Good evening. Welcome to the Vancouver Aquarium's
inaugural Introduction to Marine Life BC Course.
Thanks for joining us tonight.
[no audio]
to the YouTube comment section or
if you are here at the Aquarium, you can raise your hand.
And our speakers can answer some questions as we go.
And then they will also be available for answering questions
during the break and after the class.
We will try to stick to about two hours
so that we can be timely and get everyone going
as soon as they need to kind of move on and do other things.
The class will end on November 18; that will be our last class;
and then we might put together a ceremony at a later date
so I'll ask you to save a date
towards the end of our presentation tonight.
The group that is presenting is a
Cetacean Research Lab here at the Vancouver Aquarium,
and the Cetacean Research Lab has been studying killer whales
and other cetaceans here in British Columbia for over 50 years.
They have a breadth of knowledge and wealth of experience,
headed by Dr. Lance Barrett-Lennard
who has been studying killer whales for quite some time now
and has been doing some very innovative new techniques
to study killer whales, newer than the new ones that were new,
probably a dozen years ago or so.
So, it's quite exciting and I think
we're gonna hear about some of that tonight.
So without further ado, we go ahead and get started.
Dr. Lance Barrett-Lennard.
Thank you, Jonathan.
And thank you to everybody for coming out this evening.
It's a very pleasure to have you here
and it's an exciting day for us as that's the first time
we have done anything like this. And thanks to Jonathan for,
I think this is your brain child, Jonathan,
this is the whole idea of doing this course.
So yeah we'll see how it goes and
my name is, Jonathan mentioned this, Lance Barrett-Lennard.
I head up the Cetacean Research Program here,
he was right on that,
and I've been here for about twelve years
but I was associated with the Aquarium for several,
for a number of years before that as a research associate,
as a graduate student actually,
and then after I finished my grad work
worked for the Fisheries and Oceans Departments.
So I go back over 20 years here.
My mentor, my predecessor in my position
heading up our Cetacean Research Program
was Dr. John Ford.
He was my graduate supervisor, or co-supervisor,
and I just wanted to start this evening by
making a plug for John's new book and then
we'll launch into the course.
But here it is. It's called
Marine Mammals of British Columbia.
Very original title.
This book was 25 years in the making,
when I first met John as he was
talking about writing this book,
the father of killer whale biology in British Columbia,
this guy who really got this started, the pioneer,
that got systematic killer whale research going
in the world was Dr. Michael Bigg.
He died in 1990, well ahead of his time,
and John promised that he would write this book,
gave, made that promise to Michael
on his death bed, and
anyway, it's out. It came out about two weeks ago.
It's a wonderful thing. You can give Jonathan,
here is a notice,
but you can give Jonathan your email address.
Our Vancouver Aquarium gift store doesn't
have it yet. It's that new.
They'll have it within probably a few weeks,
but if you give your email address to Jonathan,
he'll help it launch at the gift store and I'll notify you.
I think it's around 38 bucks or something.
It's a voluminous, incredibly meticulously researched,
well-bound, portable. If you are on the Internet,
you can probably get this on Amazon
sometime, before too long.
So without further ado we'll launch into this.
We're going to, we've divided the
Shall I do the,
here, I'll move to the beginning here.
Here we'll go. Splash light.
This is what we are going to cover tonight.
My assistant and the newest member of the Lab
and her research assistant and runner of
our vital Killer Whale Adoption Program, Carla Crossman,
will do, give the general overview of cetacean biology.
Carla finished her master's degree at UBC a year or so ago.
She is well-qualified to do this.
Tessa, Tess Danelesko will be next
talking about the particular set of cetacean species
we have here in BC,
and we are lucky to have a diverse fauna
of cetaceans here.
I'll go on and talk about killer whales,
particularly, specifically some, a lot of basic biology and
some recent research findings.
And then Chad Nordstrom, he's been with our Lab
as a research assistant for several years now.
He'll do an overview of the cetacean research
at the Vancouver Aquarium,
and that'll be quite a diverse presentation, I think.
And then we'll do a quick set of conclusions.
So without further ado.
Carla.
So the evening's talk tonight I guess this portion was called
whales, dolphin, porpoises, but this really falls
under that big umbrella of cetaceans.
So when we talk about cetaceans,
and we will talk about them several times this evening,
we'll talk about that big group that includes
all the whales, all the dolphins, all the porpoises,
these river dolphins, sperm whales, belugas, narwhals,
that whole inclusive group.
And when we go back, we step back, we say, okay,
what do these guys all have in common.
Well, they all fall into that kingdom Animalia,
this is the animal kingdom.
They are vertebrates, they are also mammals.
So this is an important thing to keep in mind that
these are marine mammals, they are not fish,
and they all fall under that order Cetacea.
So if you think back to biology a long, long time ago,
this order Cetacea is a monophyletic group.
So all of these whales, dolphins, and porpoises
are more related to each other
than they are to anything else.
So this is really important.
From this kind of we can break down
and break it down a little bit further.
But these cetaceans, it's really just
the whales, dolphins and porpoises.
These are including all marine mammals.
We are not talking about sea lions.
We are not talking about the pinnipeds and otters.
They are a little bit separated,
and that'll also come in the later week.
So we have to step back millions and millions of years
and go back to when life began in the ocean.
But then terrestrial life in mammals
actually evolved upon land,
and it wasn't until things went back
secondarily into the ocean
that we had the evolution of cetaceans.
So the furthest back,
cetaceans have a common ancestor
that's actually more related to the ungulates.
So this was a hoof-liked creature,
somewhat like a hyena in shape
but eventually moved back into the water
and started to become a little bit more cetacean-like
and evolved those cetacean characteristics
that we know and think of today, those long snouts,
kind of a streamlined body shape, and eventually
evolving the loss of limbs, and the flippers and the fluke.
Now the cetaceans that we have here in BC
and most of all the cetaceans in the world
fall under one of two big broad categories.
They are either mysticetes, so these baleen whales,
meaning that they are feeding, they are filter-feeding.
They are feeding, from the roof of their mouth
hang these plates of baleen,
and there sat one on the table on the outside
you can see at the break.
And what this is, it's made of keratin,
the same stuff your hair,
your fingernails are made out of it,
and hangs from the roof of the mouth,
and they can take a big gulp of water
and filter all the food out
through this baleen.
So those are the baleen whales, so the Mysticeti.
We also have the Odontoceti or the toothed whales.
And so those can range from anything like
small spade-shaped porpoise-like teeth
like as you can see here
to big large teeth like killer whales or sperm whales
or even a narwhal tusk, that's an erupted tooth.
So those will fall into those odontocetes,
the toothed whales.
Another divergence between these two groups
happened over 35 million years ago.
So in evolutionary time scale it's not that, that long
but it is quite a long time ago.
And when we look at the Mysticeti,
we can break it down even more into the right whales,
and the baleen, the other baleen whales,
like grey whales, humpback whales, blue whales.
Those are those mysticetes, those baleen whales.
Now the odontocetes, the toothed whales, they
are a little bit more diverse.
Those are including things like
the sperm whales, the river dolphins,
the different types of beaked whales,
the monodonts which are the belugas
and your narwhals.
We have porpoises and finally dolphins.
And so odontocetes, those toothed whales,
as you can see,
represent a much more diverse
array of species than those baleen whales.
And Tess, shortly after me, will present
a little bit more on those
specific species of those whales that we see in BC.
Now first we should just talk a little bit about
some general cetacean anatomy and
some of the terminology
we are gonna be using throughout the night.
Perfect.
So we have, you can see, it's just a typical
picture of a Pacific white-sided dolphin here.
Dolphins and a lot of the small whales,
small dolphins and porpoises have a rostrum,
that beak on the front of their face.
And so this can be a rostrum, a beak,
a snout, several of these words all for that
beak right on the front.
There is also a blowhole.
All these baleen whales, the baleen whales
and the odontocetes, the toothed whales,
have to breathe air. And we'll talk about that later
but they do so easily with their blowhole.
We've the dorsal fin on the back,
the fluke which is the tail fin,
and the pectoral fins on the sides.
Almost all the same terminology for
those big baleen whales except that throat
because when they baleen, they're filter feeding
that throat has to be big and expand
and so there is throat grooves and throat pleats
on many other species
where that throat would be able to expand big
and take in huge volumes of water.
And as we've talked about earlier,
cetaceans are mammals.
So we have to keep in mind that they have to share
all the same mammalian characteristics.
So they do give birth to live young,
they are warm-blooded,
they breathe air, they lactate.
While they are in utero they do have some hair erupting
that oftentimes fall off.
A couple of species might have a little bit of remnants.
But so it's important to keep in mind that these species
have a lot of differences that
you don't really think of species in the marine world having.
They have a little bit more challenges
than a lot of the other marine species.
Now not only are there natural challenges
that we'll talk about later,
but we are adding to these threats.
There are a lot of anthropogenic challenges,
so whether it's competition for prey through
interactions with fisheries, or there is
different contaminants that are put into the water,
interactions with other vessels, or underwater noise.
There is a lot of anthropogenic threats
that Chad'll touch on a little bit earlier [later]
that cetaceans face in the wild.
But just life in an aquatic world is a challenge in itself.
There is several different things and complications that
these creatures have had to evolve to be able to,
let's try again.
They've had to evolve to be able to maintain
and live in this environment.
So just breathing.
In order to, they are all obligate breathers,
they have to breathe air. So every time
they need to breathe, they need to come to the surface
to make that conscious decision to breathe.
So one can think that, you know,
fish might have an advantage on this but it's really
oxygen in the air is in much higher concentrations.
They are getting a high octane fuel
if you think about it by breathing air and diving down
but they are limited in their down time.
So this is kind of a trade-off
that has evolved with the cetaceans.
But breathing,
they are obligated to come to the surface to breathe.
Getting around.
Getting around in the oceans is a little bit different.
There aren't any physical barriers.
If you can swim, you can swim just about anywhere.
It might get a little cold, it might get a little bit warm,
but you can get there.
So this is a little bit different than on land
where you might have a giant mountain in your way
that you can't necessarily cross.
So if you think of terrestrial species having
fairly small distributions,
a lot of marine species like this killer whale
have global distributions. So this is the distribution map
for killer whales all around the world.
So this is something that's pretty,
the general trend here is that marine species
and cetaceans have a much larger range
than a lot of their terrestrial counterparts.
And one of the things that they have to,
that's a little bit different in the water is that
getting around is
that they don't have to support their body mass on land.
So they are not fighting gravity the same way they are
in the water.
So this has enabled them to get very, very large,
to grow to a much larger size as like the blue whale,
that's the largest creature that has ever lived on our planet.
So just some side effects of being able to grow
so very large in the water.
They also have to think about staying warm.
The ocean is not always a warm place,
especially for some animals like some
Antarctic killer whales
or belugas that live up in the high Arctic.
The oceans can be pretty cold
even if you're diving down the deep depths.
How they kind of get to counteract that;
there is very low surface area to volume ratio.
So they don't have really long appendages.
There is not a very huge surface area on these animals.
They are pretty stocky and pretty robust
which means that there is less area for heat loss.
So this is one way to combat this.
All the cetaceans also have very thick blubber layers.
And this blubber is a really dense layer of fat
that helps insulate them in the cold waters.
They also have the ability to shunt their blood
so that means that they can cut off blood flow
and restrict blood flow to their flukes
or their dorsal fin or those pectoral fins.
If they need to stay warm, so restrict that blood flow
and keep that blood flow in their core.
These are all kind of adaptations that have evolved
to be able to live in this cold environment.
There are also challenges in an aquatic world
because this is a three-dimensional world.
And so if you are trying to eat,
you have to chase your prey everywhere,
and not just in two dimensions.
You have to chase them in three dimensions.
This can be a little bit more challenging.
And then if you're like these humpback whales,
you are lunging.
So there is those throat pleats we talked about
expanding as these whales are engulfing
large amounts of food.
And the consequence though is that
they are also engulfing a little bit of extra salt water.
Now they are mammals,
and they have to drink fresh water.
Unfortunately, there is not really much fresh water
to drink in the oceans. So they're getting
all their freshwater needs from their food sources.
So if you're a big baleen whale and feeding on
small krill or small fish, all of your diet,
all of your water that you're getting to sustain yourself
is coming from your diet.
So it's coming from tiny, tiny krill
or the water in the bodies of tiny, tiny fish.
So it's huge requirements that food requirements,
not just for the nutrition of the food but for also the water
they need to maintain their lives.
