Introduction To Marine Life Course: Whales, Dolphins & Porpoises

Good evening. Welcome to the Vancouver Aquarium's inaugural Introduction to Marine Life BC Course. Thanks for joining us tonight. [no audio] to the YouTube comment section or if you are here at the Aquarium, you can raise your hand. And our speakers can answer some questions as we go. And then they will also be available for answering questions during the break and after the class. We will try to stick to about two hours so that we can be timely and get everyone going as soon as they need to kin

d of move on and do other things. The class will end on November 18; that will be our last class; and then we might put together a ceremony at a later date so I'll ask you to save a date towards the end of our presentation tonight. The group that is presenting is a Cetacean Research Lab here at the Vancouver Aquarium, and the Cetacean Research Lab has been studying killer whales and other cetaceans here in British Columbia for over 50 years. They have a breadth of knowledge and wealth of experie

nce, headed by Dr. Lance Barrett-Lennard who has been studying killer whales for quite some time now and has been doing some very innovative new techniques to study killer whales, newer than the new ones that were new, probably a dozen years ago or so. So, it's quite exciting and I think we're gonna hear about some of that tonight. So without further ado, we go ahead and get started. Dr. Lance Barrett-Lennard. Thank you, Jonathan. And thank you to everybody for coming out this evening. It's a ve

ry pleasure to have you here and it's an exciting day for us as that's the first time we have done anything like this. And thanks to Jonathan for, I think this is your brain child, Jonathan, this is the whole idea of doing this course. So yeah we'll see how it goes and my name is, Jonathan mentioned this, Lance Barrett-Lennard. I head up the Cetacean Research Program here, he was right on that, and I've been here for about twelve years but I was associated with the Aquarium for several, for a nu

mber of years before that as a research associate, as a graduate student actually, and then after I finished my grad work worked for the Fisheries and Oceans Departments. So I go back over 20 years here. My mentor, my predecessor in my position heading up our Cetacean Research Program was Dr. John Ford. He was my graduate supervisor, or co-supervisor, and I just wanted to start this evening by making a plug for John's new book and then we'll launch into the course. But here it is. It's called Ma

rine Mammals of British Columbia. Very original title. This book was 25 years in the making, when I first met John as he was talking about writing this book, the father of killer whale biology in British Columbia, this guy who really got this started, the pioneer, that got systematic killer whale research going in the world was Dr. Michael Bigg. He died in 1990, well ahead of his time, and John promised that he would write this book, gave, made that promise to Michael on his death bed, and anywa

y, it's out. It came out about two weeks ago. It's a wonderful thing. You can give Jonathan, here is a notice, but you can give Jonathan your email address. Our Vancouver Aquarium gift store doesn't have it yet. It's that new. They'll have it within probably a few weeks, but if you give your email address to Jonathan, he'll help it launch at the gift store and I'll notify you. I think it's around 38 bucks or something. It's a voluminous, incredibly meticulously researched, well-bound, portable.

If you are on the Internet, you can probably get this on Amazon sometime, before too long. So without further ado we'll launch into this. We're going to, we've divided the Shall I do the, here, I'll move to the beginning here. Here we'll go. Splash light. This is what we are going to cover tonight. My assistant and the newest member of the Lab and her research assistant and runner of our vital Killer Whale Adoption Program, Carla Crossman, will do, give the general overview of cetacean biology.

Carla finished her master's degree at UBC a year or so ago. She is well-qualified to do this. Tessa, Tess Danelesko will be next talking about the particular set of cetacean species we have here in BC, and we are lucky to have a diverse fauna of cetaceans here. I'll go on and talk about killer whales, particularly, specifically some, a lot of basic biology and some recent research findings. And then Chad Nordstrom, he's been with our Lab as a research assistant for several years now. He'll do an

overview of the cetacean research at the Vancouver Aquarium, and that'll be quite a diverse presentation, I think. And then we'll do a quick set of conclusions. So without further ado. Carla. So the evening's talk tonight I guess this portion was called whales, dolphin, porpoises, but this really falls under that big umbrella of cetaceans. So when we talk about cetaceans, and we will talk about them several times this evening, we'll talk about that big group that includes all the whales, all th

e dolphins, all the porpoises, these river dolphins, sperm whales, belugas, narwhals, that whole inclusive group. And when we go back, we step back, we say, okay, what do these guys all have in common. Well, they all fall into that kingdom Animalia, this is the animal kingdom. They are vertebrates, they are also mammals. So this is an important thing to keep in mind that these are marine mammals, they are not fish, and they all fall under that order Cetacea. So if you think back to biology a lon

g, long time ago, this order Cetacea is a monophyletic group. So all of these whales, dolphins, and porpoises are more related to each other than they are to anything else. So this is really important. From this kind of we can break down and break it down a little bit further. But these cetaceans, it's really just the whales, dolphins and porpoises. These are including all marine mammals. We are not talking about sea lions. We are not talking about the pinnipeds and otters. They are a little bit

separated, and that'll also come in the later week. So we have to step back millions and millions of years and go back to when life began in the ocean. But then terrestrial life in mammals actually evolved upon land, and it wasn't until things went back secondarily into the ocean that we had the evolution of cetaceans. So the furthest back, cetaceans have a common ancestor that's actually more related to the ungulates. So this was a hoof-liked creature, somewhat like a hyena in shape but eventu

ally moved back into the water and started to become a little bit more cetacean-like and evolved those cetacean characteristics that we know and think of today, those long snouts, kind of a streamlined body shape, and eventually evolving the loss of limbs, and the flippers and the fluke. Now the cetaceans that we have here in BC and most of all the cetaceans in the world fall under one of two big broad categories. They are either mysticetes, so these baleen whales, meaning that they are feeding,

they are filter-feeding. They are feeding, from the roof of their mouth hang these plates of baleen, and there sat one on the table on the outside you can see at the break. And what this is, it's made of keratin, the same stuff your hair, your fingernails are made out of it, and hangs from the roof of the mouth, and they can take a big gulp of water and filter all the food out through this baleen. So those are the baleen whales, so the Mysticeti. We also have the Odontoceti or the toothed whale

s. And so those can range from anything like small spade-shaped porpoise-like teeth like as you can see here to big large teeth like killer whales or sperm whales or even a narwhal tusk, that's an erupted tooth. So those will fall into those odontocetes, the toothed whales. Another divergence between these two groups happened over 35 million years ago. So in evolutionary time scale it's not that, that long but it is quite a long time ago. And when we look at the Mysticeti, we can break it down e

ven more into the right whales, and the baleen, the other baleen whales, like grey whales, humpback whales, blue whales. Those are those mysticetes, those baleen whales. Now the odontocetes, the toothed whales, they are a little bit more diverse. Those are including things like the sperm whales, the river dolphins, the different types of beaked whales, the monodonts which are the belugas and your narwhals. We have porpoises and finally dolphins. And so odontocetes, those toothed whales, as you c

an see, represent a much more diverse array of species than those baleen whales. And Tess, shortly after me, will present a little bit more on those specific species of those whales that we see in BC. Now first we should just talk a little bit about some general cetacean anatomy and some of the terminology we are gonna be using throughout the night. Perfect. So we have, you can see, it's just a typical picture of a Pacific white-sided dolphin here. Dolphins and a lot of the small whales, small d

olphins and porpoises have a rostrum, that beak on the front of their face. And so this can be a rostrum, a beak, a snout, several of these words all for that beak right on the front. There is also a blowhole. All these baleen whales, the baleen whales and the odontocetes, the toothed whales, have to breathe air. And we'll talk about that later but they do so easily with their blowhole. We've the dorsal fin on the back, the fluke which is the tail fin, and the pectoral fins on the sides. Almost

all the same terminology for those big baleen whales except that throat because when they baleen, they're filter feeding that throat has to be big and expand and so there is throat grooves and throat pleats on many other species where that throat would be able to expand big and take in huge volumes of water. And as we've talked about earlier, cetaceans are mammals. So we have to keep in mind that they have to share all the same mammalian characteristics. So they do give birth to live young, they

are warm-blooded, they breathe air, they lactate. While they are in utero they do have some hair erupting that oftentimes fall off. A couple of species might have a little bit of remnants. But so it's important to keep in mind that these species have a lot of differences that you don't really think of species in the marine world having. They have a little bit more challenges than a lot of the other marine species. Now not only are there natural challenges that we'll talk about later, but we are

adding to these threats. There are a lot of anthropogenic challenges, so whether it's competition for prey through interactions with fisheries, or there is different contaminants that are put into the water, interactions with other vessels, or underwater noise. There is a lot of anthropogenic threats that Chad'll touch on a little bit earlier [later] that cetaceans face in the wild. But just life in an aquatic world is a challenge in itself. There is several different things and complications t

