Watching whales from space

Date: November 1, 2018

Source: British Antarctic Survey

Scientists have used detailed high-resolution satellite images provided by Maxar Technologies' DigitalGlobe, to detect, count and describe four different species of whales. Reported this week in the journal Marine Mammal Science, this study is a big step towards developing a cost-effective method to study whales in remote and inaccessible places, that will help scientists to monitor population changes and understand their behaviour.

Each species was observed in one of their known aggregation areas, where individuals come together to congregate: southern right whales off Argentina, humpback whales off Hawaii, fin whales in the Pelagos Sanctuary in the Mediterranean and grey whales off the coast of Mexico. Already it has helped whale conservation bodies to identify 10 key inaccessible whale populations that would benefit most from the application of satellite imagery in studies.

Lead author Hannah Cubaynes, a whale ecologist at British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and University of Cambridge explains:

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New cameras allow scientists to better track grey whales

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Scientists that track grey whale migrations along the western coast of North America are always looking for more efficient ways to track their subjects and a new set of thermal imaging cameras could help them do just that.

The new system, being used by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is configured to capture the heat release by whales as a part of their natural physiology.

“A whale is this great big motor that takes in a breath of air and holds it inside for a long time,” said Wayne Perryman, a NOAA Fisheries scientist who helped develop the new system. “When it exhales, the air is much warmer than the background, and we can detect that difference very easily, both day and night.”

The infrared cameras used by the system are the same ones that police use when looking for suspects from the air. The NOAA system uses new software that automatically evaluates the video to recognize when a whale blows out air. To achieve that, it has to differentiate the blow of a whale from other signals, such as a small boat moving into the field of view.

“The biggest challenge was getting the detector to be as accurate as possible without having it get fooled by false alarms,” said Dave Weller, the NOAA Fisheries scientist who leads the survey team.

The system computer also anticipates when and where an indentified whale will rise to the surface to blow again. An algorithm, which is derived from years of study into gray whale diving behavior, enables the computer to track individual whales.

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Grey whales took to high seas to survive the ice ages

A SMALL, poorly studied population of non-migrating grey whales may hold the key to how these ocean giants survived the last ice age.



Grey whales feed on the seafloor at depths of up to 50 metres, and rely heavily on the shallow regions in Alaska's Bering Sea for food. But when Nick Pyenson of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC modelled Pacific feeding grounds during peak glaciation, he found that very little of the north Pacific was shallow enough for feeding: sea levels were up to 120 metres lower than today and the Bering Sea was a land bridge. Northern feeding grounds might have supported only a few hundred whales, he told the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology meeting on Monday. Yet genetic studies show no sign of a bottleneck at the time.


Pyenson thinks the whales shifted to open-water feeding to survive. Support for this idea comes from a small group of open-water feeders found living year-round in the Pacific northwest. Pyenson says that after the ice age the non-migratory whales would have been easy targets for early whalers, so the migratory population has come to dominate.


http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827826.100-grey-whales-took-to-high-seas-to-survive-the-ice-ages.html