Now the other consequence of engulfing
huge amounts of salt water like this
is that it's a little bit harder in your kidneys.
So they have extremely specialised kidneys
that have multiple, many, many multilobed kidneys
that are specialised to be able to deal with this
extra salt water intake.
But as we talked about this three-dimensional world,
not only is it a problem,
not only is it challenging to eat
in a three-dimensional world,
mating can be a little bit harder
to manage in a three-dimensional world.
It's been akin to, someone once said,
trying to refuel a jet mid-flight.
Things can be a little bit challenging to line everything up,
get the timing right, get all three dimensions lined up,
make sure everything is lined up, fits in,
get it in, get it out, and you're done.
It's a little bit challenging.
In all the meantime you have to remember
you can't stay down too long
because you have to breathe air.
So it's just an extra bit challenging,
those challenges to mating,
but it is something they have to deal with.
So all these cetaceans, as you can see,
you can't really tell if they are boys or girls.
They have these nice genital slits
where everything tucks right up inside.
They keep that nice streamlined body shape.
Both males and females have a genital slit.
The females have additional mammary slits on either side
where they'll nurse their young.
But if you would see right underneath,
you might see that thin little line, that slit,
where everything will tuck up inside,
enable them to mate in that three-dimensional world.
So life in aquatic world can be really challenging,
and there's lots of way, and
each species really goes about
facing these challenges in a different way.
And Tess is gonna talk to you a little bit about
how the different species do accomplish these challenges
and face them.
Alright. Good evening and hello to everyone
who is tuning in online as well.
Can everyone hear me alright?
Excellent. Okay. Perfect. Thank you.
So I'm gonna be talking about
cetacean natural history and really
taking a special interest in cetaceans in BC.
So what can we find around us?
Who are these marine mammals, these cetaceans
that are sharing our homes, the same waters that
we might ourselves spend a lot of time in?
But before I get into those local species
I'm gonna be talking about cetaceans of the world.
So, of course, we know there is a
global distribution of cetaceans.
There is at least 83 extant or living species.
And that is changing.
There are some species that are still described
by only one individual.
That might have been a stranding or
perhaps just one sighting.
So that number is flexible.
Here is a poster of what all those species
look like together.
It's pretty incredible when you look at this image,
the diversity not only in size
but different types of bodies
and what these types of adaptations can do
in their marine world.
Like Carla mentioned, Cetacea, there is basically
two different groups that are divided into
we're talking about the mysticetes,
the baleen whales,
and it is the baleen whales who are
most plentiful within mysticetes.
There is also odontocetes,
and those are the toothed whales.
And out of the odontocetes,
Delphinidae is the most diverse family,
and it contains 36 species.
So I mentioned they are incredibly diverse.
We're talking from very small vaquita
to the largest animal that has ever existed on earth,
the blue whale.
And they've got global distributions.
So they are found from very, very cold waters.
We can find them distributed from
temperate to polar latitudes,
and in fact, some species can be found
pretty much everywhere.
For example killer whales can be found in
all of the world's oceans.
So zooming in to our home Province.
BC is special.
We are home to 28 percent
of the world's cetacean species.
In fact, we have 23 species or populations which
in some communities there is a debate
if they should be their own species or not
but 23 species in BC here, in our local waters.
And what's important to note about that is that
twelve of those species are listed as 'at risk'
under the Species at Risk Act.
So when we're thinking about these threats
that Carla mentioned and that Chad will touch on,
we need to remember that these animals
do share our home,
and there are actions that we can take
certainly to protect them.
What is the distribution of these animals?
What does it look like?
And you can take a look at this image here.
This map represents the sightings
that have been collected
by the BC Cetacean Sightings Network
which is the program that I currently coordinate.
And you can see they are basically all over.
Keep in mind that
sometimes with these sightings, they might occur
more frequently around coastal communities
because there is more people there.
But of course there are many oceanic species
that we can find in the Province as well,
and I will talk a little bit about them as we go along.
Zooming in even closer,
we're gonna take a look at the Salish Sea.
There's a lot of people that live around there.
I'm sure many of us live somewhere on this map here.
So this gives you an idea of many of the species that
can be found very, very close to where we are located.
So there is 23 species. Here is a list of them.
I've grouped them into kind of
more commonly sighted species,
less frequently sighted, and of course,
there are some uncommon or incidental species
that we can find here in British Columbia as well.
So starting with the mysticetes.
We can talk about the minke whale.
The minke whale is a really fascinating whale
but there are
really a lot of questions that still remain to be answered
about this species.
We do know that they are highly vocal.
In fact, I've heard someone refer to the vocalisations
that minkes can make, it's almost Star Wars-like.
It's really, really amazing.
And there is a recent discovery, I think,
it occurred either late last year or early this year,
where for years researchers in the Antarctic,
minkes also occur in the Antarctic,
were looking for an animal called a bio-duck,
that's what they were naming it, like quack, quack,
like that kind of duck,
because they've been hearing this
type of localisation for years,
and what they actually discovered
is that it was being produced
by the species of Antarctic minke whales.
So huge variation in the vocalisations
that they can create.
They gulp or skim feed on krill or schooling fish,
but sometimes they'll actually erupt
out of the water with their mouths open.
They don't do a lot of aerial behaviour
but, like you can see in this image, it is possible.
They can be very elusive. They tend to swim quite quickly.
If you look at their body, they are very streamlined.
They only stay at the surface for a short period of time.
And they also move in fairly unpredictable patterns.
So not only does that make them difficult to observe,
it makes them difficult to research, hence why
there are so many questions that still remain with them.
Another sign that you can maybe
keep your eyes out for minke whales is
if you see sea birds.
And any idea why they might occur in conjunction?
Yeah.
Yeah, definitely, so they're gonna share
some of the same prey species.
So that's why you often do see them together.
Now I have included some videos
in my presentation just to give you an idea
what these animals look like in the water.
And in this video you can really see the
streamlined shape
of the minke whale as it moves through the water.
And again just at the surface, dip back down,
and that's typically all you see
if you do spot a minke.
Moving on, a little bit larger,
a baleen whale, grey whale.
Grey whales, I like to say,
they are more than meets the eye.
Some people, when you mention grey whale,
they are oh yeah, great, it's a grey whale.
But they are actually really, really fascinating.
They are more than meets the eye,
you can see in this picture here
because they do happen to be
kind of covered in barnacles
and whale lice. So they really are almost like
floating communities.
But they do some pretty neat things as well.
There are about 25,000 of them in the North Pacific but
those whales can go, undergo incredible migrations.
In fact, they undergo the longest mammalian migration
in the world travelling from Mexico
to the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort seas each year.
So that's almost a 20,000 kilometre round trip.
And they travel down to those warmer waters to mate
and also to give birth in lagoons in Mexico.
And why they travel,
or the reason that they come back north
is to feed.
We don't know a lot about their life span.
We think it's around 80 years.
And I was talking about that migration,
they do have to be very careful of
killer whales. In fact,
Dr. Lance Barrett-Lennard here
knows a lot about this area called False Pass in Alaska
which is narrower where many
migratory grey whales travel through.
And there is a specific group of killer whales
who will go to that area during this migration.
And each year there is about 150 grey whales
that can be taken by killer whales in that area. So certainly
they do need to keep watch out for those predators.
Grey whales have a very interesting feeding mechanism.
And they'll actually filter feed small invertebrates
that can be found in the sediment,
usually quite close to shore. In fact,
one other really neat thing about grey whales is that
they almost come in
just within about ten metres or so of the shore.
And very interestingly, they do show some laterality.
So they'll prefer one side of the other
that they kind of scoop,
when they use their mouth digging into the sand,
and they'll have barnacles rubbed away from that area,
and their baleen will actually be shorter.
They do tend to show preference for the right side
which I find quite interesting as well.
And, of course, a grey whale video here.
You can see that really crusty kind of modelled skin,
and if you take a look down the dorsal surface area,
you can see those knuckle-like protrusions.
That's a characteristic that we can use
to identify grey whales,
of course, along with the lack,
the absence of a dorsal fin.
Even larger than the grey whale,
we have humpback whales.
And humpback whales were quite newsworthy this year
as they continue to recover from historic whaling.
So I'm sure many of you have heard that story by now
but their population is recovering.
We think there is about 2,100 or so in BC. And that
number is increasing at a rate of about four per cent a year.
In the North Pacific in total their estimate is currently
about 18,000 whales.
So like grey whales humpback whales will
undertake a pretty impressive migration
between Hawaii and Mexico or BC and Alaska,
between BC and Alaskan waters.
They display some pretty amazing behaviour
when they are at those breeding grounds.
Males will group together in groups called leks.
These groups can be extremely aggressive,
and the males will battle
over females that they might come across.
Sometimes this can lead to bloodshed
but their vocal behaviours in these areas are
fascinating as well.
We don't know why or even how males vocalise
but they produce these incredible vocalisations
that we can refer to as songs.
And these vocalisations can travel
huge distances across the water.
What they mean still has yet to be discovered
but really, really neat vocalisations that they can create.
Feeding mechanisms are also something that we can,
I mean, I'm sure we can have a whole course
on feeding mechanisms for humpback whales.
We are still learning more about the different ways that
they've learned how to feed
on the krill or the small fish that they do eat.
Their bubble-net which is a group tactic
where several whales will swim in a spiral pattern
so they'll mid-air from their blowhole
travel in a spiral pattern.
And what that creates is this false net
which is very scary if you're a fish.
So what you're gonna do if you're a fish is
group together in a very tight ball but, of course,
then come the humpbacks
right up through the middle of that bubble net,
and they've got their mouths full certainly after that.
What we do know about bubble-netting as well is that
different humpbacks, individual humpbacks will play
certain roles within that group.
So socially very interesting, very complex behaviour
that we're observing there.
If you look at the underside of the fluke
which is what you're seeing in
the bottom image there,
that can act as a fingerprint.
And that's really important
because we can use that for species,
sorry, individual identification for humpback whales.
In BC we can even classify
humpback whales into three groups,
based on the percentage of white
that you see on the underside of this tail.
So from zero to twenty per cent, you're gonna have BCX.
So sometimes that tail might be completely
black on the underside or dark grey.
From about 20 to 60 you're gonna see BC Y classification.
So an individual humpback will be,
let's say BCY1023 or something like that.
And above 60 per cent you're gonna see BCZ.
And that's gonna be the third category
of humpback whales.
Humpback whales are also known
for some pretty impressive behaviour like this.
So often very popular with whale watchers,
they can be extremely acrobatic.
What purpose that behaviour serves
is certainly up for debate.
We think it could be something that occurs
for a number of reasons, but in any case,
it's very, very impressive.
Larger baleen whales that we have in BC,
we can talk about the fin whale and the sei whale
at the same time.
Fin whales are actually the
second largest whale or animal
on earth growing to a length of about 24 metres.
What's really interesting about them is that,
well, we don't really know a lot about them.
We know that they were persecuted,
of course, during,
when whaling was going on
but other than that, the ones that remain,
we are not really sure about their movements,
where they really tend to spend time.
But we have seen them in BC, and certainly
when I was out in the field earlier this summer,
we saw quite a few in offshore environments.
They do eat a lot. They can eat up to
one ton of prey a day in the summer.
And they have a really unique bi-coloured jaw
that we can use as an identification technique
which is very important when we're thinking of
comparing them to the sei whale
which are a little bit smaller.
And although it's not completely obvious
in these two images,
these two species can look very much alike.
Sei whales are not seen as
frequently as fin whales are.
They were heavily persecuted during whaling,
not at first,
but when there were no more blue whales
or fin whales to go after in the 1960s,
sei whales became very popular.
So they are still recovering from that. We are not
really sure why they are not seen as frequently
but certainly there is, I know, lot of biologists
so who would absolutely love to have their first
sei whale sighting and they spend
lots of time out on the water.
The four images here I wanted to talk about briefly,
on the left you are looking at fin whales,
and what's really interesting with the top image
there on the left is that you're not seeing the blowhole
and the dorsal fin out of the water at the same time.
For fin whales, when you see them surface,
you're gonna see the blowhole,
then you're gonna see the back,
then you're gonna see the dorsal fin.
If you look at the top right picture,
you're gonna see a sei whale there,
and what you're looking at is, of course,
that blowhole out of the water and that dorsal fin.
So that's a diagnostic kind of
identification technique you can use.
I did mention the bi-coloured jaw for the fin whales.
So on the bottom left
you're seeing that it's white on the right side.
