Namibian Dolphin Project

Latest news - Dec 2011

2012-01-10T16:57:00.000+02:00

In December, Tess and Simon attended the 19th Biennial Conference of the Society of Marine Mammalogy, held in Tampa, Florida. Over 2000 people attended from all over the world and this meeting is the biggest of its kind globally. [Conference Website]

Simon had a talk accepted and spoke about the research the NDP has been doing on bottlenose dolphins in Namibia entitled: Considering behaviour and individual identity in defining a protected area for an isolated population of common bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) in Walvis Bay, Namibia.

The talk was very well received and it was great to get our research and Namibia's cetaceans on the map.

In other news:
Ruth and Simon have also managed to get a short note out on sightings of leatherback turtles and killer whales in Namibia based on collated sightings from our own work and sightings made by various tour companies. A special thanks must go to Francois Visser of Levo Tours, and Mike Lloyd and Orlanda Sandinha of Catamaran Charters for sharing their sightings with us. Please get in touch if you'd like to get a copy of the paper.

Elwen, SH and Leeney RH. 2011 Interactions between leatherback turtles and killer whales in Namibian waters, including possible predation : short communication. S. Afr. J. of Wildlife Research.

Lastly - we're currently building our new 'proper' website which is partly why updates have been slow on here - this site will soon link to the new website and vice versa.

Meeting of minds

2011-08-24T17:56:00.000+01:00

By Gabriel Al-Najjar - Oceans Intern August 2011

I’m now halfway through the internship living and working with people from all over the world and still feeling like there is so much to do and learn. That’s not to say I haven’t been fulfilling my goals for the month, but a month is a relatively short time to take in everything there is to see. Up to this point, the most memorable experience in the whole trip has happened in one minute; one minute of pure significance and amazement. I was out on the water where we had encountered a group of bottlenose dolphins with about 7 individuals. I had been documenting their behaviour, so I was able to really focus on everything that they were doing: every jump, every breath, every action taken above the water or next to the boat. We had been with them for about half an hour and this is when it all happened. One of the adult dolphins came up to our boat to the side I was on, and had turned on his side in such a way that he could look up at me. At first I wasn’t sure what he was doing, and that’s when Simon said “He is totally looking up at you right now”. In that instant, I knew that I was experiencing something that I had longed to be a part of since I begun aspiring to be a field biologist. The dolphin had continued to swim with us and fix his gaze for about a minute before breaking our locked eyes and dashing off to reunite with his dolphin friends where he belonged. To see these magnificent creatures in the wild as free beings and have an interaction like this one has, in a way, made the whole trip worthwhile. That is one minute of my life that I will never forget.

On tourism..

2011-08-17T21:28:00.000+01:00

by Alyssa Avery - Oceans Research Intern August 2011

Tourism in the winter months at Walvis Bay is at a high making July and August the busiest months for the companies. Most boats are filled with people who either prepay for the trip, or have reservations for the trip. However, every so often one of the interns gets to join the boat on its tour of Walvis Bay to see the marine life. While this may just sound like a fun day off, it is actually work even though they give you “Namibian Coffee” which is actually sherry, but they don’t tell you that. Being on the tour boat is different from being on Nanuuq, or being in the office grading photos, looking at acoustic recordings or evaluating the forms of data collected. Our job while on the boat is to see how many animals either boards the boat (yes it does happen, especially with the seals who like to board the boats for fish) or how many animals interact around the boat. We also make note of how many fish are fed to the local seals, seagulls, and pelicans that are encountered throughout the three-hour boat ride and the seagulls really do sound like the ones from Finding Nemo. We do this to see how tourism is affecting the marine life, and if there should be something done to give the animals a ‘safe zone’ where boats could not go, or give the animals more distance. That way it would be the animals’ choice to interact with the numerous catamarans, ski boats and kayaks that encircle the area on a daily basis.

Interning in Namibia

2011-08-13T12:36:00.000+01:00

by Jaime Werenka

My first week as an intern for the Namibian Dolphin Project went super well. I found it pretty easy to adjust to the house and town and everyone is really sweet. The work is hard but enjoyable- yes even the office work isn’t too bad. In fact an office day is almost like a day off because it is so chill. We have early mornings and early nights here - falling asleep at 9pm is no problem after a few days work. And as all of us interns had been warned but hoped differently, it is cold here in the winter.

The first week came to an exciting close with the necropsy of a False Killer Whale. Simon received a phone call about a whale washed up on the public beach in Swakopmund just as our work day was starting. Awesome!

The False Killer Whale was already dead when we arrived but it was still warm. It looked like as if it was a life size plastic toy. We took several measurements at first and found that it was a 4.02m long juvenile male. Simon and Tess decided that head of the whale should be removed so the skull could be taken to the national museum in Windhoek. Well you can’t exactly leave a decapitated whale on a public beach. So the necropsy, which took approximately five hours to complete, began. It was pretty gruesome but so amazing. I readily put on some gloves, grabbed a knife, and dug in. Literally.

It was also very educational. Simon and Tess showed us the heart, lungs, kidneys, intestines, stomach, and pretty much everything else there is to see. A unknown growth was also found and kept for further observation along with other whale bits like the stomach and testes.

Tomorrow the stomach will be cut open because the weather has been no good lately for boat work. We will be checking the contents to learn about the diet of the whale, as well as examining the stomach for parasites like worms.

[ Note - subsequent to this post being written, we have opened the stomach and it was full of full of squid beaks and large, freshly dead (but unidentifiable) fish, so clearly the animal had been eating recently ]

So far it has been an amazing almost two weeks of raw science.

False killer whale stranding in Swakopmund

2011-08-08T21:22:00.000+01:00

A dead false killer whale (Pseudorca crassidens) was found by Swakopmund residents washed ashore on the morning of the 6th of August in the Mole. The animal appeared to have died very recently. The sighting was reported to the Walvis Bay strandings network and the NDP were on the scene soon after it was reported. We took a set of standard measurements from the animal and several samples for molecular analysis and collected the skull which will go to the National Museum in Windhoek. We also looked for the the possible cause(s) of death by looking for signs of illness including tumours and parasites. The stomach was removed and the contents will be analysed in the coming weeks to assess what the animals had been eating prior to its death.

The false killer whale was male, was just over 4 meters in length and likely to have weighed around 600 kgs. Its teeth were severely worn down which may be to be a sign of old age or that it was feeding on sharks and rays which have very rough skins. False killer whales normally live in deep offshore waters along the continental shelf edge. They are part of the oceanic dolphin family and mainly eat fish and squid. Like ‘real’ killer whales, they occasionally prey on marine mammals as well. There is no information about the number of false killer whales in Namibian waters, but they may be threatened by fishing activity and offshore seismic exploration for oil and gas which leads to a high degree of sound pollution.

Being on one of the main holiday beaches in Namibia, we had quite an audience throughout the necropsy, including lots of small children who were all very fascinated by the inside of a whale!

Worn down teeth.

Measuring it's girth

Removing the head

Tess taking on the PR job

Community Outreach Programme

2011-08-04T22:41:00.000+01:00

by Simon Elwen
This year the NDP and Oceans Research has been developing an Education Programme or “Community Outreach Programme”, aimed at both adults and school learners. Heidi Etter, has been developing this part of our work.

On the 11th of July we held an evening of public talks at Oceans Restaurant in Walvis Bay, along with John Paterson of the Albatross Task force. This evening was initiated and hosted by Marko Jansen van Vuuren of Catamaran Charters and we used the opportunity to sell some of our photos to raise some funding for the Education programme (for printing, laminating and a projector etc). The evening was a great success and we had really positive feedback and interest from the people who attended and managed to raise a few thousand rand for the project! We’ll be giving another evening of talks up in Swakopmund on the 9th of August at the Swakopmund Museum (19h00) so please do come along to that if you can!

Heidi has done a great job of making contact with the local schools and in developing materials, so we’ve already managed to have education days at two local high schools. Last week a baby Heaviside’s dolphin was found stranded along the beach south of Walvis (by Naude Dreyer again) and since the animal was small and easy to move around, we used the opportunity to perform the necropsy as a demonstration. We did this for the Grade 12 biology learners at the International School. I think they got a lot out of it and we’re looking forward to future education events. It was great having Dr Sonja Heinrich (a colleague from the University of St Andrews who works on the Chilean dolphin, 'sister' species to the Heaviside's) with all her experience involved as well - she's been visiting us and the dolphins for the last two weeks.

Some photos below of us with the students at the dissection with the International School.

a slightly concerned looking class at the beginning

but getting into it - here I was showing them the 'hand' bones in the flipper

The lungs were healthy with no signs of worms, and no other clear signs of cause of death

Sonja, Me, Heidi, Rachel, Deanna and Lesley.

Then Heidi at Duneside High

Playing the 'echolocation game' trying to pinpoint sounds

Bethan measuring our whales and dolphins with students

On the naming of dolphins

2011-08-02T08:26:00.000+01:00

by Xela Indurkya

We photograph dolphins' fins and try to identify them. If you’re reading this blog, you probably already know that. Being a work of science, the fins get assigned numbers or letters for identification. That was probably an obvious point.

Yet dolphins are adorable, lovely creatures. Who would ever think that a number could do them justice?

That is why, every so often, a dolphin gets a name.

Presumably this sometimes happens during office work, when someone is grading or matching photos of fins and goes a bit loopy after staring at fins for hours. Personally, I have yet to see this happen. What I have seen instead is a great deal of random naming in the wild, and over dinner.

Last Thursday, we were out on the boat and saw a dolphin with a relatively unmarked fin, but a white mark on his head. At first, it was "the dolphin with the white mark on its head." But we went from encounter to encounter, and it eventually reached the point where it was simply inefficient to say, "Don't photograph that, it's the dolphin with the white mark on its head again."

Instead someone said, "No, it's Kevin again."

Thus he or she was christened Kevin.

Not that field naming always works. A few days before that, we met a dolphin with an unusually large nick at the base of his or her dorsal fin, whom we called Bruce. (A debate ensued as to whether it was Bruce, Brucette, or Brucella, but that's irrelevant; most names seem to end up being masculine anyhow.) It became clear over a dinner conversation, however, that we apparently have three different dolphins with supposedly unusually large nicks at the bases of their dorsal fins; all of whom we've been calling Bruce.

It wouldn't be the first time the same name was used more than once. We have two Daves (but as they are different species, some would argue that this doesn't quite count). Despite the attempts of some to use feminine names—like the attempt to say that Bruce was Brucette, or a dinner table conversation in which several people agreed that someone ought to be named Lucy—masculine names seem to be the ones to stick.

Whale Season in Walvis Bay

2011-07-17T21:01:00.000+01:00

By Deanna Massey

Well it has been about 2 weeks since I landed here in Walvis Bay and I can’t believe how fast it has gone by. I am loving everything so far and I have learned so much in just two weeks’ time (don’t touch the jellyfish).

My favorite part of the past 2 weeks was the humpback whale stranding we had early the first week. It was my first time seeing a whale up close and personal so it was an exciting experience for me. After we took some measurements and some blubber samples it was decided that the whale probably died of natural causes.

The other interns and I have also had quite a few encounters with live whales while out on the boat. I remember the first encounter with a humpback I had and turning to Bethan, another intern, and just smiling and saying “this is so cool!!”. It is surreal when you see these guys for the first time; they are so big yet so graceful in the water it is hard to believe that they weigh so much. I don’t think that I will ever get tired of the whale encounters while here in Walvis Bay. Another fun part about my trip so far is all the interesting birds that can be found in Namibia, especially near the coast. It is my goal by the end of the month the name all the birds of Walvis Bay CORRECTLY! :D

Day off in the Desert

2011-07-17T20:58:00.001+01:00

by Rachel Blackburn

Even on a day off, myself and the other interns this month spent it surrounded by and continuing to learn more about the nature around us.

At about 8 A.M. we were all picked up to start our desert tour in the Moon Valley of Namibia. Right away, our tour guide began to give us more information than we really knew what to do with but we were all intently listening and absorbing every word. We were informed about the culture of the local area, the history, and the economic changes that will be occurring soon with the construction of a uranium mine and desalination plant. Although we were all very interested by this, my favorite part began once we entered the moon valley and began learning about the plants and animals which are adapted to live in the desert. We learned about beetles who will do headstands every night to collect the condensation from the air with their body and allow it to drip down to their mouths, plants with roots that extend up to 60 meters underground to find a water source, spiders who build their webs under a layer of sand where they can hang out under it protected and only come out when food is at the edge of the web, and much bigger animals like ostrich who will eat very bitter fruits and leaves because of the high water content within the plant. We also learned about how local cultures found uses for the plants adapted to live in the area and much, much more. It was truly a different world and we were lucky enough to see even just a small amount of it and thoroughly enjoy our first day off here in the wonderful Namib Desert.

The Fascinating World of Acoustics

2011-07-10T19:09:00.000+01:00

By Cayla Ranice

I was excited to discover that each intern would be given their own project to work on during office days or during spare time and days on land. And I was even more excited to know that if we were interested, we could learn more about dolphin acoustics and work on analyzing whistles and clicks. I raised my hand immediately when we were all asked who was interested in getting involved with this. I’ve always found dolphin whistles super fascinating and wanted to learn more about them. So I was extremely happy when Tess informed me that I could work on acoustics with her. YAY!

Since that day, I have been working on analyzing bottlenose dolphin whistles that were recorded by Tess at uShaka Sea World in Durban last year. There are many whistles to go through and it definitely takes a lot of concentration and motivation to get through them. Some days are harder than others and sometimes the whistles are confusing and unclear. But all in all, the experience has been awesome. Listening to dolphin sounds is really cool and being able to see what the whistles and other sounds look like on a spectrogram puts everything into a whole new perspective. I could listen to dolphin whistles all day! But I will admit that after 4 to 5 hours of staring at dolphin whistles, a headache often occurs and some minor frustration! I have recently started helping out with recording dolphins while out on the research boat as well. I love being able to see the dolphins in their natural habitat and also listen to them communicate at the same time. It’s a really rewarding feeling when you come home after a hard day at sea and look through your recordings from the day and discover that you did indeed catch the dolphins whistling. It’s truly amazing!

(Note from Simon - It's not all about work - this is Cayla and her sand angel on Sunset Dune. Acoustic projects don't make for good photos, so I've put this one in :).

Weather - what we talk about all the time...

2011-07-07T21:54:00.000+01:00

Since our lives are controlled by the weather, I thought we should dedicate a whole blog post to it :)

by Heidi Etter

What’s the weather like in Namibia? It is a common question asked by interns that have been accepted to the program. The answer is it can be very fickle. The key thing to remember is contrary to popular belief, everywhere in Africa is not hot! Namibia is located in the southern hemisphere and the coastline is bordered by the cold, upwelling Benguela current and weather conditions are wind-driven. And since Namibia is in the southern hemisphere, the months of the internship, June, July, and August are during the winter months.

You would expect it to be warm in Walvis Bay, even in the winter since it is bordered by the desert, however, this is not the case. The only time you will get warm weather here during the winter is when the east wind blows off of the desert, though this is usually accompanied by a sandstorm for part of the day. With all of this being said, expect it to be cold…expect it to be even colder on the boat on the water.