hat these creatures have had to evolve to be able to, let's try again. They've had to evolve to be able to maintain and live in this environment. So just breathing. In order to, they are all obligate breathers, they have to breathe air. So every time they need to breathe, they need to come to the surface to make that conscious decision to breathe. So one can think that, you know, fish might have an advantage on this but it's really oxygen in the air is in much higher concentrations. They are get

ting a high octane fuel if you think about it by breathing air and diving down but they are limited in their down time. So this is kind of a trade-off that has evolved with the cetaceans. But breathing, they are obligated to come to the surface to breathe. Getting around. Getting around in the oceans is a little bit different. There aren't any physical barriers. If you can swim, you can swim just about anywhere. It might get a little cold, it might get a little bit warm, but you can get there. S

o this is a little bit different than on land where you might have a giant mountain in your way that you can't necessarily cross. So if you think of terrestrial species having fairly small distributions, a lot of marine species like this killer whale have global distributions. So this is the distribution map for killer whales all around the world. So this is something that's pretty, the general trend here is that marine species and cetaceans have a much larger range than a lot of their terrestri

al counterparts. And one of the things that they have to, that's a little bit different in the water is that getting around is that they don't have to support their body mass on land. So they are not fighting gravity the same way they are in the water. So this has enabled them to get very, very large, to grow to a much larger size as like the blue whale, that's the largest creature that has ever lived on our planet. So just some side effects of being able to grow so very large in the water. They

also have to think about staying warm. The ocean is not always a warm place, especially for some animals like some Antarctic killer whales or belugas that live up in the high Arctic. The oceans can be pretty cold even if you're diving down the deep depths. How they kind of get to counteract that; there is very low surface area to volume ratio. So they don't have really long appendages. There is not a very huge surface area on these animals. They are pretty stocky and pretty robust which means t

hat there is less area for heat loss. So this is one way to combat this. All the cetaceans also have very thick blubber layers. And this blubber is a really dense layer of fat that helps insulate them in the cold waters. They also have the ability to shunt their blood so that means that they can cut off blood flow and restrict blood flow to their flukes or their dorsal fin or those pectoral fins. If they need to stay warm, so restrict that blood flow and keep that blood flow in their core. These

are all kind of adaptations that have evolved to be able to live in this cold environment. There are also challenges in an aquatic world because this is a three-dimensional world. And so if you are trying to eat, you have to chase your prey everywhere, and not just in two dimensions. You have to chase them in three dimensions. This can be a little bit more challenging. And then if you're like these humpback whales, you are lunging. So there is those throat pleats we talked about expanding as th

ese whales are engulfing large amounts of food. And the consequence though is that they are also engulfing a little bit of extra salt water. Now they are mammals, and they have to drink fresh water. Unfortunately, there is not really much fresh water to drink in the oceans. So they're getting all their freshwater needs from their food sources. So if you're a big baleen whale and feeding on small krill or small fish, all of your diet, all of your water that you're getting to sustain yourself is c

oming from your diet. So it's coming from tiny, tiny krill or the water in the bodies of tiny, tiny fish. So it's huge requirements that food requirements, not just for the nutrition of the food but for also the water they need to maintain their lives. Now the other consequence of engulfing huge amounts of salt water like this is that it's a little bit harder in your kidneys. So they have extremely specialised kidneys that have multiple, many, many multilobed kidneys that are specialised to be a

ble to deal with this extra salt water intake. But as we talked about this three-dimensional world, not only is it a problem, not only is it challenging to eat in a three-dimensional world, mating can be a little bit harder to manage in a three-dimensional world. It's been akin to, someone once said, trying to refuel a jet mid-flight. Things can be a little bit challenging to line everything up, get the timing right, get all three dimensions lined up, make sure everything is lined up, fits in, g

et it in, get it out, and you're done. It's a little bit challenging. In all the meantime you have to remember you can't stay down too long because you have to breathe air. So it's just an extra bit challenging, those challenges to mating, but it is something they have to deal with. So all these cetaceans, as you can see, you can't really tell if they are boys or girls. They have these nice genital slits where everything tucks right up inside. They keep that nice streamlined body shape. Both mal

es and females have a genital slit. The females have additional mammary slits on either side where they'll nurse their young. But if you would see right underneath, you might see that thin little line, that slit, where everything will tuck up inside, enable them to mate in that three-dimensional world. So life in aquatic world can be really challenging, and there's lots of way, and each species really goes about facing these challenges in a different way. And Tess is gonna talk to you a little b

it about how the different species do accomplish these challenges and face them. Alright. Good evening and hello to everyone who is tuning in online as well. Can everyone hear me alright? Excellent. Okay. Perfect. Thank you. So I'm gonna be talking about cetacean natural history and really taking a special interest in cetaceans in BC. So what can we find around us? Who are these marine mammals, these cetaceans that are sharing our homes, the same waters that we might ourselves spend a lot of tim

e in? But before I get into those local species I'm gonna be talking about cetaceans of the world. So, of course, we know there is a global distribution of cetaceans. There is at least 83 extant or living species. And that is changing. There are some species that are still described by only one individual. That might have been a stranding or perhaps just one sighting. So that number is flexible. Here is a poster of what all those species look like together. It's pretty incredible when you look a

t this image, the diversity not only in size but different types of bodies and what these types of adaptations can do in their marine world. Like Carla mentioned, Cetacea, there is basically two different groups that are divided into we're talking about the mysticetes, the baleen whales, and it is the baleen whales who are most plentiful within mysticetes. There is also odontocetes, and those are the toothed whales. And out of the odontocetes, Delphinidae is the most diverse family, and it conta

ins 36 species. So I mentioned they are incredibly diverse. We're talking from very small vaquita to the largest animal that has ever existed on earth, the blue whale. And they've got global distributions. So they are found from very, very cold waters. We can find them distributed from temperate to polar latitudes, and in fact, some species can be found pretty much everywhere. For example killer whales can be found in all of the world's oceans. So zooming in to our home Province. BC is special.

We are home to 28 percent of the world's cetacean species. In fact, we have 23 species or populations which in some communities there is a debate if they should be their own species or not but 23 species in BC here, in our local waters. And what's important to note about that is that twelve of those species are listed as 'at risk' under the Species at Risk Act. So when we're thinking about these threats that Carla mentioned and that Chad will touch on, we need to remember that these animals do s

hare our home, and there are actions that we can take certainly to protect them. What is the distribution of these animals? What does it look like? And you can take a look at this image here. This map represents the sightings that have been collected by the BC Cetacean Sightings Network which is the program that I currently coordinate. And you can see they are basically all over. Keep in mind that sometimes with these sightings, they might occur more frequently around coastal communities because

there is more people there. But of course there are many oceanic species that we can find in the Province as well, and I will talk a little bit about them as we go along. Zooming in even closer, we're gonna take a look at the Salish Sea. There's a lot of people that live around there. I'm sure many of us live somewhere on this map here. So this gives you an idea of many of the species that can be found very, very close to where we are located. So there is 23 species. Here is a list of them. I'v

e grouped them into kind of more commonly sighted species, less frequently sighted, and of course, there are some uncommon or incidental species that we can find here in British Columbia as well. So starting with the mysticetes. We can talk about the minke whale. The minke whale is a really fascinating whale but there are really a lot of questions that still remain to be answered about this species. We do know that they are highly vocal. In fact, I've heard someone refer to the vocalisations tha

t minkes can make, it's almost Star Wars-like. It's really, really amazing. And there is a recent discovery, I think, it occurred either late last year or early this year, where for years researchers in the Antarctic, minkes also occur in the Antarctic, were looking for an animal called a bio-duck, that's what they were naming it, like quack, quack, like that kind of duck, because they've been hearing this type of localisation for years, and what they actually discovered is that it was being pro

duced by the species of Antarctic minke whales. So huge variation in the vocalisations that they can create. They gulp or skim feed on krill or schooling fish, but sometimes they'll actually erupt out of the water with their mouths open. They don't do a lot of aerial behaviour but, like you can see in this image, it is possible. They can be very elusive. They tend to swim quite quickly. If you look at their body, they are very streamlined. They only stay at the surface for a short period of time