On the left side, it's actually very, very dark.
So blue whales.  Of course, I'm sure
you've heard of blue whales. You probably know
some pretty amazing facts about the size
of their hearts or, you know,
anything to do with sizes is fascinating
with blue whales,
and they truly are a species of extreme.
They are bigger than any animal
that's ever existed on earth,
bigger than any dinosaurs ever were.
They are also the fastest cetacean, and they are also
the largest, sorry, the fastest largest cetacean.
And they are also the loudest animal on earth.
The vocalisations that they can create are
louder than a jumbo jet,
and much of those localisations occur
below the hearing range
in which humans are able to perceive,
but certainly those localisations can actually travel
for hundreds if not thousands of kilometres
which is very important if you are a nomadic species
who is really few and far between spread out
over a wide offshore environment.
I wanted to play this video here.
It's from one of the observers who participates in
the BC Cetacean Sightings Network,
but you really get a scope of
how large these animals are
through this video.
So first it's kind of like you don't really know
what you are looking at, but in a second
you'll see a spout,
and that spout is actually several stories tall.
As we zoom in you really get an idea
of how large these animals are.
Very, very impressive,
so up to about 33 metres in length.
Another baleen whale we have in our waters
is the North Pacific right whale,
another very newsworthy species,
typically, because sightings don't happen very often.
In fact, in 2013 there were two sightings
which marked the first time the species was seen
in over 60 years.
Now that's because this whale
was the right whale to catch during whaling,
and that's in fact where their name does come from.
They were very slow moving, rich in oil
which means the bang for your buck
that these whalers were getting
was just through the roof. So,
unfortunately, we're seeing this population
very much struggle to overcome
the threat that they did have during whaling.
And it's estimated that there's only about 100
in the North Pacific currently,
although that number is highly debated
and it could be quite variable.
What's really neat about them now, what's different, is
that they have these callosities that you can see,
kind of on the top of the head,
and that's keratinized tissue, so it's quite rough,
but that's also colonised by many, many whale lice.
So they kind of live in these little islands
on the head of the North Pacific right whale.
And the largest callosity that's right near the tip
of the head, that's called a bonnet.
So I'm not sure why it has a special name like that,
but it's certainly neat that these animals
do possess those callosities.
Like the grey whale North Pacific right whales
don't have dorsal fins,
and they do display really interesting behaviour called
skim feeding where they kind of open their mouth
and swim right at the surface of the water
just kind of collecting prey as they go.
And you'll see that in their closest relatives as well
who live up in the Arctic.
Anyone know what that whale might be?
Yeah, bowhead, yeah, bowhead whales, absolutely,
very closely related to right whales.
Well, they do kind of sound slow
and maybe a bit more docile
when I am describing them skim feeding.
They can be acrobatic as well, and they'll
display behaviours like breaching, lobtailing,
pectoral slapping, and again,
I did mention those two sightings in 2013
which were extremely exciting for the species.
So moving on from mysticetes to odontocetes.
We'll start small and then'll get a little bit bigger.
So harbour porpoise are the smallest cetacean
that we have in British Columbia.
And it can actually be overlooked quite often.
They tend to be quite inconspicuous. Some people
describe them as shy, often avoiding boats and people.
But interestingly, they are common year round here.
And we do certainly get quite a few reports of them
at the BC Cetacean Sightings Network.
Typically they are travelling alone,
although in the spring especially they may form
social or feeding groups of about twenty.
One of the differences
between porpoises and dolphins are,
like Carla briefly mentioned, is the tooth shape.
So dolphins are gonna have cone-shaped teeth
while porpoises are gonna have spade-shaped teeth.
So these harbour porpoises are gonna have
spade-shaped teeth.
And interestingly, although they are common, they
are the most commonly entangled
small cetacean in BC.
So there is, that is one of the great threats
facing this species.
In the water they can be typically quite calm.
I've heard someone describe them as almost like
they are spinning on an axis. So you see that
triangular porpoise fin pop out of the water,
dip back down and that's often the extend
of what a harbour porpoise sighting comprises.
Dall's porpoises, well, still a porpoise.
They tend to exhibit quite opposite behaviour
to harbour porpoises.
They travel in slightly larger groups.
They are extremely fast. In fact,
they are the fastest small cetacean on our coast,
travelling at speeds of about 55 kilometres an hour.
And you can see that kind of v-shaped splash
coming of the body of this image.
That's called a rooster tail.
And that's a result of that very fast speed
they can reach right at the surface at the water.
Oftentimes Dall's porpoises will actually
interact with boats.
So sometimes you'll see them bow-riding,
that kind of thing.
And I have to put in a plug for the
Be Whale Wise guidelines
which Chad is gonna cover cause
we need to be talking about best practices
when it comes to marine mammals,
but sometimes Dall's will come and
interact with vessels.
They are quite common as well.
So in the North Pacific, very large area,
we do have quite a number of them present.
In the video here you'll see the Dall's porpoise
moving very slowly, and that's because
I want you to check out that dorsal fin,
and then you're gonna can see a second bump there.
It's called a caudal peduncle.
It's a large chunk of muscle,
and that's it what propels them to very fast speeds,
like this here.
And there you observed that rooster tail splash as well.
Pacific white-sided dolphins,
very, very charismatic species that we have along our coast.
And they are gonna be typically travelling
in very large numbers.
The biggest group that's ever been observed for this species
was around 6,000 animals that occurred offshore,
but the average group is around 60 or so.
They are wide ranging. You'll see them
over to the coast of Japan,
from Alaska down to Mexico,
and certainly we see them in our local waters as well.
Opportunistic feeders, they feed on
countless numbers of fish and cephalopods.
And they are preyed on by killer whales.
In fact, if you remember back to March of this year
there was a story in the news about
Pacific white-sided dolphins near Squamish
being hunted by killer whales.
Very, very acrobatic as well,
just like you are seeing in this picture that is
quite representative of what you'll see
if you do come across the species.
They have a very interesting history
in the Province of British Columbia.
About 2,000 years ago we know that they spent time
right along the coast, so in coastal waters because
their teeth were found in First Nations' mittens.
Now shortly after that time they disappeared.
So for some reason they decided that
offshore was a better habitat,
one that they wanted to spend more time in.
And up until about the mid-80s or mid to late 80s,
sightings were very, very few and far between
for the species.
Starting in the mid-90s or so
those sightings started to increase, and in fact,
today we can see that those green dots you're looking at
on the map, they are very coastal. So we now can say
the species has once again become coastal.
We're not exactly sure why they came back.
It might have to do with ocean temperature
or prey distribution.
And very interestingly, Howe Sound
is quite a hotspot for them as well.
So that started just a few years ago,
this trend where we are seeing
Pacific white-sided dolphins in great number
in Howe Sound.
A video of Pacific white-sided dolphins for you.
Like I described, you can see they wear a very kind of
curved dorsal fin which is different from porpoises
which tend to have much more triangular dorsal fins.
Of course, absolutely beautiful, a large group
that you are seeing travelling here,
but they can display very,
very acrobatic behaviours as well.
Risso's dolphins.
They are less commonly spotted species,
probably because they do spend most of their time
in oceanic environments.
And I'll talk about the main conjunction with
Northern right whale dolphins as well which also
tend to spend a lot of time in oceanic environments.
Both tend to travel in fairly large groups
although the Northern right whale dolphin
can be observed sometimes in the thousands.
And just a couple weeks ago we received a sighting at
the Sightings Network of just
absolutely thousands of them in an offshore environment.
And they are really kind of bizarre looking.
They don't have a dorsal fin. They're almost,
they almost look like leaches, kind of
jumping out of the water. It's kind of neat.
These pictures that you can see kind of best describe
what they would look like in that environment.
You can see in the bottom right there
what I'm talking about. They are just very, very narrow,
very streamlined animals
which does help them travel at quite great speeds.
Risso's dolphins on the other hand, on the left,
covered in scratches of really an unknown origin.
We think that it's from other members
of the groups that they travel with.
When they are born
they are basically completely grey,
but elder the animals can be almost entirely white,
just from these scratches.
Both species,
still many, many questions remain about them
but we do know that they occur off of our coast.
False killer whale, another animal that's made the news,
of course, recently with one individual
at the Marine Mammal Rescue Centre right now, Chester.
But sightings don't come in very often of these animals.
We do know that they are extremely social.
They are highly vocal.
And they display some really interesting behaviours
like mass strandings which
really we don't know why that happens
but it tends to be something that occurs
for false killer whales.
Lots of records of human interaction
with these animals as well.
There was a case of one false killer whale,
I believe, his name or its name was Willy
that travelled around with several vessels in BC
for quite some time before ending that behaviour.
But you can see they have really kind of
interestingly shaped pectoral flippers,
those ones on the side.
Those can be used for species identification.
Beaked whales.
Probably the most mysterious type of cetacean
that we can find in the world.
We know there are quite a number of species
but again, when I was talking about some species
only being described by one individual
from a stranding or maybe from one sighting,
that's pretty descriptive of beaked whales.
They can be very, very difficult to spot,
but when people do come across them,
it's very exciting.
What's unique about them is,
basically all their teeth are vestigial but they have
usually two teeth on their lower jaw,
and most adult males and some females
in some species,
that erupt upwards almost like tusks.
They are social; they do travel in groups,
heavily scarred like the Risso's dolphins
but again oceanic, so
sightings are very few and far between
of these species.
And just on the right-hand side you can see
the four species that can be found
in British Columbia,
and these are not to scale but those are Baird's,
Cuvier's, Hubbs' and Stejneger's beaked whales.
Sperm whales. Really, really amazing animals.
They are not at risk in British Columbia.
So we do know they are out there in numbers but
they are also not seen very frequently
because they are oceanic.
Another species of extremes like blue whales.
They tend to dive for a very long time.
They eat really big prey.
They do prey on giant squid
with some really interesting teeth on their lower jaw.
Each one of those teeth can weigh
up to about one kilogram or so,
so we're talking about really, really big teeth.
They have a couple of interesting
things in their bodies,
I guess, I can describe them as that.
They have spermaceti which is oil-like wax
that's found in their head and that's
where they get their name from.
And they also have ambergris which is
basically a digestive by-product.
It's found in their intestines. They can excrete it.
It sometimes floats and washes up on beaches
but it's actually prized by perfumers,
sometimes using very fancy perfume
which is kind of gross to think about.
Depredation is also an issue. And what depredation is
is when catch is taken by a cetacean from a line,
and certainly that can be dangerous
for both of boaters and animals involved,
and that is certainly a major issue.
I'm not sure if Chad's included it but
depredation is certainly something that we are
watching on the radar.
I will conclude
by talking just very briefly about killer whales.
Certainly I'll leave most of that up to
Dr. Lance Barrett-Lennard here but I'm sure
many, many of you are familiar with killer whales.
They are certainly the most iconic species that we can
of cetacean we can find off of our coast.
And in British Columbia we are actually very lucky
because we have three distinct types of killer whales
off of our shores. And we refer to those as ecotypes.
So we have residents, Bigg's, also known as transients,
and offshores.
Now there is two populations of residents,
southern and northern. Those populations are distinct.
They do not mix, and they are quite different,
particularly in number.
Northern residents tend to be doing quite well.
They are at about 260 right now.
Their numbers seem to be increasing.
Very different story for the southern resident killer whales
who are at about 80 or so,
and it is concerning for them.
Bigg's or transient whales, we think,
are numbered about 300
but their behaviour tends to be quite variable,
and they have a massive range. So
it's difficult to say.
And for the offshore killer whales,
again, found in an oceanic environment.
What does that mean? Very mysterious.
So there is about 211 catalogued so far.
By no means does this comprise the entire population.
We definitely are still describing individuals
from that population for the first time.
And just for fun, I'll play a killer whale video.
Very, very iconic species along our coast.
Here you can see them,
almost displaying a resting line in that first shot
but they tend to exhibit a whole host of behaviours,
rolling around in the water, sometimes spyhopping
which is where the head comes out of the water there,
maybe to check out what's above
the surface of the water in their environment
but always a thrill to see killer whales
in British Columbian waters.
Residents. Fish eaters.
Particularly out of the five species of Pacific salmon
we have in our waters, they do specialise on Chinook.
They move in patterns,
therefore tend to be quite predictable,
at least in the summer
because they are following where the fish go.
They do travel in matrilines. So male and female
offspring will stay with their mother
for their entire lives.
And for this reason large groups can be observed.
They are highly vocal as well.