Perfect example of the weather conditions…the other week starting on Sunday, we had beautiful weather because an east wind was blowing…the sun was shining…we were on the boat in flip flops, shorts, and t-shirts (well some of us were)! Then bring on Tuesday…the wind changed to the southwest and we were freezing! Layers of thermals, fleeces, jackets, warm hats, etc. you get the point! Everyone’s noses looked like Rudolph the reindeer because they were so red from the cold. Out at sea on Wednesday, the morning started out with three layers of clothing, it was foggy and windy and we were drinking coffee to stay warm. By the afternoon, it was nice and sunny but the wind had picked up to 13 knots making for a bumpy and chilly ride home. However, once on shore because it was sheltered and the sun was radiating its heat on us…we decided to go for a refreshing afternoon swim. To sum up that experience…imagine a polar plunge…it was shocking to the body cold.

So to answer everyone’s questions on what the weather is like in Namibia…nobody knows…not even the weather forecasters because they are always getting it wrong. Prepare for cold and hot weather conditions…it just depends on which way the wind is blowing, literally!

Satellite photo of the east wind blowing sand out to sea - taken in June last year

June 2011

2011-07-06T15:45:00.000+01:00

1 lunar eclipse
1.5 beach surveys (one cut short by a stranding elsewhere)
2 necropsies of animals

15 sea days
73:59 hours at sea
332nm / ~600km driven at sea
733litres of fuel burnt at sea

16.6 GB or 4500 photos taken
6.5 hours of acoustic recordings

All in all a very productive month - many thanks to Mel Ngo, Cayla Vandenaweele, Hannah Murphy, Kuan Li and Kassler Peh! Great to meet you guys and thanks for coming out to help with our project.
Simon, Tess and Heidi

2011-07-04T17:40:00.000+01:00

We'd like to thank Daniel Gard from Virginia Beach, Virginia, USA. At the beginning of the 2011 winter field season, he graciously donated a Panasonic Toughbook laptop to the project. As resources are very valuable and limited in fieldwork, the donation of such an important piece of equipment greatly improves the productivity of our project. The laptop has already been utilized extensively in data management and processing during this field season and will allow us do more advanced acoustic recordings at sea in the future. Thank you again Daniel for your generation donation to the Namibian Dolphin Project!

Bottlenose dolphin acoustics - by Mel Ngo

2011-06-25T19:16:00.000+01:00

20 June 2011
This past weekend, we were given Saturday and Sunday off to relax and explore the wonders of Namibia. A couple of interns went on a camping trip to Spitzkop, which is about 3 hours away from Walvis Bay. From the stories and pictures they shared, they had a great time seeing the kind of glory Namibia has to offer.

This week has been the most productive by far. After coming back from our two day break, we were all re-energized and eager to get back to work. On Monday, we had an encounter with the bottlenose dolphins, which we haven’t seen much of this month. This season the NDP has brought in some new technology, a hydrophone to record the sounds made by the bottlenose dolphins (and anything else they encounter), focusing on whistles and other sounds they are able to make which are mostly for communication.

Back in the office, the ‘acoustic team’ uploaded the data on to the computer; from there we are able to look more closely at the data to see (and hear) if we have recorded any whistles. Unfortunately, there were no whistles from Monday’s encounter, but there were a couple of other interesting sounds such as clicks, buzzes and burst pulses.

The next day, Tuesday, we did our normal routine of launching the boat around 8 am. The boat team for that day was Simon, Heidi, Hannah, Kuan and I. As always, we were on search for whales and dolphins, and heading north just off the fishery docks we spotted bottlenose dolphins again. I was very excited as it was my first time seeing them this season and for some of the others as well. I forgot how massive and big these dolphins are and I was happy I got to see them again. Some were friendly in the beginning, approaching the boat and others were jumping and socializing from a distance. With Tess not being on the boat I’d been ‘promoted’ to run the acoustic recordings. Once we found them, I immediately prepared the equipment, hooking up the hydrophone to the boat, connecting it with the recorder, finding a spot for the recorder, and plugging the headphone to the device. When everything was set up and the hydrophone was placed in the water and the recording was on, I listened to the eerie mysterious sound of the sea for the first time. It was quite an interesting experience, it was very quiet when the engines were off, kind of spooky in a way. Within the first couple of seconds that the recorder was recording and the headphones were on my head I heard these amazing animals whistles. I jumped and shouted “They’re whistling!”. Simon and Heidi just looked at me and laughed as I could not believe what I was hearing. VERY COOL! We did several recordings and most of those files had at least a few whistles and many clicks the bottlenose produced. SO VERY COOL!!!!

At the time of the recording at sea, listening in on the dolphin’s secrets, it seemed like no sound was being made much of the time, but once everything was downloaded on to the computer, I found other whistles in the files that I did not hear when at sea. It’s much easier to pick the whistles out visually on the computer than by ear on a noisy boat! It was one of the coolest experiences I have got to experience again with the NDP team this season. I cannot wait to learn and find out more!!

Intern blog 3 - Kuan Li

2011-06-20T21:24:00.000+01:00

Tess's birthday last Friday (17th), so we decided to combine a beach survey following the spring tide with a little beach braai (barbeque) to celebrate the occasion. Worked the poor car almost to death, apparently a full tank and 8 people on a soft beach is about the limit a Mitsubishi Turbo Diesel can deal with..

Blog entry by Kuan:

June 17th, Friday

We went to Donkey Bay for beach survey today. Donkey Bay is at the south of Walvis Bay. On the way to Donkey Bay, we passed the salt banks and everyone was excited about it. We jumped of the car and had a walk along the muddy road. The pools were red because of algae and the mud around the pool had different layers of color. Then, Simon drove us all the way south to the border of Sandwich Bay. We saw four jackals, probably a big happy family, walking along the sand dunes.

Basically, the survey started from Donkey Bay till Pelican point. We travelled north and tried to find dead animals especially dolphins and whales. There were a lot of dead seals on the beach, some were freshly dead and others had only bones left. We drove to a freshly “dead” seal on the beach and wanted to check it out. As soon as we stopped the car beside it, it opened eyes and started to run away from us. We were so amazed because everyone thought it was dead. The seal looked back at us innocently like saying: “Leave me alone. I am just having a nap”. We had a big laugh and continued the search. After a while, we discovered a dead leatherback turtle. It had been dead for a long time since only bones were left and buried in the sand. The turtle was about 160cm long and its skull was missing, but we could see its tail, legs and shell. Apart from the turtle, we also found a piece of whale’s bone nearby, which was pretty awesome. It could be a right whale or a humpback whale. After investigated the area, we headed to Pelican point.

At the Pelican point, we set a bonfire and prepared for braai on the beach. At the meanwhile, we explored a wrecked ship. The water was quite shallow but freezing cold. There were some sea anemones, which were fun to touch. It was awesome to have braai on the beach and we all enjoyed the day.

Science...it's not all about pretty pictures of dolphins...

2011-06-20T21:16:00.001+01:00

Blog entry by Hannah "Banana" Murphy...

The first day we went out to sea, I did not go out to sea. When I was informed of this tragedy, I replied, “Oh, okay! That’s great!” I did not, however, think it was great. I was dying a little on the inside. We all woke up at 6 and I waved at everyone as they filed out the door with excitement in their voices. I locked the door behind them and turned around to face the empty house. I trudged to the office and plopped down next to the stack of data forms that I was going to enter into an Excel spreadsheet. There were so many! “Well,” I thought to myself, “someone has to do it… and it might as well be me.” I prepared myself for the boring task ahead. Only a few minutes passed before I was intrigued by the information on the data sheets! The first thing that I leaned was that being on a boat is not conducive to good hand writing. I now read Simon Hieroglyphics and Tess Hieroglyphics almost fluently. It was super difficult at first, but got easier as the day went on. I felt like I was learning more about dolphin behaviour than the people were on the boat! It was so cool! Before long, I could recognise where the dolphins liked to hang out! When I got on the boat the next day, I picked up the data form and knew exactly what I was doing! It was great!! The next week when my office day came around, I was excited to sit in my PJ’s, drink tea, and enter really interesting data about dolphins!

Necropsy Day

2011-06-12T22:00:00.000+01:00

While we have interns, we’ve asked them to write the blog entries for us to get across some of the excitement and novelty of doing all this for the first time. I think that having done this for a few years now I sometimes forget what an impression a whale necropsy makes when you do it for the first time. I loved Kassler’s contribution so much I’ve left it entirely unedited except for correcting place names.

I think in all the excitement and ‘gore’, some of the interns may have missed the bit where we looked for parasites, obvious signs of death and collected skin and blubber samples for genetic, stable isotope and pollutant analyses. The skulls of both animals have been collected and are going to the National Museum in Windhoek in due course.

Both animals described below were discovered by Naude Dreyer of Sandwich Harbour tours who is one of the key members of the Walvis Bay Strandings team.

I've put in some photos below showing the stages from collection on the beach to final remains. Also a photo showing the small hair follicles on the snout, the shark bites on the tail stock (after death) and Tess looking up cranial structure as we tried to look for the sound producing organs

7th June, Tuesday, 2011

By Kassler Peh – Oceans Research Intern from Singapore

Necropsy of killer whale (calf) and Heaviside’s dolphin (calf)

We set off for Swakopmund early in the morning and reached the offices of the Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources at about 0900 hrs. Somewhere within fisheries laid our prized possessions, the dead killer whale and Heaviside’s dolphin. The whale was about 2.3m in length while the dolphin was much smaller, only about 80cm long. Excitement could be sensed all across the intern’s faces and everyone was ready for the necropsy. There were even two journalists present, sharing the exciting moment with us. But little did we know that what started off as a pleasant day would soon turn into a day filled with gore and blood.

First up was Mel, who had the task taking off the killer whale’s head. As soon as the knife sliced through the layer of blubber on the whale, blood started oozing out of the slit. Gas from within the whale started escaping as well and soon, the whole room was filled with the foulest smelling stench ever. As soon as the head came off, Simon took over and dismembered the beast like a seasoned butcher. Together with a few other interns, we started tearing and cutting off the blubber and flesh of the whale. Bits of whale flesh and blood started spewing and spurting all across the room, finally exposing the insides of the whale after about an hour. From the oesophagus all the way to the anus, every bit of the whale was pointed out by Simon expertly. It was a really insightful day for the interns albeit the gore and mess. Finally, the whale was chopped into pieces and packed into small bags, ready for disposal.

Next up after lunch was the Heaviside’s dolphin. Relatively easier to butcher due to its size, the insides of the dolphin was exposed in a matter of minutes. The surprising thing was that the lungs of the dolphin actually had dark patches in it and lung worms were present in its lungs. Milk was also discovered in the stomach and intestines of the dolphin. Just like the whale, the dolphin was also chopped up into pieces and packed into bags.

The only remains of the two corpses were their skulls, which will be transported to the National Museum in Windhoek. Removing the flesh and brain matter off the skull was the last thing on the agenda that day. Once that was done, signs of relief can be witnessed all over the intern’s faces and all of us gladly left the fishery with a huge sense of achievement. What a bloody Tuesday indeed.

Namibian Humpback Whales

2011-06-06T22:08:00.001+01:00

06 June 2011 - by Simon Elwen

Humpback whales are one of the most well studied large whales in the world and yet there is still great uncertainty about many aspects of their lives. Even such relatively simple facts such as where exactly they feed and breed can be surprisingly complicated as individuals sometimes mix between these grounds. The International Whaling Commission (the body which governs and controls global whaling) has defined the stock of humpback whales which breed off the West coast of Africa as 'Breeding Stock B'. This stock is split in a northern (B1) and southern (B2) component based mainly on historic whaling data records.

Most of the work on this population has taken place in Gabon (by the Wildlife Conservation Society), which is a breeding area and in South Africa (by the University of Pretoria), which is largely seen as a migratory corridor, and there is very little information from the thousands of km of coast in between. Genetic analysis of whales from South Africa and Gabon, has shown some evidence of stock separation, supporting the B1/B2 split. However individual animals have been resighted (from photographs and using genetic sampling) in both South Africa and Gabon showing that at least some animals use both areas. However there is still some confusion about how all these stocks, breeding areas and migratory corridors actually fit together. Data from the areas in between SA and Gabon are particularly valuable right now in trying to help the IWC answer these questions.

In addition to our main dolphin focus, the NDP has been collecting photographs and genetic samples from humpback whales at sea and from strandings as much as possible since we started. We've also been collating photographs and records from tour boat operators in Walvis Bay which has greatly increased our data set of humpback whale photos. Most of these photos have been taken by Mike Lloyd and Orlanda Sardinha who work on the Cataraman Charters vessels (http://www.namibiancharters.com). Recently, a colleague of mine who did his PhD work on the humpback whales off western South Africa, matched the photographs we've collected in Namibia to his catalogue of known animals from SA. Unfortunately no matches have been found yet between Namibia and South Africa, but we'll keep looking. Although this is a very small sample (only 35 individuals were identified from tail flukes in Namibia), it is still an interesting result and is being presented as paper SC-63-SH21 at the meeting of the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission which is being held right now in Tromso, Norway (www.iwcoffice.org).

Next up is matching our Namibian whales to the catalogue from Gabon. Meanwhile, work continues here in Walvis Bay and we hope to see lots more humpback whales this winter!

2011-04-28T19:14:00.000+01:00

Some of the NDP's work on the Walvis Bay population of bottlenose dolphins was presented recently at the South African Marine Science Symposium at Rhodes University - this conference is the preeminent get together of marine scientists in Southern Africa. http://www.atas.co.za/SAMSS2011/

Presented was:

Individual variation in bottlenose dolphin ranges in Walvis Bay, Namibia. Implications for managing restricted areas.
by Lauren Snyman with Simon Elwen, Marthán Bester, Tess Gridley, Theodore Meyer and Ruth Leeney as coauthors

Also accepted was a talk I was meant to give entitled

Shrinking or emigrating? Decreasing abundance trends of a vulnerable population of common bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) in Walvis Bay, Namibia, subject to high human impacts.
by Simon Elwen with Ruth Leeney, Tess Gridley, Lauren Snyman and Justina Shihepo as coauthors.

Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, I wasn't able to make the conference to present my talk, but Lauren did us proud getting our research out there.

2011-03-14T17:59:00.007+02:00

March 2011 - Luderitz

by Simon Elwen

A flying month in Namibia, I wish we could stay longer as there is so much to do as always!

Just spent 10 days in Ludertiz where we serviced the hydrophone (unfortunately, one is AWOL..), and had a remarkably good run on the weather front. We got in a 7 days on the trot of photo-ID data collection on Heaviside's dolphins and defintely had some resightings of animals previously ID'd there.

As always, the Heaviside's in Luderitz were lovely, although a little thinner on the ground than normal (possibly due to the odd weather down there recently, there has been very little wind and its very warm)

However, we had a good few encounters and some super friendly animals which really helps for photography! I've pasted in a few pics below, including one of a young animal with some diatoms on it which is interesting and one of the tall ship Picton Castle which was in town for a few days while we were there.

