Counting Whales From Space: scientists and engineers plan hi-tech effort

New England Aquarium partners with local firm

Project could help work to save endangered right whales

Associated Press in Boston

Sun 5 Jan 2020 18.40 GMT

An aquarium and an engineering firm in Massachusetts are working on a project to better protect whales – by monitoring them from space.

The New England Aquarium, based in Boston, and Draper, a firm based in nearby Cambridge, say new and higher-tech solutions are needed in order to protect whales from extinction. So they are using data from sources such as satellites, sonar and radar to keep a closer eye on how many whales are in the ocean.

A project involving complex data and surveillance has an easy to understand name: Counting Whales From Space. But John Irvine, chief scientist for data analytics at Draper, said that was the only simple thing about the project.

 “If whales are moving out of one area and into another,” Irving said, “what’s the reason for that? Is it due to ocean warming? Is it changes in commercial shipping lanes? These are all questions we’ll be able to start answering once we have the data.”

The work will involve gathering data from sources ranging from European space agencies to amateur radio operators, in order to create a probability map of where in the ocean the whales might be, Irvine said. Conservation groups will then be able to monitor whales and their movements, he said.

The aquarium and Draper have committed a combined $1m to the project, which is expected to develop over several years.

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Echolocation found to be cheap for deep-diving whales

NOVEMBER 1, 2019

by University of St Andrews

A new international study led by Aarhus University in Denmark, in collaboration with the Universities of St Andrews and La Laguna, Tenerife, reveals how whales have evolved to live in the world's deepest oceans.

Many whales and dolphins, including the champion deep-diving beaked whales, use echolocation, the ability to locate objects by reflected sound, to find food in the dark of the deep ocean. Scientists have not been able to agree on how much energy this remarkable sensing ability takes, until now.

A new study published today (Thursday 31 October) in the journal Scientific Reports reveals that, at least for short-finned pilot whales, echolocation is cheap. This may help explain how echolocating whales evolved to live in deep waters throughout the world.

In a throwback to terrestrial ancestors, whales use air to make their intense echolocation click sounds and this raises a problem for deep divers. Air compresses with depth so that at 700m deep, where pilot whales hunt, a lung-full of air has shrunk to 1.5% of its volume. But the new study shows that pilot whales use tiny amounts of air to make each click so this volume goes a long way. Even so, whales need to capture the air used by each click and recycle it, like a SCUBA rebreather, to be able to echolocate throughout their dives.

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Stranded whales: Numbers on the rise around UK shores

By Helen BriggsBBC News

6 September 2019

The number of whales and dolphins washing up around the UK coastline has risen, according to new figures.

In 2017 alone, 1,000 animals were stranded - more than in any year since records began.

A total of 4,896 whales, dolphins and porpoises died on beaches between 2011 and 2017 - up 15% on the previous seven years.

Scientists found a number of causes for the deaths, including infectious diseases, fishing and plastic.

It's difficult to say conclusively what's driven the rise, but it's associated with multiple causes, including rises in some dolphin and whale populations, they say.

"Strandings aren't actually in and of themselves bad news," Rob Deaville of ZSL (Zoological Society of London), who led the report, told BBC News.

"There's a misconception that we're trying to stop strandings - we're not, we're trying to learn more about those that are due to human activities and then try and mitigate those where we can."

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Canada bans capture and breeding of dolphins, whales

JUNE 11, 2019

Canada's parliament on Monday approved a bill banning the capture and breeding of cetaceans such as whales and dolphins in a move hailed by animal rights activists.

The bill, first proposed in 2015 and now awaiting symbolic royal approval, will not apply retroactively, meaning captive marine mammals can stay confined.

And it will contain exceptions for marine mammals who require rehabilitation following an injury, or in other cases authorized by authorities.

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How whales defy the cancer odds: Good genes

Researchers break down DNA of world's largest mammals

Date:  May 10, 2019

Source:  Arizona State University

Scientists know that age and weight are risk factors in the development of cancer. That should mean that whales, which include some of the largest and longest-lived animals on Earth, have an outsized risk of developing cancer.

But they don't. Instead, they are less likely to develop or die of this enigmatic disease. The same is true of elephants and dinosaurs' living relatives, birds. Marc Tollis, an assistant professor in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems at Northern Arizona University, wants to know why.

Tollis led a team of scientists from Arizona State University, the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, the Center for Coastal Studies in Massachusetts and nine other institutions worldwide to study potential cancer suppression mechanisms in cetaceans, the mammalian group that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises. Their findings, which picked apart the genome of the humpback whale, as well as the genomes of nine other cetaceans, in order to determine how their cancer defenses are so effective, were published today in Molecular Biology and Evolution.

