Today we journeyed about 20 miles offshore of the coast of Georgia to retrieve our three bottom-mounted hydrophones. I was really nervous about this trip and everything that could go wrong. We built these moorings ourselves out of concrete, rebar and used car tires and PVC pipe, and zip-tied and electrical-taped our instruments to the PVC. In January, we tossed the mooring off the side of a boat and marked the latitude and longitude from the boat's GPS. Other than marking the GPS, we had no other way to locate or retrieve these instruments - no surface buoy marking the surface, no pinger or acoustic release to help us find them, nothing. We returned, 7 months later, with a fantastic dive team on Skidaway's R/V Blanton. When the boat hit the right latitude and longitude, we dropped a mushroom anchor with a buoy off the side of the boat, then the dive team used that buoy line to head to the seafloor and search for our instruments. To my surprise and delight, the visibility was unusually good and the divers found the moorings at each of the 3 sites within minutes! They cut through the tape and zip ties and brought our instruments, and the precious acoustic data they hold, to the surface. Now it's time to analyze the data! I was invited to sail on the brigantine Corwith Cramer over the last week as part of the Sea Education Association's North Atlantic Right Whale symposium. I met the ship at Brooklyn Harbor in NYC, and we sailed for a week up the Long Island Sound, past Rhode Island's Block Island wind farm, and through the canal into Cape Cod Bay and around Stellwagen Bank. We then brought the ship to her home port at Woods Hole, MA. During the trip, we put hydrophones in the water and listened for whales and dolphins. I also gave a talk on the quarter deck about right whales, prey and climate change while the ship was hove to. What a fantastic adventure, and I hope I'll be able to sail on the Corwith Cramer again one day! Today there was really nice coverage in The State newspaper of our Slocum glider mission to listen for right whales off the coast of Georgia this winter. Although our mission only lasted 2 weeks due to mechanical issues, we recorded 8 "possible detections" of right whales in real-time and these detections were shared on Robots4Whales and WhaleMap. We are planning another glider mission during the winter of 2023-2024! Today USC hosted Discovery Day today for undergrad and grad students to present their research. Our lab had 5 students presenting posters about their research. Amadi presented an update to her research on right whale / human interactions and her right whale news project. Kira presented on a meta-analysis of research conducted to assess body condition in cetaceans. Jasmine presented an update on her research with Kira on gray whale body condition in the Puget Sound. Alyson presented her Honors Thesis tagging sharks in the Galapagos. Kaitlyn presented her creative Honors Thesis developing an educational podcast about the National Estuarine Research Reserve. Alyson and Kaitlyn both won first place for best poster in their respective categories! We celebrated the conference and the end of the year with a lab dinner! This week, National Public Radio posted a series of stories about how Greenland ice melt affects Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which in turn impacts right whale foraging and distribution. Our lab's research is featured in a gorgeous scroll-through article, as well as the Morning Edition news story and a Short Wave podcast. The reporting for these stories is excellent, taking the audience through the impacts of ice melt on physical oceanography, ecology and finally conservation. Two graduate students from our lab won awards at the SEOE Graduate Award ceremony today. Kira Telford received an award for Outstanding MEERM Thesis based on her research developing a new metric to assess gray whale body condition. Amadi received the Outstanding Teaching Award in Marine Science for her work as a teaching assistant for MSCI 311 over the past two years. Both of these awards are extremely well deserved and come with $500 (and a comically large check). Congratulations to Kira and Amadi!! Maddie Rich became a NOAA Hollings Scholar, which is a fantastic program that provides a 2-year scholarship and a summer internship with NOAA after her junior year. Great job Maddie!
A series of strong right whale up-calls that we detected on the Norfolk buoy just before midnight on 4/5/23 caused NOAA to set up a temporary slow zone around the port. The details of the slow zone can be viewed on WhaleMap. In other right whale news, Woods Hole collected some great video of a mother right whale (named Spindle) nursing her calf in Cape Cod Bay 2 weeks ago! PhD student Amadi Afua Sefah-Twerefour received two prestigious honors this month! Amadi was accepted into the Grace Jordan McFadden Professor's Program - a highly competitive program that provides a $30,000 fellowship as well as mentorship and professionalization support. The goal of this program is to diversify the future professoriate. Amadi also received the GSA Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Assistant Award, which is awarded to only one graduate student per year across all 13 colleges at USC. These awards are extremely well deserved, and we are so proud of Amadi! In January we collaborated with Dr. Catherine Edwards at Skidaway Institute of Oceanography to deploy a Slocum glider off the coast of Georgia. This glider is equipped with a DMON2 hydrophone to listen for right whales in real-time. Although we had to abort the mission after two weeks due to mechanical malfunctions, the glider made 8 possible detections of right whales during the peak of the calving season. During the mission period, the glider's detections provided coverage close to the busy port of Savannah and during times when visual surveys were not available. The glider also made possible detections of sei and humpback whales. A summary of the acoustic detections can be found on Robots4Whales and this work was highlighted in a USC news article. |
AuthorErin Meyer-Gutbrod is an Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina. Her lab researches human impacts to marine ecosysems. Archives
April 2024
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