Just up in Walvis Bay now, so more updates will follow soon!

2011-01-20T09:14:00.002+02:00

by Simon Elwen 20 Jan 2011

A quick update to say we're working on the annual report for the project in amongst trying to get some papers published from all the data we've been collecting in the last few years.

The project continues and we'll be back for a short field season in March (Walvis and Luderitz) and then another long field season in June-July based mainly in Walvis Bay.

If you don't receive a copy of the report by early in Feb, please get hold of me. I've put in a little teaser map below. This figure shows a 'probability density distribution' of bottlenose dolphins in the last 5 seasons (i.e. where we have and are likely to see them). One map for each season and one with all combined.

Walvis Bay Strandings Network

2010-12-10T06:34:00.003+02:00

This month, the Walvis Bay Strandings Network finally got some much-needed strandings equipment. In 2009, the Namibian Dolphin Project received a Walvis Municipality Environmental grant to support the network in this way. DDP Industries in Walvis Bay made up the stretcher, and very kindly sponsored the production of a second one also. The equipment also includes buckets and blankets to keep beached animals wet and protected from the sun and wind.
In my final week in town, I carried out a short training session with some of the network's volunteers, to familiarise them with techniques for getting a stranded animal into the stretcher easily (using our inflatable dolphin!), and the important things to remember in the refloatation process. For example, once a stretchered animal has been brought to the water, it needs time to get used to the water again and to start to use its swimming muscles again, before removing the stretcher support.
The strandings gear is looked after by Strandings Network members and anyone who finds a stranded whale, dolphin or turtle in the Walvis Bay - Swakopmund area should contact Sandwich Harbour Tours or Mola Mola Tours in Walvis Bay. Many thanks to the Walvis Bay Municipality, George Wolfaardt at DDP Industries, Simon Wearne, John Paterson, Naude Dreyer, Francois du Toit and all the network members and volunteers who have given freely of their time for stranded animals. Keep up the good work!

So long, and thanks for all the (big) fish!

2010-12-02T15:11:00.006+02:00

The C-PODs, now less mussel-encrusted than when they were retrieved, went back in the water today at Aphrodite Beach and Pelican Point. We now have over a year and a half of data on patterns of dolphin habitat use at these two sites, which will provide huge insight into seasonal patterns in habitat use by Heaviside's and bottlenose dolphins.

As my month of fieldwork draws to a close, I wanted to take the opportunity to thank the many people and organisations who have helped me and supported the project.There are some people here in Namibia, and especially in Walvis Bay, without which I could not achieve what I come here to do. These people give freely of their time, resources, company and advice, and always renew my faith in human nature by their generosity. My great appreciation to the following people and organisations –

Sandra Knop – du bist ein Stern. Gert Le Roux and the team at Namib Diving – for your invaluable assistance over the past two years; also Andries of Alucraft Construction for providing a boat at short notice. John and Barbara Paterson, Jean-Paul Roux at the Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources, Jeanne Meintjes of Eco Marine Kayak Tours for your local knowledge, enthusiasm, and for many kayak trips and providing me with wheels!, Francois du Toit, Katja and Naude Dreyer, Heiko Metzger and family. Baie Dankie!

Namibian Dolphin Project gets airborne!

2010-11-29T20:22:00.007+02:00

by Ruth Leeney

Are there whales using all of the coast? What habitats do Heaviside's dolphins use apart from Walvis Bay and Luderitz? At what time of the year do turtles start using Namibian waters? These and many other questions have crossed my mind, and been asked by others, so often since we started our research here in 2008. One excellent means of addressing some of these questions is to survey coastal waters from the air. Aerial surveys allow for a large study area

to be covered in a relatively short period of time, and in a wider range of sea conditions than are suitable for boat surveys. An aerial perspective makes it much easier to detect and identify whales and dolphins since they can be visible even when they are beneath the water surface. When the Bataleurs, an organistion of volunteer pilots interested in conservation, provided me with the opportunity to run an aerial survey along the coast, I was delighted.

Early morning conditions were misty on the coast and we discussed the survey plan as we waited for the horizon to clear. Shortly after 9:00, we were on our way, with calm seas and surprisingly clear waters as our Cessna 182 survey plane headed south at 300 ft. Immediately we started to see small groups of Heaviside's dolphins. In fact, there were a surprising number of Heaviside's dolphins south of Walvis Bay. This is one of the focal species we study in the bay and in Luderitz, but we have not been able to study them outside of these two regions. Today I realised that they use a far greater part of the coast than I thought. Having refuelled in Luderitz, we set off south again and very soon afterwards, sighted our first whales - a mother and calf southern right whale. Another four right whales were seen north of the border. Further south, the coast becomes ravaged by diamond mining and is a really shocking sight.

We flew the entire coast from Walvis Bay to Oranjemund (at the border with South Africa), thus covering the southern half of the Namibian coastline. Total sightings came to 63 Heaviside's dolphins, two dusky dolphins, six southern right whales and two ocean sunfish. No turtles were sighted - the water is likely still too cold for them. Many thanks to all who made this possible: Joan Cameron and the Bataleurs for organising the survey; Nico Louw for his time, flying skills and the use of his plane; John Paterson and Francois du Toit for filling the observers roles.

Just checking....

2010-11-26T11:11:00.002+02:00

by Ruth Leeney
Walvis Bay, 8 am. I get an email saying there are two bottlenose dolphins well into the lagoon - it looks like they're going to strand near to where the mass stranding occurred last year. John Paterson and I dashed to the lagoon, and met with Francois who had been keeping an eye on them as they swam in circles. As we got there, they had turned around and were heading northwards at quite a fast pace, towards deeper water. Good timing too - the tide was going out. I guess this pair of bottlenose dolphins were just keeping us on our toes and checking that the chain of communication in the Walvis Bay Strandings Network does indeed work. Thanks to all the local folks involved in getting the word out this morning.

2010-11-21T15:25:00.006+02:00

Sunday, 21st November

Today, I tagged along on a marine wildlife trip on Zeepard, run by Heiko Metzger. There are lots of box jellyfish (class Cubozoa) in the waters around Lüderitz at the moment.

Perhaps as a result of this, a sunfish was our first sighting of the morning. A big fin flopped on the surface, suggesting quite a large Mola mola beneath, but it did not reveal any more of itself and made a swift departure from the scene. Sunshine turned to thick fog at Diaz Point and then back to sunshine again. There were lots of bow-riding Heaviside’s dolphins and several of them also breached and even back-flipped a number of times – more than I have ever seen in Lüderitz, or even in Walvis Bay, before.

There were many Heaviside’s dolphins in Shearwater bay, several hundred metres from where one of the C-PODs is moored, which is always good to see! Towards the end of the trip, Heiko decided to explore over on the other side of the entrance to the harbour, where they sometimes see minke whales. Instead of a minke, we encountered a juvenile humpback whale. At first it seemed disinterested in the vessel and kept its distance, but after ten minutes or so, it fluked and then only minutes later, breached about 100 metres ahead of us! A while later it started spyhopping, though a little far away from us, and then started to nudge around some kelp for a while as it swam in our direction. It eventually surfaced very close to boat, twice, affording everyone a close-up view before it decided we were rather boring and swam off. Thanks as always to Heiko and Stefan for letting me join the trip.

Fieldwork in November

2010-11-21T14:56:00.006+02:00

by Ruth H. Leeney

It has been almost a year since I have been in Namibia, so I had some catching up to do. After a few weeks of office work, emailing, meetings and observations in Wavis Bay, I headed south to fulfil my usual duties with the acoustic monitoring gear deployed there. The project has been carrying out acoustic monitoring for odontocetes at two sites in the coastal waters of Lüderitz for a year and a half now, and I’m looking forward to seeing what patterns in habitat use start to emerge from the data. Having arrived I spent the afternoon and evening downloading data from the two C-PODs and their associated temperature loggers, and resetting the instruments for redeployment.
Early on the following morning, I boarded the RV !Anichab to redeploy both C-PODs and allow the time series of acoustic data to continue. I had much help from the crew with sorting out the moorings and getting the heavy anchors over the side as we deployed each mooring. I’m very grateful to Jean-Paul Roux for organizing this trip on the Ministry of Fisheries’ research vessel.

2010-09-02T17:58:00.004+01:00

by Stefanie Rowland, UK. Oceans research Intern August 2010:

When I got off the plane seemingly in the middle of the desert I never dreamed that this barren land would supply some of the best experiences and memories of my life in the space of a few short weeks. On my first full day in Walvis Bay we were blessed with gorgeous weather, so headed out on the boat. The early start was a bit of a shock, but was definitely worth it, when in the space of one morning we had two species of dolphin coming up to us and bow riding! To cap it all off two humpback whales had been spotted – a mother and calf! They surfaced so close to us that I could feel the spray from their blow hole! I thought that things couldn’t possibly get better than that, but I was oh so wrong: in the space of two weeks I’ve travelled north to a national park, where we ventured into the desert to play on sand dunes; seen amazing scenery ranging from ocean to desert to scrub land; been up close to a dead humpback whale (the smell wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be!); had some practise at driving the boat; had a go at some photography; travelled south for two days (with a stopover in the capital); seen loads of wildlife including springbok, orix, seals and a family of warthogs! It’s not all glamour though, some days can be cold on the boats and you can’t be squeamish about getting covered in all sorts, from seawater to barnacle juice, but it has most definitely been worth it, I’ve learnt so much from being here and had a lot of laughs in the process.

At the entrance to the Skeleton Coast National Park:

Team photo at the Ugab River mouth in the Park

John Paterson (the former head ranger at SKNP and now Albatross Task Force), took us up to a place called Oasis on the edge of the dune field...stunning.

Some of the cetacean skulls we were measuring and collating at the little Museum at Mowe Bay

Passing time during another puncture on the way back south from the park

Photographing dolphins in Luderitz -

One of our own

2010-08-12T20:13:00.004+01:00

For the first time in my career as a marine mammal biologist, I saw one of my study animals dead. I've seen loads of dead whales and dolphins since I started along this path and I've identified lots of whales and dolphins photographically. But Walvis Bay is the first project I've worked on long enough, that I've got to see and get to know some of the animals as 'individuals'. We have regular of Heaviside's we know but it's the bottlenose population here (~80-100 animals) that become like old friends after a while. The majority of them are easily identifiable and I've had a particular fondness for the mothers in our population, which are frequently seen together, so it was a little sad finding one of them dead on the beach.

Animal T-017 was first seen by us in June 2008 with a small calf and on several other occasions during out pilot study.

She wasn't seen at sea during the summer field season of 2009 but was one of the 19 animals which stranded in the lagoon in March, were tagged with seal flipper tags and rescued. She was actually tagged twice on that day, the first time was unsuccessful and left a partial hole, the second time went all the way through. Since this time she has hardly been seen at all in the bay area.

She was seen in the winter field season (Aug 2009) with her tag still in her fin, not seen in the summer of 2010 and only once in the current winter season.

Then, a dolphin was reported dead on the beach north of Swakopmund a few weeks ago and when we went to investigate, it turned out to be one of 'our' bottlenose dolphins, T-017.

She was fairly decomposed, and had a few shark bites along her belly. It's impossible to tell if these occurred before or after death, but judging from their size are probably from a bronze whaler shark which are common along this coast.

So..we've lost a mother from this population. We kept the skull and from the teeth, it may be possible to age her one day.

2010-07-30T15:12:00.003+01:00

Just wanted to add a little thank you to our friends atWe managed to break the plug pins on the sponsored 420S Chart plotter a little while ago, and also had a older hand held GPS unit that was giving us some trouble.

Jason, Mike, Fraser and the crew at Garmin in Cape Town speedily sorted them out for us and everything is in 100% working order - thanks guys!! We'd be lost without you .

Days off in Namibia

2010-07-30T14:58:00.002+01:00

By Lucille Chapuis - Oceans Research Intern July 2010.

16/07/10

Etosha National Park… a small taste of Eden

Although we enjoy greatly the aquatic fauna of Walvis Bay, we were quite happy when Simon accepted to let us have 3 days off in a row, which allowed us to visit the one of the world’s greatest wildlife reserves: Etosha National Park, 20 000 sq km of inland protected habitats, around the Etosha Pan, a huge flat and saline desert that is transformed in a lagoon during the rainy season. Having spent a night in a camp site near the park, we leave on an early morning and enjoy the sunrise entering the gate. Only a few minutes later, giraffes, zebras and springboks are already shining in our eyes… The time flows as we explore the bush and grasslands and discover their inhabitants: grass eaters like blue wildebeests, impalas, oryx, steenboks, jackals and ostriches are very abundant. The predators and the bigger ones are of course more difficult to spot. We face up to the challenge and with our budding biologists nose, we find a horde of 40 elephants having a communal bath in a waterhole, a leopard chilling under a bush, one lioness and her three cubs sipping quietly some water from a pond, as well as an immense and solitary elephant crossing the road nonchalantly. We rushed through the exit door under a beautiful “Etoshan” sunset, in high spirits and satiated. We drive back to Walvis Bay on the next day, looking forward to meet our sea-friends again. This week-end was just a part of our epic journey that we interns have been undertaking here for more than three weeks, experiencing an untouched, although elusive, “wild” wilderness.

Lucille

Stranding season continues..

2010-07-24T15:22:00.007+01:00

It seems to be a season of many strandings. On Wednesday this week a humpback whale was reported to us by Neels Dreyer to be stuck in shallows of the harbour in front of the fishing factories. The NDP team and John Paterson (Albatross Task Force) responded promptly and got on site to find several divers from Walvis Bay diving already in the water trying to guide the animal out to sea. After a little discussion with the TunaCor security officers to assure them we were there on legit business, John, Gwen Penry and I got our wetsuits on hopped in the water with the divers to help with the rescue attempt.

The whale was clearly unwell, covered in cyamids (whale lice), had a broken dorsal fin (probably from hitting into the jetty, it definitely wasn't a propeller cut) and was clearly disoriented, swimming at an angle, holding its head up and only going in circles. With much pushing we occasionally got the animal out of the shallows but it kept turning back to come lie on its belly. We attempted to the tow/guide the whale out of the shallows with help from the Walvis Bay diving boat, but although it got out a little way, it again came back.

The WBD boat had to leave but we got in two more boats from Mola Mola Tours and Henning DuPlessis (a local oyster farmer). These larger boats were more successful at pulling the whale further out of the jetty area, and eventually managed to get it past the moored ships. With some great driving by Rudi Hass and Eddie of Mola Mola and Henning - they managed to keep the whale from turning back to the shallows and guided her out in the deeper central bay area (last photo).

Once in the deeper water the whale paused to reoriented it self and seemed to wake up and head off strongly northwards. We were all hopeful that it was going to make it but unfortunately, on Thursday, the whale was reported re-stranded on the west side of the bay near the pump station.

The decision was taken at this point to let nature take it's course. Strandings are sad, but natural events and you can only perform so many rescue attempts (which are quite stressful for the whale) before admitting defeat.