The study is the first major contribution from the newly formed Arizona Cancer and Evolution Center or ACE, directed by Carlo Maley under an $8.5 million award from the National Cancer Institute. Maley, an evolutionary biologist, is a researcher at ASU's Biodesign Virginia G. Piper Center for Personalized Diagnostics and professor in the School of Life Sciences. He is a senior co-author of the new study.

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WWF sounds alarm after 48 lbs of plastic found in dead whale

APRIL 1, 2019

by Colleen Barry

An 8-meter (26-foot) sperm whale was found dead off Sardinia with 22 kilograms (48.5 pounds) of plastic in its belly, prompting the World Wildlife Foundation to sound an alarm Monday over the dangers of plastic waste in the Mediterranean Sea.

The environmental group said the garbage recovered from the sperm whale's stomach included a corrugated tube for electrical works, plastic plates, shopping bags, tangled fishing lines and a washing detergent package with its bar code still legible.

The female whale beached off the northern coast of Sardinia last week, within the vast Pelagos marine sanctuary that was created as a haven for dolphins, whales and other sea life.

"It is the first time we have been confronted with an animal with such a huge quantity of garbage," Cinzia Centelegghe, a biologist with the University of Padova, told the Turin daily La Stampa.

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Fossil barnacles, the original GPS, help track ancient whale migrations

March 25, 2019, University of California - Berkeley

Barnacles that hitch rides on the backs of humpback and gray whales not only record details about the whales' yearly travels, they also retain this information after they become fossilized, helping scientists reconstruct the migrations of whale populations millions of years in the past, according to a new University of California, Berkeley, study.

Oxygen isotope ratios in barnacle shells change with ocean condition and allow scientists to chart the migration of the host whale, for example to warmer breeding grounds or colder feeding grounds. Now, marine paleobiologists led by UC Berkeley doctoral student Larry Taylor have discovered that barnacles retain this information even after they fall off the whale, sink to the ocean bottom, and become fossils."

As a result, the travels of fossilized barnacles can serve as a proxy for the peregrinations of whales in the distant past, like GPS trackers from the Pleistocene.

"One of the more exciting things about the paper, in my mind, is that we find evidence for migration in all of these ancient populations, from three different sites and time periods, but also from both humpback and gray whale lineages, indicating that these animals, which lived hundreds of thousands of years ago, were all undertaking migrations similar in extent to those of modern-day whales," Taylor said.

One surprise finding is that the coast of Panama has been a meeting ground for different subpopulations of humpback whales for at least 270,000 years and still is today. Whales visit Panama from as far away as Antarctica and the Gulf of Alaska.

This information about ancient migration will help scientists understand how migration patterns may have affected the evolution of whales over the past 3 to 5 million years, how these patterns changed with changing climate and help predict how today's whales will adapt to the rapid climate change happening today.

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New Zealand whales: Why are so many getting stranded?

By Gareth EvansBBC News

30 November 2018

The pictures are striking: dozens of whales lie stranded on an idyllic beach in a remote part of New Zealand.

The group were found by a walker on Stewart Island earlier this week. And just a few days later, a further 51 pilot whales died after becoming stranded on a beach on the Chatham Islands.

While whale strandings are not uncommon, they usually involve just a single animal rather than a whole group. The recent flurry of mass strandings has brought a renewed focus on the mysterious, and rare, phenomenon.

So why does it happen? While the exact reasons remain unclear, experts say many different factors could play a part.

Sickness and injury

"Quite often animals that turn up on a beach are getting exhausted, they're malnourished, or they haven't eaten because they're ill," says Dr Simon Ingram, a Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of Plymouth.

"They can be in the final stages of being ill or die at sea and end up getting washed up on a beach," he adds.

But Dr Ingram says that sickness or injury mainly plays a part when a single animal is found stranded.

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A Parasite Spread by Cat Poop Is Infecting (and Probably Killing) Whales in Canada

By Brandon Specktor, Senior Writer | October 18, 2018 02:32pm ET

Whales have it hard. For a century, they were hunted to a mere fraction of their preindustrial populations, and they now face constant threats from pollution, climate change and ongoing human meddling in the planet's waterways. It's a lot for a cetacean to worry about, and now, according to recent research, whales can add "cat poop" to their list of concerns.

In the new study, published online Sept. 27 in the journal Diseases of Aquatic Organisms, a team of marine researchers from Canada tested the brain and heart tissues of 34 beluga whales. The animals died in Quebec, Canada's St. Lawrence Estuary between 2009 and 2012. The researchers were looking for parasites — in particular, Toxoplasma gondii. This single-celled parasite is commonly found in cats and is notoriously good at spreading to other animals, usually through feces. The team found that 15 of the whales (about 44 percent of the samples) tested positive for T. gondii.

