What a day!

It was around 8:15am when we got the call from Cathy Harlow, one of the Discover the World guides. Whales had just gone under the bridge and were in the inner part of the fjord! The news we had been waiting for. Just the previous day Julie and Miguel from our team had been onboard the Laki Tours boat and saw a group of whales outside the fjords. So it looked like after a short trip outside the whales were back in Kolgrafafjordur.

Check out this video taken by team member Miguel Neves of the whales going under the bridge.

We got ready to go out and soon were deploying the Tango. Bjarni, the farmer from Eidi farm, has been helping us this season picking up and deploying the Tango every day we go out with his tractor. With his help we were out in the water and ready for some work again! Conditions were good, not so much wind and no rain or snow. So we start by doing some photo-id to identify which whales were around. The whales seemed spread out, with smaller groups in different locations, so we took the opportunity to do some acoustic recordings with a hydrophone array that allows us to locate where sounds come from. This way we could tease apart which of these smaller groups was producing sounds. Between photo-id and recording sessions the morning went by and with the sun out and warming us (slightly!) we had lunch. It was a quiet and perfect morning, just what we had been craving for after some days without whales.

The Tango being deployed in Kolgrafafjordur by Bjarni.

Out of the water and ready for the next time the whales show up!

After lunch the whales started travelling and moving out of the fjord. We followed them, the weather was not too bad on the other side of the bridge and we could attempt some biopsying. This year we are trying to collect biopsies of identified individuals to investigate their genetics, diet and pollutant levels. It is incredible the amount of information we can collect with such a small sample of their skin and outer blubber layer. We try to be very careful to only biopsy whales we haven't sampled yet and soon we managed to sample one of the adult males we needed. The whales kept travelling slowly out of the fjord but the weather was deteriorating. Wind increased, it started snowing and continuing work was becoming a challenge. Even seeing anything was a challenge when snow was hitting our eyes! We managed to get one more sample and we decided to stop then and come back home. It was the right decision; the weather kept getting worse and worse and for the rest of that day and the following day it was impossible to work even though the whales were back inside Kolgrafafjordur.

These two days have lifted our hopes that the whales are around and maybe we will get some more chances to work before the end of the season...today there have been no sightings but the weather is not very good and a storm is expected tonight. So again we wait for nature to give us one more chance to have another incredible day.

Waiting for whales...

For the last few days whale sightings have been few and far between...we occasionally have seen a small group towards the end of the day but nothing like earlier in the season when whales could be seen most days and earlier. 

Is this a sign of the end of the season? We don't know, but things do look different. There have been a few reports of whales further out, nearer Olafsvik and just two days ago we followed a group of 3 whales heading in the direction of Stykkishólmur so it could be that there are plenty of whales out in the bay of Breiðafjörður but we just can't get to them because they are too far. When weather allows members of our team still join the Láki Tours boats which can go further afield than we can on the mighty (albeit small) Tango. So if they are around we will certainly find them!

One of the 3 whales we followed two days ago out of Kolgrafafjordur and heading East. This group was composed of this adult male and two females.

New year, new field season

We are back in Grundarfjordur but this year things are very different indeed! So far we have only seen a few whales at a time, usually one or two groups and they tend to go to the inner part of Kolgrafafjordur, a place where we never saw them last year. There are whitebeaked dolphins, grey seals and lots of seabirds around so the wildlife spectacle is impressive. Not to mention the dramatic scenery that is typical of Iceland and, particularly, the Snaefelsnes peninsula. We have seen some familiar fins, but definitely not the same numbers of whales that we were spoiled with last season. There is a lot less herring around and that might be the reason why we are getting fewer visitors. Or it could be that the whales found a better place to spend their winter, we just don't know. This is the beauty of studying wild animals, nature is in charge and all we can do is try to understand what lies behind the changes we observe.

The Icelandic weather however is still playing its tricks on us. For most of last week we were land-bound due to very strong winds. The sea was rough, even in the sheltered inner fjord where the whales now tend to come. It just so happened to be the week of Whale Fest, organised by Discover the World, so we were happy to have time so see a lot of interesting lectures featured in the programme. We also got to share our latest results with the public and meet some of the people that travelled all the way to this beautiful part of Iceland.

Today we got a chance to go back out again and we resighted some individuals we hadn't seen in more than a week - maybe this means some whales are coming back? We hope so and that the whales stay around for a little while longer.