I've put in some photos below, most taken by Lucille Chapuis, (one of our July interns) of the rescue operation in the harbour.

A big thankyou to Walvis Bay Diving, Mola Mola tours, Henning du Plessis and Tunacor for their help.

2010-07-11T17:50:00.003+01:00

By Caroline Budden.

Hello! My name is Caroline and I am currently an intern at the Namibia Dolphin Project. I arrived here on the 1^st of July from the UK. The view as I flew from Johannesburg to Walvis Baywas beautiful and consisted of miles of desert as far as the eye could see. I was met at the airport by Simon and after meeting the other interns and staff, I was soon feeling settled in and started learning how to grade dolphin photographs. This is important as only high quality photos are used to identify individual dolphins. The next day, on land survey duty, I caught a glimpse of my first bottlenose dolphin, which surfaced about 10m from shore. After teasing us with two short appearances, it then promptly disappeared. On my next land survey a few days later, we came across a whole group of bottlenose dolphins close to shore. We watched them wave riding, took as many photographs as we could and spent the next few hours tracking them from the beach to monitor their social interactions and general behaviour. This proved to be more difficult than it sounds - you don’t realize just how fast they can swim unless you are running alongside, trying to keep up with them!

On our day off, myself and the other interns went kayaking with wild seals at Pelican Point. The seals were adorable and were very intrigued by us and our brightly coloured kayaks. They were constantly swimming over to take a closer look and there were even a few attempts to steal our paddles! We saw a number of jackals as we drove through the desert and were amazed to witness a stand-off between a jackal and a fully grown seal. The jackal won the fish prize in the end but the seal didn’t give up easily!

While out on the research boat we encountered a whole group of Heaviside dolphins, inccluding two mothers with calves. I will never forget the sight of a baby calf swimming alongside the boat right beside me. However, the highlight of my first week here has to be the sight of a humpback whale surfacing about 5m away from the back of our boat. The noise of it blowing out as it surfaced made everyone on board jump with shock, especially as we were all expecting it to come up about 500m away in a completely different direction. I have had so many incredible experiences here in just a week and I am eagerly looking forward to the next few weeks!

2010-06-22T22:05:00.003+01:00

If you're on Facebook, check out the Namibian Dolphin Project page for more photos from out current field season.

Here are a few of the small humpback whale that stranded alive near the desalination plant north of Swakopmund last week. It died soon afterward we first saw it, and we returned to collect some samples from the animal for further study.

2010-06-16T23:02:00.004+01:00

The blog is going to start filling up again! We haven't had much internet at the house where we base the office, and it's been a pretty hectic start to the season. Dolphins coming and going as usual, but we've got the hydrophone in at Sandwich Harbour again (Thanks to Ingo of Pelican Tours for lending us his dinghy!) and we've seen at least two known Heaviside's again, including the animal that was injured so badly last season by a boat propeller - and he's completely healed (you can just see the scarring on his body below)!

This season we're a much bigger team than normal and we've got 5 interns working with us here through Oceans Research. This has allowed us to start a new project collecting data from shore on the bottlenose dolphins (so there is no bias from the boats at all), as well as get more info from the tour boats themselves and get that back log of data under control! We've also had a few strandings and well, there's lots going on. I'm going to let the interns put it in there words from here on:

Namibian Dolphin Project by Melanie Ngo

The interns arrived on the 1^st of June and I am one out of the six that get to experience this wonderful opportunity. For the past few weeks, we have done a lot of work on shore and on the water in Walvis Bay, Namibia. We are having an amazing time with the Heaviside dolphins and the bottlenose dolphins each time we are at sea and on land. It is and will always be a thrilling excitement every time we encounter these animals, no matter how many times we have seen them before we enjoy their company out at sea. When I see the expression on Simon’s face every time we spotted the dolphins, it reminds me of the face kids make when you bribe them with candy and he has been working with these animals for a couple of years now.

We have taken pictures of the Heaviside's and bottlenose dolphin’s dorsal fin for photo ID, observed their behavior in the water and on land, and observed the number of birds and bird species in certain areas on the beach to look at the impact of beach users. Most of the time, the dolphins are very friendly, socializing with us and each other, they were jumping and spy hopping, swimming alongside the boat, bow riding, swimming underneath and around the boat, overall they are having a good time in their own home. There were a few days we did not go out on the boat due to the weather, but that did not stop us from doing work around the office. We have had long days out on the boat and on land, we’ll come back exhausted, but love every minute of our time with the dolphins and that keeps our energy up for the rest of the day.

Melanie:

Bottlenose dolphins double their known range!

2010-05-26T10:04:00.004+01:00

Dr Jean Paul Roux from the Ministry of Fisheries, who we collaborate with down in Luderitz sent me some photos they captured from shore in April of a group of bottlenose dolphins in Guano Bay (the main Heaviside's dolphin concentration area in Luderitz).

Although they occasionally see bottlenose dolphins down there, they tended to be very poorly marked (undistinctive) animals, and have always been assumed to belong to the offshore stock of bottlenose dolphins (which live in the open ocean off the continental shelf, and don't mix with the local population). The Walvis Bay population has a known range from Sandwich Harbour to Cape Cross (only about ~250km along shore), but with observer effort very low north and south of these points, we assumed they probably did range a bit further than that, there was just no one there to see them.

So this sighting was really exciting as we now have photographic proof of 'our' population of bottlenose dolphins in Luderitz, about 400km south of the known limit of their range! There were about 12 animals, several well marked ones including some of those tagged in the lagoon in 2009 and some of the mother-calf pairs.

We'll be back in Walvis Bay at the beginning of June to work all of June and July and plan to spend some more time in Luderitz in August. This will give us a chance to see if these animals were simply on a summer holiday trip and have come back to Walvis Bay, or if they have 'permanently' emigrated.

2010-04-09T17:06:00.005+01:00

Slow on the updates recently. We wrapped up the season in Walvis Bay and left town on the 26th March as I had to give a talk up in Windhoek at UNam. I've never been there before, it's quite a small university compared to Pretoria or UCT, but a nice campus. The talk went well, there was small, but interested crowd who asked lots of questions, which is always nice.

Then moved on down to Luderitz to go service the hydrophones down there and collect some skin samples for analysis. I couldn't have done it without the help of Jean Paul Roux at the Ministry of Fisheries. We took out their research ship the Anichab (actually it's "!Anichab", but apparently if you mispronounce the initial click represented by "!", you turn it into a rather rude word, so most folk err on the side of the English pronounciation and just start with the A...). It was a good few days (although pretty windy the whole time), and great having a whole ship and good crew to help with everything. Hauling the hydrophone moorings is a pleasure with a winch, and we got them cleaned up and put back in in no time. I put down another hydrophone just at the northern edge of the Lighthouse bay, to replace the one in Guano Bay that is still AWOL. Biopsying was slow work as the weather didn't play along and the dolphins weren't as super friendly as they usually are in Luderitz, but we got there in the end.

Exciting sighting of the week - 2 minke whales! Apparently there are two or three in the bay which have been around and seen on a weekly basis since December by Heiko Metzger (Zeepard Tours). I've put in a few photos below of hauling and cleaning the hydrophones and the minke whales as seen from the ship and one of JP's pics of me and the !Anichab crew out in the little dinghy trying to get biopsies.

More exciting news - JP just emailed me the other day to say that a few bottlenose dolphins had been spotted in the bay and they all had large distinctive markings. The Walvis Bay population isn't supposed to range so far south (it's ~400km from Walvis), and bottlenose dolphins that have been seen there previously are thought to be vagrants from the offshore populations. However...photo ID will tell and hopefully the Luderitz locals can get us some usable photos.. i'll keep you informed.

2010-03-14T07:52:00.003+02:00

Busy times here. We were out to sea almost everyday last week and had a great run of good dolphins and good weather. Luckily(?) that's turned now and it's been quiet and rather choppy out there the last two days, so we're taking today off to catch up a little. Season is drawing to a close and there's still lots to do and summarise.

The good news - we have twice seen the injured dolphin since the original report a few blog posts ago. He ('it' really as we don't know it's sex) still bowrides the boat, but most importantly is healing amazingly well. If you click on the images it opens a slightly larger version. Compare the two photos below to the open wounds of the original photos. I'm really quite astounded at how well these wounds have healed.

I sent an email around to all the tour operators about this sighting and I think it really brought it home to them that as the people out there every day, the responsibility for the animals lies with them. They have all been really good about not reverse bowriding with the dolphins and letting them determine the space use a little more.

Jeff Slater from Cape Town has joined me up here for the month to help out on the boat with driving and taking photos. Jeff is considering a career in marine biology and I'm doing my best to show him both sides of the coin - the fun side on the water, and the real work which involves sitting behind a computer for hours on end processing data, writing grant applications and updating the blog. I really ought to put up more pictures of empty seas on misty days, freezing cold mornings and dimly lit offices with flickering computer monitors - just to give a more rounded view of what we do out here :) I'd also roped in Edith Mertz, to help me out for a few weeks. Edith is a Master's student of mine who's investigating the interactions between cetaceans and a fin-fish farm that is being developed in Mossel Bay. It's something we also touch on here in Namibia here there are a large number of oyster farms in the bay. Now that we have four seasons of spatial data from Walvis, it's really interesting looking at the variation in habitat use between seasons, and what the implications of that are for coastal development or trying to make restricted or protected areas. Edith's work is described on the site below:

http://www.oceans-research.com/marinescienceprojects/mosselbaycetaceans.html

2010-03-02T15:18:00.003+02:00

Time for an update - we've a few really nice days recently. Loads of sunshine, flat calm and lots of dolphins. Managed to see a leather back turtle, 2 sunfish (Mola) and multiple Heaviside's dolphins groups the other day during a 10 minute period.

Had a resighting today of another Heaviside's form the 2008 catalogue which is great. We also saw the wounded dolphin again (see entry below for details), he came to bowride brielfy and the wound looked a little more healed (paler, less raw) but i only managed to get a shot of it under water.

Had a great day with two groups of bottlenose today (both of 3 animals) and loads of friendly Heaviside's. we were pretty much with dolphins solidly between 8:00 and 12:30 today. One of the bottlenose dolphins caught a massive fish, i think it was a springer (type of large mullet) and swam around with it for ages.

Hydrophone deployed at Sandwich Harbour!

2010-02-25T23:07:00.003+02:00

We’ve been wanting to do some work down in Sandwich Harbour for a while now and eventually managed to get there today by boat. Sandwich Harbour is a similar, but shallower embayment ~50km south of Walvis Bay. Although it used to be deep enough for ships to sail into it and refill their water supplies, the movement of the dunes and erosion by the sea has made the whole bay much shallower, the mouth narrower and dug considerably into the dunes which lie alongside the sea. To illustrate how dynamic an environment these sandy coastlines are here – the GPS map was WAY off down there and indicated us being on land on several occasions.

The attraction of this area from our point of view is that there is almost NO human activity in the area (barring a bit of light fishing and the occasional weekend boat), which makes it a very interesting comparative site to Walvis Bay with its harbour, tourism and aquaculture – are the animals using the area differently down there? We hope that a month of a hydrophone logging the presence and absence of the dolphins in the area will gives us some indication of their habitat use patterns in the absence of human activity.

We looked at various options to get down there including towing the boat down the beach, borrowing a smaller boat to tow or using a bigger boat which we could stay on. I briefly flirted with the idea of buying our own catamaran, but then remembered I’m a scientist not an internet millionaire. So in the end, the quickest and easiest way was to drive down the coast with Nanuuq and back. It’s a very long way (the GPS track showed 84nm total for the day – I won’t tell you how much fuel we used, it makes me feel a little bit sick) along a very exposed and lonely section of coastline. We had really hoped to stay over there and send fuel down by car and then be able to work for two days in the area to allow us to do some more exploring and photo-ID work, before heading back up and thus make the most of the fuel use. Unfortunately the Ministry of Environment (MET) wouldn’t give us a permit to stay over, merely to enter the area (it is part of the Namib Naukluft National Park).

So with the wind picking up quite strongly every afternoon here, we were on a pretty tight time schedule and had to leave Walvis at 6am and head straight down there only recording dolphins as we passed. But the good news is that the weather held out all day, we got the hydrophone in the water (red star on map) and back home safely before the wind picked up! Not many dolphins to report unfortunately, a few small groups of Heaviside’s in the mid-section of the trip (the blue dots on the map) but a good day all round. The white bar on the map indicates 50km

Moving house tomorrow and then back on the water on the weekend.

2010-02-13T15:00:00.006+02:00

While out yesterday on a fairly average misty, windy day, we encountered a Heaviside’s dolphin with clear propeller wounds down the length of its body. As you can see from the photos below, it was quite a horrific looking injury. However, the animal was remarkably unafraid of the boat and would still occasionally bow ride our boat and we hope it will make a full recovery over time.

Why dolphins bow ride is not fully understood, but simple ‘play’ behaviour is the most likely reason. It's occurrence is clearly affected by the behavioural state (or mood) of the animal, as well fed or socializing animals bow ride far more keenly than those which are busy hunting or resting. Dolphins ride swell in the open ocean and surf near beaches and they will even ride the bow wave of large whales. The behaviour may be related to the practice of swimming in their mothers slipstream as calves. Heaviside’s dolphins, when in the mood, are particularly avid bowriders. Heaviside’s dolphins will even ride a boat going in reverse, when they swim very, very close to the engines. The keenness with which some species and individuals bow ride can be likened to dogs chasing cars. And it is the role of the boat skipper to bear in mind that just because an animal will react in a certain way to a boat, it is not necessarily a good practice to do it (would you throw stones at elephants to make them charge you?).

The high amount of boat traffic at Pelican Point has always been a concern to local conservation organizations and understanding the potential impact of this traffic was one of the motivating factors behind the development of the Namibian Dolphin Project. Sightings like this re-enforce the need for protocol compliance and the application of common sense and environmental responsibility while interacting with these fantastic animals.

Beach survey to Cape Cross

2010-02-11T22:40:00.005+02:00

by Michelle Wcisel

“There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.” ~Mohandas K. Gandhi (Warning: Some readers may find the pictures in this blog post disturbing).

Yesterday, we took a shore-side drive to Cape Cross to scope out potential launch sites with the hope of expanding our coverage of the coast to the north. However the tone of the trip quickly changed to a beach scavenging expedition as we learned the truth behind the “Skeleton Coast.” We found countless Cape fur seal skeletons, a few leatherback turtle carapaces that had been bleached in the sun, dozens of stranded shore birds, and four spotted gully sharks. The majority of the carcases were there due to natural causes, but every shark we found had been hooked and carelessly cut from the line.

When your career is in a biological science, especially one that is based in field research, you are exposed to life and death daily. You come to understand that cycle as an integral piece of a healthy ecosystem, and seeing a natural death of an animal changes from a mournful moment to solemn recognition of a bigger process in action. But, when you come upon an animal that has had its life taken by a hook, or a piece of line that cuts through its body, or a plastic bag lodged in its throat, you never stop feeling infuriated.