Still, these findings don't prove that the whales died from this parasite, study co-author Stéphane Lair, a professor of veterinary medicine at the Université de Montréal, told the CBC. Rather, "it means [that the parasite was present] either in their heart or their brain." 

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New species of ancient whale identified and named by Otago palaeontologists

April 18, 2018, University of Otago

University of Otago palaeontologists are rewriting the history of New Zealand's ancient whales by describing a previously unknown genus of baleen whale, alive more than 27.5 million years ago and found in the Hakataramea Valley.

The new genus and species of extinct baleen whale is based on a skull and associated bones unearthed from the Kokoamu Greensand, a noted fossil-bearing rock unit in the South Canterbury and Waitaki district from the Oligocene period, which extends from about 33.9 million to 23 million years ago. At this time, New Zealand was an archipelago surrounded by shallow, richly productive seas.

Former Ph.D. student in the University of Otago's Department of Geology, Cheng-Hsiu Tsai and his supervisor, Professor Ewan Fordyce, have named the new genus Toipahautea waitaki, which translates in Māori as a baleen-origin whale from the Waitaki region.

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Why are whales so big?

Why aquatic mammals need to be big, but not too big

Date:  March 26, 2018

Source:  Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences

Summary:

Examining body sizes of ancient and modern aquatic mammals and their terrestrial counterparts reveals that life in water restricts mammals to a narrow range of body sizes -- big enough to stay warm, but not so big they can't find enough food.

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Whale and shark species at increasing risk from microplastic pollution – study

Large filter feeders, such as baleen whales and basking sharks, could be particularly at risk from ingesting the tiny plastic particles, say scientists

Fiona HarveyEnvironment correspondent

Mon 5 Feb 2018 06.01 GMTLast modified on Thu 8 Feb 2018 13.32 GMT

Whales, some sharks and other marine species such as rays are increasingly at risk from microplastics in the oceans, a new study suggests.

Species such as baleen whales and basking sharks, which feed through filtering seawater for plankton, are ingesting the tiny particles of indigestible plastic which now appear to permeate oceans throughout the world. Some of these species have evolved to swallow hundreds or even thousands of cubic metres of seawater a day, but taking in microplastic can block their ability to absorb nutrients, and may have toxic side-effects.

The new study, published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, advises more research on the megafauna of the oceans, as the effects of microplastics on them is currently not well understood. Scientists have found, for instance through examining the bodies of beached whales, large pieces of plastic in the guts of such creatures, but the effect of microplastics, though less obvious, may be just as harmful.

Elitza Germanov, a researcher at the Marine Megafauna Foundation and co-author the study, said: “Despite the growing research on microplastics in the marine environment, there are only a few studies that examine the effects on large filter feeders. We are still trying to understand the magnitude of the issue. It has become clear, though, that microplastic contamination has the potential to further reduce the population numbers of these species, many of which are long-lived and have few offspring throughout their lives.”

Many species of whale, filter-feeding shark and rays are already under threat from other problems, such as overfishing and pollution. The added stress from microplastics could push some species further towards extinction, the authors of the study warned.

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Whale learns same language as dolphins, research finds

After two months the beluga whale learned to speak to its dolphin neighbours

A whale that was living close to a pod of bottlenose dolphins has learnt to speak their language, according to new research. 

Two months after the beluga whale was introduced into a new facility with the dolphins, scientists found that it began to imitate their whistles.

The four-year-old whale was moved in 2013 to live in the Koktebel dolphinarium in Crimea, with details of the discovery reported in science journal Animal Cognition.

And as the whale learned to communicate in the dolphins’ language, scientists found that the whale began losing its own.

“Two months after the beluga’s introduction into a new facility, we found that it began to imitate whistles of the dolphins, whereas one type of its own calls seemed to disappear,” said researcher Elena Panaova, of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

She added: "While the imitations of dolphin whistles were regularly detected among the beluga's vocalisations, we found only one case in which the dolphins produced short calls that resembled those of the beluga.”

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Dolphins have ‘human-like’ societies...but are held back by a lack of opposable thumbs, say scientists

 Sarah Knapton, science editor 

16 OCTOBER 2017 • 4:00PM

Whales and dolphins live in human-like societies and share similar brain evolution to primates and man, scientist have concluded.

A new study which looked at 90 species found a link between brain size and social and cultural traits in marine mammals.

It is the first time that scientists have considered whether ‘social brain hypothesis’ applies to whales and dolphins, as well as humans. The theory suggests that intelligence developed as a means of coping with large and complex social groups.

Just like humans, whales and dolphins live in tightly-knit social groups, cooperate with other species, talk to each other and even have regional dialects.

