The winter calving season has had some serious highs and lows. So far, 19 calves have been identified during the 2023-2024 season. This includes a newborn calf of Palmetto (Eg #1970) sighted off Hilton Head Island, SC. Palmetto is known for giving birth off SC! Unfortunately, 4 of these calves are either dead or likely to be dead, and 3 additional deaths of females, including the mother of a newborn, have occurred in the past month, from ship strikes and entanglement. The first calf of the season and its mother Juno (Eg #1612) were spotted off Georgetown, SC, on Nov. 28, 2023. On Jan. 3, 2024, the same calf was spotted off Edisto island, SC, with severe wounds from a boat propeller, and the calf's carcass washed up Cumberland Island, GA on Mar. 3, 2024. On Jan. 5, 2024, a mother (Eg #3780) was spotted without her newborn calf. Although nothing is known about the status of the calf or the reason for the separation, this is most likely an indicator that the calf did not survive. On Jan. 14, 2024, Half Note (Eg #1301), was seen without her newborn calf. The calf has most likely died from failure to thrive, as it was observed earlier in the season looking very thin, and the mother Half Note has a history of reduced ability to nurse her young. On Jan. 28, 2024, a 3-year-old female (Eg # 5120) killed by an entanglement washed up on Martha’s Vineyard, MA, and the rope collected during necropsy carried purple zip tie markings from the Maine lobster fishery. The Maine lobster fishery was required to utilize gear markings following a 2020 rule for state waters and a 2021 rule for federal waters. On Feb. 13, a 1-year-old female carcass (calf of Eg#4340, Pilgrim) was found off Savannah, GA with evidence of vessel strike. On Mar. 30, 2024, the carcass of adult female (Eg#1950) was found off the coast of Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge, VA, and necropsy confirmed that the cause of death was a vessel strike. This whale was the mother of a newborn calf (first spotted Jan. 11, 2024), who is not expected to survive without its mother. If you see a stranded whale, please use the stranding hotline 866-755-6622 from Maine to Virginia and 1-877-WHALE-HELP from North Carolina to Florida to report all sightings so the stradings network can respond as soon as possible. Today our paper was published on "The role of professional societies in advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and accessibility in the fields of coastal and ocean science" in Oceanography magazine's special issue on building diversity, equity and inclusion. In this article, we examine 12 functional services that professional societies provide to the field, and how each service can be used to advance DEI goals. We provide examples of specific actions that ocean-themed societies have taken to advance these goals, and also provide some suggestions for how societies can continue to make improvements in the field. For example, The Oceanography Society maintains a fully open access journal and has recently formed the JEDI committee. However, TOS nominees and winners of honors and awards have historically been homogenous, so TOS is renovating the awards, the nomination process and the criteria, in the hopes of creating a more diverse and equitable honors program. Right whale up-calls were detected on our Norfolk buoy this morning! These detections triggered a voluntary slow zone that will last for 15 days called the "E Virginia Beach Slow Zone". A mom-calf pair were spotted off the coast of South Carolina last week. It's been a great start to the right whale migration season! To keep up with their movements, check out WhaleMap and Robots4Whales. Today Kira Telford defended her MEERM thesis! She had two chapters that she presented during her talk. The first chapter was called "Assessing the Assessments: A Meta-analysis of Body Condition Methods Across Cetacean Taxa". The second chapter was "How Robust is Eschrichtius robustus? A Novel Photographic Index of Body Condition from boat-based photographs of Gray Whales". Lab mates, colleagues and collaborators at the Cascadia Research Collective cheered her on, and we celebrated afterwards with pizza and champagne. Way to go, Kira!! Today, Amadi was invited to serve as a Women & Whales panelist at the Grays Reef National Marine Sanctuary Ocean Discovery Center in Savannah, Georgia. The panel discussion took place after a public screening of the documentary "Saving the Right Whale". Amadi answered public questions, and used this opportunity to share her expertise on the specific threats that right whales face when they migrate to their Southeast US calving ground. This was a fantastic opportunity to provide public education and outreach on a topic that is extremely relevant to the people who live in coastal Georgia! It was a super busy week for our lab at the