The first spotted gully shark had been killed within the hour we found it. It was a female, her gills were bright red and her body was still cold to the touch (cold because she had just been in the cool water, if she had been on the beach for awhile, her skin would have been hot from the sun – like the other three sharks we found). The line had cut through the corner of her jaw and it was obvious she had given the fishermen a “lekker fight” since the tension of the line had worked a massive wound into the side of her face. Out of curiosity, we collected her to do a full autopsy to further determine her cause of death, but were not expecting to find that the majority of this 1.55m shark’s body cavity was uterus. She was carrying 8 pups, 4 female and 4 male, all around 33cm in length. We eventually found the hook, which had punctured through her oesophagus, worked into her pericardial cavity, and pierced the left side of her heart. It is impossible to tell which of these injuries killed her first.

A mass loss of life like this feels overwhelming when you extrapolate it to all the world’s beaches, especially when you consider how this pales in significance to some of the horrors happening in the offshore fishing fleets. It is legal in Namibia to catch spotted gully sharks and they are classified on one of the lowest ranks by the IUCN Red data list as “near threatened”. However, it is important to recognize this type of blatant waste in order to inspire more research, more students, and further grasp the sense of urgency our oceans are silently suffering. If nothing else, the death of those sharks inspired a blog, maybe a few conversations, and perhaps some of you readers got to see images that are unfortunately all too commonplace to us in marine biology.

2010-02-07T23:30:00.004+02:00

Welcome to summer season 2010! After a long drive/bus trip from our starting points of Johannesburg and Cape Town, we started the season off in Lüderitz to pick up and dust off Nanuuq. After 2 days of howling wind we took advantage of a lull in the weather to get in one good sea day. Lüderitz is after all, the “Heaviside’s capital of the world”. The dolphins in Guano Bay started the day being somewhat evasive, preferring the company of the kelp to that of the boat. However, they became a lot more amenable as the day wore on and we had many boat friendly groups, including a mother calf pair (will try to put up a video link when we get a better internet connection). This was out first ‘photo ID’ day in Lüderitz and it was great to see so many well marked animals – we’ll begin developing a catalogue for the area in the near future, which will start to feed into future abundance estimates for the region. Alas, high winds and a dropping tide put an early end to our day, although we did get a chance to check on the C-POD in Shearwater Bay and it hasn’t moved an inch since it was deployed by Ruth in December!

Two days of tar road driving later (we didn’t want to chance the boat and trailer on the dirt roads in this rainy summer season) we arrived back in Walvis Bay. During our first day out at sea we didn’t get too many good photos with the dolphins being evasive and the weather cloudy. However, we were excited to discover that two of the marked animals we photographed were Heaviside’s known from the 2008 catalogue! This was a great way to kick off the season and our first confirmed evidence on long term residency of Heaviside's dolphins in Namibia (the general behaviour of the animals at Walvis Bay is so different to those in South Africa that there was no certainty of this characteristic either). Later in the week, “Dave” the bottlenose joined us with three of his friends for a romp around the shipping channels. “Dave” is probably the most boat friendly and photogenic of the bottlenose dolphins in Walvis Bay and does his best to hog the limelight during encounters with him.

Neels Dreyer informed us of a stranded Heaviside’s dolphin in Donkey Bay (on the outside of the Point) and we were able to collect it the next day. It was a small, juvenile male only just over a metre long – the plates in the skull weren’t even fused yet. It was unfortunately too desiccated after a few days on the beach in the Namibian sun to allow for the collection of many samples, but we kept the skull which will be passed on to the museum in due course and got a few basic measurements.

The days have been characteristically cool with bright sunshine on the dunes but clouds over the sea. With any luck, we’ll run into the rumored humpback whale sometime soon…

With a little help from our friends..

2010-01-15T13:37:00.004+02:00

A nice bit of news for the project. The new boat Nanuuq has been without a working depth sounder or GPS since we got her last year, which obviously makes navigating in the mist rather challenging. Knowing the depth is also of great importance to us so we know how much rope to put on the hydrophone moorings and when we're over reefs.

Even more importantly, from a scientific point of view we can use the depth and temperature data generated by the fish-finder as part of the environmental data we collect at dolphin sightings to help build up a model of their habitat use patterns.

Last year I asked Garmin South Africa (run by Avnic Trading locally) if they would sponsor us a small GPS / Fishfinder unit for the boat, and they've agreed! I'm currently sitting with the new 'toy' in my hands, a 420S and will be fitting it to the boat as soon as we get to Namibia at the end of the month.

A big thank you to Fraser McHenry at Garmin South Africa

Rescue of a rare whale

2010-01-11T17:26:00.016+02:00

By Ruth Leeney

On the 6th of January, a pygmy right whale (Caperea marginata) stranded just south of the pumpstation in Walvis Bay. The whale was a 3.5m youngster. Members of the Walvis Bay Strandings Network, including John Paterson and Naude Dreyer, quickly made their way to the scene and had a easy time getting it back into the water, although the whale did at first seem very disoriented and headed straight back to the beach four times before finally swimming out into the bay. This kind of behaviour is not uncommon in stranded cetaceans, and reinforces the importance of monitoring the animal after it has been refloated!

The pygmy right whale is one of the least-known whales in the world. It is very rarely seen at sea, and is mostly known from the few stranded specimens which have been examined by scientists, post-mortem. They grow up to about 6 m in length. Pygmy right whales are so-named because the shape of their head resembles that of a true right whale, but they are not closely related. Pygmy right whales are found only in temperate waters of the southern hemisphere. Sightings occur year-round in Tasmania, and seasonally along the coasts of South Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Falkland Islands, and some areas of Antarctica.

We're really proud of the Walvis Bay Strandings Network, for acting quickly and efficiently in this matter and with a number of other recent strandings. Their continued interest and voluntary efforts ensure that we can get rare creatures such as this pygmy right whale back into their natural habitat, and perhaps learn something about the in the process.

Lüderitz, 17-20 December

2009-12-21T20:05:00.007+02:00

By Ruth Leeney

Having deployed 2 C-PODs in the Lüderitz area back in August as well, I had hoped to get down to the south, retrieve the units, download their data and get them back out in the water as part of this trip. As my schedule became more restricted, Jean-Paul Roux at the Lüderitz offices of the Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources was invaluable in helping out. He organised the retrieval of both units, to have them waiting on land for me when I arrived. Unfortunately, only the C-POD with the surface marker buoy, deployed in Shearwater Bay, was retrieved, so hopefully, efforts in the new year to grapple for the Guano Bay POD will be successful. For now, at least, the first ever acoustic monitoring dataset for this region has been collected - the C-POD logged over 100 days in an area known to be used by small groups of Heaviside's dolphins, and plenty of detections are evident in the data.
The Shearwater Bay C-POD was re-deplyed in the same spot on the 19th of December and will continue to collect habitat use data in this area. I hope to see some seasonal patterns in these data start to emerge, as well as the interesting diel (day-night) patterns already evident!
Many thanks to Heiko and Stefan Metzger on Zeepard for their assistance in the field, and for the 'lekker' place to stay, and to Jean-Paul for his ongoing involvement with this project.

Keeping the acoustic monitoring 'clicking' over....

2009-12-16T15:17:00.010+02:00

By Ruth Leeney

December in Walvis Bay. Turns out the sun actually shines here sometimes! I have come back for a short visit, to check up on the C-PODs Simon and I deployed, with the help of Johann from Levo Tours, at the end of August. It has been just over 3 months, so the batteries are reaching the end of their running time, and after that long in the often-wild waters of the Namibian coastline, I thought it wise to check that the moorings were also still in place and were holding up well against the storms!

The project's 2 C-PODs at Pelican Point were retrieved last week. After we received a report that the surface marker buoy from this mooring had gone missing (thanks to all our local friends who were on watch in our absence!), a team from Namib Diving went out to the location and grappled for the gear, in and around the deployment location. The waters at Pelican Point have almost zero visibility and are thus not diver-friendly, so we really appreciate the time and effort they put into finding this gear for us. Three months' worth of data were downloaded from each C-POD and at first look, there are plenty of Heaviside's dolphin detections throughout that time period! More details will follow on our findings from this, our first long(ish)-term acoustic data set. Meanwhile, the PODs were spruced up a bit (in the rich waters of Walvis Bay, 3 months is ample time for an assortment of encrusting organisms to make any unsuspecting POD their home), given new batteries and re-set for more data collection, and with the help of Kurt and Darius from Namib diving, I redeployed them at Pelican Point today, whilst numerous Heaviside's dolphins surfaced a few hundred metres away. We also stopped at Aphrodite Beach, to retrieve the third C-POD, which will be re-deployed shortly. A solitary Heaviside's dolphin, about 500 m west of the Aphrodite Beach, was perhaps the first of this species that I have seen in this area, perhaps mirroring the more dispersed pattern of this species in summer, observed by Simon last year. A huge thank you to Gert Le Roux and the staff at Namib Diving for helping me get this done in a short time window.

On another note, the dusky dolphin which live-stranded in Walvis Bay on the 3rd of December generated a bit of press for the Walvis Bay Strandings Network which we have been working to re-invigorate over the past 18 months. John Paterson oversaw the successful refloatation of this animal and by passing the story on to the Namib Times, generated some good press for the Strandings Network and helped to spread the word amongst local people about what action to take, and who to contact, in such a situation.

Interns

2009-12-15T18:59:00.002+02:00

From 2010 onwards we will be accepting interns as part of the Namibian Dolphin Project.

Interns will take part in all project activities and learn a whole host of field and data management skills. Having extra hands to help out will allow us to do more things and get more days at sea and include some extra dimensions to our field research.

For more information on the programme, please see:
www.oceans-research.com

If you're a Namibian biology student and interested in working on the project, please contact me directly to talk about internship and potential student projects.
s_elwen AT yahoo . com

Hydrophones deployed!

2009-09-10T17:28:00.004+02:00

With the hydrophones eventually in hand it has been out primary goal in the last few weeks to get them out to sea. We are happy to announce that they have now been successfully deployed in both Walvis Bay and Luderitz. In Walvis they are deployed at Pelican Point, to investigate Heaviside's dolphin habitat use, and near Aprhodite beach on the east side of the bay where the bottlenose dolphins are frequently seen to rest.

Although we towed Nanuuq all the way through the desert (see pic) from Walvis to Luderitz, the wheel bearings couldn't deal with the dust and we had to leave the boat in Aus (100km from the sea at 1600m altitude!!) for more than week while the problem was sorted out! Luckily we still managed to get the hydrophones deployed in two known Heaviside's hotspots at Shearwater and Guano Bays. We couldn't have done this without the phenomenally generous help of Heiko Metzger of Zeepard tours (see pic) and the knowledge and support of the local Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources scientists, especially Jean-Paul Roux.

Although we're naturally somewhat nervous about the moorings being pulled up, dredged, trawled, entangled in propellers or washed out to sea, we're quite excited about getting the data back from them in a few months time!

August

2009-08-20T08:23:00.005+01:00

Trevor and my student Theo have left, headed back to Pretoria. Theo is doing his honours (4^th) year project looking at the distribution of bottlenose dolphins in the bay, and particularly how their behaviour varies in different areas. It’s still in progress, but by the end of the year we’ll have a much better idea of what’s happening out there.

Ruth has now arrived from the US – with hydrophones (C-PODs) in tow! This is great news for us as they are rather expensive and we’ve been struggling to get them funded. We have eventually been successful through a Matching Grant from the NACOMA project (see links) in a joint proposal with the Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources. These instruments will be used for long term monitoring of the dolphin populations and habitat.

The C-PODs (http://www.chelonia.co.uk/about_the_cpod.htm) are very new instruments and replace the older, simpler T-POD. Last year we borrowed some T-PODs from Simon Northridge at St Andrews University in Scotland to investigate dolphin habitat use at Pelican Point and got some very interesting and unexpected results which differed from the visual observations quite considerably. Ruth has worked closely with the manufacturers for many years and we also managed to get one of the very first C-PODs built to test (although there were many teething issues which thankfully now seem to have been solved). We’ve already put in one at Pelican Point and are really looking forward to what we see with the longer term deployments we’ll get this year. In an exposed environment like Namibia, the PODs are ideal instruments for long term monitoring of habitat use as they can stay in the sea 24 hours a day for months at a time, while we are limited to calm sunny days. We’ll be putting 2 more in the bay in the near future and 2 down in the Lüderitz area.

Other than that, all has been going well. We’ve had a few days off the water with bad weather (or bad decisions on my part, but the weather forecasts here are about as good as throwing a dice) but the data is coming in. Lots of sightings of bottlenose dolphins, including some great jumping and socialing on one day which is always fun to see and photograph. Heaviside's dolphins have been a bit scarce and whales too have been few and far between this year. There have only been 4 humpbacks since I got here and 2 right whales were in the bay last week but we missed them unfortunately.

Mid July 2009

2009-08-11T21:29:00.003+01:00

The winter field season has started again. I’m rather behind in updating the blog as you’ll notice from the date! Have been pretty busy and doing most things on my own for the first few weeks.

In summary – Unfortunately Pedro, who we used last year as a phenomenally generous loan from Pelican Tours, wasn’t available any more. However, the project is making good head way and we’ve managed to secure our own boat this year which makes us more flexible in terms of time spent at sea and when and where we launch. She’s a nice little boat, which I’ve called Nanuuq (which is Inuit for polar bear – I wa trying to avoid the more obvious dolphin based names). As a new acquisition which had been standing for a while in the previous owners driveway, she has unfortunately taken a fair bit of teasing back into shape. New batteries, spark plugs, had to get most of the safety equipment, winch strap broke after seeing too much sun in the last few years, dirty carbs…lots of frustrating little things like that to keep us busy.

Ruth couldn’t make it out for the beginning of the season this year due to work commitments, so I started this season by roping in a colleague of mine from the University of Pretoria, Trevor McIntyre to do some skippering for me. Trevor is doing his PhD work on elephant seal foraging behaviour in the southern ocean. He’s using data from electronic tags attached to the seals on Marion Island. Fascinating stuff and a quite different approach to the type of work we’re doing here, but in many ways answering the same core questions of distribution and ecological interactions.

We had a few good days out to sea in between all the boat mechanicing. There were some really dominant east wind conditions here to start the field season, which made for hot, dry sandy mornings with katabatic winds howling down off the desert. But these conditions always drop in the afternoons as the southerly winds fight back, often resulting in a warm, calm truce out in the bay. Nice for us to get out in the afternoons a few times as its almost impossible during the rest of the year due to the strong winds in the afternoons – and it’s really lovely to be on the water in just a t-shirt in this part of the world!! The Heaviside's dolphins have been as fickle as always, some days they’re all there and super boat friendly, while other days you can barely find a single one.

2009-06-04T19:35:00.003+01:00

Time flies! Already we’re making preparations for our next season, currently planned for mid July until the end of August. During the last few months we’ve been processing data, trying to publish some of our initial findings and working on grant applications. Now having data from a summer and winter season, we are able to look at how the animals behave in different environmental conditions and are starting to build up a more confident picture of how the dolphins are using the bay.

