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.

Back in Vestmannaeyjar

We are back in Vestmannaeyjar for the month of July, to complete our summer field season. It is great to be back, see the familiar places and faces. We are waiting for our research boat to arrive and then we will be ready to properly start our field work. It will be a few more days but in the meantime we can go out with Viking Tours or search from land to try to spot them!

We are staying in the island of Heimaey, the only inhabited island of the archipelago, and the picture above shows one of the best spots on the island to search for whales - also happens to be the windiest spot in the whole of Iceland with record wind speeds! From here we can see all the other islands of the archipelago and the places where in previous years we regularly found the whales.

Over the next 4 weeks we will be posting regular updates of our activities on this blog. We have heard there is lots of herring around so, even though we haven't spotted whales yet, we hope they are not far!

Images of the snow storm

The end...for now!

Over the last couple days the whales disappeared...not completely but as they gave us a couple days off we decided to take in the beauty of this place and went hiking up one of the mountains to enjoy this amazing view. The light was just incredible, there is something different about a sunny winter day in the bay of Grundarfjordur that makes us appreciate how lucky we are to be here...

This change in killer whale presence in the fjords coincided with the end of our field season. As a lot of the equipment we are using needs to be sent back for other projects we had to take our mighty boat Tango off the water and pack everything. And just as we did that the orcas showed up just outside the harbour, literally! As some of us cursed our luck, others had the better thinking that the whales came just to say goodbye.

Either way, it seems that over the last few days things have been changing. The whales have been appearing later in the day and sometimes not at all, probably because they have started following the herring that is migrating further offshore. We certainly hope so because that means we have good chances of finding them again in the summer, off Vestmannaeyjar, where our summer fieldwork will take place!

It has been an amazing season in Grundarfjordur. We were welcomed by all the locals, even though we were constantly hassling everyone asking for help with equipment failures, boat breakdowns and various other things. We thank everyone here for these times we won't forget and we already look forward to next year!

In the meantime we will continue posting on the outcomes of our time here and our experiences, so stay tunned as it ain't over yet!