And does anyone have an idea why that might be?
Yea.
[inaudible]
That's right, and I'm just gonna cut you off there
cause you're giving away some of my secrets here
that I was just about to get into.
But talking about resident killer whales,
they do tend to be highly vocal
which is contrasting to the Bigg's whales like you said.
Because the salmon can't hear very well under the water,
so certainly our resident salmon eaters
can make as much noise as they would like.
And that is contrasting to Bigg's whales
who tend to be mostly silent
because they are gonna be eating marine mammals,
other cetaceans, pinnipeds
who have very good underwater hearing.
They're gonna have a large range,
these Bigg's killer whales, from Alaska,
all the way down to California.
They travel in loose groups, not quite as
tight as those matrilines are for the residents.
We also think their population is increasing in BC
by about two to three per cent a year.
And the Pacific Wild Watching Association did release
a media release a couple weeks ago that said
that they've had an incredible number of transient
or Bigg's killer whale sightings this year.
That last group, offshore killer whales,
again largely mysterious.
We do know two main things about them.
They travel in very large groups,
and we also know that they eat
some pretty interesting prey.
They're gonna be focusing
on deep sea fish like halibut as well as sharks.
And for that reason their teeth are were worn down,
sometimes almost to the pulp from that
sandpaper-like texture of shark skin.
So with that I will conclude talking about those
BC species and their natural history.
I'm not sure if we're gonna take a break now.
Yeah, I think, we're probably gonna have a break,
fifteen minutes or so,
and Dr. Lance Barrett-Lennard will pick up from there.
[break]
Okay. I've been given the word to get started again.
So I'll mean to launch into the about,
thirty minutes or so, on the,
what we've learned, I guess,
over the last forty years of killer whale research,
particularly here in British Columbia,
particularly, but not exclusively.
The next thing I need to learn is how to use this.
Here we go.
So, it's been really interesting.
I've been involved in this game for about 25, gosh,
it's over 25 years now.
My wife and I, Kathy Heise and I started as
lighthouse keepers on the coast. We did
the biology degrees at the
University of Guelph in Ontario,
moved to British Columbia,
just had this romantic notion of
becoming lighthouse keepers,
did that for a few years.
We had killer whales swimming by us all the time,
and we realised we could recognise them,
and sure we were recognising individuals, that is.
And then shortly afterwards we heard about this guy
named Mike Bigg I mentioned before,
and he was a scientist at the
Department of Fisheries and Oceans at the time,
and that's, we went, met Mike, and
that's how we got hooked.
But I think, with any, you know, this is probably true,
of any sort of focused study of a wildlife species
or perhaps this is true for, [unintelligible],
I don't know, but
when you start off with a new system
as we tend to call it now,
or a new species as we used to call them.
You spent a lot of your, you know,
your early days and there,
your first graduate students and so on
if you are at the university,
sort of apologizing for the lack of knowledge
that you have about your species.
And people say why don't you work on something
more tractable like the fruit fly system for example,
and you try to explain to them why, you know,
you are not a whale hugger because that's not okay
in university but you've got a genuine
sort of scientific interest in the new species.
And then at some point along your career path
if you continue with it,
you suddenly wake up and realise
wow we've actually got a fair bit here.
We have to stop apologising.
You do it for a few years beyond the time,
and it's really necessary.
And I think that's the way
and the solution certainly came along
late in the game really but that's the way with
killer whale research here in British Columbia.
1960 - The Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans
installs a machine gun at Seymour Narrows
between Vancouver Island and Quadra Island
to cull killer whales. This is based on complaints from
sports fishermen at Painter's Lodge in Campbell River
who observed and actually they were correct,
the killer whales were competing with them for
spring salmon.
Now the Canadian Department of Fisheries
put this gun in place and there is
abundant correspondence in the files at the
Pacific Biological Station about the right calibre of
machine gun to use, and the size of bullets,
and the stopping power and all this kind of stuff.
And I think, they talked about it so much,
they never got around to doing it.
So luckily the gun was actually never fired. In fact,
I'm not actually sure if it was really put on its
big cement base but the base was poured for it.
Frank Bocato and Boots Calandrino attempted to
lasso and capture a killer whale in Washington
in the early 1960s. That was unsuccessful
but it got some press.
1964 - The Vancouver Aquarium,
our former director Dr. Murray Newman
decided we should have an anatomically
perfectly correct killer whale sculpture,
and the way to do that was to get a specimen.
And this was the days, of course, when biologists
went out and shot first and asked questions later,
that was just the way it was done.
And so a sculptor was commissioned, and
the first part of this was harpooning a killer whale.
Well, the killer whale was called Moby Doll.
It was hit with a harpoon that passed through the skin
and the very, very thin underlying tissue
on the back of its head, and it survived.
So it was towed across Strait of Georgia
and resided in a net pen in Vancouver harbour
for three months before it died.
And, you know, it's a sad story,
particularly looked at, you know,
with our, you know, 2014 eyes
but it really did demonstrate in a way that
these animals are not the voracious, sort of
shark-like critters that they were presumed to be
at that point. And in fact, it's quite funny
to look at some of the photographs of those days
when poor gentle Moby Doll living in this net pen,
and people would stand back with
twenty foot poles with the fish on the end
because they were sure that she, you know,
she turned out to be he, was gonna jump out
and eat their arm.
So with these experiences of Moby Doll
it was realised that, you know, these animals really
weren't anything like what had been expected before.
So in 1965 the Seattle Aquarium acquired a killer whale
from a fisherman that was called,
the whale's name was Namu from the little
cannery village of Namu up on the central coast,
and then larger scale captures for the display industry
if you like began a couple of years later.
In 1971 because of this, because there was
this generalised interest in catching killer whales
and putting them on display,
Canadian Fisheries and Oceans Department decided
that somebody should find out how many there are
and they should develop a harvest plan.
So Dr. Michael Bigg, you know, sort of new,
wet behind the ears, young, research scientist
at the Pacific Biological Station got the job.
Mike conducted the world's first animal census.
These few, next few pages are kind of text heavy.
So the little handout that you need a microscope
to read is just a printout of these,
I think, first four slides in this section.
Anyway, Mike conducted the world's first
animal census of a species in the wild like this
in 1971, repeated it in '72 and '73.
The concept was simple. He got everybody
that he possibly could through
newspaper advertisements and radio ads
and TV and so on to count all the whales
and keep an accurate description of
exactly where they were.
And one day in the summer on July 26,
that's the best day of the year, according to
all the weather information he could dig up,
and he sent that information in,
and he spent months and months looking at it
and to try to see if somebody had a sighting at 10:05
and somebody later on had one at 10:20,
and, you know, was that the same group
or a different group.
He came up with a number,
somewhere in the order of 200 to 350
killer whales on the BC/Washington coast.
Well, that number was widely disputed.
It was thought to be, you know,
fishermen and members of the general public,
they were boaters, thought that that was probably
an order of magnitude too small, you know,
a tenth of the real number.
Of course, later on, it was determined that
that number was remarkably accurate, really.
1976 was the last capture in Washington,
and the DFO, as it's now known,
Department of Fisheries and Oceans decided that
not to authorize any additional captures.
Mike also about that time recognized
that there were two distinct types of killer whales.
These are the Bigg's killer whales and
the resident killer whales that Tess referred to,
these two ecotypically distinct groups.
This is long before the offshores were discovered.
And Mike was thanked by the Department and told to
work on harbour seals for the rest of his career.
Thankfully he didn't. He had a secret sort of little
project going on which took about
98 per cent of his time, and that was to continue this
illicit study of killer whales. And I had the good fortune
to work for him as a technician for a while
in 1998 and early in 1990,
six months before he died actually.
And part of my job was to run cover for him
if the director of the Biological Station came down,
he had to hide all the killer whale pictures,
and actually he had these old, you know,
the old maps in your geography classroom and,
you know, he pulled them down, and the world,
the British Commonwealth in red, you know.
He had a bunch of those, and you know,
he had all these pictures of killer whales
on the blackboards, but he could pull this,
the maps down,
and there were pictures of seals on the maps.
So he was always, he was always worried
the director had his office bugged but
I don't think there was any evidence of that.
So anyway, as I say, sadly Mike died in 1990
but he really got all this started.
In the 80s we saw the existence of the two,
these two distinct groups, residents and transients
or Bigg's killer whales was confirmed.
And the stability of resident killer whale pods
in particular was recognized.
And Tess referred to matrilines,
this was established at that time.
And also the two communities as Mike referred to them
as we now usually call them populations,
why, I don't think communities is a bad word for this,
were discovered, and these are the so-called
southern residents and northern residents
that occupy that bottom third
in the top two thirds of the Province roughly.
1984 Doctor John Ford who was here
at the Vancouver Aquarium at the time, just started,
finished his PhD in '84 and took up a post doc here.
He completed his and published his
ground-breaking study of
the dialects of resident killer whales.
This is really heady stuff, you know.
It turned out every killer whale pod had a distinct
dialect, every resident killer whale pod.
And John could identify them over the phone.
People could call up and,
there were no cell phones then, so I guess,
they've had to have a long extension cord
from their cottage and put it down there in the water,
and he could tell them which pod was swimming by.
And John identified, realized that these dialects fell into,
for the northern resident population, for example,
fell into three distinct groups.
You know, although each pod had a dialect,
some dialects were more similar than others,
there were three language groups if you like,
and he called each of these three groups clans.
And that's turned out to be a good word, I think,
to describe them. I'll explain why later on perhaps.
1984 Mike found a colleague.
Craig Matkin started a parallel study of
Prince William Sound killer whales up in Alaska.
Craig came down here and introduced himself to Mike
and slept on his living-room floor for a couple of months.
And Mike finally sent him back to Alaska,
and he started a very important and
productive research program up there.
1989 - National Marine Fisheries Service and
SeaWorld biologists challenged
Mike on the reliability of this technique of
photo-identification that he had come up with.
They challenged his longevity estimates , his estimates,
and his, the existence of residents and Bigg's killer whales.
It's quite interesting but anyway,
the evidence was robust and the
existence of these were confirmed.
And as I say, he died in 1990,
just after publishing his, this very seminal paper on
resident killer whale social organization.
The last 25 years, so Craig and colleagues went on
to confirm the population structure of killer whales
in Prince William Sound in the wake of the
Exxon Valdez oil spill.
I discovered the distinctly different echolocation
behaviour by residents and transients.
That refers back to the question earlier on.
These are very, very different animals.
They are really behaving much like different species.
The also the later on, the genetic work that John
supervised in 1980 confirmed that,
based on DNA analyses, confirmed that,
the independence of residents and transient
killer whales. They don't intermate.
John Ford later on, 2005, identified a link between
Chinook salmon abundance and resident
killer whale mortality. Basically when Chinook
salmon numbers go down catastrophically
after a really bad Chinook year,
resident killer whale mortality goes up strikingly.
It's a very, very strong correlation.
Around the same time Bob Pitman and his colleagues
identified four, now five, possibly six killer whale,
distinct killer whale populations in the Antarctic.
So we know this species, if it's a superspecies,
or really a species complex of killer whales
has its propensity to diversify.
And in 2012 my friend and colleague John Durban,
Doctor John Durban, developed photogrammetry
methods to assess killer whale body condition
in the field. I won't talk about that.
Actually, 2012 now, it was a bit earlier than that.
So just very briefly, this can be a review
cause it has this pretty much covered.
There is resident killer whales.
There are three well-known populations
along the coast she mentioned,
two in British Columbia, she said that,
the southern residents in yellow here,
the northern residents in red.
There is a group called the Gulf of Alaska residents
above that, and that group is, was the focus of
Craig Matkin's studies in Prince William Sound.
As we've mentioned these guys have a
strong preference for Chinook salmon.
They also eat chum salmon, they also eat
some other halibut, a few other fish species.
Interestingly, they seem to eat virtually no
pink salmon, even in years when pink is abundant
or sockeye.
Pinks, I can sort of understand,
they are fairly low calorie and small but
sockeye, a bit hard to understand why
they don't take them more often. But anyway,
Chinook is the biggest, and that's what killer whales want.
And chum are the second biggest.
Bigg's killer whales, I keep slipping in
calling these transients, that's the former term.
These ones as Tess mentioned feed on
marine mammals exclusively. We know of,
we have a fair bit of knowledge about three populations
along the coast, and one extending from California
all the way up through BC and the south-east Alaska,
showing in red, the Gulf of Alaska transients in light blue,
and then orange you can see this little,
small area where the 81 transients live.
