Kathe Tanner writes about the new technology being used to monitor Californa Gray Whales as they migrate along our coast:
As fisheries biologists tally their 22nd springtime count of northbound mother and baby gray whale pairs migrating past Point Piedras Blancas on their way to Alaska, scientists are getting a better look than ever at the cetaceans, thanks to eyes in the sky — in the belly of a $25,000 hexacopter, a kind of drone.
Read the rest at http://www.sanluisobispo.com/2015/05/07/3623531/whales-enter-the-drone-zone-at.html.
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
Saturday, April 25, 2015
Molting
This month's column in The Cambrian:
The seals look like something terrible is happening to them. Their skin is peeling off! Talk about splotchy skin. But for northern elephant seals, it’s the normal, annual molt.
The adult females are on the beach in April and May, accompanied by juvenile seals of both sexes.
Elephant seals, like only one other seal (the Hawaiian monk seal) molt their skin annually in a few short weeks. All other seals molt, but most do so gradually, so it isn’t as noticeable.
A new skin layer forms beneath the old skin. Blood supply to the old skin ceases and the old skin peels off in pieces. Scraps of it skitter across the beach. Friends of the Elephant Seals docents have samples of it to show visitors. Children enjoy handling it. Adults seem to be more dubious, extending a cautious finger for a touch.
The adult males are gone, and this
year’s weaners have left on their first migration. The beach is full of
seals, but the drama of the breeding season has passed. There are
actually more seals on the beach in May than during the breeding season.
The seals stop eating when they are on the beach at the rookery, fasting for that four to six weeks it takes for them to complete their molt.
Females gain weight
When the females were last on the beach, at the end of lactation in February, they were thin. They’d converted their blubber to milk to nourish their pups. They’ve spent the past two months eating and gaining weight.
Now, while they are molting, other invisible, but
significant, changes are happening beneath the skin. Before returning to
the ocean and leaving her weaned pup on the beach in February, each
seal mated to conceive a pup for next season. That fertilized egg
divided a few times, then stopped developing. The tiny embryo continued
to float free in the uterus, dormant.
The mother-to-be spent the next two months or so feeding freely in her ocean home. When she returns to the beach in April to molt, her body makes the changes needed to have a pup next season.
After she’s finished molting and returns to the ocean, that embryo implants in the uterine wall and begins normal development. Delaying development of the embryo gives her time to gain weight before starting the demands of the next pregnancy.
Staying at sea
Gestation is 7.5 months. When they leave the beach after molting, the expectant mothers will remain at sea until they return to give birth next January.
Delayed implantation is part of a complicated life cycle. Spending most of the year solitary in the water requires different strategies for breeding. So far as their lives are understood, males and females don’t encounter each other except on the beach during breeding season. This is how the species has worked it out.
The 2015 breeding season produced about 4,900 live young-of-the-year, a 9 percent increase over 2014. Fewer females and fewer pups were actually born, but more survived, thanks to the mild winter weather.
The seals look like something terrible is happening to them. Their skin is peeling off! Talk about splotchy skin. But for northern elephant seals, it’s the normal, annual molt.
Elephant seals, like only one other seal (the Hawaiian monk seal) molt their skin annually in a few short weeks. All other seals molt, but most do so gradually, so it isn’t as noticeable.
A new skin layer forms beneath the old skin. Blood supply to the old skin ceases and the old skin peels off in pieces. Scraps of it skitter across the beach. Friends of the Elephant Seals docents have samples of it to show visitors. Children enjoy handling it. Adults seem to be more dubious, extending a cautious finger for a touch.
The seals stop eating when they are on the beach at the rookery, fasting for that four to six weeks it takes for them to complete their molt.
Females gain weight
When the females were last on the beach, at the end of lactation in February, they were thin. They’d converted their blubber to milk to nourish their pups. They’ve spent the past two months eating and gaining weight.
The mother-to-be spent the next two months or so feeding freely in her ocean home. When she returns to the beach in April to molt, her body makes the changes needed to have a pup next season.
After she’s finished molting and returns to the ocean, that embryo implants in the uterine wall and begins normal development. Delaying development of the embryo gives her time to gain weight before starting the demands of the next pregnancy.
Staying at sea
Gestation is 7.5 months. When they leave the beach after molting, the expectant mothers will remain at sea until they return to give birth next January.
Delayed implantation is part of a complicated life cycle. Spending most of the year solitary in the water requires different strategies for breeding. So far as their lives are understood, males and females don’t encounter each other except on the beach during breeding season. This is how the species has worked it out.
