The NIMPA surveys - Part II

The surveys begin... by Tess Gridley

After securing the funding, compiling the hydrophone in Scotland (thank you Rene and Ricardo Antunes!), learning to use the software, driving 2000km to Namibia and eventually receiving the hydrophone (after a very frustrating 2 week delay) and bench testing in the lab, we finally embarked on our first survey last Thursday. 

Rene trying to figure our where to beging unravelling the hydrophone:

With nervous anticipation we loaded the 400 meter hydrophone onto our new research vessel the !Anichab and headed out to sea. What they don't tell you in the instruction book is just how long it takes to unravel 400 meters of hydrophone.. ..Thirty minutes and three safety lines later our hydrophone was successfully deployed (along with several peoples breakfasts!) and we were ready to start our acoustic surveys.

A very happy with Rene, with 400m of fully functioning hydrophon deployed off the back of the !Anichab

At first the weather was pretty good, and the visual team were doing considerably better than the acoustics team at a) spotting dolphins and b) not throwing up.. but after a while, and rather predictably the swell picked up, the mist thickened and acoustic methods were really our only hope of detecting any life out there in the misty Benguela. Though all credit has to go to JP Roux who carried on looking for cetaceans and birds regardless of the < 200 m visibility. 

Our survey lines took us out to the shelf edge at a water depth of 200 m +.  On the way out we encountered one lonely Heaviside's dolphin, in 120 meters water depth something which is either rare or rarely reported (only further research will tell.. :-)) . To our surprise, and several shouts from Simon, we also spotted 3 largish baleen whales, from the pictures  we think are likely to be sei whales. Which didnt hangaround for too long and may well have been feeding. Quite an unusual sighting and not what we had expected. 

  

By the end of the survey, we had also detected several Heaviside's dolphins and a large school of dusky dolphins.. Most importantly, the acoustic system was up and running nicely, and detecting animals that were not spotted by our visual observers! 

So what next...? This is only the tip of the iceberg.. Surveys will continue to run until June this year and intermittently for the next two years at least. We hope to build up information on Heaviside's and dusky dolphin habitat use patterns, as well as much needed information on a whole range of species out there in the Benguela. We hope that this information can be integrated into conservation and management plans and will hopefully help to protect vulnerable populations of marine top predators.. So watch this space, as we will be regularly updating this blog on the progress of the NIMPA Visual and Acoustic surveys !

The NIMPA surveys - Part I

Around this time last year we were granted funds through the Nedbank Go Green Fund to purchase an acoustic array for surveys of the Namibian Islands Marine Protected Area, near Luderitz. This is basically a series of hydrophones (underwater microphones) which are towed behind a research vessel and can detect the naturally occurring sounds produced by whales and dolphins. Using acoustic methods in surveys of marine mammal distribution and relative abundance can greatly increase the chances of detection and optimise survey time and funds.  With the strong winds and swell experienced in southern Namibia, we felt like acoustic methods were the best way to study the area and were thrilled to get the chance to start this work.

We planned this research in collaboration with Dr JP Roux of the Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources and soon after began working with Rene Swift (University of St Andrews Sea Mammal Research Unit, UK) to design the most appropriate hydrophone for our needs and budget. 

Through a SCOR visiting fellow grant, Rene was able to visit South African and Namibia to run training in the use of PAMGUARD software which we are using throughout these surveys.  Training in South Africa took place over two days (23-24th Feb) and involved participants from the Uni. Pretoria's Mammal Research Institute, SANBI and Namibian Dolphin Project and was a great success. SANBI (South African National Biodiversity Institute) are using PAMGUARD to study the distribution and abundance of frogs on Table Mountain, showing how useful acoustic methods can be to biologists.

Feb 2012 - new field season beginning

During February, Ruth has been up in Walvis Bay running a MarWise course - this is a training and education course aimed at ocean users interacting with marine mammals - see her blog about it here.

Simon and Tess have been down in Cape Town, writing papers, writing grant applications for more funding, finding students and volunteers, buying the relevant equipment, building the new website and just generally sorting out a million little logistical challenges for the next field season.

We'll be heading up to Namibia by the end of Feb to start the new Nedbank Go Green funded project surveying the Namibian Islands Marine Protected Area in conjunction with the Ministry of Marine Resources and Fisheries.

In other news - YAMAHA have supported the Project by providing us with new 7-HP 4-stroke motors at cost price - this is very generous of them and they are currently being shipped to Namibia to be fitted for free by Skeleton Coast Yamaha.  Getting new engines for the boat will make a huge difference to the project - increased reliability and the ability to travel further will mean more data collected in more areas, 4-stroke motors are also quieter and more fuel efficient which will make a big difference to our pollution levels and carbon footprint on the water!   So a BIG thank you to both Yamaha and Skeleton Coast Marine!

One minor glitch in the plan is that cost price is still far from free. The NDP is looking for additional funding to cover some of the R150 000 for the motors.  If you are interested in supporting marine research and conservation (as a person or a company) - get in touch.  Your branding on our brand new Yamaha motors will look great!

Latest news - Dec 2011

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

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..

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

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.