These findings are very relevant at the moment as it has just come to our attention that Namport (the port management authority) are planning a vast expansion to the current harbour for a container terminal. Obviously we’re concerned over the effects this will have on the environment and wildlife in the bay. See details on the Namport webpage and register as an “IAP” (interested or affected party) to voice your concerns:
http://www.namport.com/content/show.php?m=4

On a different note, one of the projects we’re trying to get up and running in Namibia is a “strandings network” which we think is very worthwhile and needed for both conservation and science reasons. You may recall the stranding of a live humpback whale in February and of 19 bottlenose dolphins in the upper lagoon in March. Recently there was an even bigger mass stranding of 50-odd false killer whales just outside Cape Town. The perceived lack of organisation and the decision to euthanise animals which it was not possible to rescue has met with serious criticism from some quarters. However, knowing many of the people who were involved in the Cape Town stranding, I’m confident they made the best decisions possible at the time, it was clearly a very difficult situation . It is important to keep in mind that events such as this, although tragic, are natural occurrences that have been happening for thousands of years without human interference. Either way, we hope that by developing a network of trained people who can coordinate events and make decisions in the event of further live strandings of animals, Walvis Bay residents can be confident of the best response in these situations.

2009-04-07T10:00:00.002+01:00

The 2009 summer field season is now over. I'm going to handing the data over to my student and hopefully not thinking about solving any problems for a day or two :) I'll post updates as our findings come out.

Luderitz was a sweet and successful end to the season for me, which has been rather stressful due to all our funding issues. But all things considered, it worked out pretty well, mainly I must say due to the fantastic support the project has received from the Namibian community. I'm going to try list a few of the key people to whom I really owe a vote of thanks:

Ingo, Isolde, Dougie, and Alan at Pelican Tours - the loan, launching and recovering of Pedro was invaluable for our work in Walvis Bay.

Naude, Megan and Neels Dreyer of Mola Mola Safaris - for being proactive and organising so much relating to the whale and dolphin strandings. For helping us out with cheaper fuel and a venue for our fundraiser talks in Feb.

Catamaran Charters and Eco-Marine kayak tours - for donations to our research costs this season.

NACOMA, and Rod Braby especially - for being so supportive of the project and helping us find ways to rescue out funding situation.

Namibia Nature Foundation, Rachel Malone and Chris Brown - for fighting so hard when our funding was pulled out that they seem to have rescued the situation for us and all the other projects funded through the same granting body.

John and Barbara Paterson for housing us and being so helpful with the strandings and our research all the other little things that we are always needing.

I'm back in Pretoria for a few months trying o process some of the data and publish and few papers, but we're still working on some grant applications, mainly to buy some hydrophones so that when we're back in July for the winter season we'll be running at full tilt. With all the work we've put in over the last year the project is now reasonably set up to run for the next two years.

The two main items that we still need to fund are a set of C-POD hydrophones (grant in progress) and getting our own research boat which will allow us more freedom for longer days and different launch sites and allow us to broaden out goals and work considerably. Anyone reading this who might be able to help us fund or find a research boat that will be used for marine conservation in Namibia - please get in touch with me!

Three days home and I'm looking forward to the winter season when more whales are around. There is very little known about humpback whales from Namibia and we're currently collaborating with the Wildlife Conservation Society who are working in west Africa and with other researchers from the University of Pretoria to share data we collect on this species from Namibia.

2009-04-01T15:01:00.002+02:00

This season is now winding down after a good few ups and downs. And they continue.

We have left Walvis Bay and are currently in Lüderitz for a few days as we hope to develop LDZ into a secondary field site. Due to its latitude and slightly jutting out position on the west coast, the weather here is normally very windy and makes small boat based photographic work like we’re doing in WB almost impossible. If our grant comes through, we hope to deploy some hydrophones as well as run a few visual surveys and collect skin once a season to investigate the structure and separation of dolphin populations between here and WB and later with South Africa.

I’ve never been to Lüderitz before and I’m glad I made it out here this season despite the continued car problems (my car is still stuck in Windhoek!!). It’s a very interesting little town, and is really isolated being ~400km from the border to the south and from WB to the north and about 800km from the capital with very little in between other than vast expanses of sand dunes.

I've put a few pics at the end of this post. A big thanks to Jean Paul Roux of MFMR who, although he’s not in town this week put me in contact with Günter Behrens (who runs yacht tours of the bay). Within hours Günter had helped sort us out with a boat to get us out to the dolphins, and great accommodation right on top of the hill that we’ll hopefully be able to use longer term!

We went out to sea on Tuesday morning trying to squeeze in a few hours before the notorious wind picked up. What can I say? Dolphins galore! I managed to get seven skin samples in an hour and a half. It took us 3 weeks to do that in Walvis Bay – it’s a combination of the dolphins mood (whether they’ll bow ride the boat or not), where they ride the boat (affected by the shape of the boat hull) and the fact that the dolphins here are really abundant and boat friendly! On Monday afternoon we’d been out to Dias Point and Guano Bay to look at the site from shore and saw at least 30 dolphins within a km or two of the land and some animals were only meters from shore – what a fantastic spot for dolphin watching. We also saw a brief feeding frenzy with about 40 gannets diving onto fish and a several groups of Heaviside’s dashing over to join the fun. Other than one or two brief observations of surface feeding in Walvis Bay, I’ve never seen Heaviside’s dolphins do anything that could be described as definite feeding behaviour. In South Africa where I did my PhD research the animals seem to be feeding offshore in deep waters at night and when inshore are mainly socializing and resting.

It’s fascinating seeing all these differences in behaviour along the coast. Unraveling the links between prey type, prey distribution, and competition from seals and other dolphins (for instance, there are no bottlenose dolphins hogging the nearshore environment in Lüderitz or South Africa) and how these factors affect dolphin behaviour is one of our key goals. We hope that by studying these processes will be able to understand the mechanisms behind habitat choice and thus be able to better predict how dolphins are likely to respond to a changing environment.

Pics below of the light house at Diaz Point, a Heaviside's dolphin that was swimming around in the bay just in front of the lighthouse, a rather bad shot of the brief feeding frenzy (it was far away) and a map of the area.

2009-03-18T20:56:00.006+02:00

Walvis Bay - there's always something new. Just as i was getting used to the tame seals, boat friendly pelicans, semi-resident humpback whale (the little scarred individual we first saw on the 17th Feb is still here one month later) and dolphins that feed in hip deep water, something really interesting happens.

On Monday , 19 bottlenose dolphins (roughly 1/4 of our entire study population of 70 odd!!) got themselves stuck up the inner lagoon on a dropping tide and were stranded for the entire day! Where was I? 400km away in Windhoek for the day with car problems! The bottlenose dolphins have been stuck up this lagoon as well as in Sandwich Harbour on several occasions before, but to my knowledge, never this many animals at once.

Megan Dreyer of Mola Mola tours called me with the news and I although I couldn't be there, many other people were able to attend including many of the owners and guides from the tour companies, John and Barbara Paterson, Caroline Weir who has been working with me for a few weeks and Heidi Skrypzeck from the Ministry of Fisheries. The community was amazing - it's great to see so much interest in marine wildlife and we can only hope that this type of event has positive knock on effects for marine conservation initiatives in general. The only downside was that at times there were too many people in the water with the dolphins and more central control and guidance was needed. The development of a more formalised 'strandings network' will definitely help in this regard. Working with the local community to develop the existing network and help with training, communication and networking is one of our goals for this project.

Back to the dolphins - it seems they had trapped themselves in the shallow end of the lagoon on a dropping tide but were otherwise healthy individuals. All the people that attended did a great job of keeping the dolphins cool and wet and generally calm. Of 19 animals identified from photographs (including 3 calves) after the fact, all were released successfully as the tide came back in with the exception of the smallest calf which unfortunately died in the afternoon (probably from stress given the situation). Most animals were reported to be generally very calm. Only one animal was extremely agitated all day and kept falling on it's side and battling to breathe. In the end this animals also was released.

On Tuesday, the day after the main stranding event, one animal (tagged with number 203 by the Ministry during the stranding and given number T-012 from natural marks in our catalogue from last year) restranded far into the lagoon. Unfortunately we were at sea at the time and although we tried to find a group of bottlenose dolphins which had been reported in the bay so that the stranded animal could be released in their vicinity, we were unable to track them down as they seem to have passed around the point into very rough waters. Going through my catalogue now - we identified this animal (T-012) as a mother last year, but I can't match the animal we had identified as its calf to the photographs from Monday (calves aren't very well marked at all so it's very difficult to re-identify them without a continuous set of images as they grow). It is possible that this animal was the mother of the calf that died. Bottlenose dolphins have been reported to show very clear mourning behaviour including carrying dead calves around for several days after they have died and this may explain why it came back to the lagoon after the initial rescue.

Naude Dreyer (Mola Mola / Sandwich Harbour tours) and John Paterson were able to attend and coordinate a rescue. The decision was made to relocate the animal out of the inner lagoon area. With help from Namport (the port authority) the dolphin was moved (across several hundred metres of knee deep mud) using a cargo net, ground sheet and air mattress onto a pickup and moved across to the north side of town an released just north of the harbour breakwater (since we couldn't find any other animals). Upon release, the animal took a minute or so to orient itself and then shot off northwards. Although we were only a mile away at the time of release in Pedro, we were unable to find the dolphin at all and we all hope it won't re-strand. We're still at sea for a few more days this season and I hope we can reward all involved with at least a confirmation of this photo of this dolphin swimming free again.

This evening, (48 hours post stranding), Naude called me to let me know that he had seen 3 tagged animals in a group of 6 down near Sandwich Harbour this morning. They were feeding, chasing fish and moving very rapidly southwards in a fairly rough sea. So, other than the one calf death, it seems that all the other animals are none the worse for wear after their misadventure.

Photos below by Caroline Weir showing a few scenes from the stranding and a shot of animal T-012 (tag 203) that restranded the day after the event and Wally (Mola Mola / Sandwich Harbour tours) looking after the very stressed animal and trying to keep it upright so it could breathe properly.

2009-03-09T20:24:00.008+02:00

Our fundraiser was held on the 3rd at the Anchor's restaurant thanks to the Dreyer's of Mola Mola and went off very well. Thank you to everyone who came, there was quite a nice mixed turnout of skippers, tour boat operators and various other interested people. And a very big thank you to those who supported our research with donations, especially the tour companies who made larger donations - it's really made a difference to the number of sea days we're able to get out there now. Also a thank you to John Paterson, who kindly gave us all ten minutes on his very important work (see the albatross link to right) with sea birds to split the dolphin talks and help support our project!

We were out almost everyday last week trying to make the most of having three of us on the boat. Caroline Weir of Ketos Ecology (www.ketosecology.co.uk) has joined me for a few weeks on her way through to an offshore job in Angola and overlapped with Tess Gridley for a week, who has just left for Plettenberg Bay in SA to collect more bottlenose dolphin whistles with Vic Cockroft's lab down there. Just want to say a quick thanks to Tess for coming through and helping me out and I'm sorry we couldn't get you more whistles - you'll just have to come back in winter when they're more abundant! This was the first external collaboration for the project and I hope we'll be able to support many more in future - I certainly learnt a lot from having an acoustics person on the boat and we're currently working on trying to get a paper out of what we have recorded, so it was a productive visit.

We've had a few good dolphin days out there with the Heaviside's in particular being more abundant in the last week, but they were scarce at the point again today. Saw our first dusky dolphins today in the middle of the bay - just a small fast moving group of 3 which we unfortunately lost quite quickly. In my last post I mentioned the bottlenose feeding in the lagoon. When we launched the next day the dolphins swam right past the slipway and we got in a really long focal follow on them all the way around the south of the bay, around the point and down to Donkey Bay where we left them. They were feeding quite a lot in the bay but largely just pottering along once they got past the point. See photo of them feeding in proximity to some local fishermen and a great shot that Tess got near Donkey Bay of a younger animal jumping.

2009-03-02T22:59:00.004+02:00

What news from Namibia? Thing have been perking up here which is great. The Heaviside's were fairly abundant at the point for a few days over the new moon period, but were difficult to find today again, although it was quite choppy out there.

Highlights of the last few days? On a long survey up to Swakopmund yesterday, we resighted the small, scarred humpback whale I mentioned in my previous post, and only a kilometer from where we saw him on the 17th! I've never known a humpback whale to stay in one place for so long. Although it is 'out of season' now and they should theoretically be feeding in the southern ocean, so it's hard to tell what is motivating them right now. Although there was a large group of birds circling it when we first saw it, we didn't see anything that could be definitively described as feeding behaviour from the whale.

After a slow start to today with a some dark, choppy weather and impossible to find Heaviside's, we managed to track down the bottlenose dolphins (thanks to the tour boat skippers). They were in the inner lagoon, where they had been seen yesterday afternoon. This is right next to the yacht club where we launch and the Raft which is a great local pub with a lovely sea view and wonderfully cheap beer (which, given the current water shortage in Walvis Bay is the cheapest thing in town to drink).

The bottlenose dolphins in Namibia come into ridiculously shallow water. We spent the whole morning sitting inside the inner lagoon in water that was only just deep enough for the boat and trying to get recordings of their whistles without dragging the hydrophone (or the boat) on the sea bed. The lagoon is a RAMSAR site so boats aren't allow to go in - but it's so shallow and full of sandbanks you couldn't even if you wanted, although the dolphins managed it. The dolphins were feeding on some of the hundreds of mullet that were schooling in the lagoon and we got some great shots of them pinning the fish against the shore using a 'pincer' manoeuvre. One or two animals would chase a school of fish along at the surface (it was so shallow there was nowhere else for them to go) and a third animal would circle around to the front. As they the dolphins met, all the fish would jump out the water (see pics). I've never seen such obvious cooperative feeding before so it was a great sighting for me and we got some good data from this group, both behavioural and acoustic.

2009-02-25T20:39:00.006+02:00

The (unfortunate) highlight of this season so far has been our abrupt lack of funding as mentioned in the last post. So the majority of the last week has been spent in coming up with alternate plans on how to raise some capital to keep us on the water until the end of March. Some progress has been made and there is hope of some longer term funding but that will take some time to filter through and it's a long way from in the bag.

In the short term however we've been approaching local companies in the hope that one or a few of them will be interested in supporting marine research and conservation and help us out with fuel money for the rest of this season. I guess the recession isn't all bad news - petrol is half the price I'd expected it to be this year, so the bill is a lot less than it could have been!

On that note - we're having a little fundraiser event next week, Tuesday the 3rd, down at the Anchors at the Walvis Bay yacht club jetty. 18h00-19h00. Tess will be talking about dolphin communication and her PhD work, I'm going to give a little presentation on our work here and John Paterson of the Albatross Task Force will be talking about sea bird conservation in Namibia. So please come along and support local research and conservation initiatives!