The 2015 breeding season produced about 4,900 live young-of-the-year, a 9 percent increase over 2014. Fewer females and fewer pups were actually born, but more survived, thanks to the mild winter weather.
Thursday, April 23, 2015
Weddell seals in the Ross Sea
Wildlife photographer John Weller concluded the story he
shared with Cambrian readers last week at his Sunday afternoon
presentation, sponsored by Greenspace — The Cambria Land Trust. In last
week’s Cambrian, he told about being in an underwater ice cave in
Antarctica’s Ross Sea. About 60 people turned out to hear him tell the
story.
After he descended through a hole in the ice, he entered an
ice cave. A second, smaller cave, its entrance only waist-high,
beckoned. He climbed through the low opening.
A beacon of light penetrated a crack in the ice shelf above, creating a gleaming beam, illuminating bottom-dwelling sea creatures, in motion as they climbed on a pile of rocks. Weller unloaded his tripod and camera, no simple task under water, to set up for a particularly beautiful photograph, when he was struck from behind and thrown to the ocean floor.
With his head whirling, and vision blurred, Weller tumbled to the sea floor. A cloud of silt mushroomed up around him. Losing air from his dry suit, he gazed up toward the sea ice, panic setting in.
Above him, he saw a Weddell seal floating, looking down at him. Weddell seals aren’t usually aggressive toward humans, but they are big wild animals. They can be 11 feet long and weigh more than 1,300 pounds. Not the animal to be enclosed with in a small ice cave on a bad day.
Weller scrambled to pull himself together and get out of that cave, but picking up the weight of the tripod and camera without adding air to his dry suit made him crawl toward the exit instead of swimming. Recovering from his daze, he added air to his suit so that he could move better, without losing his equipment.
He made his way out of the cave, past the seal, back to the surface and the safety of the ship. Uninjured but shaken by the experience, he wasn’t sure whether this close call would disqualify him from future dives. Eventually, he shared it with Antarctic ecologist Dr. David Ainley, his mentor on the voyage. By that time, he had become convinced that the seal had never touched him — it had blasted him with a sound so loud that he didn’t recognize it as a noise.
Ainley was intrigued. One of the mysteries of Weddell seals is how they capture prey such as the Antarctic toothfish at depths of more than 800 meters. Seals commonly bring the large fish to the surface by the lip, otherwise uninjured.
Do seals stun their prey with loud sounds blasts? Weller’s experience was consistent with being the target of a 190-decibel sound blast. Ainley is now investigating that possibility. And unlike toothfish, Weller surfaced to tell the tale.
 | |
| John Weller's photo of a Weddel Seal in the Ross Sea. |
A beacon of light penetrated a crack in the ice shelf above, creating a gleaming beam, illuminating bottom-dwelling sea creatures, in motion as they climbed on a pile of rocks. Weller unloaded his tripod and camera, no simple task under water, to set up for a particularly beautiful photograph, when he was struck from behind and thrown to the ocean floor.
With his head whirling, and vision blurred, Weller tumbled to the sea floor. A cloud of silt mushroomed up around him. Losing air from his dry suit, he gazed up toward the sea ice, panic setting in.
Above him, he saw a Weddell seal floating, looking down at him. Weddell seals aren’t usually aggressive toward humans, but they are big wild animals. They can be 11 feet long and weigh more than 1,300 pounds. Not the animal to be enclosed with in a small ice cave on a bad day.
Weller scrambled to pull himself together and get out of that cave, but picking up the weight of the tripod and camera without adding air to his dry suit made him crawl toward the exit instead of swimming. Recovering from his daze, he added air to his suit so that he could move better, without losing his equipment.
He made his way out of the cave, past the seal, back to the surface and the safety of the ship. Uninjured but shaken by the experience, he wasn’t sure whether this close call would disqualify him from future dives. Eventually, he shared it with Antarctic ecologist Dr. David Ainley, his mentor on the voyage. By that time, he had become convinced that the seal had never touched him — it had blasted him with a sound so loud that he didn’t recognize it as a noise.
Ainley was intrigued. One of the mysteries of Weddell seals is how they capture prey such as the Antarctic toothfish at depths of more than 800 meters. Seals commonly bring the large fish to the surface by the lip, otherwise uninjured.
Do seals stun their prey with loud sounds blasts? Weller’s experience was consistent with being the target of a 190-decibel sound blast. Ainley is now investigating that possibility. And unlike toothfish, Weller surfaced to tell the tale.
