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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.