idea of how things have changed and what we saw since what we saw was quite different
quite surprising differences between the cohorts and it wasn't certainly wasn't what I expected but
on second review it seems to make some sense. What we really saw was that our mums and calves
both our mums and our calves we didn't see a great deal of difference if we pooled 2017 18 and 20
19 20 together where we did see a difference was in the non-maternal adults and here we saw around
about a 10 to 15 difference in body condition the numbers were significantly different between
the two time periods that we were looking at 2017 and 18 and 19 and 20 and as I say a difference
coming up to around about 12 percent in general and when we go into the cohort specific
juveniles that we can pull out and things like that we're getting even larger amounts so it seems
that that's where it was. The moms however did not change and it's remarkably consistent
so what we actually think was happening here was that our moms literally didn't go into
reproductive cycles when they were in a position of nutritional stress as they mentioned there is a
direct tie-in here essentially if you have enough adipose
fat tissue release the hormones required to orchestrate ovulation and orchestrate the start
of a reproductive cycle but when the whale gets really thin and it might be it certainly is in
most mammals but those hormones are not produced we hear about this in dancers and gymnasts don't
we when people get when women get really thin and the reproductive cycle drops out and so
the suggestion is that in mammals we see the same thing and this could be what happened
with the whales where those moms really didn't have the body condition to support pregnancy
they didn't even initiate the whole process with the adults what we saw was poorer body conditions
so it might be that the males you know that the males made the return journey in the hope of
in the hope of having a mating opportunity and that's where we saw the reduced volume condition expressed.
So really interesting that we see a different a different response to nutritional stress
in the two different cohorts the good news there is good news the good news is
that numbers have come back up the warm water dissipated the food starts improved and by 20
2019 we were seeing lots of calves on Maui and by 2020 those numbers had consisted over two years
so you can see we saw some really dramatic increases in our mom and calve encounters and
these rates were right up back to about 2014 levels. What's concerning is when we look ahead
when we look ahead we can realize that you know it looks like the ocean's getting warmer consistently
now by 20 20 50 they're estimating will be two degrees by one to two degrees higher overall
and blob-like conditions these you know these warm water heat wave conditions are
likely to reoccur at a higher baseline and so we have to realize that you know while our whales
dodged the bullet at this time you know there is more to come down the pipe.
How we think our humpback whales in Hawai'i may adapt? Well we know the whale populations
under nutritional stress you know if that if that warming water really impacts the food availability
certainly in other populations such as the Southern resident Orca off of
Seattle that area and other southern residents it's thought to be nutritional stress behind their
complete drop in reproductive output and similarly in southern right whales
the reproductive output of females there has been tied into a cool availability which is reliance
on ice conditions and that connection has been made again so it does seem that during periods of
nutritional stress large whales will reduce their overall reproductive activity and we'll get far
fewer females going into the process of calving. Another possibility though that we certainly
should consider especially when we think about on 2019 numbers it was super interesting you know
at one level because 2019 on Maui our numbers for calves came back up to around about what they've
done in 2014 so we did have a quick recovery. However Glacier Bay remained really low just to
two calves seen maybe possibly up to six across the whole of southeast in the meantime down in the
Salish Sea which is just in the waters between Seattle and Washington state and Vancouver
island and as you can see far more whales were spotted than usual and even more interestingly
over in California on this graph here this was the estimated expected number of whales to be
counted in the population surveys and abundance estimates they were doing and this is what they
got and those estimates exceeded you know by 500 whales or more what they expected to see now
it's possible that that population did get into you know into a real boom period but the other
the other thing to consider is where the mothers are altering their migratory routes and maybe if
that food is available further south then right north in Alaska maybe they're gonna stop and
feed in other areas so we may see some changing of the typical migratory connections that's
certainly something that may happen you know as we get towards these periods of
reduced resources. Another thing we have to consider though is how the calf's doing you know
is a mother producing a calf able to does she have sufficient energy resources to get that calve
back and that could be another variable in this you know maybe that we should
certainly consider as a possibility whether that nutritional stress is expressed in reduced
calf survival rates unfortunately our most recent estimates on this are not recent that's all we can
say Chris Gabriel did a wonderful job back in 2001 of matching whales between Hawaii and Alaska and
she estimated a survival rate of 0.82 so that's about you know losing less than 20 percent
of the calves seems like a really healthy and good survival rate you know for really immature animals.
Zabini did a much larger estimate and she was looking at survival rates between
zero in the first year so her rates came in a little lower but you're still looking at you
know close to a 70 survival rate which you know it's pretty it's pretty good in terms of current
survival rates has to be said though since 2000 the 2001 estimate we don't have one to fall back
on so it's a baseline piece of information that might be really useful as we understand how our
whale populations change as our waters warm and behavior around the neonate is something that's
proving super interesting too and certainly this gives pause to the idea that all the calves.