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Ross Sea photos
Internationally acclaimed photographer John Weller was drawn
to the plight of Antarctica’s Ross Sea after learning this place – the last
large intact marine ecosystem left on earth – was under attack by an
unsustainable fishery. His decade-long journey to tell the Ross Sea story
brought him there four times, including over 50 dives under the ice. He’ll
share photographs and stories from his book The
Last Ocean on Sunday afternoon, 3-4:30 pm, at the Vets Hall. Please join us
to celebrate the incredible natural history and get involved in the movement to
protect the Ross Sea.
Pollution, climate change and overfishing have intrinsically
changed every other part of the world’s ocean. Researchers estimate that humans
have caught as much as 90 percent of the top ocean predators since 1950.
“The ocean seems infinite and immutable,” Weller said. “But
the truth is horrifying. We’ve pushed ocean systems to the brink of collapse
worldwide. The fact that we have damaged the ocean so deeply should be of grave
concern to all people. The Ross Sea story is not just about a fish, or the incredible
organisms that live at the edge of the world. This is our story – the story of
our struggle to become sustainable.”
But Weller believes that conservation in the Ross Sea could
be the start of a tide change in international marine management. Right now a
massive marine protected area in the Ross Sea is under discussion at the
highest levels of government around the world. It would be the biggest marine
protected area in the world.
“Ross Sea protection would require the agreement of 25
nations. Imagine all these voices speaking as one in defense of the ocean. It
has the potential to both protect one of the world’s last great places, and set
the stage for sweeping changes in how we manage oceans all over the globe.
There is a lot riding on the fate of the Ross Sea.”
Despite feeling continually humbled by the extremes of the
Ross Sea, Weller says the most humbling moment occurred on a dive under the
ice:
“Under the ice in McMurdo Sound, there’s a series of
underwater ice caves formed by crushed sea ice. The entrance to the cave
complex is an archway 10 feet tall. Beyond that is a cathedral of light.
‘As I entered this underwater cave, time stood still. It was
as if I were entering an ancient place. And it is. Those caves form every year,
and have for eons. I swam through the first chamber of that cave and was about
to turn around, when I saw another cave, with an archway about waist high. I peeked
through that archway and saw a photograph I knew I needed to take.
‘I swallowed some fear and pushed myself through the archway
into the second chamber of the cave. There, I saw a photograph I will never
forget. Benthic creatures were arranged on a pile of rocks on the sea floor. A crack
in the ice ceiling looked like a plume of blue smoke. I was carrying a tripod
and a camera, so I put it together, working with my camera to get this
photograph.
‘All of a sudden, there was a smack. It felt like something
had hit me in the back of my head with a hammer. My vision blurred, and my
muscles tensed. I rotated in the water, lost air from my dry suit, and found
myself on the sea floor completely dazed, and with a building sense of panic…”
He lived to tell the tale, which he will conclude at his
talk Sunday afternoon.
Weller’s visit is sponsored by Greenspace. $10 suggested donation
at the door. He will sign books for sale after his talk.
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
Molting
The beach is filling up with seals returning to molt. It's adult females and juveniles of both sexes who are on the beach.
Most of this year's pups have left on their first migration. The seals on the beach now are a full year old and older. It's easy to see the old skin peeling off.
The adult males have left to regain the weight they lost in three months on the beach during the breeding season. This one shows how thin they get.
He'll soon regain that weight and bulk up to his fighting weight, feeding along the coastal shelf along the Canadian and Alaskan coast.
The adult males have left to regain the weight they lost in three months on the beach during the breeding season. This one shows how thin they get.
Friday, March 27, 2015
Weaners
From this month's column in The Cambrian:
The beach at Piedras Blancas is quiet in March and April. Mostly weaners sleeping. Between naps, they go into the water, to practice holding their breath and learn to swim. As the days pass, they spend more time in the water, swimming and diving, until they are ready to launch into their first migration.
Perhaps it’s an evolutionary
disconnect, but they are unable to swim when they are born, despite the
fact that they will ultimately spend most of their lives deep under
water. When they are born, they are in danger of actually drowning if
they are washed out to sea on a high tide. As they mature, they will
spend eight to 10 months a year diving continually to 1,000 feet and
deeper.
