With a little help from our friends..

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

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

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....

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

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!

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

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.