About how calves are doing in Maui waters or how calves do generally in this first couple
of these this first four weeks of life so with being in the air now doing the
ground tree that we're doing we're able to see some of this so I'm just gonna play this for you
and see what you think is happening here this is pretty interesting there isn't any sound to it so
I'll annoy you and just chat away over it you can see a little calf there and this was definitely
a neonate it was signs of remnants of the placenta was still being extruded from the
mother as we were filming I didn't show that in this piece but we have a record of that so we know
that this was really quite a young calf. Now it's very typical on Maui in Maui waters for us to see
a mom calve escort group a group like this but what happens next really surprised me now I have to
I have to apologize a little bit for the quality of the filming here unfortunately it was me flying
the drone which is never the best thing I have the qualifications but not the I motor skills it turns
out it's best to have a 19 year old who's done lots of video games doing that but just watch what
happens here as the as the escort comes up you can see the mom's actually got the calve riding on
her back there this little calf flaccid dorsal flaccid pectoral fins very obvious neck clearly a very
young you know lots of neonate traits we expect to see and as this escort comes underneath like this
the behavior displayed by both of these animals well I'll let you watch and see what you think
there
and watch as he turns in again here of course the calve is on completely the other side now
and those behaviors there are quite aggressive things that we often see in competitive groups
and things of that nature so it's definitely not the typical mother-calve escort group that we
usually see and so interpreting this it does seem that those escorts might be just a little
bit more feisty around the neonates than we originally took for granted if you watch the
second piece here you can see here he comes he's back again and moving in on the mom-calve again
and again the mom moves the calve to the other side gets the calf out of the way and this time she does
actually seem to make contact with him doesn't she and pushes him out the way of the calf so what's
the implications like we don't know. A really good paper for people interested in this was
just put out by Nicole Ransom and it brought together all the observations we have so far on
that published recently in marine mammal science excellent paper to go look at the references
at the end of this presentation but and she did notice that she reports in that paper a little
bit more aggressive activity around neonates with escorts so one of the things we need to take into
account is whether or not the calves will survive their time in Maui. So looking ahead what
we're hoping to do is we've joined with Ted Cheeseman at Happy Whale and we are taking on the
we're taking on the task of tracking our moms this will be a data mining exercise as well as a
data collection thing though and we have to be really careful about making sure we get these
moms exactly right making sure you've got mom escorts making sure when the mother-calf
separates in Alaska waters there's a lot of complications to it but we're going to take it on
and this will be a big part of the work that the this this cohort of Cal state students the
students from Channel Islands and the faculty from Channel Islands are all going to focus on this
with us as we try and get some answers and see if we can work on some of those survival rates.
We're also going to look at monitoring a little bit more about this neonate behavior in Maui
waters talking to other people what we found is that in other regions there are some differences
in the behavior of neonates and you know this there are a couple of other studies come out
that describe quite different behavioral dynamics for the calves in those early days in different
regions and and really looking into that and comparing very precisely what's happening in other
areas may be very informative for us so right now we're partnering with the researchers in
Okinawa and we're going to do some comparative work there and we're hoping to recruit maybe one
of the Australian groups into this as well so that we can compare between regions and I think
that will be really helpful. At the end of the day you know the the health of whales and Maui waters
is very much influenced by the location you know it's a busy place anybody out on the water will
attest to this and you know as busy it is as it is our mothers-calves often swim right through
the harbor don't they through the roadsters and luckily we have Ed and the entanglement team
ready to go and look out for any of the whales that get entangled but still we have boat strikes
and injuries like this one you know looking ahead this may be something we need to think more about
of course we want the Aoao channel to be a safe haven for mums and calves as those calves get their
start in the early days every single calve that we see counts towards the longevity of this
of this population but in these days of warming waters it counts in a whole different way
I'm sure you're following some of the from the COP 26 of course may be a little biased being a
Brit but I really I felt very included by the comments that David Attenborough
mentioned at the start of the conference when he talked about rewilding the planet and working
with nature to address our changing climate. It turns out that there may be a way to do this
and something called the krill paradox sort of leads us into this when large whales removed from
southern oceans during whaling everybody expected to be more krill, more fish and a huge swell of
productivity now you've taken those you know those big appetites out of the water. What we actually
found is krill numbers plummeted by 80 percent and that was the first indication that our whales are
an essential component in nutrient cycling systems. I'm sure you've heard already that they move
iron and other crucial crucial minerals that are released and sink to bottom of the
of the water column where whales are feeding down low in the water column rising into the surface
and when they defecate they release that iron. A recent paper as well has also
further clarified that the movement of the whale through the water redistributes the iron so that
it can be used by cocoapods as well as krill and it really has the effect of regulating the
productivity in these areas this study here was done by the international monetary fund and they
were really able to establish the big role that our whales might be able to take in increasing
the productivity of the ocean and that would sink carbon dioxide which of course is the thing we're