. And they also move in fairly unpredictable patterns. So not only does that make them difficult to observe, it makes them difficult to research, hence why there are so many questions that still remain with them. Another sign that you can maybe keep your eyes out for minke whales is if you see sea birds. And any idea why they might occur in conjunction? Yeah. Yeah, definitely, so they're gonna share some of the same prey species. So that's why you often do see them together. Now I have included

some videos in my presentation just to give you an idea what these animals look like in the water. And in this video you can really see the streamlined shape of the minke whale as it moves through the water. And again just at the surface, dip back down, and that's typically all you see if you do spot a minke. Moving on, a little bit larger, a baleen whale, grey whale. Grey whales, I like to say, they are more than meets the eye. Some people, when you mention grey whale, they are oh yeah, great,

it's a grey whale. But they are actually really, really fascinating. They are more than meets the eye, you can see in this picture here because they do happen to be kind of covered in barnacles and whale lice. So they really are almost like floating communities. But they do some pretty neat things as well. There are about 25,000 of them in the North Pacific but those whales can go, undergo incredible migrations. In fact, they undergo the longest mammalian migration in the world travelling from M

exico to the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort seas each year. So that's almost a 20,000 kilometre round trip. And they travel down to those warmer waters to mate and also to give birth in lagoons in Mexico. And why they travel, or the reason that they come back north is to feed. We don't know a lot about their life span. We think it's around 80 years. And I was talking about that migration, they do have to be very careful of killer whales. In fact, Dr. Lance Barrett-Lennard here knows a lot about th

is area called False Pass in Alaska which is narrower where many migratory grey whales travel through. And there is a specific group of killer whales who will go to that area during this migration. And each year there is about 150 grey whales that can be taken by killer whales in that area. So certainly they do need to keep watch out for those predators. Grey whales have a very interesting feeding mechanism. And they'll actually filter feed small invertebrates that can be found in the sediment,

usually quite close to shore. In fact, one other really neat thing about grey whales is that they almost come in just within about ten metres or so of the shore. And very interestingly, they do show some laterality. So they'll prefer one side of the other that they kind of scoop, when they use their mouth digging into the sand, and they'll have barnacles rubbed away from that area, and their baleen will actually be shorter. They do tend to show preference for the right side which I find quite in

teresting as well. And, of course, a grey whale video here. You can see that really crusty kind of modelled skin, and if you take a look down the dorsal surface area, you can see those knuckle-like protrusions. That's a characteristic that we can use to identify grey whales, of course, along with the lack, the absence of a dorsal fin. Even larger than the grey whale, we have humpback whales. And humpback whales were quite newsworthy this year as they continue to recover from historic whaling. So

I'm sure many of you have heard that story by now but their population is recovering. We think there is about 2,100 or so in BC. And that number is increasing at a rate of about four per cent a year. In the North Pacific in total their estimate is currently about 18,000 whales. So like grey whales humpback whales will undertake a pretty impressive migration between Hawaii and Mexico or BC and Alaska, between BC and Alaskan waters. They display some pretty amazing behaviour when they are at thos

e breeding grounds. Males will group together in groups called leks. These groups can be extremely aggressive, and the males will battle over females that they might come across. Sometimes this can lead to bloodshed but their vocal behaviours in these areas are fascinating as well. We don't know why or even how males vocalise but they produce these incredible vocalisations that we can refer to as songs. And these vocalisations can travel huge distances across the water. What they mean still has

yet to be discovered but really, really neat vocalisations that they can create. Feeding mechanisms are also something that we can, I mean, I'm sure we can have a whole course on feeding mechanisms for humpback whales. We are still learning more about the different ways that they've learned how to feed on the krill or the small fish that they do eat. Their bubble-net which is a group tactic where several whales will swim in a spiral pattern so they'll mid-air from their blowhole travel in a spir

al pattern. And what that creates is this false net which is very scary if you're a fish. So what you're gonna do if you're a fish is group together in a very tight ball but, of course, then come the humpbacks right up through the middle of that bubble net, and they've got their mouths full certainly after that. What we do know about bubble-netting as well is that different humpbacks, individual humpbacks will play certain roles within that group. So socially very interesting, very complex behav

iour that we're observing there. If you look at the underside of the fluke which is what you're seeing in the bottom image there, that can act as a fingerprint. And that's really important because we can use that for species, sorry, individual identification for humpback whales. In BC we can even classify humpback whales into three groups, based on the percentage of white that you see on the underside of this tail. So from zero to twenty per cent, you're gonna have BCX. So sometimes that tail mi

ght be completely black on the underside or dark grey. From about 20 to 60 you're gonna see BC Y classification. So an individual humpback will be, let's say BCY1023 or something like that. And above 60 per cent you're gonna see BCZ. And that's gonna be the third category of humpback whales. Humpback whales are also known for some pretty impressive behaviour like this. So often very popular with whale watchers, they can be extremely acrobatic. What purpose that behaviour serves is certainly up f

or debate. We think it could be something that occurs for a number of reasons, but in any case, it's very, very impressive. Larger baleen whales that we have in BC, we can talk about the fin whale and the sei whale at the same time. Fin whales are actually the second largest whale or animal on earth growing to a length of about 24 metres. What's really interesting about them is that, well, we don't really know a lot about them. We know that they were persecuted, of course, during, when whaling w

as going on but other than that, the ones that remain, we are not really sure about their movements, where they really tend to spend time. But we have seen them in BC, and certainly when I was out in the field earlier this summer, we saw quite a few in offshore environments. They do eat a lot. They can eat up to one ton of prey a day in the summer. And they have a really unique bi-coloured jaw that we can use as an identification technique which is very important when we're thinking of comparing

them to the sei whale which are a little bit smaller. And although it's not completely obvious in these two images, these two species can look very much alike. Sei whales are not seen as frequently as fin whales are. They were heavily persecuted during whaling, not at first, but when there were no more blue whales or fin whales to go after in the 1960s, sei whales became very popular. So they are still recovering from that. We are not really sure why they are not seen as frequently but certainl

y there is, I know, lot of biologists so who would absolutely love to have their first sei whale sighting and they spend lots of time out on the water. The four images here I wanted to talk about briefly, on the left you are looking at fin whales, and what's really interesting with the top image there on the left is that you're not seeing the blowhole and the dorsal fin out of the water at the same time. For fin whales, when you see them surface, you're gonna see the blowhole, then you're gonna

see the back, then you're gonna see the dorsal fin. If you look at the top right picture, you're gonna see a sei whale there, and what you're looking at is, of course, that blowhole out of the water and that dorsal fin. So that's a diagnostic kind of identification technique you can use. I did mention the bi-coloured jaw for the fin whales. So on the bottom left you're seeing that it's white on the right side. On the left side, it's actually very, very dark. So blue whales. Of course, I'm sure

you've heard of blue whales. You probably know some pretty amazing facts about the size of their hearts or, you know, anything to do with sizes is fascinating with blue whales, and they truly are a species of extreme. They are bigger than any animal that's ever existed on earth, bigger than any dinosaurs ever were. They are also the fastest cetacean, and they are also the largest, sorry, the fastest largest cetacean. And they are also the loudest animal on earth. The vocalisations that they can

create are louder than a jumbo jet, and much of those localisations occur below the hearing range in which humans are able to perceive, but certainly those localisations can actually travel for hundreds if not thousands of kilometres which is very important if you are a nomadic species who is really few and far between spread out over a wide offshore environment. I wanted to play this video here. It's from one of the observers who participates in the BC Cetacean Sightings Network, but you really

get a scope of how large these animals are through this video. So first it's kind of like you don't really know what you are looking at, but in a second you'll see a spout, and that spout is actually several stories tall. As we zoom in you really get an idea of how large these animals are. Very, very impressive, so up to about 33 metres in length. Another baleen whale we have in our waters is the North Pacific right whale, another very newsworthy species, typically, because sightings don't happ

en very often. In fact, in 2013 there were two sightings which marked the first time the species was seen in over 60 years. Now that's because this whale was the right whale to catch during whaling, and that's in fact where their name does come from. They were very slow moving, rich in oil which means the bang for your buck that these whalers were getting was just through the roof. So, unfortunately, we're seeing this population very much struggle to overcome the threat that they did have during

whaling. And it's estimated that there's only about 100 in the North Pacific currently, although that number is highly debated and it could be quite variable. What's really neat about them now, what's different, is that they have these callosities that you can see, kind of on the top of the head, and that's keratinized tissue, so it's quite rough, but that's also colonised by many, many whale lice. So they kind of live in these little islands on the head of the North Pacific right whale. And th

e largest callosity that's right near the tip of the head, that's called a bonnet. So I'm not sure why it has a special name like that, but it's certainly neat that these animals do possess those callosities. Like the grey whale North Pacific right whales don't have dorsal fins, and they do display really interesting behaviour called skim feeding where they kind of open their mouth and swim right at the surface of the water just kind of collecting prey as they go. And you'll see that in their cl

osest relatives as well who live up in the Arctic. Anyone know what that whale might be? Yeah, bowhead, yeah, bowhead whales, absolutely, very closely related to right whales. Well, they do kind of sound slow and maybe a bit more docile when I am describing them skim feeding. They can be acrobatic as well, and they'll display behaviours like breaching, lobtailing, pectoral slapping, and again, I did mention those two sightings in 2013 which were extremely exciting for the species. So moving on f