By March, they have been weaned from nursing and gaining weight — hence the term “weaners.” As they sleep on the beach and cavort in the surf, their metabolism is changing. They don’t have anything to eat on the beach. They spend the next eight to 10 weeks without food, living off that blubber. Their bodies convert some of it into muscle. They also increase the amount of blood and the oxygen-carrying capacity of their muscles, important adaptations to allow them to dive deep. The black coats they were born with are replaced with lighter tan and silver coats.
At some point, each of the weaners feels the unknown call
of the sea, and enters the water to begin its first migration. They may
not get all the way to Alaska this first year, but they somehow know
where to go. A few wash up on local beaches and are rescued. They will
get supportive feeding until they are able to take on the ocean for
themselves, then be set free.
About half never return, part of the cycle of life. Those that aren’t able to catch enough prey starve, and others become prey themselves. The circle of life.
Those that succeed will find their way back to island and mainland beaches along the West Coast in September. About three-quarters return to the beach where they were born.
A few adult bulls remain on the beach, sleeping and resting from the rigors of the three-month breeding season. Soon they will join all those that have already left, migrating up to Alaska to gorge on fish and squid, and gain weight for the coming year. There are always a few stragglers. Biological systems are usually distributed as a bell-shaped curve, with some early, some late and most in the middle.
Watch for whales
Look beyond those sleepy weaners for whale spouts in the open ocean. Gray whales are migrating from their breeding and calving grounds in Baja California north to their feeding grounds in the Arctic from March through May.
Mothers and their calves swim close to shore during the northward migration to avoid orca attacks.
By staying close to the surf line, they take advantage of the pounding surf to camouflage them.
The shallow water also helps protect them, since orcas attack from below. If orcas are around, gray whales will come right up into the rocks and stay still to avoid detection.
Whale scientist Wayne Perryman monitors the whale count from the Piedras Blancas Light Station.
In 2014, he and his team counted 431 calves, the fourth-highest total in the 21 years that he’s been doing it.
The beach at Piedras Blancas is quiet in March and April. Mostly weaners sleeping. Between naps, they go into the water, to practice holding their breath and learn to swim. As the days pass, they spend more time in the water, swimming and diving, until they are ready to launch into their first migration.
 |
| The weaner in the middle is losing his back natal coat. |
By March, they have been weaned from nursing and gaining weight — hence the term “weaners.” As they sleep on the beach and cavort in the surf, their metabolism is changing. They don’t have anything to eat on the beach. They spend the next eight to 10 weeks without food, living off that blubber. Their bodies convert some of it into muscle. They also increase the amount of blood and the oxygen-carrying capacity of their muscles, important adaptations to allow them to dive deep. The black coats they were born with are replaced with lighter tan and silver coats.
 |
| The young black weaner will soon molt to a lighter coat like his brothers. |
About half never return, part of the cycle of life. Those that aren’t able to catch enough prey starve, and others become prey themselves. The circle of life.
Those that succeed will find their way back to island and mainland beaches along the West Coast in September. About three-quarters return to the beach where they were born.
A few adult bulls remain on the beach, sleeping and resting from the rigors of the three-month breeding season. Soon they will join all those that have already left, migrating up to Alaska to gorge on fish and squid, and gain weight for the coming year. There are always a few stragglers. Biological systems are usually distributed as a bell-shaped curve, with some early, some late and most in the middle.
 |
| This bull is thin at the end of the breeding season. |
Look beyond those sleepy weaners for whale spouts in the open ocean. Gray whales are migrating from their breeding and calving grounds in Baja California north to their feeding grounds in the Arctic from March through May.
Mothers and their calves swim close to shore during the northward migration to avoid orca attacks.
By staying close to the surf line, they take advantage of the pounding surf to camouflage them.
The shallow water also helps protect them, since orcas attack from below. If orcas are around, gray whales will come right up into the rocks and stay still to avoid detection.
Whale scientist Wayne Perryman monitors the whale count from the Piedras Blancas Light Station.
In 2014, he and his team counted 431 calves, the fourth-highest total in the 21 years that he’s been doing it.
Monday, February 23, 2015
Weaners
Life is pretty easy for weaners. Mostly, they sleep on the beach.
these two are still losing their black newborn coats. They shed the black fur when they wean and acquire the brown, tan and silver of juveniles.
The weaners sleeping around this adult bull have mostly acquired their new coloration. This male looks pretty good but many are very thin. They've spent three months on the beach without food. Good thing they were fat to start with.
This one definitely shows the effect of long months without food.
Beautiful beach weather, although we need rain. Lots of whales traveling through, too.
Beautiful beach weather, although we need rain. Lots of whales traveling through, too.
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