so worried about with climate change that would have the impact of really sinking carbon
dioxide into the ocean and fixing it in a very long-term way and currently each whale that
we count we can count 33 tons of carbon dioxide actually in the biomass of the whale itself but
more important is perhaps the up regulation that they provide as these whale pumps moving that iron
through the water column increasing phytoplankton productivity and you know the stats are remarkable
calculated by economists one percent increase in phytoplankton would be the equivalent
of our adding two billion trees and sinking 1.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually this is
what David Attenborough was talking about when he said that we can look to the natural world we
can look to nature for some of the problems that we're facing at the moment and as we look out in
the waters of the Sanctuary I'm sure I'm speaking to the converted when you look out and you're on
the boat and it's hard to believe that things are as challenging as they are because here in Hawai'i
we're very very lucky to to work in such a beautiful place one of the great pieces of news
recently of course was that our dolphin resting areas are going to be protected what a huge step
forward and thanks to the work of so many people that that that came to be but we've also got
to think of the whales there in an equally highly trafficked area and the work we do
hopefully will ensure that they are protected as they live amongst us in this favored area so I'd
just like to leave with one key thought really and that is you know what we see when we see these
when we see calves in Maui waters the one thing I would like to point out is that every
calve can make a difference a young calve like this if it makes it successfully to Alaska will likely
will likely live to be maybe 60 years if it's a female it will reproduce between the ages of maybe
10 and 50 so that's 40 years of reproduction two with a with a biannual calf that's 20 new whales
that can also be adding to the mixing of the waters and the productivity of the ocean
and helping us address the very issues that are threatening these whales so I hope that we
can think towards a larger goal when we think of our whales these days as the IPCC just said
every single turn of carbon dioxide that we sink in that we take out of the atmosphere
can reduce the rate at which our climate warms so every time we see one of our little
calves so happy and healthy in the waters of Maui it should be a chance of celebration
because this might just be the way that we can reinstate our large whale populations
and get them back to really healthy numbers and in so doing they we're going to support the health
of the larger ocean system so okay well that is my presentation with that I'd just like to say thank
you so much to all the people that help with the work that we do obviously this is a group effort
and we all have our role in it but we're always open to new assistants, new volunteers and new
ideas of how we can take on these key questions and contribute to yeah so much of the wonderful
work that's being done here in Hawai'i. I've got a bunch of references here but if you download and
this this presentation later on you might want to look for some of those and with that
just ready to take any questions thank you so much for listening to the presentation today.
Thank you Rachel. That was a really great presentation and I know a lot of folks have
been asking if this is being recorded . Yes it is and once we get it closed captioned
we will archive it on the ONMS webinar series and it has been sent in the chat box the link to
that so check it out in a couple weeks and we'll also email you a heads up when it does get posted
other than that I know we have a couple questions and we are running a bit over time but folks if
you can hang on with us. One question Rachel was: Did you notice more surface behavior from calves
last season in Maui with less boats out there to COVID ? That was really interesting. I wouldn't
say we noticed more surface activity and what we were expecting to see was more calves in shore
and you know because we've always felt that there was an impact of traffic we really didn't see that
and our data doesn't support that either the one change I am I'm not sure I'm seeing
but I think I'm seeing is more younger calves so that's probably the most noticeable difference
we saw last year and in terms of a specific difference in fact by the time we got on the water
and we were out for the entire season but because the boats were running at half capacity
there was a few less boats but there wasn't that noticeable of a drop in boat traffic I wouldn't
say they're just the boats were on that were the boats that were out were not quite as full and you
know I have to say in general I think our watching community is so respectful around the whales
that you know I think we have a habituated population which you know has pros and cons for
sure but the the pronounced changes I'm seeing is possibly more younger whales and a shorter season
as well yeah a few less mums and calves sticking around to the end of
end of march is probably the other thing that we're really noticing.
Thank you Rachel. And one last question before we move forward.
Where did the large amount of 100 gallons of milk per day come from?
I do not know and I would really be interested to find out where that urban legend came from and
it's something that I've been asked a lot and that was why as a group you know I delved into
the numbers I had it I had a rough estimate and then I spent some of my pandemic lockdown days I
thought I'm gonna read I'm gonna make sure I've got that exactly right because it is surprising
and I have no idea but I'd be very interested to hear where it originally came from so yeah it's
definitely is it's definitely a lot lower than we thought. So I even heard it in the most recent
one of the recent documentaries the secret life of whales they they quoted that specific
number so you'll hear it everywhere but it really isn't worn out by the energetics of things.
You're on mute Cindy.
Alight thank you everyone. Alight so thank you Rachel. If folks have any other questions
for Rachel please submit it in the question box and we will get them to her and we can send you
an answer to them other than that I think we'll kind of conclude with some closing slides.
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and other than that thanks again to Rachel for a great presentation we really appreciate you
presenting to all of us as well as all of our viewers and Mahalo to all of you for taking the time to join us and this concludes today's webinar Mahalo everyone thank you thank you. Thank you