rom mysticetes to odontocetes. We'll start small and then'll get a little bit bigger. So harbour porpoise are the smallest cetacean that we have in British Columbia. And it can actually be overlooked quite often. They tend to be quite inconspicuous. Some people describe them as shy, often avoiding boats and people. But interestingly, they are common year round here. And we do certainly get quite a few reports of them at the BC Cetacean Sightings Network. Typically they are travelling alone, alth

ough in the spring especially they may form social or feeding groups of about twenty. One of the differences between porpoises and dolphins are, like Carla briefly mentioned, is the tooth shape. So dolphins are gonna have cone-shaped teeth while porpoises are gonna have spade-shaped teeth. So these harbour porpoises are gonna have spade-shaped teeth. And interestingly, although they are common, they are the most commonly entangled small cetacean in BC. So there is, that is one of the great threa

ts facing this species. In the water they can be typically quite calm. I've heard someone describe them as almost like they are spinning on an axis. So you see that triangular porpoise fin pop out of the water, dip back down and that's often the extend of what a harbour porpoise sighting comprises. Dall's porpoises, well, still a porpoise. They tend to exhibit quite opposite behaviour to harbour porpoises. They travel in slightly larger groups. They are extremely fast. In fact, they are the fast

est small cetacean on our coast, travelling at speeds of about 55 kilometres an hour. And you can see that kind of v-shaped splash coming of the body of this image. That's called a rooster tail. And that's a result of that very fast speed they can reach right at the surface at the water. Oftentimes Dall's porpoises will actually interact with boats. So sometimes you'll see them bow-riding, that kind of thing. And I have to put in a plug for the Be Whale Wise guidelines which Chad is gonna cover

cause we need to be talking about best practices when it comes to marine mammals, but sometimes Dall's will come and interact with vessels. They are quite common as well. So in the North Pacific, very large area, we do have quite a number of them present. In the video here you'll see the Dall's porpoise moving very slowly, and that's because I want you to check out that dorsal fin, and then you're gonna can see a second bump there. It's called a caudal peduncle. It's a large chunk of muscle, and

that's it what propels them to very fast speeds, like this here. And there you observed that rooster tail splash as well. Pacific white-sided dolphins, very, very charismatic species that we have along our coast. And they are gonna be typically travelling in very large numbers. The biggest group that's ever been observed for this species was around 6,000 animals that occurred offshore, but the average group is around 60 or so. They are wide ranging. You'll see them over to the coast of Japan, f

rom Alaska down to Mexico, and certainly we see them in our local waters as well. Opportunistic feeders, they feed on countless numbers of fish and cephalopods. And they are preyed on by killer whales. In fact, if you remember back to March of this year there was a story in the news about Pacific white-sided dolphins near Squamish being hunted by killer whales. Very, very acrobatic as well, just like you are seeing in this picture that is quite representative of what you'll see if you do come ac

ross the species. They have a very interesting history in the Province of British Columbia. About 2,000 years ago we know that they spent time right along the coast, so in coastal waters because their teeth were found in First Nations' mittens. Now shortly after that time they disappeared. So for some reason they decided that offshore was a better habitat, one that they wanted to spend more time in. And up until about the mid-80s or mid to late 80s, sightings were very, very few and far between

for the species. Starting in the mid-90s or so those sightings started to increase, and in fact, today we can see that those green dots you're looking at on the map, they are very coastal. So we now can say the species has once again become coastal. We're not exactly sure why they came back. It might have to do with ocean temperature or prey distribution. And very interestingly, Howe Sound is quite a hotspot for them as well. So that started just a few years ago, this trend where we are seeing P

acific white-sided dolphins in great number in Howe Sound. A video of Pacific white-sided dolphins for you. Like I described, you can see they wear a very kind of curved dorsal fin which is different from porpoises which tend to have much more triangular dorsal fins. Of course, absolutely beautiful, a large group that you are seeing travelling here, but they can display very, very acrobatic behaviours as well. Risso's dolphins. They are less commonly spotted species, probably because they do spe

nd most of their time in oceanic environments. And I'll talk about the main conjunction with Northern right whale dolphins as well which also tend to spend a lot of time in oceanic environments. Both tend to travel in fairly large groups although the Northern right whale dolphin can be observed sometimes in the thousands. And just a couple weeks ago we received a sighting at the Sightings Network of just absolutely thousands of them in an offshore environment. And they are really kind of bizarre

looking. They don't have a dorsal fin. They're almost, they almost look like leaches, kind of jumping out of the water. It's kind of neat. These pictures that you can see kind of best describe what they would look like in that environment. You can see in the bottom right there what I'm talking about. They are just very, very narrow, very streamlined animals which does help them travel at quite great speeds. Risso's dolphins on the other hand, on the left, covered in scratches of really an unkno

wn origin. We think that it's from other members of the groups that they travel with. When they are born they are basically completely grey, but elder the animals can be almost entirely white, just from these scratches. Both species, still many, many questions remain about them but we do know that they occur off of our coast. False killer whale, another animal that's made the news, of course, recently with one individual at the Marine Mammal Rescue Centre right now, Chester. But sightings don't

come in very often of these animals. We do know that they are extremely social. They are highly vocal. And they display some really interesting behaviours like mass strandings which really we don't know why that happens but it tends to be something that occurs for false killer whales. Lots of records of human interaction with these animals as well. There was a case of one false killer whale, I believe, his name or its name was Willy that travelled around with several vessels in BC for quite some

time before ending that behaviour. But you can see they have really kind of interestingly shaped pectoral flippers, those ones on the side. Those can be used for species identification. Beaked whales. Probably the most mysterious type of cetacean that we can find in the world. We know there are quite a number of species but again, when I was talking about some species only being described by one individual from a stranding or maybe from one sighting, that's pretty descriptive of beaked whales.

They can be very, very difficult to spot, but when people do come across them, it's very exciting. What's unique about them is, basically all their teeth are vestigial but they have usually two teeth on their lower jaw, and most adult males and some females in some species, that erupt upwards almost like tusks. They are social; they do travel in groups, heavily scarred like the Risso's dolphins but again oceanic, so sightings are very few and far between of these species. And just on the right-h

and side you can see the four species that can be found in British Columbia, and these are not to scale but those are Baird's, Cuvier's, Hubbs' and Stejneger's beaked whales. Sperm whales. Really, really amazing animals. They are not at risk in British Columbia. So we do know they are out there in numbers but they are also not seen very frequently because they are oceanic. Another species of extremes like blue whales. They tend to dive for a very long time. They eat really big prey. They do prey

on giant squid with some really interesting teeth on their lower jaw. Each one of those teeth can weigh up to about one kilogram or so, so we're talking about really, really big teeth. They have a couple of interesting things in their bodies, I guess, I can describe them as that. They have spermaceti which is oil-like wax that's found in their head and that's where they get their name from. And they also have ambergris which is basically a digestive by-product. It's found in their intestines. T

hey can excrete it. It sometimes floats and washes up on beaches but it's actually prized by perfumers, sometimes using very fancy perfume which is kind of gross to think about. Depredation is also an issue. And what depredation is is when catch is taken by a cetacean from a line, and certainly that can be dangerous for both of boaters and animals involved, and that is certainly a major issue. I'm not sure if Chad's included it but depredation is certainly something that we are watching on the r

adar. I will conclude by talking just very briefly about killer whales. Certainly I'll leave most of that up to Dr. Lance Barrett-Lennard here but I'm sure many, many of you are familiar with killer whales. They are certainly the most iconic species that we can of cetacean we can find off of our coast. And in British Columbia we are actually very lucky because we have three distinct types of killer whales off of our shores. And we refer to those as ecotypes. So we have residents, Bigg's, also kn

own as transients, and offshores. Now there is two populations of residents, southern and northern. Those populations are distinct. They do not mix, and they are quite different, particularly in number. Northern residents tend to be doing quite well. They are at about 260 right now. Their numbers seem to be increasing. Very different story for the southern resident killer whales who are at about 80 or so, and it is concerning for them. Bigg's or transient whales, we think, are numbered about 300

but their behaviour tends to be quite variable, and they have a massive range. So it's difficult to say. And for the offshore killer whales, again, found in an oceanic environment. What does that mean? Very mysterious. So there is about 211 catalogued so far. By no means does this comprise the entire population. We definitely are still describing individuals from that population for the first time. And just for fun, I'll play a killer whale video. Very, very iconic species along our coast. Here

you can see them, almost displaying a resting line in that first shot but they tend to exhibit a whole host of behaviours, rolling around in the water, sometimes spyhopping which is where the head comes out of the water there, maybe to check out what's above the surface of the water in their environment but always a thrill to see killer whales in British Columbian waters. Residents. Fish eaters. Particularly out of the five species of Pacific salmon we have in our waters, they do specialise on