In between all the fun and games of emergency fund raising, we've managed to get out to sea a few more days and collect some data - although it's been unfortunately quiet out there (as the tour boat skippers told me last year that it would be). The Heaviside's have been scarce or skittish, and when we found the bottlenose, they have been in very small groups. But we had a nice behavioural follow along the Long beach area over the weekend (they didn't do much - it's not all Blue Planet out there I'm afraid).

It's been making for a quite interesting (if slightly boring) comparison to the distribution patterns we observed during winter last year - most noticeably we're seeing Heaviside's in quite different places. We had a lovely encounter with a single young Heaviside's dolphin off Bird Island on Monday - we sat with the engines off for a full 40mins recording it and it just quietly circled us and checked us out for the entire time. Was a lovely change from the normal noisy sound of outboards and cries of 'it's behind you!' - usually followed by turning the boat around and calls of 'it's still behind you!'. Challenging little animals to photograph sometimes.

2009-02-18T16:05:00.005+02:00

After a long (beautiful) drive across from Johannesburg, we're back in the field at last. It's been a slightly tempestuous start to the season unfortunately with some ups and some downs.

Just as we got to Windhoek we heard that our main sponsor for the season had just pulled out of funding our project at the very last minute (as well as a few others from the same funding round). This is obviously a major concern for the long term future of this project as this money represented core funding for us for the next 2 years. Luckily the Namibia Nature Foundation are fighting our corner (thanks to Rachel Malone on this) and the issue is not yet finally resolved so we are hopeful that the funders will see the light and support our research here.

On a positive note - we got off to a flying start here. A humpback whale live stranded just last week (while we were en route from JHB!) but unfortunately died ~36 hours later despite valiant rescue efforts by many people here in Walvis Bay. We drove down to the whale on Saturday afternoon and took a few measurements and samples and today Naude Dreyer of Mola Mola tours collected some baleen which had fallen out subsequent to our visit.

This season, Tess Gridley a PhD student from the University of St Andrews in Scotland is helping me out in the field for a few weeks while collecting some data for her PhD work. Tess is working with Vincent Janik at St Andrews and doing a comparative study of the signature whistles of bottlenose dolphins in different environments around the world (photo of Tess in her 'hole' listening to her dolphin recordings). We hope she'll get enough data from the bottlenose dolphins here to be able to include this site in her study. So far so good - we encountered a single dolphin off Pelican Point on Monday and he was surprisingly vocal for a single animal and we got some good behavioural data from him as well. This is a component of the project we're trying to build on from our pilot study - looking at how the dolphins use the bay, e.g. if there are some areas that are used primarily for feeding or resting.

Heaviside's are unfortunately rare on the ground at the moment, this may be related to the very warm sea conditions here at the moment (19-22C!) related to the weaker summer winds in the northern Benguela. I can't tell you how lovely it is to have t-shirt weather at sea again after freezing all winter! We did encounter several animals while running north toward Swakopmund this morning including a very small calf, but they were all fairly evasive and very difficult to photograph.

This highlight of today was a very small (~8m, smaller than the boat at least) solitary humpback whale. This is the smallest humpback whale I've ever seen alone and thought it might be an abandoned calf, although the high number of well healed cookie cutter shark bites on him suggest he may be older than I thought.

This year we're using PEDRO again. The use of this boat, a loan from Pelican Tours is absolutely invaluable to us and I'd like to say a big thank you to Ingo and Isolde of Pelican Tours for really going out of their way to help us out: www.pelican-tours.com

We'll continue for the next few days and hope this funding issue clears up in a positive way and we can progress with the project at full speed. There is so much to do here that I really hope we can maintain this project long term. Please let me know if you can think of anyway to help out at all.

2009 - The project continues

2009-01-14T14:54:00.005+02:00

Happy New Year to everyone!

It's been a while since I last updated the blog, but both Ruth and I have been otherwise occupied (processing last year's data, doing our actual jobs, and finding funding to continue this project - research is an expensive exercise). But there is good news - we've managed to secure two sets of funding to continue the project into 2009 and beyond. We'll be expanding our goals slightly and are planning to be back in the field in mid-February. There are still a few issues that need sorting out and we need to be certain the funding will be available in time for the beginning of the field season, but it's all looking positive, and I'll be updating the blog more regularly again.

Unfortunately, several grant applications were unsuccessful (at least partly due to the recession) and at the moment it looks like we're not going to be able to get the hydrophones (C-PODs) we wanted that collect 24hour data on dolphin presence along the coast. The ones we used last year showed some really interesting and unexpected data and we hope we can find the funding to buy some before the winter field season. But at ~£1200 each, they're not cheap (and they also take several months to put together)!

There are a few other items of equipment that the project needs (other than the hydrophones mentioned above), so if you, or your company, would like to support the project - please get in touch with us.

Report finalised

2008-10-29T09:57:00.003+02:00

The report of the 2008 pilot feel season, including the final abundance estimates, acoustic monitoring and habitat survey results is now complete and has been submitted to the relevant bodies. Please contact me if you would like to get a copy.

2008-09-28T12:23:00.002+02:00

My apologies for the lack of recent updates - it's been a busy few months recently.

The report from our first season is nearly ready and I'll be sending it out to all IAP's hopefully by the end of Sept, early Oct latest. If you were at our end of season talks in Walvis you've already seen the majority of it, this will just be a more formal version. If you don't get a copy by mid Oct and would like one, please contact me (leave a comment blog on this or email me s_elwen AT yahoo DOT com).

Unfortunately, we missed the "Moving Sushi" expedition when they passed through Namibia - please take a look at Michael and Linda's great website and blog about their phenomenal trip around Africa and Europe to film and promote marine conservation. Best of luck to you both!
http://www.marine-expedition.co.za/

Other than that - the quest for funding continues, in between everything else, and we've been submitting a few more grants and requests to both conservation and corporate bodies. In addition to our core goals in the Walvis Bay area, we're hoping to extend the work down to Luderitz next season and that comes at a cost, more PODs, more fuel, a need for a 4x4 to get us there... we'll let you know how it develops.

2008-08-11T17:58:00.002+01:00

I have now left Namibia and am currently in Pretoria, South Africa and Ruth is in Cape Cod, USA where we both have work commits for the rest of the year. Analysis of our data from Namibia is ongoing and we plan to have a report of our field season complete by mid-Sept, which we will pass around to interested parties.

Updates on the blog will slow down from now on but I'll keep it updated with news of funding and requests etc. For now - we're looking for a boat for next year and hope to raise funds to buy one and we're also looking for a 4x4 which we need for beach surveys for stranded animals and towing the boat etc. Ideally we'd like to get a vehicle sponsored or loaned for the project.

Once again - thank you to everyone in Namibia who helped us out this year. We feel that we had a great and very successful season and we couldn't have done it without all the help and support we received from everyone there - too many to mention here!

2008-08-02T17:01:00.005+01:00

I'm still in town as I'm trying to sell our little Golf that we were using during the season to get us around town. This week, together with John Paterson of the Albatross Task Force, I got roped into helping NACOMA out with their launch of the new Coastal Awareness Programme. The launch ceremony was held at the Raft Restaurant in Walvis Bay, where the Minister of Environment and Mayor (among others) were speaking. John and I and a few other local paddlers had to kayak past the venue bearing the standards with the new branding. Seemed to be a successful launch and we wish them all the best with the project. The "kayaking with banners" obviously hit it off with the media too as we made two of the papers the next day. All in all, it was an amusing day out and a much needed break from data crunching.

Had nearly 100 pelicans fly over the house this afternoon - a really striking sight, and their wings make a surprising amount of noise too as they fly along.

2008-07-30T10:52:00.005+01:00

Last days. We've been working hard trying to catch up all our data processing before the end of the season and we've also had a few good days out at sea. We've seen the bottlenose in the lagoon for the first time (it's great working in a place where you can occasionally spot your study animals before you even launch the boat!), at Pelican Point and of course up the coast north of town, where they are regularly spotted close to shore.

We had our last day out at sea on Monday, and had a great day out (it's always nice to end on a high note), spotting the bottlenose dolphins, a group of 5 humpback whales well north of town, including a tiny calf probably only days to weeks old and ending with a great few hours with the Heaviside's at the Point, where they were being quite active and boat friendly and I managed snap this photo of them jumping in front of of the the Mola Mola tour boats.

2008-07-30T10:39:00.002+01:00

Apologies for the lack of updates, but it's been a busy few weeks as the season has been coming to a close for us. Last week we held a stranding workshop to try and rebuild interest in collecting data from stranded animals. This was done in collaboration with NACOMA and the Ministry for Fisheries and it was hosted by Heidi Skrypzeck at the Ministry in Swakopmund. Dr Jean-Paul Roux, who was been working with cetaceans and fur seals longer than anyone in Namibia made it up from Ludertiz and gave a great introduction to the area and the history of strandings here.

Stranded cetaceans are fairly rare and Namibia has a very large empty coastline, so to be able to effectively find out what animals are stranding and be able to collect data (species, size, age, genetics, stomach contents etc) from them , there needs to be a system in place for reporting their occurrence. This workshop was a first step in getting people interested and letting them know why strandings are important, what kind of data to collect (location, photographs and length) and who to tell so that there is an opportunity for more in depth sampling and that all the data gets centralised.

We'll put up more data on this in a few days.

2008-07-24T14:27:00.004+01:00

It seems that it's whale season in Namibia! Although we expected to see the odd southern right whale and a few humpbacks passing by on their way north, we've been surprised by the number of animals in the bay. Of course, getting reports from the tour boat skippers makes it much more obvious. Yesterday there were 3 or 4 right whales in the bay, today at least one other, and there have been humpbacks most days in the last two weeks.
The weather has been good and the dolphins are still around. Although the Heaviside's seem to be less active and harder to get to around the full moon, we've kept the data collection ticking over. Today, we eventually managed to get the C-POD (the new proto-type version of the moored hydrophone we have at the Point) into the water and hopefully working this time! New technology is always a challenge, but hopefully it gives us a few good days of data. We had bottlenose and Heaviside's swimming right past it this morning just a few hours after we put it in the water, so that gives us some great visual verification of the data it's collecting.

And lastly - we noticed that the guano platform was getting scraped clean when we passed it the other day. This platform was built in the early 19th century for birds to roost on i the hope that they would generate large amounts of guano in an easy to access location that was safe from predators. There are a few of these platforms scattered along the Namibian coastline, but only the one here in Walvis Bay (you can see it on Google-earth on the north east side of the bay very close to shore if you look). They scrape the guano off and then send it across to shore on a wire pulley system. Quite a job!

2008-07-18T20:25:00.002+01:00

Sadly, we learnt today that Keith Wearne of CETN passed away last night.

Keith has been an active force in conservation here in Walvis Bay for long time, and was especially involved with the birds and RAMSAR site. He was one of our central contacts here in Namibia and was fantastically welcoming to me when I arrived, showing me around and introducing me to all the relevant people and has recently been helping us by letting us use his computer for downloading hydrophone data, and lending us books from his personal library.

We'd like to pass our condolences to Gail and their sons on their loss. Although we didn't know Keith for very long, we'll all miss him.

End of Seaon Talks!

2008-07-16T09:43:00.002+01:00

Please note - if you are in the vicinity please come to our end of season talks. It will be a fairly informal affair with plenty of time for questions and discussion.

Monday 28th July
At the "Anchor's" (Mola Mola's coffee shop at the jetty next to the Yacht basin)
17h30 - 19h00.

Get in touch with us, if you have any questions.

2008-07-16T09:30:00.005+01:00

Despite the wintery misty weather, we've had a productive, if variable, week out there - two days of only 20 odd photographs and two of several hundred photographs! The Heaviside's were fantastically abundant and boat friendly for a few days, even coming to play around the boat while we were sitting on the mooring dealing with the hydrophones, so I had a productive hour with the camera without even switching the engines on. They seem to have returned to their more normal 'indifferent' behaviour again and the windier weather the last two days hasn't helped, as it makes them much harder to find.

The PODs have gone back in and come back out as we're still having some teething problems with the newer C-POD's hardware, but the older T-POD is collecting some good data out there.

Ruth and Joaquina setting up the PODs ready for deployment.

One of Jeanne Meintjies customers having a great paddle in a very aptly named boat.

2008-07-08T21:00:00.004+01:00

We've been trying to get the database up to date, but it's a running battle as we're collecting data all the time. But currently - and this is a rough and unfiltered count, we've identified 58 Heaviside's dolphins and 46 bottlenose dolphins. This doesn't mean that's how many there are - far from it, it's simply the number we've been able to photograph and identify.

The big difference between the two species is that we keep seeing more or less the same bottlenose dolphins and have identified very few new animals since mid-June. Whereas, the Heaviside's dolphin catalogue continues to grow. They're much harder to photograph and not nearly as well marked.

I've put up pictures below of our two "star performers": T-029 a bottlenose that we've see a grand total of 8 out of the 13 days that we've seen bottlenose so far and C-022, a very boat friendly and photogenic Heaviside's dolphin that we've now seen on 6 different days!
Unfortunately, C-022's distinctive scarring pattern is already starting to fade so we can only use these scars for a short period. The deeper notches found in the trailing edge of some dolphins are much more stable and can be used over several years to identify animals.
The difference in how "boat friendly" individual dolphins are is a problem for the mark-recapture analysis we're trying to do as, unless we can account for it, we will be severely biasing the resulting abundance estimate (downwards) because we are oversampling some members of the population and undersampling others which are less boat friendly. The best way around this is try to 'capture' the entire population. So...we're back out tomorrow.

2008-07-08T20:45:00.003+01:00

Despite the teething problems we've been having with the T-PODs and C-PODs, things have been progressing well and we've spent most of our time recently out at Pelican Point due to putting the PODs in and out.

Highlights: Despite being a little more choppy than usual due to a northerly wind, the 5th was a nice day out with lots of activity - we had another encounter with a humpback whale off the Point; there several seals were feeding on some large fish out there as well as a few white chinned petrels in the area which we haven't seen too often.

Although the bottlenose dolphins seem a little harder to find this week, we managed an encounter off the Point today (8th) with 5 of them and Mike Lloyd of Mola Mola got a great shot from the beach of us following them down the coast. We were being patient and slowly following them in the hope that they would move out of the surf zone so we could photograph their other side!

2008-07-06T11:54:00.002+01:00

On Thursday we hauled out the T-PODs which had been sitting of Pelican Point for a week, where we see Heaviside's dolphins on a daily basis, and bottlenose dolphins occasionally.

The T-POD (www.chelonia.co.uk) is a self-contained, submersible hydrophone and computer which recognises and logs the high-frequency clicks made by dolphins. These "echolocation" clicks are used by dolphins (and porpoises) to explore their environment, find prey and communicate.

This screenshot from the programme TPOD.exe shows a 4-second period in the early morning of June 30th. These clicks were recorded in the frequency range between 90 and 130 kHz, indicating that they are clicks from Heaviside's dolphins. Time is shown on the x-axis and the y-axis shows Pulse Repetition Frequency, or click rate. The red and yellow lines probably represent clicks from at least 2 dolphins, since one series of clicks appears to be increasing in speed, whilst another series (the yellow and red line on the bottom right of the screen) is slower.