That's just Prince William Sound and Resurrection Bay,
up near Whittier, Homer, Cordova, Seward,
those little towns in Alaska.
This group is very small. In fact, it's down to
just five individuals now.
It's dying out and it's a sad thing, and a lot of them,
a large number, percentage of this group
went missing at the time at the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
They don't intermate with the larger population
that's around them of Bigg's killer whales,
the ones in light blue. So it's,
they've genetically distinct and culturally distinct,
very different vocalizations.
So it's been sad in my life time
to watch these guys go down.
I spent three years up in Prince William Sound
in the late 80s, early 90s.
We mentioned, this pictures was taken by Peter Ross,
yea, as we mentioned they feed on,
Bigg's killer whales feed on marine mammals.
And that takes a lot of skill, you know,
handling a large adult Steller sea lion like this is
definitely a risk of injury. The killer whales are
much bigger but they are soft-skinned, and
they've big teeth but they don't have any body armour.
Their mouths and their jaws aren't strong enough
or big enough to grab an animal this size.
So it takes a lot of, you know, both hootspa and
skill to do it. That skill is passed on by learning.
Offshores we now know feed on, as Tess mentioned,
a variety of fish, but sharks are very big,
very important in their diet, particularly sleeper sharks
which is interesting.
They have a very broad distribution,
cover a lot of the coast.
Here is the sleeper shark in case you've never seen one.
And if you have seen one, you are one of about
three people in Canada, I think so.
Congratulate yourself.
So here is when we overlap the distribution of
these certain known populations of
killer whales on top of each other.
You get a really complicated picture.
This is kinda what it looks like, Bigg's in red,
residents in black, and offshores in blue,
and then more recent work by Craig,
Craig and I are working together and several others now
out and along the tip of the Alaska Peninsula and
the southern Bering Sea, we know that there are at least
two more resident populations and
two more transient populations out there.
And as we go across the top of the Pacific to Russia,
there is at least one population of each.
So again, the species, this superspecies has this real
propensity to divide into these
almost xenophobic populations, if you like.
Field research. We hear a couple of the basic tools,
I mentioned, photo identification,
we do that all the time.
We've got a question over there. Yes, can you say?
[inaudible question]
Green circles, oh, that's a good, yea, you got me there.
That's down in Southern California in Bahia,
and there is a couple of populations there
that we don't really know very much.
In fact, we don't actually know if there should be
one green circle or two green circles down there.
There is a group called the LA killers,
and they show up every few years and raise havoc,
but we don't know much about them.
[inaudible question]
Yea, I haven't heard of offshores going into the
Sea of Cortez myself, but, yes,
they have been seen down to Southern California
to the border with Mexico anyway, I know that.
Field research again. One of the couple of the
basic tools we use in addition to camera
for photo identification is a hydrophone.
That's what this guy with a beard that looks like
Che Guevara is holding in his hand.
It might be me. And there's,
in the bottom picture is a biopsy dart,
that's about the size of a pencil.
That's what we used to collect those skin samples
from the whales. We fire this with an air rifle,
it bounces off the back of the whales,
it collects a piece of skin the size of a
cigarette filter, and that's enough to get
enough DNA for a lifetime of work, really.
So we have over 400, yea, getting close to
500 animals, I guess, biopsy sampled in
British Columbia and Alaska now.
I didn't want to label this slide, but this is just a
map of gene space, if you like,
based on the so-called mitochondrial DNA,
this is the DNA and your cells that is
only inherited from your mother.
And what this is intended to show really is that
there is a cluster; all of the different populations of
Bigg's killer whales are genetically quite similar.
There is a break showing in the little line
connecting them to other whales,
and that's because this would be a
barbell-shaped figure with this cluster
quite a lot further apart than appears in the slide.
And the resident killer whales are all
clustered together, so they have closer
maternal relatives with each other
than they do with the transients,
and offshores and some miscellaneous
killer whale samples from the Atlantic
all cluster with the residents.
Okay, behavioural and ecological differences
between residents and transient killer whales
or Bigg's killer whales are almost certainly
not genetically maintained and transmitted.
There just isn't enough genetic variation
for that to be realistically possible.
We are certain that these differences are learned
and are passed on culturally, if you like, between,
you know, both horizontally,
between members of the common generation,
and vertically, from one generation to the next
within killer whale groups.
So these differences would include their repertoires,
their dietary preferences, foraging behaviour,
social organization, even their
mating preferences are learned which is bizarre,
dispersal patterns and so on, their use of echolocation.
So why would they, these residents and transients,
residents and Bigg's have such, you know,
divergent, if you like, cultures?
Well, we think that's because this cultural
displacement, if you like, this separation of
feeding habits and dietary preferences
reduces competition.
And the residents and Bigg's killer whales co-exist,
they actually swim through the same waters,
they share the same space. They don't socialize,
they avoid each other but, you know,
you can see them sometimes on the same day,
relatively close together, just avoiding each other.
And they can do that because
they are actually not competing for resources,
not competing for access to females either,
they don't intermate.
So there is no a mate competition,
and there is no food competition.
If one of them breaks the rules,
if a transient starts eating Chinook,
then it's trouble, and vice versa, we think.
This is speculation, that is the only
reasonable speculation that anyone in my field
has come up with to explain how, what,
how these differences persist.
What would happen if they lost their culture?
Well, we think, you know, the converse
of really all the reasons that they have culture.
It would compromise your ability to find food,
loss of hunting skills, the reduced ability to
perceive and recognize risk and reduce it.
A lot of that knowledge, if you like,
a lot of information about what's scary and what's
dangerous is passed on between individuals.
They don't have to learn everything by trial
and error unlike most, I have a fifteen year old son,
he learns everything by trial and error but
I try a little cultural stuff but doesn't always work.
And reduced social cohesion, and of course,
I think, the big one is, increased competition
and conflict with neighbouring groups.
Am I getting taller or is this mike slowly
coming down? I think that it's going down.
So wo are the, which individuals in the group
are responsible for passing culture on?
Well, we think that it's the females,
and we think it's the older females,
and part of the reason for thinking that is that
females live much longer than males, and
there is presumably a revolutionary reason for that.
They must be of some value to the group.
They go through menopause, so they are
some value to the group after they've,
some important value to the group, after they,
even when they're no longer reproducing.
And they must benefit the survival of the group
for those genes, those longevity genes
to be passed on, if you like.
So we think that they are the ones that
are responsible primarily for passing on culture,
not exclusively but there is multiple reasons
for thinking this, I could go into later on.
So I'm gonna go into, move into a slightly
different theme for a couple of minutes,
and that is, you know, a discussion of what
factors determine the abundance of killer whales.
Why, in most wild populations ultimately
the abundance is determined by some formula
that has, that takes into account the
availability of food, how much
predation pressure there is, you know,
disease, I would link in with predation here,
and some sort of behaviour. Sometimes animals are
gonna spacing themselves out through territoriality.
From the early 1970s in case of killer whales,
until very recently we had no idea what
determined their numbers.
In fact, from the early 1970s the numbers in BC
were increasing both of Bigg's and
resident killer whales.
And, sorry, and then John Ford,
as I mentioned in the little history summary
sort of made this fairly revolutionary observation,
I think, and that is that, as I mentioned before,
that in poor salmon years, so we have
Chinook abundance on the bottom of this graph,
you can see a period between, you know, the
kind of earlyish 1990s and the earlyish 2000s
when Chinook salmon numbers were way down,
and there was a corresponding spike
in the mortality of both northern and southern
resident killer whales, and this
Chinook abundance was an overall
coast-wide index, so all of the rivers,
major salmon runs were down during that period.
And so it really looked like, you know,
perhaps killer whales, resident killer whales anyway
were up against the food ceiling.
So they've been increasing for a number of years
and then hit the ceiling. Why were they increasing?
We don't know but it could be that there are
very few of them, it's a very small population,
they are very vulnerable, they are easy to shoot,
I can attest to that, having biopsied hundreds of them.
Every fishing boat, you know, when they first
throughout most of the 1900s had a rifle on board,
you know, it's very likely that a lot of
these animals were simply shot because they were
competition for salmon.
There are other things that may have affected
the population size as well, but anyways, I say,
this Chinook abundance affected both populations.
This is just another, it's the last graph I'll show,
I promise, showing this, that this
relationship between Chinook salmon
abundance index has very little effect on birth
but it has a big, it's in the bottom graph,
slight effect on birth, but appears to have a
very big effect on mortality.
So the four workshops convened in,
starting about four years ago between,
involving the Canadian and US governments to
look at this information and decide whether
anything should be done in terms of
changing the ways Chinook salmon fisheries
are managed in order to preserve, make sure
that there was enough food for killer whales.
That was something that the governments of
both countries were responsible for doing really
under their own endangered species legislation.
You know, southern resident killer whales are
endangered, and they had to do something.
So they convened this workshop, I attended,
along with many others, attended all of them.
The conclusions after lots and lots of discussion
and debate were that increases in
Chinook salmon abundance would lead to
higher survival rates, and therefore higher
population growth rates of southern
resident killer whales. But the effect isn't linear.
Consistently positive growth rates can occur by
avoiding extremely low Chinook salmon levels,
so although the relationship isn't linear.
And it seems very clear
that when salmon numbers are really low
there is an impact on killer whales,
but sadly in a way, the workshop panel concluded that
elimination of ocean fisheries for Chinook salmon
would impact salmon abundance far less
than the variations that we have seen in
salmon since the 1970s. In other words,
there is high variation in salmon,
regardless of fisheries, and they couldn't untangle
which runs of Chinook salmon were the
most important for the killer whales.
If they could have done that, they being the, we,
I should say, I guess, being a member of that group,
if we could have figured out which,
is it the Fraser River Chinook salmon that are important,
is it the Nelson, the Skeena,
then there could have been recommendations to
curtail fisheries. But when it's the whole coast,
and this is a lot of hardship for people,
fishing communities to shut the whole fishery down,
there were no recommendations at the end of the day.
But there was, at least there was
no recommendations to fisheries managers,
but there was a recommendation that this
technique called photogrammetry be
further investigated, and what,
sorry, it's just too distracting.
What photogrammetry is means measuring
from photographs, and it was realized by
the panel that mortality is a rough index, of course,
index of an impact of food decline.
So in other words if you have to wait for something
to die because it was hungry, die of starvation
then you're kind of after the fact by the time
you draw your conclusions, and a lot of
animals die randomly from factors,
not randomly necessarily but from disease or
things not to do with food. So there is a lot of
noise in those data, and surely, it would be
better to be able to look at body condition
rather than death to try and figure out
which salmon runs are most important.
So one way to look at body condition in
killer whales is to use this technique called
photogrammetry to take pictures and to try and
infer from those photos, you know,
whether animals are fat or skinny,
and if they are skinny, some of them are skinny,
if that's correlated or if it's just a few individuals.
So this recommendation was made.
There are two ways to do it. One is to do
horizontal photogrammetry where you are
in your boat taking pictures of killer whales
and try to infer, take measurements from those.
Another one to look at them from above.
John Durban, my colleague I mentioned before,
had developed this technique of
horizontal photogrammetry. You can see two dots
on the killer whale, on the fin of this killer whale.
They are exactly ten centimetres apart.
John attached two laser pointers,
I don't know if I got one in here but we do,
like that there, to his camera, and he made them,
and he set them up with their rigs so that
they are exactly parallel. And so
they projected dots when he took a photo,
no matter how far away the killer whale was,
the dots were always ten centimetres apart,
and this provided a way to actually measure,
to put a yard stick on the killer whale, so if you like,
made a, provided a way to measure them.
And so here the little L is the distance between the
two dots, so you've got, you know,
from that you can then go further height of the
dorsal fin, you can then go further
width of the dorsal fin, the dorsal fin to
blowhole length and so on.
So John did a lot of work
showing that he could get accurate lengths,
blowhole to dorsal fin lengths anyway, and
extrapolate those to total lengths,
using this method. It's quite effective.
It was really good for looking into differences
between populations but turns out that
killer whales are really good at camouflaging
when they get into poor condition,
when they are starving, because they've got these
firm streamlined bodies and if they start
getting saggy and lumpy from being skinny,
they lose their streamlining.
So as they lose blubber, as they use up their
fat reserves they switch it up with water.
So their blubber tissue if you cut them open,
if their blubber tissue is full of oil,
they are in good condition.
Sometimes the blubber is full of water and
they are in poor condition.