Chinook. They move in patterns, therefore tend to be quite predictable, at least in the summer because they are following where the fish go. They do travel in matrilines. So male and female offspring will stay with their mother for their entire lives. And for this reason large groups can be observed. They are highly vocal as well. And does anyone have an idea why that might be? Yea. [inaudible] That's right, and I'm just gonna cut you off there cause you're giving away some of my secrets here th

at I was just about to get into. But talking about resident killer whales, they do tend to be highly vocal which is contrasting to the Bigg's whales like you said. Because the salmon can't hear very well under the water, so certainly our resident salmon eaters can make as much noise as they would like. And that is contrasting to Bigg's whales who tend to be mostly silent because they are gonna be eating marine mammals, other cetaceans, pinnipeds who have very good underwater hearing. They're gon

na have a large range, these Bigg's killer whales, from Alaska, all the way down to California. They travel in loose groups, not quite as tight as those matrilines are for the residents. We also think their population is increasing in BC by about two to three per cent a year. And the Pacific Wild Watching Association did release a media release a couple weeks ago that said that they've had an incredible number of transient or Bigg's killer whale sightings this year. That last group, offshore kil

ler whales, again largely mysterious. We do know two main things about them. They travel in very large groups, and we also know that they eat some pretty interesting prey. They're gonna be focusing on deep sea fish like halibut as well as sharks. And for that reason their teeth are were worn down, sometimes almost to the pulp from that sandpaper-like texture of shark skin. So with that I will conclude talking about those BC species and their natural history. I'm not sure if we're gonna take a br

eak now. Yeah, I think, we're probably gonna have a break, fifteen minutes or so, and Dr. Lance Barrett-Lennard will pick up from there. [break] Okay. I've been given the word to get started again. So I'll mean to launch into the about, thirty minutes or so, on the, what we've learned, I guess, over the last forty years of killer whale research, particularly here in British Columbia, particularly, but not exclusively. The next thing I need to learn is how to use this. Here we go. So, it's been r

eally interesting. I've been involved in this game for about 25, gosh, it's over 25 years now. My wife and I, Kathy Heise and I started as lighthouse keepers on the coast. We did the biology degrees at the University of Guelph in Ontario, moved to British Columbia, just had this romantic notion of becoming lighthouse keepers, did that for a few years. We had killer whales swimming by us all the time, and we realised we could recognise them, and sure we were recognising individuals, that is. And

then shortly afterwards we heard about this guy named Mike Bigg I mentioned before, and he was a scientist at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans at the time, and that's, we went, met Mike, and that's how we got hooked. But I think, with any, you know, this is probably true, of any sort of focused study of a wildlife species or perhaps this is true for, [unintelligible], I don't know, but when you start off with a new system as we tend to call it now, or a new species as we used to call them.

You spent a lot of your, you know, your early days and there, your first graduate students and so on if you are at the university, sort of apologizing for the lack of knowledge that you have about your species. And people say why don't you work on something more tractable like the fruit fly system for example, and you try to explain to them why, you know, you are not a whale hugger because that's not okay in university but you've got a genuine sort of scientific interest in the new species. And

then at some point along your career path if you continue with it, you suddenly wake up and realise wow we've actually got a fair bit here. We have to stop apologising. You do it for a few years beyond the time, and it's really necessary. And I think that's the way and the solution certainly came along late in the game really but that's the way with killer whale research here in British Columbia. 1960 - The Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans installs a machine gun at Seymour Narrows be

tween Vancouver Island and Quadra Island to cull killer whales. This is based on complaints from sports fishermen at Painter's Lodge in Campbell River who observed and actually they were correct, the killer whales were competing with them for spring salmon. Now the Canadian Department of Fisheries put this gun in place and there is abundant correspondence in the files at the Pacific Biological Station about the right calibre of machine gun to use, and the size of bullets, and the stopping power

and all this kind of stuff. And I think, they talked about it so much, they never got around to doing it. So luckily the gun was actually never fired. In fact, I'm not actually sure if it was really put on its big cement base but the base was poured for it. Frank Bocato and Boots Calandrino attempted to lasso and capture a killer whale in Washington in the early 1960s. That was unsuccessful but it got some press. 1964 - The Vancouver Aquarium, our former director Dr. Murray Newman decided we sho

uld have an anatomically perfectly correct killer whale sculpture, and the way to do that was to get a specimen. And this was the days, of course, when biologists went out and shot first and asked questions later, that was just the way it was done. And so a sculptor was commissioned, and the first part of this was harpooning a killer whale. Well, the killer whale was called Moby Doll. It was hit with a harpoon that passed through the skin and the very, very thin underlying tissue on the back of

its head, and it survived. So it was towed across Strait of Georgia and resided in a net pen in Vancouver harbour for three months before it died. And, you know, it's a sad story, particularly looked at, you know, with our, you know, 2014 eyes but it really did demonstrate in a way that these animals are not the voracious, sort of shark-like critters that they were presumed to be at that point. And in fact, it's quite funny to look at some of the photographs of those days when poor gentle Moby D

oll living in this net pen, and people would stand back with twenty foot poles with the fish on the end because they were sure that she, you know, she turned out to be he, was gonna jump out and eat their arm. So with these experiences of Moby Doll it was realised that, you know, these animals really weren't anything like what had been expected before. So in 1965 the Seattle Aquarium acquired a killer whale from a fisherman that was called, the whale's name was Namu from the little cannery villa

ge of Namu up on the central coast, and then larger scale captures for the display industry if you like began a couple of years later. In 1971 because of this, because there was this generalised interest in catching killer whales and putting them on display, Canadian Fisheries and Oceans Department decided that somebody should find out how many there are and they should develop a harvest plan. So Dr. Michael Bigg, you know, sort of new, wet behind the ears, young, research scientist at the Pacif

ic Biological Station got the job. Mike conducted the world's first animal census. These few, next few pages are kind of text heavy. So the little handout that you need a microscope to read is just a printout of these, I think, first four slides in this section. Anyway, Mike conducted the world's first animal census of a species in the wild like this in 1971, repeated it in '72 and '73. The concept was simple. He got everybody that he possibly could through newspaper advertisements and radio ads

and TV and so on to count all the whales and keep an accurate description of exactly where they were. And one day in the summer on July 26, that's the best day of the year, according to all the weather information he could dig up, and he sent that information in, and he spent months and months looking at it and to try to see if somebody had a sighting at 10:05 and somebody later on had one at 10:20, and, you know, was that the same group or a different group. He came up with a number, somewhere

in the order of 200 to 350 killer whales on the BC/Washington coast. Well, that number was widely disputed. It was thought to be, you know, fishermen and members of the general public, they were boaters, thought that that was probably an order of magnitude too small, you know, a tenth of the real number. Of course, later on, it was determined that that number was remarkably accurate, really. 1976 was the last capture in Washington, and the DFO, as it's now known, Department of Fisheries and Oce

ans decided that not to authorize any additional captures. Mike also about that time recognized that there were two distinct types of killer whales. These are the Bigg's killer whales and the resident killer whales that Tess referred to, these two ecotypically distinct groups. This is long before the offshores were discovered. And Mike was thanked by the Department and told to work on harbour seals for the rest of his career. Thankfully he didn't. He had a secret sort of little project going on

which took about 98 per cent of his time, and that was to continue this illicit study of killer whales. And I had the good fortune to work for him as a technician for a while in 1998 and early in 1990, six months before he died actually. And part of my job was to run cover for him if the director of the Biological Station came down, he had to hide all the killer whale pictures, and actually he had these old, you know, the old maps in your geography classroom and, you know, he pulled them down, a

nd the world, the British Commonwealth in red, you know. He had a bunch of those, and you know, he had all these pictures of killer whales on the blackboards, but he could pull this, the maps down, and there were pictures of seals on the maps. So he was always, he was always worried the director had his office bugged but I don't think there was any evidence of that. So anyway, as I say, sadly Mike died in 1990 but he really got all this started. In the 80s we saw the existence of the two, these

two distinct groups, residents and transients or Bigg's killer whales was confirmed. And the stability of resident killer whale pods in particular was recognized. And Tess referred to matrilines, this was established at that time. And also the two communities as Mike referred to them as we now usually call them populations, why, I don't think communities is a bad word for this, were discovered, and these are the so-called southern residents and northern residents that occupy that bottom third in

the top two thirds of the Province roughly. 1984 Doctor John Ford who was here at the Vancouver Aquarium at the time, just started, finished his PhD in '84 and took up a post doc here. He completed his and published his ground-breaking study of the dialects of resident killer whales. This is really heady stuff, you know. It turned out every killer whale pod had a distinct dialect, every resident killer whale pod. And John could identify them over the phone. People could call up and, there were

no cell phones then, so I guess, they've had to have a long extension cord from their cottage and put it down there in the water, and he could tell them which pod was swimming by. And John identified, realized that these dialects fell into, for the northern resident population, for example, fell into three distinct groups. You know, although each pod had a dialect, some dialects were more similar than others, there were three language groups if you like, and he called each of these three groups

clans. And that's turned out to be a good word, I think, to describe them. I'll explain why later on perhaps. 1984 Mike found a colleague. Craig Matkin started a parallel study of Prince William Sound killer whales up in Alaska. Craig came down here and introduced himself to Mike and slept on his living-room floor for a couple of months. And Mike finally sent him back to Alaska, and he started a very important and productive research program up there. 1989 - National Marine Fisheries Service and