This is the first use of T-PODs to acoustically monitor Heaviside's dolphins! Watch this space for developments and more detailed findings......

Many thanks to Dr Simon Northridge at the University of St. Andrews for the loan of this equipment.

2008-07-01T22:06:00.003+01:00

After nearly a month's worth of various postal and custom delays, we eventually managed to get the T-PODs out at sea on Sunday. We dropped two in off Pelican Point where the density of Heaviside's dolphins is the highest. These two will be in together for a calibration period of a week, to make sure they're receiving at the same level, then we'll move one over to near Bird Island where the bottlenose dolphins are regularly seen. We managed to have a generally productive day on the water and also got some good photo-ID data from Heaviside's and a group of bottlenose dolphins which were at the Point. Both species swam very close to the T-PODs while we were there providing us with a great visual confirmation for the acoustic data.

We're taking most of this week off to take care of a few logistic issues but will be back on the water on Friday

2008-06-25T19:03:00.005+01:00

Today was an interesting day. We came across the bottlenose dolphins feeding towards the south of the lagoon, then later a different subgroup further north and then at the end of the day when we came in, we found them again, in the yacht basin right where we launch the boat! The feeding is interesting to watch as the dolphins do a lot of dashing back and forth and surface-rushing to chase fish. Whenever we have seen dolphins feeding so far there have also been young seals feeding alongside, although usually in a tighter cluster, and with more fish leaping out in front of them. They're very difficult to photograph when they're feeding and it takes a lot of patience to get the ID shots we need, although it's great now that we're starting to identify individuals by eye. While looking through the photos of the day just now, I discovered one animal with a very deep scratch which we hadn't noticed while at sea (see photo).

The Heaviside's were almost absent from the point today for the first time, with only a handful sighted. But the big excitement of the day was that killer whales were seen by one of the tour boats. After all the boats had had a look at them, we managed to grab a few ID shots as they were moving offshore. I've cropped in a few and posted them below, along with a shot of a Caspian tern which was feeding alongside the bottlenose dolphins.

2008-06-23T22:03:00.003+01:00

Data collection has been continuing along in the last week and we've been putting together the the bottlenose dolphin catalogue - so far we've identified 38 individuals (although there are some repeats in that as 12 animals were only identified from one side).
Unfortunately, we've been held up slightly by having some engine problems with the boat, which Ingo has been great about getting sorted out - thanks so much for that. We've used the opportunity to get on some of the tour boats to collect some opportunistic photographs. Thanks to Levo Tours and Mola Mola for hosting us. While on Levo's Antie, Ruth and Joaquina came across these 2 humpback whales near Pelican Point, which were rather popular with the tour boats.

2008-06-17T08:42:00.004+01:00

Data collection is now progressing well and we've had 6 dedicated research trips on Pedro already. We've encountered Heavside's dolphins (or Benguela dolphins as many people call them here) on all of those and bottlenose on 4 of them (with some re-sightings already). However, all encounters are not equal and some days the Heaviside's dolphins can be very difficult to approach for photography.

We're trying to stay on top of the data processing by grading our images for quality and picking out the distinctive animals as we go. Only good quality photographs of well marked animals will be used in the mark-recapture calculations. This means fins need to be well focused, close up, and perpendicular to the camera to minimise the chances of mis-identifying any animals. I've put a few example photographs below of the types of natural-marks we use to identify animals. The bits of missing fin are mainly the result of interactions with other animals, they never heal and can be used to identify individuals for many years (if they don't get disguised by the addition of too many more marks!). These images are not all of a good enough quality for abundance estimates - but I've included a few of the very well marked ones we've seen in the last week, just to show that they're out there. As you can see, the Heaviside's (left column) are not nearly as well marked as some of the bottlenose fins (right column). (For scale - the Heaviside's fins are actually much smaller than those of the bottlenose).

2008-06-11T19:40:00.004+01:00

Went out to the Point today in the hope of surveying to the south when the mist lifted but it only lifted quite late so we just stuck around and worked the Heaviside's for several hours. They were being particularly frustrating today, diving whenever we got near them, hardly ever coming close to the boat, changing direction and splitting up all the time. On a positive note - there were a few nicely marked ones out there which was gratifying as the first few I'd photographed from the Mola Mola tour boats all had perfectly clean identical fins. The dolphins seem to wake up at about 10am when the tour boats arrive and the sun comes out and a few were leaping about.

Marko on Silverwind spotted a young humpback whale just off the point and after the tour boats left for home we followed it for a while and got a few ID shots for our colleagues working on the species in Angola, Gabon and South Africa.

2008-06-11T19:10:00.005+01:00

Tuesday was a fantastically sunny calm day and we took Pedro for a survey most of the way to Swakopmund before hitting mist and turning back to the point. After working with a few evasive Heaviside's, we encountered a great group of bottlenose dolphins which the tour boats had spotted.

The majority of the time, the dolphins were in very close to shore and appeared to be feeding, with lots of chasing up and down the shore line with occasional small fish jumping. The seals were also getting in on the act and there were always a few with or very close to the dolphins chasing things about just under the surface.
Interestingly, there were frequently Heaviside's dolphins nearby - they didn't exhibit anything that was obvious feeding behaviour, and the two species just seemed to ignore each other.

The dolphins were amazingly close to the shore - I kept expecting them to strand themselves on the beach chasing the fish, but they never did. Apparently this is quite common behaviour for them around here in the areas were there is little wave action.

2008-06-09T19:45:00.006+01:00

The ball is rolling! Ruth arrived on Thursday and Joaquina on Friday and we got almost straight out to sea. We tried one of the smaller boats from NDMS on Saturday but it was unfortunately a little too small for the type of work we are trying to do and the areas we need to visit outside the bay, so it was a rather short day but Sunday was more successful..

Ingo, of Pelican Charters has generously offered us the use of his ex-tour boat Pedro, which is fairly large and very safe and a great option for us at the moment. Sunday we took Pedro for our first full working day as a team and spent several hours with the Heaviside's at the Point. Unfortunately, they were being rather shy and the misty weather didn't help with photography, but that's the nature of the work. We narrowly missed finding the bottlenose dolphins but hope to get them next trip. All in all, it was great being out there and tomorrow we're out again. The only downside of working on Pedro is that the seals kept jumping aboard expecting to be fed. It's a strange feeling trying to work with a 350kg bull fur seal standing behind you watching you work. We're hoping they'll eventually dehabituate to this particular boat as they seem pretty well tuned as to the difference between the tour boats.

We're still going out on the tour boats in between research trips to gather data on their movements in the area and interactions with animals in the bay. Thanks to Marko of Catamaran Charters who took out Ruth and Joaquina today while I spent the day standing in queues at the Traffic department dealing with the necessary bureaucracy involved with buying an old Golf to run us around town. Ruth managed to get some nice photos of Heaviside's bowriding Silverwind today.

First team photo: Ruth, Joaquina and Simon

2008-06-04T18:28:00.007+01:00

Went out on one of the Mola Mola boats again today (thanks Neels and Megan) to try get a few bottlenose photos and they have been seen in the bay recently. It was a beautiful day, sunny and calm and we found them just north of town and I managed to get a good few ID's from them. Also nabbed a few pelican and skua shots while out there. The Heaviside's at the point were also behaving and I managed to get a few good shots of them, including a few marked individuals which is great for the beginning of the catalogue. Ruth arrives tomorrow and Joaquina on Friday so if the boat is ready we'll be out there on the weekend and data collection starts full time.
For more photos, look at : http://picasaweb.google.com/simonelwenwork/Namibia2008

2008-06-03T17:09:00.002+01:00

The project really needs a vehicle to move us and the boats around town and I've been following a few leads and putting forward some proposals in this regard. If you know anyone who can help, please get in touch.

Another big thank you to Alan Louw, Flossie Janse van Rensburg and Andries Prinsloo of Namib Diving and Marine for their help in getting us a boat.

2008-06-03T16:49:00.007+01:00

Managed to get our own boat out to sea at last. Namib Diving and Marine Services (NDMS) have been really supportive of the project and have been trying to find boats that are both suitable and fuel efficient. We took their aluminium demo boat for a run on Sunday to see if it was right for us (it has rear tiller-arm steering, I'd normally prefer a boat with a centre console that you can drive standing up to make searching and dealing with surf conditions easier). However it turned out to be a great stable design that is easy to stand in for both searching and photography and quite fuel efficient too.

Ran up the coast away and then out to the point where we encountered some Heaviside's dolphins and a group of bottlenose.
Unfortunately, the bottlenose were bow riding a tour boat away from us and I didn't want to chase them. Working around the tour boats is going to be a real challenge for us in the coming months.

2008-05-31T17:19:00.005+01:00

It's been a bit of a slow week compared to last. Met with our representatives (Heidi Skrypzeck & Hannes Holtzhausen) at the Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources on Tuesday to discuss the project and goals. They're very supportive of us and Heidi will be joining us at sea when she can. Then met with Rod Braby of NACOMA who's been working around the Namibian coast for years (including piloting the right whale surveys) and had many useful insights to share on the local dolphin populations. The rest of the week was more mundane, looking at cars and a few other boat options and trying to convince the bank to let me open an account here to make financial issues a little easier.

A black backed jackal that we saw on the way out to Pelican Point on Monday.

2008-05-27T16:59:00.009+01:00

Monday 26th I went on a kayak trip with Jeanne Meintjies of Eco-Marine Kayak tours. Jeanne has been running these tours since the 90's and is one of the older companies in town. Due to the size of the bay, the kayaks are driven out to the peninsula from where the paddle runs out to the tip of Pelican Point.

The paddle passes a small seal colony where the juvenile seals are extremely playful and very interested in the kayaks and paddles .

Although we saw a scattered group of Heaviside's at the point where I've seen them on the previous two outings, they weren't particularly 'friendly' towards the kayaks and I wasn't prepared to risk my camera this early in the season for a few poor quality ID shots.

In the afternoon Keith Wearne took me across the lagoon and salt pans by car to to look around, check up on the local bird populations (which Keith is involve in counting) and to look at the skeleton of a pygmy right whale which had stranded in the shallows. Someone had wanted the bones, so Niels Dreyer (Mola Mola) had put fencing around the carcass to allow it to rot clean without washing away. Unfortunately no body has looked at it since and the bones have pretty much rotted away. We did get to see some nice birds on the way there and back including some baby flamingos which are beginning to arrive from further north.

2008-05-25T21:54:00.000+01:00

Sunday 25th. I went out with Mola Mola cruises again today. Being a weekend, the number of tourists and boats were considerably higher than on Friday's trip. Most of the boats here run a very similar route, clockwise around the bay stopping at the derelict Russian trawlers, the oyster farms, seal colonies, the lighthouse and then ending at the tip of Pelican Point where Heaviside's dolphins are commonly found.

There were at least 8 - 10 boats on the water and at least 4 near us at any time throughout the trip (3-4 hours) and at the point, several boats would cluster around a group of Heaviside's dolphins if they were jumping or being boat friendly and bow-riding.

As you can see from the photograph, the density of boats around the dolphins was quite striking at times. This is likely to have some effect on the natural behavioural patterns of the animals and several clients on board the boat commented negatively on the situation.

2008-05-25T21:22:00.000+01:00

Since I've been here I've been trying to gather information about any stranded whales and dolphins from everyone I meet. Beach cast animals provide a wealth of information to researchers, especially for those species that are very poorly known.

Naude Dreyer (of Mola Mola tours) told me of a group of bottlenose dolphins that had stranded in the WB lagoon some time ago and the carcass of one animal was still there.

I went down to the location (near the salt pans) with Keith Wearne on Saturday and we managed to find the remains, it had clearly been there a while and was fairly dessicated. We managed to recover the skull, one tooth and a few other bone fragments. These will be useful for confirming the species from skull morphometrics, the age of the animal from the tooth and DNA can be collected from the bones if needed.

We will continue to try to collect as much information as possible on stranded cetaceans (both current and historic) during our field season.

2008-05-23T22:07:00.001+01:00

Thursday - first sea day in Walvis Bay. I went out with Mola Mola tours (www.mola-namibia.com) on one of their commercial trips to see what they do, where they work and to start to get a feel for the sea around here.

It was quite a different experience to anything I've seen before in either South Africa or the UK. There are nearly 30 boats in total working in the bay (concerns about the potential effects of this on the dolphins are one of the reasons we're running this project), and several of the other local species are very habituated to the boats.

There are a group of about 5-8 seals which are effectively trained to feed off the boats (and seem to behave remarkably well for wild animals) and the pelicans, sea gulls and some skua's will come to take fish from the hand.

We did see a small group of Heaviside's dolphins just off Pelican Point, but there is a large sulphur eruption in the bay at the moment which has caused the majority of marine life in the bay to die off or move away from the area. The local oyster farm has had an 80% die off and there are almost no fish being seen locally. This is apparently one of the largest sulphur blooms in many years.

For more pictures from this day, look at: http://picasaweb.google.com/simonelwenwork/Namibia2008

2008-05-23T18:37:00.000+01:00

The season begins!!

I have now arrived in Walvis Bay (..WB) and have been welcomed by our hosts John and Barbara Paterson (along with Spliff and Widget the dogs, and Jacob the parrot). John runs the Albatross Task Force in Namibia for RSPB/Birdlife (http://www.savethealbatross.net/) and Barbara is an ecological modeler working for MaRe at University of Cape Town.

Spliff, the dog

It's been a busy week, starting with meetings in Windhoek with staff at the Namibian Nature Foundation (www.nnf.org.na) who are suporting this project and Joaquina Eduardo, a student at U. Nam who will be joining the team this season.

I arrived in WB on Tuesday evening after dark so didn't get much chance to look around, but have been gradually finding my feet. The house is great (pictured left, complete with bicycle courtesy of Jeanne at Eco-marine kayak tours).

I plan to spend these first two weeks here before the rest of the team arrives meeting the relevant stakeholders, organising accommodation, vehicles and boats, getting familiar with the area and animals here etc, etc. Got off to a good start on Wednesday, by meeting up with Keith Wearne, who chairs the Coastal Environment Trust of Namibian (http://www.nnf.org.na/CETN/index.htm) and is our main local contact. Keith has been fantastically welcoming and has really gone out of his way to introduce me to everyone I need to meet and to show me around town. Among the more mundane logistic tasks of Wednesday I met two of the local ecotour operators, Mola Mola safari's and Eco-Marine Kayak tours, both of whom have been very supportive of our project and have kindly offered to take me out to help me get a feel for what they're doing and as well as the local sea conditions.

The very welcoming dolphin themed loo seat at home.. :)

First set up of the blog

2008-04-22T16:55:00.000+01:00

April 22, 2008. I am now beginning to work full time on the Namibian dolphin project which I have spent a large part of the last 8 months setting up. I will be leaving Scotland for southern Africa on the 10th May

So far, setting up is going well. Enough funding has been secured to cover the basic field costs for the winter season. Housing and flights are sorted out for both myself and my colleague Ruth Leeney. The buying and borrowing of equipment is coming along and we have a student interested in joining us for the season.