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Whales and dolphins lead 'human-like lives' thanks to big brains, says study

The cultural brain hypothesis of human development could also explain cetaceans forming friendships – and even gossiping

Katharina Kropshofer

Monday 16 October 2017 19.02 BSTLast modified on Tuesday 17 October 2017 11.25 BST

Life is not so different beneath the ocean waves. Bottlenose dolphins use simple tools, orcas call each other by name, and sperm whales talk in local dialects. Many cetaceans live in tight-knit groups and spend a good deal of time at play.

That much scientists know. But in a new study, researchers compiled a list of the rich behaviours spotted in 90 different species of dolphins, whales and porpoises, and found that the bigger the species’ brain, the more complex – indeed, the more “human-like” – their lives are likely to be.

This suggests that the “cultural brain hypothesis” – the theory that suggests our intelligence developed as a way of coping with large and complex social groups – may apply to whales and dolphins, as well as humans.

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Solar Flares May Explain Mass Whale Stranding

By Stephanie Pappas, Live Science Contributor | September 8, 2017 08:16am ET

A solar storm currently affecting the Earth's high atmosphere could spell bad news for an unexpected victim: whales.

Recent research finds that the fatal stranding of 29 whales in early 2016 could have been caused by solar activity — when mind-boggling amounts of energy erupt from the sun in various forms. Magnetic waves emanating from solar storms may affect sperm-whale navigation, that study found. The navigational confusion can be deadly if whales end up swimming into too-shallow waters and getting stuck.

Just this month, on Sept. 4, one type of solar storm, called a coronal mass ejection (CME), erupted from the sun, according to the National Space Weather Prediction Center. CMEs fling charged plasma and magnetic fields from the sun's surface toward Earth, where they cause fluctuations in the planet's magnetic field. Migratory animals like sperm whales, birds and sea turtles all use the geomagnetic field to navigate.

The possible culprit for last year's sperm whale stranding seems to have occurred around the period of Jan. 8 to Feb. 4, 2016, when 29 male sperm whales (Physeter microcephalus) were found dead or dying on the shores of Germany, France, Great Britain and the Netherlands. Autopsies on 22 of the whales revealed that the animals were well-nourished and had no signs of illness, according to the new research paper published in the International Journal of Astrobiology.

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Whales use nested Russian-doll structure to protect nerve tissue during lunge dives

Date: February 16, 2017

Source: University of British Columbia

Fin whales use two neatly packed levels of nested folds to protect the nerves along the floor of their mouth during lunge feeding, according to new research from University of British Columbia zoologists.

Large whales balloon an immense pocket between their body wall and overlying blubber to store captured prey during feeding dives -- extending nerves along their mouth and tongue to more than double their length.

"But when they shorten again these nerves have to fold so tightly that they develop bending stretches, which could damage the nerve," says UBC zoologist Margo Lillie, author of the paper in Current Biology. "It surprised me that just folding them up created a problem."

The solution: the nerves use a Russian doll-like structure to nest folds.

"The first level of waviness allows the nerve to extend when feeding. Then the nerve structure is folded at a second level of waviness at a smaller length scale -- that creates enough slack in the shortened nerve tissue to allow it to go around each fold without being damaged."

The whale nerves are so large that Lillie and UBC colleagues Wayne Vogl, Kelsey Gil, John Gosline and Robert Shadwick were able to use microCT to visualize the nerve's 3D structure.

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Are Solar Storms Causing Mysterious Sea Animal Beachings?

By Kacey Deamer, Staff Writer | February 3, 2017 05:38pm ET

Why do otherwise healthy sea creatures end up stranded along coastal areas around the world? NASA scientists are searching for the answer.

Whales, dolphins and porpoises — known collectively as cetaceans — partially use magnetic-field sensing to navigate. According to NASA scientists, one explanation for these mysterious strandings could be that the animals' internal compasses become confused during severe solar storms, which affect Earth’s magnetic fields, and so they lose their way. To investigate this marine mystery, NASA has launched a study that will determine whether there is a link between solar storms and animal beachings.

Cetaceans become stranded around the world in groups as small as three or as large as several hundred per event. According to Katie Moore, a collaborator on the NASA study and director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare's Animal Rescue Program, the global phenomenon occurs most often in New Zealand, Australia and Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Despite the prevalence of such beaching events, study leader Antti Pulkkinen, a heliophysicist (a person who studies the effects of the sun on the solar system) at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said there has been very little quantitative research.

"We estimate that records on the order of hundreds of cetacean mass strandings will be available for study, thus making our analyses statistically significant," Pulkkinen said in a statement. "What we’re going to do is throw cold, hard data at this. It's a long-standing mystery and it’s important that we figure out what’s going on."

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