SeaWorld biologists challenged Mike on the reliability of this technique of photo-identification that he had come up with. They challenged his longevity estimates , his estimates, and his, the existence of residents and Bigg's killer whales. It's quite interesting but anyway, the evidence was robust and the existence of these were confirmed. And as I say, he died in 1990, just after publishing his, this very seminal paper on resident killer whale social organization. The last 25 years, so Craig

and colleagues went on to confirm the population structure of killer whales in Prince William Sound in the wake of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. I discovered the distinctly different echolocation behaviour by residents and transients. That refers back to the question earlier on. These are very, very different animals. They are really behaving much like different species. The also the later on, the genetic work that John supervised in 1980 confirmed that, based on DNA analyses, confirmed that, the

independence of residents and transient killer whales. They don't intermate. John Ford later on, 2005, identified a link between Chinook salmon abundance and resident killer whale mortality. Basically when Chinook salmon numbers go down catastrophically after a really bad Chinook year, resident killer whale mortality goes up strikingly. It's a very, very strong correlation. Around the same time Bob Pitman and his colleagues identified four, now five, possibly six killer whale, distinct killer w

hale populations in the Antarctic. So we know this species, if it's a superspecies, or really a species complex of killer whales has its propensity to diversify. And in 2012 my friend and colleague John Durban, Doctor John Durban, developed photogrammetry methods to assess killer whale body condition in the field. I won't talk about that. Actually, 2012 now, it was a bit earlier than that. So just very briefly, this can be a review cause it has this pretty much covered. There is resident killer

whales. There are three well-known populations along the coast she mentioned, two in British Columbia, she said that, the southern residents in yellow here, the northern residents in red. There is a group called the Gulf of Alaska residents above that, and that group is, was the focus of Craig Matkin's studies in Prince William Sound. As we've mentioned these guys have a strong preference for Chinook salmon. They also eat chum salmon, they also eat some other halibut, a few other fish species. I

nterestingly, they seem to eat virtually no pink salmon, even in years when pink is abundant or sockeye. Pinks, I can sort of understand, they are fairly low calorie and small but sockeye, a bit hard to understand why they don't take them more often. But anyway, Chinook is the biggest, and that's what killer whales want. And chum are the second biggest. Bigg's killer whales, I keep slipping in calling these transients, that's the former term. These ones as Tess mentioned feed on marine mammals e

xclusively. We know of, we have a fair bit of knowledge about three populations along the coast, and one extending from California all the way up through BC and the south-east Alaska, showing in red, the Gulf of Alaska transients in light blue, and then orange you can see this little, small area where the 81 transients live. That's just Prince William Sound and Resurrection Bay, up near Whittier, Homer, Cordova, Seward, those little towns in Alaska. This group is very small. In fact, it's down t

o just five individuals now. It's dying out and it's a sad thing, and a lot of them, a large number, percentage of this group went missing at the time at the Exxon Valdez oil spill. They don't intermate with the larger population that's around them of Bigg's killer whales, the ones in light blue. So it's, they've genetically distinct and culturally distinct, very different vocalizations. So it's been sad in my life time to watch these guys go down. I spent three years up in Prince William Sound

in the late 80s, early 90s. We mentioned, this pictures was taken by Peter Ross, yea, as we mentioned they feed on, Bigg's killer whales feed on marine mammals. And that takes a lot of skill, you know, handling a large adult Steller sea lion like this is definitely a risk of injury. The killer whales are much bigger but they are soft-skinned, and they've big teeth but they don't have any body armour. Their mouths and their jaws aren't strong enough or big enough to grab an animal this size. So i

t takes a lot of, you know, both hootspa and skill to do it. That skill is passed on by learning. Offshores we now know feed on, as Tess mentioned, a variety of fish, but sharks are very big, very important in their diet, particularly sleeper sharks which is interesting. They have a very broad distribution, cover a lot of the coast. Here is the sleeper shark in case you've never seen one. And if you have seen one, you are one of about three people in Canada, I think so. Congratulate yourself. So

here is when we overlap the distribution of these certain known populations of killer whales on top of each other. You get a really complicated picture. This is kinda what it looks like, Bigg's in red, residents in black, and offshores in blue, and then more recent work by Craig, Craig and I are working together and several others now out and along the tip of the Alaska Peninsula and the southern Bering Sea, we know that there are at least two more resident populations and two more transient po

pulations out there. And as we go across the top of the Pacific to Russia, there is at least one population of each. So again, the species, this superspecies has this real propensity to divide into these almost xenophobic populations, if you like. Field research. We hear a couple of the basic tools, I mentioned, photo identification, we do that all the time. We've got a question over there. Yes, can you say? [inaudible question] Green circles, oh, that's a good, yea, you got me there. That's dow

n in Southern California in Bahia, and there is a couple of populations there that we don't really know very much. In fact, we don't actually know if there should be one green circle or two green circles down there. There is a group called the LA killers, and they show up every few years and raise havoc, but we don't know much about them. [inaudible question] Yea, I haven't heard of offshores going into the Sea of Cortez myself, but, yes, they have been seen down to Southern California to the bo

rder with Mexico anyway, I know that. Field research again. One of the couple of the basic tools we use in addition to camera for photo identification is a hydrophone. That's what this guy with a beard that looks like Che Guevara is holding in his hand. It might be me. And there's, in the bottom picture is a biopsy dart, that's about the size of a pencil. That's what we used to collect those skin samples from the whales. We fire this with an air rifle, it bounces off the back of the whales, it c

ollects a piece of skin the size of a cigarette filter, and that's enough to get enough DNA for a lifetime of work, really. So we have over 400, yea, getting close to 500 animals, I guess, biopsy sampled in British Columbia and Alaska now. I didn't want to label this slide, but this is just a map of gene space, if you like, based on the so-called mitochondrial DNA, this is the DNA and your cells that is only inherited from your mother. And what this is intended to show really is that there is a

cluster; all of the different populations of Bigg's killer whales are genetically quite similar. There is a break showing in the little line connecting them to other whales, and that's because this would be a barbell-shaped figure with this cluster quite a lot further apart than appears in the slide. And the resident killer whales are all clustered together, so they have closer maternal relatives with each other than they do with the transients, and offshores and some miscellaneous killer whale

samples from the Atlantic all cluster with the residents. Okay, behavioural and ecological differences between residents and transient killer whales or Bigg's killer whales are almost certainly not genetically maintained and transmitted. There just isn't enough genetic variation for that to be realistically possible. We are certain that these differences are learned and are passed on culturally, if you like, between, you know, both horizontally, between members of the common generation, and vert

ically, from one generation to the next within killer whale groups. So these differences would include their repertoires, their dietary preferences, foraging behaviour, social organization, even their mating preferences are learned which is bizarre, dispersal patterns and so on, their use of echolocation. So why would they, these residents and transients, residents and Bigg's have such, you know, divergent, if you like, cultures? Well, we think that's because this cultural displacement, if you l

ike, this separation of feeding habits and dietary preferences reduces competition. And the residents and Bigg's killer whales co-exist, they actually swim through the same waters, they share the same space. They don't socialize, they avoid each other but, you know, you can see them sometimes on the same day, relatively close together, just avoiding each other. And they can do that because they are actually not competing for resources, not competing for access to females either, they don't inter

mate. So there is no a mate competition, and there is no food competition. If one of them breaks the rules, if a transient starts eating Chinook, then it's trouble, and vice versa, we think. This is speculation, that is the only reasonable speculation that anyone in my field has come up with to explain how, what, how these differences persist. What would happen if they lost their culture? Well, we think, you know, the converse of really all the reasons that they have culture. It would compromise

your ability to find food, loss of hunting skills, the reduced ability to perceive and recognize risk and reduce it. A lot of that knowledge, if you like, a lot of information about what's scary and what's dangerous is passed on between individuals. They don't have to learn everything by trial and error unlike most, I have a fifteen year old son, he learns everything by trial and error but I try a little cultural stuff but doesn't always work. And reduced social cohesion, and of course, I think