They get a condition when they get really skinny
which, as Tess said, is likely to be, or Carla,
when they are dehydrated,
then they begin to show it in their
physical appearance but then they are in a
death spiral, there is, you know, there is a
small chance of them recovering.
So when they starve acutely
they begin to get dehydrated.
So we wanted to be able, so
looking at them from the side, like this
bottom line is, is hard to tell.
It's hard to tell when they are really in poor,
when they are in somewhat poor condition.
So John and I discussed, we had worked together
a lot in Alaska, and we discussed a couple of
years ago using hexacopter or some sort of
remotely operated little toy helicopter to get
over the top of whales so we could look at
their width, even though their general form
doesn't change much as they lose lipids,
their girth does.
They get generally a bit thinner.
We thought that if we could get vertical photos,
we could ascertain that.
John had done a bit of this, using a
manned helicopter in Washington and shown
that it was quite a promising technique
but it was way too expensive to use
a real helicopter,
and way too disturbing for the killer whales.
Helicopters are noisy. So this year,
the summer of this year we, he and I and
Dr. Holly Fearnbach, set out to give it a try
in Johnstone Strait.
This is the little unit that we used. It's got a
camera mounted to the bottom.
It was provided for our use by NOAA.
It's an expensive little thing, this particular unit,
but it worked really well.
So that's, we launched it from the top of our
little Vancouver Aquarium research boat,
launched it by hand, retrieved it by hand.
There it is somewhere over here.
So it was quite inconspicuous. We flew it
over the whales at a height of 100 feet.
And at that height we got no behavioural
reactions that we could see whatsoever.
The whales seemed completely unaware of it.
And these were the kind of photos that we got.
So the water was fairly clear in Johnstone Strait
this summer, and so these whales are actually
all underwater right now, just
below the water surface.
And we could measure their, we could
recognize individuals, their saddle patch that
show up quite nicely, so we could see
all the scars and scratches, and we could tell
which ones are fat and which ones are thin.
And they get a good sense of their
length to width ratios, I guess.
We also saw some interesting behaviours,
some head-butting. I like this photo,
except that the bottom is sort of slightly
cut off, my fault.
In this photo we have a skinny whale
up at the top, a worrisomely skinny whale,
a young adult female,
three normal-sized killer whales below her,
and one little baby as well, and then,
mostly cut off at the bottom, you can see
another animal. That's a pear-shaped whale.
This is a pregnant female, you can just see
in this photo I think that her weight,
her maximum width is behind her saddle patch,
at the back of her saddle patch,
and this is a sign of pregnancy.
So this is one of the first photos we took
in our little August field study this year.
We realized right away this is gonna be
a good, a useful method.
This is a male that's starving, A37.
He is a well-known member of the northern
resident community. He's just like a tadpole.
He's got this terrible depression behind the head.
He is actually so thin you would actually
be able to see it from a boat.
This is what he looks like from the air.
He is tapered behind the saddle patch
all the way to his tail, and he is using his
great big pectoral flippers to try to hold
himself up when he came up to breathe.
He's got so little lipid left that he is very dense
and quite feeble, so getting to the surface
and breathing was a struggle for him.
And sadly he died a few days,
went missing, presumed dead
a few days after we took this photo.
Here is the video of what it looked like.
So I guess the bottom line is, I think,
this technique of photogrammetry is gonna be
very useful years from here.
It's gonna be a very useful way for us to
gauge the health of these populations at the time
as a tool as simple enough and cheap enough.
We could do it every year.
And it would give us a very good sense of
how the whales are doing in that year,
whether they are suffering from
reduced food availability,
what the pregnancy rates are.
And advice from a study like this could be used
by fisheries managers to make decisions about
sort of local closures of fisheries in bad years.
So it's dead simple conceptually and
got some geek appeal cause it's a
cool little helicopter.
But, you know, it's a kind of thing; it's so obvious
that I'm not sure we would have been doing it
twenty-five or thirty years ago.
We just have the tool to do it, and it's been
very, very useful for that killer whale research.
So I guess, overall conclusion, you know,
going back, looking back over the last forty years,
it's been a wild ride, it's been, you know,
if we keep on thinking as scientists
working in this field that we are gonna
run out of questions, and boy, we never do.
Every time we have answered a question,
we have five new ones. So it's gonna be,
there's lots of opportunity for future marine biologists
to come along and take over and
see where the study leads us.
In the process killer whales have gone
from the one of the most poorly understood
mammals on the planet to one of the best.
And this happened without anybody
really noticing, there wasn't any particular day
that is referred to as the beginning;
it's just something that happened.
And it seemed terribly impractical to
study these animals but glad we did.
And we are looking forward to
where things go from now. So thank you.
[inaudible question]
I don't know why do people do it?
The question was why do, why,
can I speak to why killer whales were
butting heads. No, it's a good question.
I think, one of the things that was really
obvious looking at them from above was
that they are very, very tactile,
constantly touching each other,
constantly playing, they are rolling around.
We only saw that head-butting once, but I think,
it was just, we saw lots of pushing and shoving,
and, you know, generally
interacting in a very physical way. And I think
that was just one case of it but, you know,
I guess, the bigger question's why are they so
tactile or why are they, you know,
what's in it for them with this sort of,
this group composition.
And everything that they do, really,
they spread out a little bit to forage
but the rest of the time they are always
really, really close together.
And it seems to play a role,
and we can speculate anyway that
it plays a role in the cohesion of the groups
and maintaining these groups.
And group cohesion is pretty important
if everything that you do and everything
that you learn about as a youngster
is learned socially.
These guys have a really low reproductive rate.
They don't reproduce until, start reproducing
until they are, you know, say, are 13, 14, 15 years old.
Females go through menopause.
They can't make many mistakes, you know,
they have one calf at a time.
Life is precious, and life seems to be
maintained best in these very tight social groups.
Yes, go ahead.
[inaudible question]
Yea, there was this story from Alaska of
killer whales attacking moose and at least
one moose being killed and eaten.
I take that with a grain of salt to be honest.
There's lots of stories, you know,
interesting anecdotes out there, some of which
I find frankly unbelievable, others I propagate
because they happened to me.
But what makes it surprising to me
that observation is that these animals
seem to have such a strong idea what food is,
you know, and they don't, you know,
the notion that you have resident killer whales
starving to death because Chinook salmon
are down, you know, down in abundance
when there are other fish, little other
marine mammals out there to eat
really indicates that there's got to be,
you know, a high premium on this diet,
a high evolutionary premium, if you like,
on being very, very selective.
It doesn't seem to me that they experiment
very much with eating other prey. I can,
Bigg's killer whales do harass other creatures
sometimes, they go and check them out.
And sometimes it's really hard, you know,
what they are eating and what they are just
harassing, but anyway.
I think I should probably let Chad speak,
and we'll out be out to answer
if there is any more questions,
we'll all be out to address them at the end.
Thank you.
Thank you, Lance.
Thank you again all for coming and
thank you for hanging in there to the very bitter end.
We're gonna go from one of the best studied
mammals, and, you know, cetacean that
we know the most about
into another realm of questioning,
some of the future research that we are doing
here at the Aquarium and by our colleagues at
Fisheries and Oceans in Canada and
other ENGOs along the coast.
And not only that, we're gonna talk about
anything but killer whales.
We're gonna try to pair them up with some of
their conservation concerns that exist for all cetaceans,
not just killer whales in all BC and not just
BC whales either but some of these worldwide trends.
But, you know, we try to use some examples
that we have here of conservation concerns in BC,
and research that's being done to
counteract or support them.
So that's how all the slides are set up.
So in general I'll try to present the conservation concern
and then follow it up with a research activity
that's kind of being done here locally
to address some of these things.
So the major conservation concern for most of
BC's cetaceans and the worldwide ones is
there are low population numbers.
And that's just the reflection of historical whaling.
So really the number one conservation concern
for almost all cetaceans in BC is
their population status and their numbers.
As again, just recovery from whaling,
and we're gonna use the example,
Tess addressed that earlier on,
that BC sei whales were incredibly impacted.
And in fact, you can hardly ever find one in BC
these days. Sighting reports are incredibly rare
and even harder to verify.
This example here, you've got 4,000 records.
These are 4,000 confirmed sei whales
that were in BC waters at one time
somewhere between 1908 and 1969, 1968.
It's roughly sixty years that they were out there
but no, and you basically can't find them here anymore.
Now this figure is pretty complex,
so I'll just walk you through a little bit.
The red dots are all the confirmed
whaling locations over those sixty years.
And the green dots in places like
Maiden Harbour, Rose Harbour, Coal Harbour
along the coast are whaling stations from the past.
And the size of the circle is reflective of
how many whales were taken from
each one of those particular locations.
And then the bar graph at the bottom
just simply has number of animals caught,
and then time on the very bottom.
And you can see that there is a lot of ants.
A few animals taken in the years 1920s
through the '30s. There is a big gap there,
part of that is World War II.
And then it starts to increase again afterwards,
and you see that big spike sort of in the lead,
'50s, early 60s, and that's when they ran out of
blue whales and fin whales to hunt.
So there is a huge spike,
and then they wiped out the sei whales
in BC as well, and the fishery collapsed,
and that was the end of it.
So in total there's 25,000 whales taken from
BC waters pretty much in just under 60 years.
There you go.
So nowadays the only time there is usually
a whale death it becomes a bit of a vocal
to-do. So in this case,
this is a humpback whale that came ashore
in just south of here, Boundary Bay.
That was 2012.
Lots of people out to check it out.
Eventually we've had these animals also necropsied.
So we learned a lot in the early days
from whaling, and luckily, we don't have to
rely on slaughtering thousands of them anymore
to sort of get our information.
That last example is something close to shore,
so that, you know, lots of people around, very,
sort of close to a populated area.
That's not usually the case when you have a
dead whale. Usually it floats up in some
inaccessible place, middle of nowhere,
you don't have a great big team or
heavy equipment to do it, and it's usually sort of
local lighthouse keepers that are able to go
and collect a lot of information
you can get from it.
We are lucky in BC to have the Animal Health
Department out in Abbotsford which is a
provincial run organisation that has a specialist there
who's dabbled on the side in lot of marine mammal
works and has become internationally recognized for it,
and is able to sort of direct people like
this lone individual here.
But nowadays we are interested in so how many
whales are left, and that's the biggest, you know,
our biggest conservation concern is
how many are there when we really need to
get out there and figure out how many whales
of different species there are.
So here we are talking about population surveys
and abundance, and it's best done by
ocean going vessels at least when you're getting
in terms of abundance, just like this one.
This is the John P. Tully, DFO science vessel,
and it's commandeered every couple of weeks
out of every year to do a winter survey and
a summer survey for cetaceans,
particularly those that are listed species at risk.
And so much like an aerial survey that's done,
you have lots of people observing, in this case
binoculars staring through them all the time.
You have a really good idea of how many hours
people are sort of staring out of the water,
hoping to see something out there in the waves.
You combine that with a very detailed track
where that ship has gone and the distance
that it traveled, the number of hours that it spent
cruising around. You can do some math,
and you can get sightings per kilometre
which then you can turn into
population estimates for every species
that you have seen along that track
for that particular area. Now you wouldn't
wanna take it just one time, you wanna do it
multiple times over the years, over many years
to kind of get an idea on population variability
in the numbers and then in potential trends
you might be able to see.
Another way that you can look at this kind of
information survey is less on population abundance
but on population distributions,
of where there are located in the province
is done probably most effectively by our
in-house BC Cetacean Sightings Network.
So that's a collaborate project between
Fisheries and Oceans Canada and the
Vancouver Aquarium, and we curate the
database here on site, between 
 and myself.
It's a citizen science program which takes
advantage of, you know, the fact that not
everyone has a John P. Tully, you know,
cruising around. It really distributes that,
you know, that effort over a variety of people
we've been crowd sourcing long before it was cool.
As because of our network is over 3,000 observers
strong at the moment, and the best part is,
anyone can join, anyone can be a part of the project.
We've got a lot of people that come from BC Ferries,
pleasure craft operators, the fisheries, you know,
boat captains, other, you know, DFO cruises that
not necessarily task the science, that are out on
research and patrol, coastal residents,
lighthouse keepers are some of our best observers,
as well as just coastal residents, people who
live on the water, people who are hiking along
the edge of the ocean, paddlers, anyone can join.
Tess showed this one before. This is the entire
BC Cetacean Sightings days from now through
just last year. We are now currently at about
80,000 sightings, and that includes
one of every of those 23 cetacean species or
populations that we have here in BC.