The underwater world

One of the aims of our project was to try to understand how the whales may change their feeding behaviour depending on the behaviour of their prey: the herring. This might seem like an easy enough task, but think again...the waters where we find the whales have very low visibility. Try putting an underwater camera in the water and within a few seconds, as the whale moved just a few metres, you can't see anything but the blue. So, observing the feeding behaviour of a whole group of whales like that is just impossible!

Luckily we can rely on a cool piece of kit: a multibeam sonar. The sonar scans the water and provides us with a picture of what is going on. Because it emits pulses of very high frequency it provides a higher resolution image than a traditional echosounder and its this image that we can use to see how the whales behave when feeding on herring. It also has a very wide horizontal beam and gives us an image up to about 100 m distance. Suddenly a whole new underwater world is visible.

The support of Teledyne RESON has made it possible for us to use one of their sonars and some of the images we have obtained can now be seen here. We will be using the sonar again in 2014 so hopefully we can continue exploring the underwater world of feeding killer whales.

Happy 2014!!

We are getting ready for a new field season starting already in February! We can't wait to go back to Grundarfjordur and see the whales again. We have been busy analysing the data that was collected last year and we got a chance to present some of our results at the 20th Biennial Conference on Marine Mammals that took place in New Zealand in December. We are still far from finishing all the analysis but time has come to prepare for a new season, as the herring and the whales have already been sighted in the fjords all December. As before, we will update the blog with news of our progress so stay tuned for more news.

National Geographic Weekend

The research on Icelandic orcas was featured in the National Geographic Weekend radio show last Sunday. The 2-hr programme features several stories and you can hear each one or the whole podcast online. Check out the website detailing last Sunday's programme here.

A challenging season

This was definitely one of the most, if not THE most, challenging field season we have ever had in Vestmannaeyjar! The weather was not on our side and when the wind did calm down, there was such a thick fog we couldn't see anything more than a few tens of meters ahead of us. Searching for whales was definitely not easy! First there was the one sunny day with little wind but with huge swell coming from further south where a storm was brewing. We decided to do only photo-ID since tagging, acoustic recordings or anything else in those conditions would have been a nightmare. Photo-ID was the only thing we could do...or so we thought! The swell made it really hard to get pictures of dorsal fins and saddle patches because there was usually a big wave between us and the whale! It took a lot of careful driving to position the boat as close as possible to get those pictures without disturbing the whales. And when we did get close we saw this was a group of 4 whales, all of which we already knew from our catalogue. The picture below shows the Marvin, the second boat we used, with students Sara Tavares and Timothy Carden on board and our collaborator Páll Jónsson skippering and the whale we call IS28.

For days after this encounter we couldn't go out. We started thinking: "That was it! That's the only whales we will be able to see this summer..."

We had a break in the wind so we decided to go for it despite the thick fog yet again! When looking for whales was pointless because we couldn't see them even if they were right next to us, we decided to listen if they were around. The Marvin was our acoustic listening station and after a few attempts in different locations over the wide area where we have seen whales in previous years, Tim, Paul and Páll shouted: "We hear whales!". We were just close to Heimaey, so the whales were very close to our home island. It took a lot of manoeuvring the boat, trying different locations, to figure out where we heard the calls loudest and finally see the whales in the middle of the fog. Quite an experience and certainly nothing like we have ever had to deal with before! We stayed with the whales for as long as we could, we quickly figured out the best way to keep tracking them was by switching off our engines when they dove and just listen for the blows when they came up to breathe at the surface. Acoustics was our guide that day, first underwater and then in air, as our ears guided us to where the whales were heading.

The Marvin team placing the acoustic array in the water to listen for whales.

We first found one group of whales and thought that was it. But we lost it and then heard blows in the distance, so we thought we had found them again, quickly rushed to that spot just to find different individuals. We stayed with them for a while but then lost them also. When our third attempt to catch up with a group led us to different individual yet again we realised there must be a large aggregation of whales around us and we don't even have any idea, because we can't see anything! When the fog cleared that evening, and we were still working in the same area the picture revealed itself. We were indeed surrounded by whales in all directions. We had a perfect ending for a rewarding day and we thought maybe there was still hope for the last days to come.

Spotting whales in the fog.