, the big one is, increased competition and conflict with neighbouring groups. Am I getting taller or is this mike slowly coming down? I think that it's going down. So wo are the, which individuals in the group are responsible for passing culture on? Well, we think that it's the females, and we think it's the older females, and part of the reason for thinking that is that females live much longer than males, and there is presumably a revolutionary reason for that. They must be of some value to t

he group. They go through menopause, so they are some value to the group after they've, some important value to the group, after they, even when they're no longer reproducing. And they must benefit the survival of the group for those genes, those longevity genes to be passed on, if you like. So we think that they are the ones that are responsible primarily for passing on culture, not exclusively but there is multiple reasons for thinking this, I could go into later on. So I'm gonna go into, move

into a slightly different theme for a couple of minutes, and that is, you know, a discussion of what factors determine the abundance of killer whales. Why, in most wild populations ultimately the abundance is determined by some formula that has, that takes into account the availability of food, how much predation pressure there is, you know, disease, I would link in with predation here, and some sort of behaviour. Sometimes animals are gonna spacing themselves out through territoriality. From t

he early 1970s in case of killer whales, until very recently we had no idea what determined their numbers. In fact, from the early 1970s the numbers in BC were increasing both of Bigg's and resident killer whales. And, sorry, and then John Ford, as I mentioned in the little history summary sort of made this fairly revolutionary observation, I think, and that is that, as I mentioned before, that in poor salmon years, so we have Chinook abundance on the bottom of this graph, you can see a period b

etween, you know, the kind of earlyish 1990s and the earlyish 2000s when Chinook salmon numbers were way down, and there was a corresponding spike in the mortality of both northern and southern resident killer whales, and this Chinook abundance was an overall coast-wide index, so all of the rivers, major salmon runs were down during that period. And so it really looked like, you know, perhaps killer whales, resident killer whales anyway were up against the food ceiling. So they've been increasin

g for a number of years and then hit the ceiling. Why were they increasing? We don't know but it could be that there are very few of them, it's a very small population, they are very vulnerable, they are easy to shoot, I can attest to that, having biopsied hundreds of them. Every fishing boat, you know, when they first throughout most of the 1900s had a rifle on board, you know, it's very likely that a lot of these animals were simply shot because they were competition for salmon. There are othe

r things that may have affected the population size as well, but anyways, I say, this Chinook abundance affected both populations. This is just another, it's the last graph I'll show, I promise, showing this, that this relationship between Chinook salmon abundance index has very little effect on birth but it has a big, it's in the bottom graph, slight effect on birth, but appears to have a very big effect on mortality. So the four workshops convened in, starting about four years ago between, inv

olving the Canadian and US governments to look at this information and decide whether anything should be done in terms of changing the ways Chinook salmon fisheries are managed in order to preserve, make sure that there was enough food for killer whales. That was something that the governments of both countries were responsible for doing really under their own endangered species legislation. You know, southern resident killer whales are endangered, and they had to do something. So they convened

this workshop, I attended, along with many others, attended all of them. The conclusions after lots and lots of discussion and debate were that increases in Chinook salmon abundance would lead to higher survival rates, and therefore higher population growth rates of southern resident killer whales. But the effect isn't linear. Consistently positive growth rates can occur by avoiding extremely low Chinook salmon levels, so although the relationship isn't linear. And it seems very clear that when

salmon numbers are really low there is an impact on killer whales, but sadly in a way, the workshop panel concluded that elimination of ocean fisheries for Chinook salmon would impact salmon abundance far less than the variations that we have seen in salmon since the 1970s. In other words, there is high variation in salmon, regardless of fisheries, and they couldn't untangle which runs of Chinook salmon were the most important for the killer whales. If they could have done that, they being the,

we, I should say, I guess, being a member of that group, if we could have figured out which, is it the Fraser River Chinook salmon that are important, is it the Nelson, the Skeena, then there could have been recommendations to curtail fisheries. But when it's the whole coast, and this is a lot of hardship for people, fishing communities to shut the whole fishery down, there were no recommendations at the end of the day. But there was, at least there was no recommendations to fisheries managers,

but there was a recommendation that this technique called photogrammetry be further investigated, and what, sorry, it's just too distracting. What photogrammetry is means measuring from photographs, and it was realized by the panel that mortality is a rough index, of course, index of an impact of food decline. So in other words if you have to wait for something to die because it was hungry, die of starvation then you're kind of after the fact by the time you draw your conclusions, and a lot of a

nimals die randomly from factors, not randomly necessarily but from disease or things not to do with food. So there is a lot of noise in those data, and surely, it would be better to be able to look at body condition rather than death to try and figure out which salmon runs are most important. So one way to look at body condition in killer whales is to use this technique called photogrammetry to take pictures and to try and infer from those photos, you know, whether animals are fat or skinny, an

d if they are skinny, some of them are skinny, if that's correlated or if it's just a few individuals. So this recommendation was made. There are two ways to do it. One is to do horizontal photogrammetry where you are in your boat taking pictures of killer whales and try to infer, take measurements from those. Another one to look at them from above. John Durban, my colleague I mentioned before, had developed this technique of horizontal photogrammetry. You can see two dots on the killer whale, o

n the fin of this killer whale. They are exactly ten centimetres apart. John attached two laser pointers, I don't know if I got one in here but we do, like that there, to his camera, and he made them, and he set them up with their rigs so that they are exactly parallel. And so they projected dots when he took a photo, no matter how far away the killer whale was, the dots were always ten centimetres apart, and this provided a way to actually measure, to put a yard stick on the killer whale, so if

you like, made a, provided a way to measure them. And so here the little L is the distance between the two dots, so you've got, you know, from that you can then go further height of the dorsal fin, you can then go further width of the dorsal fin, the dorsal fin to blowhole length and so on. So John did a lot of work showing that he could get accurate lengths, blowhole to dorsal fin lengths anyway, and extrapolate those to total lengths, using this method. It's quite effective. It was really goo

d for looking into differences between populations but turns out that killer whales are really good at camouflaging when they get into poor condition, when they are starving, because they've got these firm streamlined bodies and if they start getting saggy and lumpy from being skinny, they lose their streamlining. So as they lose blubber, as they use up their fat reserves they switch it up with water. So their blubber tissue if you cut them open, if their blubber tissue is full of oil, they are

in good condition. Sometimes the blubber is full of water and they are in poor condition. They get a condition when they get really skinny which, as Tess said, is likely to be, or Carla, when they are dehydrated, then they begin to show it in their physical appearance but then they are in a death spiral, there is, you know, there is a small chance of them recovering. So when they starve acutely they begin to get dehydrated. So we wanted to be able, so looking at them from the side, like this bot

tom line is, is hard to tell. It's hard to tell when they are really in poor, when they are in somewhat poor condition. So John and I discussed, we had worked together a lot in Alaska, and we discussed a couple of years ago using hexacopter or some sort of remotely operated little toy helicopter to get over the top of whales so we could look at their width, even though their general form doesn't change much as they lose lipids, their girth does. They get generally a bit thinner. We thought that

if we could get vertical photos, we could ascertain that. John had done a bit of this, using a manned helicopter in Washington and shown that it was quite a promising technique but it was way too expensive to use a real helicopter, and way too disturbing for the killer whales. Helicopters are noisy. So this year, the summer of this year we, he and I and Dr. Holly Fearnbach, set out to give it a try in Johnstone Strait. This is the little unit that we used. It's got a camera mounted to the bottom

. It was provided for our use by NOAA. It's an expensive little thing, this particular unit, but it worked really well. So that's, we launched it from the top of our little Vancouver Aquarium research boat, launched it by hand, retrieved it by hand. There it is somewhere over here. So it was quite inconspicuous. We flew it over the whales at a height of 100 feet. And at that height we got no behavioural reactions that we could see whatsoever. The whales seemed completely unaware of it. And these

were the kind of photos that we got. So the water was fairly clear in Johnstone Strait this summer, and so these whales are actually all underwater right now, just below the water surface. And we could measure their, we could recognize individuals, their saddle patch that show up quite nicely, so we could see all the scars and scratches, and we could tell which ones are fat and which ones are thin. And they get a good sense of their length to width ratios, I guess. We also saw some interesting

behaviours, some head-butting. I like this photo, except that the bottom is sort of slightly cut off, my fault. In this photo we have a skinny whale up at the top, a worrisomely skinny whale, a young adult female, three normal-sized killer whales below her, and one little baby as well, and then, mostly cut off at the bottom, you can see another animal. That's a pear-shaped whale. This is a pregnant female, you can just see in this photo I think that her weight, her maximum width is behind her sa

ddle patch, at the back of her saddle patch, and this is a sign of pregnancy. So this is one of the first photos we took in our little August field study this year. We realized right away this is gonna be a good, a useful method. This is a male that's starving, A37. He is a well-known member of the northern resident community. He's just like a tadpole. He's got this terrible depression behind the head. He is actually so thin you would actually be able to see it from a boat. This is what he looks