We also have an honorary cetacean in our group.
We've got three sea turtles because
sea turtles on their own just can't hold
their own sightings network.
So we've taken them in as, you know,
cetacean orphans.
Now the best part is that we turn this data around,
and it's used for multiple research and
conservation projects every year.
So the federal government is responsible for
creating management plans for species at risk.
And we've become a sort of like clearing house
for this kind of data because it's just not
collected anywhere else. It just can't be.
It's just not economically feasible, and we do that
through the people of BC.
One thing that we are trying to do now
that our database has sort of reached sort of that,
you know, 75,000, 80,000 plus number is to
try and get an idea on where at least there are
hotspots in the Province. So we are not
necessarily looking at abundance per se
but we wanna know where most often we'd
find cetaceans, and so the graph here
that's up here first here is, you know, raw data.
So you notice there is huge red clusters
in and around where there's lots of populations.
And that makes perfect sense.
Where there is people, you'll see whales.
But the green areas we don't know of that just
because people don't venture out there
very often. Or is there in fact no whales there.
And so we're doing some fancy math
that I can't take credit for
to kind of come up with some of these
areas and correct for those areas of green,
and take into account, you know,
who is looking, who is reporting for us,
where they live there, how often do
those particular groups go there.
And it's kind of a comeback aggregator
to see where you might have some
hotspots in the Province.
So right now this example it's from
killer whales which are still probably the
most numerically abundant type of sighting
in our database. And here you can see some
hotspots that are correlated with
other some of these cetacean surveys
that are done on the Tully and other vessels.
So the east side of the
Queen Charlotte Islands or Haida Gwaii,
the northern part of Vancouver Island,
Johnstone Strait are classic
northern resident territory.
In and around the San Juan where the
southern residents tend to hang out.
So we think we're doing very well,
and we are eager to try this with other species of BC.
So another major conservation concern is
vessel disturbance. Now this is sort of acute,
you know, one-off events where you have
individual vessels that are in the way
that are approaching whales, you know.
This can be sport boats, sport fishing boats,
individual recreational boat owners,
anyone along that line, and some real problem
that, you know, that could potentially interrupt
a lot of natural behaviours, resting, feeding,
a concern that I have never really considered
before joining this group is the effects of exhaust
that boat exhaust has on these animals.
They don't have the same kind of adaptations
that we have to deal with pollen and a
variety of things. So their mucous membranes
are not well suited to filtering out any kind
of pollutant. And so they take this stuff in
directly which is pretty nasty.
The next one is interference with passive
acoustic monitoring, all of that's disturbance
for the whales or disturbance for the researchers
that are trying to listen to them with their
hydrophones. But it's pretty, you know,
the kind of noise you can have.
I'll bring it up in another slide.
And then the last one is that it increases
the chance of ship strike which is actually
really is a concern all of its own.
So this is an example here of a
humpback in BC, Slash,
and you notice there on the back
those three ridges, those are prop marks
from this whale being struck by a propeller.
And obviously this whale's continued to go on
and do quite well but you have no idea
how many other animals might be out
that are struck and eventually succumb to
these kinds of wounds.
But luckily even though there is not a
ton of research being done and besides
what we can do with the sightings network
data and a variety of other things is that
we have a tool out there at least,
an education tool, that we try to promote
through our programs called the
Be Whale Wise Guidelines. And these were
developed by Fisheries and Oceans Canada,
by NOAA in the US and was guided through
the process by our commercial whale watchers
that we are trying to police themselves.
And really, it's got three sorts of components
to them.
It has a speed component, a location component,
and a positioning component.
It's really three rules, three basic rules.
The first is to stay out of the path of the whales.
So try not to position yourself immediately
in front of the whales or, you know, or
leave your vessel sort of parked, you know,
zoom up right in front and cut the engine,
and let them swim underneath you.
Yea, it's to stay at the side.
Another one is to reduce your speed,
slow down to less than seven knots, you know,
try not to charge in on them.
And the last one is to always stay at least
100 metres away from marine mammals.
And in the US it's, that's right, it's 200 yards.
Thank you.
And the last one is, you know, not encouraging
dolphins or porpoises to bow-ride, as Tess said.
Yea, we've got some species in BC, particularly
Dall's porpoise, that are really fantastic,
that like to come in close to boats, and they'll
do it on their own. You do not necessarily
have to bait them to do it.
And if they choose to bow-ride then, you know,
things we'd like to mention to mariners and
people that are watching online is to
maintain your course and speed, let them
dictate when they wanna be next to you.
So a major conservation concern and
an emerging one for the BC coast and one
that we are trying to get ahead of
from the research side of things is to
deal with ocean noise, and in particular,
I'm gonna use an example here of
commercial shipping. So there's been
increased shipping in BC, particularly
in the port of Metro Vancouver. Last year
it handled 135 million tonnes of cargo.
And that's up nine per cent from last year,
and it was nine per cent from the year before.
So it's a steady trend in BC. It's positioning
itself as a major port in the Pacific room.
That has to do with container traffic, coal.
Also it's a potential for liquid natural gas
on the north coast, potentially pipeline traffic.
And the problem with massive shipping noise
in these kinds of ships is that it becomes pervasive.
It almost sort of increases, you know,
the overall background noise of the ocean
which is already a fairly noisy place
as the potential to block communication
and other important activities.
I'm gonna play, pardon me,
a sound clip that has been loaned to us
by one of the ENGOs on the central coast,
OrcaLab, and it gives you an idea of a
couple of killer whale calls, I guess, I'm a liar,
there is some killer whales in this section,
as they are busy trying to communicate
and then interrupted by boat noise.
I guess we have some technical issues.
This is not gonna come along. Here we go.
And here comes the shipping.
Let's call that a day.
and you can, it's really sad, you can hear in the
middle of that passage and they try to sort of
increase their vocalizations to get over
the noise and then they just give up
as they go quiet. They've just had enough.
So one of the ways we are looking at the
ocean noise factor, sort of the ability to
monitor things is a hydrophone network.
So there is currently, you know, a series of
existing and proposed hydrophones.
A lot of ENGOs have been interested in noise or,
you know, tracking whales in their own backyard
for the last 20 years. And so you have this sort of
de facto set of, you know, instruments
that are already along the coast, and the trick is to
take them from where they are now which is
where sort of pollution monitoring was maybe
50 years ago. We had individual companies or
individual counties and cities looking at
different parameters, using different types of
instruments, looking at different things.
And they wanted to know, you know,
they were only concerned about what was in the
backyard, and they had no ability to
create this common set of standards
and to look at things that way.
And that's exactly what they're hoping and,
of course, that changed, and everyone's
looking at the same thing and trying to do
the same thing now with a hydrophone
network along the coast.
And our research associate Kathy Heise
is leading that charge and try to convince
these different groups to look at the same parameters,
to have their instruments calibrated, so you can
create a monitoring network that sort of looks at
existing conditions right now,
potentially before shipping increases, and create
a baseline on what the conditions are right now.
We are doing something very similar here
at the Vancouver Aquarium.
We are looking at not the noise in the environment,
but, you know, noise is how it relates to hearing,
so that's the second half of the equation, you know.
We can do something like monitoring the noise
in our pools which we do as a matter of fact,
you know, through, for husbandry here for our
animals here in the collection.
But we also have the ability to look at
the other half which is, you know,
what do the animals hear,
what is their perception like?
And so all of the animals here at the Aquarium
have been part of hearing studies
over the last couple of years, in all of these cases
where they're collecting audiograms.
So this is very similar to when you have a
hearing test done or, you know, the
mobile hearing booth pulls up at your office,
and you go and then they give you the headphones,
and we have the ability to sort of answer
yes and no with the thumb pads, pressing as they,
you know, as they change the frequencies and
change the volume.
Eventually you can't hear it any more.
And it's a very similar thing that's being done here
with all of the animals, except we are doing this
sort of a quick and dirty method, looking at it
physiologically. We are not, you know,
you can go through the training process and
train them up to answer yeses and nos, and
when they've heard, you know,
heard various tones, but the quick way
to do it is to do it this way where you
have attached a hydrophone, a microphone
to their jaw, and, of course, these animals
hear through their or they receive sound
through their lower jaw. It's filled with oil,
and that makes it a very good
sound receiving source. They don't have
external ear flaps like, you know, we do or
like some of the pinnipeds do.
So we put these jaw phones on, and the sound
is played directly to them and then is relayed
back to them. So essentially, you know,
we are using some of the animals here in
our collection to answer questions about
what those perceived levels might be.
So here is an example of cetacean
sound reception in general, and on the left
we've got our porpoises Jack and Daisy
who, you know, came to us through the
marine mammal rescue program.
And on the x-axis we have time, and that's in
milliseconds, and the very start of those red lines
is the instantaneous sound. It's almost like a little
click that gets produced for them, and then,
this is the response that's seen in their auditory nerve,
through those little suction cups that are on the
back of the animals, and so that's what we receive.
And that's a very typical, sort of
mammalian response, you know.
You can clearly see that they heard something,
a new chain, you know, and we can do that for.
So those are the waves that indicate the activity
in the centre of the brain.
Then we could do it with the belugas,
and on the bottom, our older animal,
our oldest female, Aurora, it's a very
standard sort of curve, and above is
her daughter Qila who has, you know,
not nearly as significant a response.
And so there is a potential that she doesn't hear
as well as her mum does, and it's anyone's guess
to why that's the case, but it's really
interesting to know that not all animals
out there have pristine hearing to begin with.
So that's part of the, so we have one example
here of, you know, of a very specific tone is
being played and their responses to it,
but you can put a whole series of these together
and eventually get a hearing curve
you are looking at different frequencies,
so I'm like the x-axis on the bottom you are
looking at pitch essentially, so you can
play different, you know,
keys on the piano, sort of going from low to high.
And on the y-axis is volume, and it always
takes a really long time to figure out
how to read these curves because
the lower the line the better is your hearing
instead of a certain pitch or a certain key or
a certain frequency. So in this area here
the dash line is the previous line from the
only other time that it has ever been looked at,
so a couple of older animals in Europe.
And then our Aquarium porpoises are
various lines beneath them.
And the lowest part is the region of best hearing.
So that means that they can hear those sounds at
the lowest possible volume at that
particular frequency. So it's pretty
interesting stuff, and it shows you that, you know,
I think people's idea of what a porpoise
could hear is well off, you know,
when you've got different animals that
you can look at, and so all of those lines
being below the dash line indicate that
our porpoises' hearing, you know,
young animals was much different than
what was previously published on porpoises.
So another major conservation concern
getting back into the field is entanglement.
Now when we are dealing with mysticetes,
so these large whales,
it's far more challenging to research ways
than which to do them. And most of the
research that goes into it deals with
gear modification, changes to fishery practices,
you know, monitoring during fishery openings,
and such kinds of things. But in BC we have
a really great mechanism there.
If you do happen to see an animal
that is in distress, you know, particularly
a large animals that is in distress,
you have the ability to report it to the
BC Marine Mammal Response Network.
And this number will be part of the slide
that's made available online,
so everyone can have access to this number.
This is also the DFO radio room or
the Fisheries and Oceans radio room,
so it's manned 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Dealing with entanglement, potentially by-catch
for some of the smaller cetaceans on BC's coast,
is something that we have tried to take a look at
as a research community, in particular,
some of the Pacific white-sided dolphins here
at the Vancouver Aquarium participated in
some of these works. So this is a picture of
one of our white-sided dolphins,
wearing eye-cups, and so essentially,
visually blind but not acoustically blind in the pools.
And you can see in the background in the light blue
there is a couple of line that are hanging down.
So these are weighted lines, and her task was to go
to swim around the pool and avoid these
types of obstacles. And all of those behaviour's being
recorded through hydrophones to get an idea on
what type of echolocation is used by this
particular species because they have this tool
that they should be able to avoid all kinds of
fishing nets, and yet they still end up as
by-catch on occasion.
So I've got a bit of a video, so that was net avoidance.
Another thing is, you know, potentially doing,
finding fish or other prey in the ocean, and, you know,
why do they end up if they should be able to
find things, you know. If you can avoid things,
you should also be able to find things.
And this is the session where the trainers working
very closely with the animal to put the eye cups on.
And the eye cups are made out of gelatin.
They are homemade; that's kinda great.
They dissolve after a few weeks, and Kathy
who is there on the dock needs to make some more.