annual North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium meeting in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This is a fantastic opportunity to spend time with colleagues and collaborators that are hyper-focused on right whale efforts, and to learn about new projects in the field. We had a really fun and productive meeting. Abby presented a poster on her movement model, which excited several of the seasoned researchers because it provides an opportunity to model whale presence when detection efforts are unavailable. Amadi presented a poster about her news project, which will be a completely new way of thinking about public perception of this species and the motivation behind policy implementation. Emily presented a poster looking at the co-occurrence of right whale sightings and AIS vessel detections across the full right whale habitat, which gives a valuable, broad overview of vessel strike risk. Erin gave a talk summarizing the National Academy of Sciences report on potential impacts of wind turbines on the right whale prey environment. There were so many other great presentations and conversations, including a showing of the play "Between Breaths" at Neptune Theater. Can't wait for next year's meeting! This year Erin served on a National Academy of Sciences committee to address the "Evaluation of Hydrodynamic Modeling and Implications for Offshore Wind Development: Nantucket Shoals". After hosting workshops, inviting expert speakers and having several meetings in Washington DC, the committee has completed the report, entitled: "Potential Hydrodynamic Impacts of Offshore Wind Energy on Nantucket Shoals Regional Ecology: An Evaluation from Wind to Whales". Our report indicates that we lack both the observations around turbines and the modeling work needed to determine how turbines might impact the productivity, distribution and aggregation of copepods that right whales feed on. We provide recommendations to enable scientists to determine what impacts might occur, if any, on the prey field. We hosted a number of webinars and presentations to disseminate our results to federal agencies, scientific communities and the general public, including this presentation that is available online. This week, we brought the students from my undergraduate class "Biology of Marine Organisms" out to our Baruch Marine Field Laboratory to conduct a series of experiments. The class is big enough (almost 80 students) that we split the class into 3 groups and bring them down on 3 consecutive days. At Baruch, the students run transects through the salt marsh to count fiddler crab burrows, use a scope to measure marsh elevation changes, and collect sediment samples that they bring back to the lab to determine how much microalgae (chlorophyll) is in the sediment. Students also go out on the boardwalk to conduct a secretive marshbird playback experiment. We play bird calls on a loud speaker, then listen quietly to see if any real marsh birds, like the least bittern or the clapper rail, respond to the calls. The last day of the trip was rainy, but the students were in high spirits! This August, I had the joy of spending 2 weeks at my favorite place in the world, Friday Harbor Marine Lab. I stayed as a Whiteley Scholar, and used a good amount of my time to make progress on some of my writing projects before the crazy start of the fall semester. Our lab's MEERM student, Allie Peterson, was there at the same time taking the marine mammals and seabird course and getting inspiration for her thesis project on killer whales and vessel noise. I gave a talk at the Whale Museum in town, visited my PhD advisor Chuck Greene, and took my family to my favorite places and hikes in the San Juans. I can't wait to come back!! Our lab is now beginning a newly funded project from the National Science Foundation's Organismal Response to Climate Change program. The PIs Erin Meyer-Gutbrod, Nick Record (Bigelow Lab for Ocean Sciences) and Dan Pendleton (NOAA) will be leading the project "Climate and adaptation deficits: Mechanisms of response to climate change by the endangered North Atlantic right whale". This work will support the remainder of Abby Kreuser's PhD work, and will also involve hiring a 3-year postdoc out of Bigelow. We will be building a series of models, including right whale individual movement models, copepod patch models and right whale species distribution models, to better understand the right whale response to climate change and the costs of adapting to a new prey environment. The project also includes some fecal analysis to assess what copepod taxa are present in right whale diets across space and time.
|
AuthorErin Meyer-Gutbrod is an Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina. Her lab researches human impacts to marine ecosysems. Archives
February 2024
Categories |