So you can see the animal accepts the eye cups.
Here she is.
And rings have been distributed around the pool,
and so, completely blind she is asked, tasked with
finding these objects in the pool.
And again the same time the hydrophone's running
the whole time so they were able to record
the type of echolocation that she is producing.
And the reason why this is pretty unique for BC animals,
not a lot of work has been done on
Pacific white-sided dolphins anywhere.
A lot of the echolocation work that is so similar
in the '70s and in the early '80s was done on
bottlenose dolphins.
So that we are finding lots of different, well,
the mechanism might be the same, there is a lot of,
you know, devil in the detail; it's different
species by species.
So it's becoming pretty spectacular stuff for dolphins.
And the video continues on but a very challenging spot
is in the back corner of the pool, of
the habitat here at the Aquarium; there's a
little extension there, and so she is able to
go and find the ring, so it sort of continues on
through that back. So I'll skip that stretch.
So some of the research has been done, particularly,
dealt mostly with the Pacific white-sided dolphins
but I can easily see this extending to the porpoises
that are here.
We are looking at both, at search and avoidance,
and a really, really cool project that's about to
get started is net discrimination, and so
we've talked about, you know, looking at
some of the behaviours that animals do
physiologically, and this is one that we are actually
gonna have the trainers train up for us.
And it's the ability for them to answer those
yes or no questions like when you are in a booth,
you know, can you see something,
or if you are at the doctor's office doing an
eye chart, you know, half eye down, can you go?
So the idea is that we are gonna change the
various types of nets that are presented to them
while they are acoustically, sorry, visually blind
but acoustically can use their echolocation
and tell us is there a drop-off point, is there
some kind of net that's out there that they can't see.
And that will have some real implications for
fisheries management.
And again, that's all to help understand,
help our understanding in behaviour of the
wild dolphins, and this is again led by
Kathy Heise who is a research associate
here at the Aquarium.
So Lance mentioned a major conservation concern
for killer whales is this link between
Chinook salmon runs and mortality, and so,
that's a really fantastic story and a
great correlation but it's not well-known
for very many other species along the BC coast.
One way to look at sort of food supply,
particularly for large baleen whales, is to conduct some,
some coordinated studies that use some of the
tools of the fisheries trade. So fisheries managers
and fisheries biologists have long known, you know,
long used sonar and various other, you know,
naturals, test fisheries to get an idea on
what type of fish is out there,
what type of species are there.
And we plan a, it's now being used, you know,
a pilot study between the Aquarium and
Hakai Beach Institute to look at the
type of prey that would be available for
humpback whales and some of their
feeding hotspots on the BC coast.
So the first cartoon there shows a
side scan sonar that's imaging fish.
On the right hand side is an equivalent idea of
what you'd actually see on the monitor.
The sea floor is in red; the school of fish
there is in blue. You could get the species,
depending on what they are and depending on
how technically savvy you are with your sonar.
You can also do naturals to figure those
kind of things out.
Not only is it usually done in BC just for fish but
we are also extending it to krill which, of course,
is a major species that's sort of used for,
that's required for some of the large
baleen whales, and why they are here
in the summer in BC in the first place just to
really fuel up on this energy-rich food supply.
A nice addition to the study was that we were
looking at some of the diving of
humpback whales in the vicinity of
some of these schools of prey. So we had
one boat that was tasked with simply doing
sonar runs, and another boat that was out there
trying to put dive tags on some of these
large animals which is a first for the Aquarium and,
you know, a really interesting step on the BC coast.
They were successful. We have a tag successfully
attached to this one particular individual,
able to follow it. This is along the Central Coast,
just north of Fitz Hugh Sound up towards
Denny Island and Shearwater.
The big cluster of pink on the bottom is when the
tag is active and still on the boat on the
end of that pole. And it's a suction cup
down on the end. So you can see it took
a lot of time circling around, doing our best
to get close to that individual.
And then finally when it takes off, and the
parallel line there, the tag is on the whale.
And we are following along.
And there is just a really a simple example of
some of the data that can come off of
those instruments.
If I hadn't mentioned that already, I'll mention it again.
The instruments are put on via suction cups.
So they only last a couple of hours.
So this is a deployment that is just over two hours,
and the black line there in the middle is the
animal as it moves through the water column.
On the y-axis it's depth, and on the bottom
it's just time. So as you go across the very
top you've got,
here we go. So at the very,
so this is the surface of the water,
this is the animal.
Actually this is the tag still on the pole.
So this is its waving up and down in the air
as it goes, and finally, it's on the animal,
and you get a fairly, you know,
sequence of dives through the whole process.
And it collects a whole lot of variety of information,
weather information, light levels.
And we are hoping to pair that with the surveys
that were done by the boats in the vicinity of
the whales to get an idea of how they are
actually interacting with those prey and,
not only what type of prey they are relying on
but how well that they are able to consume it.
Here we go.
So that all looks at the amount of prey
that's available to them in a,
but the other half of that equation is
how much energy do you need to go through.
And an example of some of the stuff that's done
here at the Aquarium has been looking at
the energetic needs of various species,
in this case again back to the
Pacific white-sided dolphins and our colleague
Erin Rechsteiner. So we've got an animal
that's in a floating metabolic dome.
And that's just the frame of it in this picture
but if you can imagine, that almost turned
into a little tent with a clear plastic
and wrapping around it.
The animals were just trained to basically station,
which means hang out, you know,
not be active which is incredibly challenging
to do for a Pacific white-sided dolphin,
just about sit there and rest in a dome.
And then some very fancy equipment was
brought out, and the air was drawn through it,
through a port, and you start to see
how much carbon dioxide they were producing,
and how much oxygen they are consuming.
And again some fancy math later, you end up
with resting metabolic rates for a
whale species which is pretty fantastic.
And again, this is sort of the gold standard, you can,
there is other ways to do it but
open circular respirometry is, you know,
considered the best and the most accurate.
And they came up with a number, you know,
15,000 calories a day required to fuel a
Pacific white-sided dolphin,
pretty high energetic requirements.
And so cetaceans in BC, we had a lot of
conservation issues, and hopefully tried to
provide you some examples of research
activities that are meant to pair with them.
Lots of conservation concerns in BC, and
they are pretty indicative of conservation
concerns for cetaceans as a whole.
There is a lot of active cetacean field programs.
Fisheries and Ocean, the Aquarium, a lot of
ENGOs are putting their time and resources
into this as well.
Most of it focuses on acoustic, but there's been
a little bit of energetic work, and some of
that's been done primarily through the Aquarium.
And I can't leave out the BC Cetacean Sightings
Network because it's a catch-all for both field
and office and modelling work that's done.
So thank you very much.
And Jonathan has, actually Lance has
a few things to say, his closing words maybe.
[inaudible]
Okay.
Sounds good.
Sure. So we'll open up to any questions that
might be left, either for myself, for Lance, Tess.
Carla's answering questions online but
I'm sure she will be happy to take some.
There she is.
Yea, go ahead.
[inaudible question]
Sure. So, the question or the comment is, you know,
that we haven't earlier addressed,
the state of fisheries in BC in relation to
its ability to support various cetacean species,
you know, in their numbers.
And that's true, but that's an incredibly
challenging link to make.
I think the best information that's out there
is the link between Chinook salmon and
killer whale mortality. And even with
that information we are unable to draw
any conclusions against sort of a
noisy background in terms of the
fluctuations that we see in fisheries.
Yea, go ahead.
[inaudible question]
Sure. I gonna let Lance to answer
that question because it actually deals with
transboundary issues that he is more than
comfortable dealing with.
Yea, I think, you are probably referring to those,
oh sorry, the question was whether there were,
whether the
taking down of dams on the Columbia River
has had a positive impact for resident killer whales.
Is that a fair way to summarize it?
Yea, well, one of the things that came out of the
workshops that I mentioned was this
realization that the background fluctuation in
salmon populations is greater than the
annual fisheries take in the present fishery,
sport and commercial fisheries for Chinook.
And so one of the take home message for that is
that habitat enhancement or conservation of the
fishes' spawning habitat is super important for
resident killer whales. So there has been some
movement there to enhance
habitat for Chinook salmon, particularly in
Washington State. We don't see effect of that yet
but again, we are dealing with a very long lived,
slowly reproducing critter in case of killer whales,
so it may be some time, but I think anything that
increases the food supply of those,
particularly the critically endangered
southern resident killer whales is gotta be good.
Can't be bad.
Any other questions? I'll take one. Go ahead.
[inaudible question]
The question was about the overhead filming
that we did of killer whales and whether
there was a difference between
the Bigg's killer whales and the resident killer whales.
The focus of that study was on
resident killer whales but we did,
and so we had many hours actually of
total flying time over residents. We did fly over
Bigg's killer whales once. So we didn't get enough
aerial footage to say much about behaviour
but we could see that they were robust
but not massively robust. We thought, I thought,
they might be even, you know, sort of, have a
greater width length ratio than the residents.
That wasn't the case in the five animals
that we saw on that particular occasion.
One thing that was really interesting that
I hadn't, wasn't expecting was that
the widths of their heads is quite massive.
They look a bit like sculpin from the air.
We know they have heavy, you know,
heavy mandibles and robust skulls.
We don't know if that's environmental,
if that's the result of sort of exercise
as they eat and as they forage or
whether it's genetic but
we may learn about that from these photos.
We could see that they have got big heads,
and those big heads, even,
there was one young animal in the group,
and even that one had a wide head.
So that made us think that maybe it's genetic.
But that's the only thing that really jumped out
at us, that one sequence of the single group.
I have an online question that
I'm gonna go ahead and read out.
So are there any comparative studies
that have done between the
Saint Lawrence belugas and the belugas
here at the Vancouver Aquarium?
It's a good question. There's certainly has been
one classic study that's used information,
I'm not sure if it's comparative exactly, to,
from work done at the Vancouver Aquarium to
sort of test questions in the wild in the
Saint Lawrence, and that was the work that
our resource associate Valeria Vergara did
in the course of her PhD thesis,
and she looked at vocal learning, in particular
the use of contact, these so-called
contact calls that she discovered.
The killer whales [belugas] in the Aquarium used to,
this sort of seems to be an affiliative behaviour
between females and their offspring,
and the rate of contact calls go up
when the animals are highly excited or stressed
or separated.
And so she and I actually went off to the
Saint Lawrence about four or five years ago and
did some recording there and found that, yes,
the killer whales, I mean the belugas in the wild use
contact calls as well.
And that they were something that we only heard
with mother calf groups, not with all male groups.
So that's one connection, I guess.
Of course, we have a new
Ocean Science Pollution Program here at the,
Ocean Pollution Science Program, I think we call it,
at the Aquarium led by my colleague Dr. Peter Ross.
And Peter will be doing some contaminant,
has done a lot of work on contaminants in
belugas in the Arctic, and will be doing
studies in the Saint Lawrence as well.
And how that links to studies here
at the Aquarium remains to be seen but certainly
there is an opportunity to look at the way that
our own belugas clear contaminants.
We wouldn't feed them contaminants deliberately
and watch them to clear but like all animals
and like humans they are getting some in their feed.
And so by comparing what they intake of
contaminants and their clearing rate
we can learn about what to expect in the wild.
And so we'll look forward to those studies
over the next few years.
Right, great. Thank you very much.
I'd like to say thank you to all of our speakers tonight.
Thank you very much for joining us.
We are gonna wrap up this evening's class.
Our next class is going to be on October 14th.
It'll be the subtidal marine organisms class,
same time.
If you need to share the link for this class,
you can share it probably tomorrow.
It'll be up online.
So you can watch this class again if you'd like.
We will provide a handout that's primarily texts
without photos, and we'll make that available
on the class web page. So if you are interested
and looking at some of the things
we talked about tonight,
we'll provide the text that we shared tonight
but not the photos for copyright reasons.
And then one date that we hadn't mentioned
for the class which I just wanted to put out,
save the date for December 2nd.
So I'm thinking about doing a kind of a
public program thank you event for the
end of the year and graduation ceremony
for those of you that chose to take the exam,
pass the exam and then receive your
certificate of completion for the course.
So I did have a copy of what the certificate will
look like, and of course,
you can put it on your resume
if that's what you would like to do.
So if you have any questions, you can contact me.
This is my contact information up here, my
phone number. I have the longest email address,
or maybe Lance has me beaten there but
a long email address to make it difficult.
Please be in touch if you have any questions.
Thank you very much,
and we'll see you guys in a couple of weeks.
Take care.