like from the air. He is tapered behind the saddle patch all the way to his tail, and he is using his great big pectoral flippers to try to hold himself up when he came up to breathe. He's got so little lipid left that he is very dense and quite feeble, so getting to the surface and breathing was a struggle for him. And sadly he died a few days, went missing, presumed dead a few days after we took this photo. Here is the video of what it looked like. So I guess the bottom line is, I think, this

technique of photogrammetry is gonna be very useful years from here. It's gonna be a very useful way for us to gauge the health of these populations at the time as a tool as simple enough and cheap enough. We could do it every year. And it would give us a very good sense of how the whales are doing in that year, whether they are suffering from reduced food availability, what the pregnancy rates are. And advice from a study like this could be used by fisheries managers to make decisions about so

rt of local closures of fisheries in bad years. So it's dead simple conceptually and got some geek appeal cause it's a cool little helicopter. But, you know, it's a kind of thing; it's so obvious that I'm not sure we would have been doing it twenty-five or thirty years ago. We just have the tool to do it, and it's been very, very useful for that killer whale research. So I guess, overall conclusion, you know, going back, looking back over the last forty years, it's been a wild ride, it's been, y

ou know, if we keep on thinking as scientists working in this field that we are gonna run out of questions, and boy, we never do. Every time we have answered a question, we have five new ones. So it's gonna be, there's lots of opportunity for future marine biologists to come along and take over and see where the study leads us. In the process killer whales have gone from the one of the most poorly understood mammals on the planet to one of the best. And this happened without anybody really notic

ing, there wasn't any particular day that is referred to as the beginning; it's just something that happened. And it seemed terribly impractical to study these animals but glad we did. And we are looking forward to where things go from now. So thank you. [inaudible question] I don't know why do people do it? The question was why do, why, can I speak to why killer whales were butting heads. No, it's a good question. I think, one of the things that was really obvious looking at them from above was

that they are very, very tactile, constantly touching each other, constantly playing, they are rolling around. We only saw that head-butting once, but I think, it was just, we saw lots of pushing and shoving, and, you know, generally interacting in a very physical way. And I think that was just one case of it but, you know, I guess, the bigger question's why are they so tactile or why are they, you know, what's in it for them with this sort of, this group composition. And everything that they d

o, really, they spread out a little bit to forage but the rest of the time they are always really, really close together. And it seems to play a role, and we can speculate anyway that it plays a role in the cohesion of the groups and maintaining these groups. And group cohesion is pretty important if everything that you do and everything that you learn about as a youngster is learned socially. These guys have a really low reproductive rate. They don't reproduce until, start reproducing until the

y are, you know, say, are 13, 14, 15 years old. Females go through menopause. They can't make many mistakes, you know, they have one calf at a time. Life is precious, and life seems to be maintained best in these very tight social groups. Yes, go ahead. [inaudible question] Yea, there was this story from Alaska of killer whales attacking moose and at least one moose being killed and eaten. I take that with a grain of salt to be honest. There's lots of stories, you know, interesting anecdotes out

there, some of which I find frankly unbelievable, others I propagate because they happened to me. But what makes it surprising to me that observation is that these animals seem to have such a strong idea what food is, you know, and they don't, you know, the notion that you have resident killer whales starving to death because Chinook salmon are down, you know, down in abundance when there are other fish, little other marine mammals out there to eat really indicates that there's got to be, you k

now, a high premium on this diet, a high evolutionary premium, if you like, on being very, very selective. It doesn't seem to me that they experiment very much with eating other prey. I can, Bigg's killer whales do harass other creatures sometimes, they go and check them out. And sometimes it's really hard, you know, what they are eating and what they are just harassing, but anyway. I think I should probably let Chad speak, and we'll out be out to answer if there is any more questions, we'll all

be out to address them at the end. Thank you. Thank you, Lance. Thank you again all for coming and thank you for hanging in there to the very bitter end. We're gonna go from one of the best studied mammals, and, you know, cetacean that we know the most about into another realm of questioning, some of the future research that we are doing here at the Aquarium and by our colleagues at Fisheries and Oceans in Canada and other ENGOs along the coast. And not only that, we're gonna talk about anythin

g but killer whales. We're gonna try to pair them up with some of their conservation concerns that exist for all cetaceans, not just killer whales in all BC and not just BC whales either but some of these worldwide trends. But, you know, we try to use some examples that we have here of conservation concerns in BC, and research that's being done to counteract or support them. So that's how all the slides are set up. So in general I'll try to present the conservation concern and then follow it up

with a research activity that's kind of being done here locally to address some of these things. So the major conservation concern for most of BC's cetaceans and the worldwide ones is there are low population numbers. And that's just the reflection of historical whaling. So really the number one conservation concern for almost all cetaceans in BC is their population status and their numbers. As again, just recovery from whaling, and we're gonna use the example, Tess addressed that earlier on, th

at BC sei whales were incredibly impacted. And in fact, you can hardly ever find one in BC these days. Sighting reports are incredibly rare and even harder to verify. This example here, you've got 4,000 records. These are 4,000 confirmed sei whales that were in BC waters at one time somewhere between 1908 and 1969, 1968. It's roughly sixty years that they were out there but no, and you basically can't find them here anymore. Now this figure is pretty complex, so I'll just walk you through a litt

le bit. The red dots are all the confirmed whaling locations over those sixty years. And the green dots in places like Maiden Harbour, Rose Harbour, Coal Harbour along the coast are whaling stations from the past. And the size of the circle is reflective of how many whales were taken from each one of those particular locations. And then the bar graph at the bottom just simply has number of animals caught, and then time on the very bottom. And you can see that there is a lot of ants. A few animal

s taken in the years 1920s through the '30s. There is a big gap there, part of that is World War II. And then it starts to increase again afterwards, and you see that big spike sort of in the lead, '50s, early 60s, and that's when they ran out of blue whales and fin whales to hunt. So there is a huge spike, and then they wiped out the sei whales in BC as well, and the fishery collapsed, and that was the end of it. So in total there's 25,000 whales taken from BC waters pretty much in just under 6

0 years. There you go. So nowadays the only time there is usually a whale death it becomes a bit of a vocal to-do. So in this case, this is a humpback whale that came ashore in just south of here, Boundary Bay. That was 2012. Lots of people out to check it out. Eventually we've had these animals also necropsied. So we learned a lot in the early days from whaling, and luckily, we don't have to rely on slaughtering thousands of them anymore to sort of get our information. That last example is some

thing close to shore, so that, you know, lots of people around, very, sort of close to a populated area. That's not usually the case when you have a dead whale. Usually it floats up in some inaccessible place, middle of nowhere, you don't have a great big team or heavy equipment to do it, and it's usually sort of local lighthouse keepers that are able to go and collect a lot of information you can get from it. We are lucky in BC to have the Animal Health Department out in Abbotsford which is a p

rovincial run organisation that has a specialist there who's dabbled on the side in lot of marine mammal works and has become internationally recognized for it, and is able to sort of direct people like this lone individual here. But nowadays we are interested in so how many whales are left, and that's the biggest, you know, our biggest conservation concern is how many are there when we really need to get out there and figure out how many whales of different species there are. So here we are tal

king about population surveys and abundance, and it's best done by ocean going vessels at least when you're getting in terms of abundance, just like this one. This is the John P. Tully, DFO science vessel, and it's commandeered every couple of weeks out of every year to do a winter survey and a summer survey for cetaceans, particularly those that are listed species at risk. And so much like an aerial survey that's done, you have lots of people observing, in this case binoculars staring through t

hem all the time. You have a really good idea of how many hours people are sort of staring out of the water, hoping to see something out there in the waves. You combine that with a very detailed track where that ship has gone and the distance that it traveled, the number of hours that it spent cruising around. You can do some math, and you can get sightings per kilometre which then you can turn into population estimates for every species that you have seen along that track for that particular ar

ea. Now you wouldn't wanna take it just one time, you wanna do it multiple times over the years, over many years to kind of get an idea on population variability in the numbers and then in potential trends you might be able to see. Another way that you can look at this kind of information survey is less on population abundance but on population distributions, of where there are located in the province is done probably most effectively by our in-house BC Cetacean Sightings Network. So that's a co

llaborate project between Fisheries and Oceans Canada and the Vancouver Aquarium, and we curate the database here on site, between and myself. It's a citizen science program which takes advantage of, you know, the fact that not everyone has a John P. Tully, you know, cruising around. It really distributes that, you know, that effort over a variety of people we've been crowd sourcing long before it was cool. As because of our network is over 3,000 observers strong at the moment, and the best pa

rt is, anyone can join, anyone can be a part of the project. We've got a lot of people that come from BC Ferries, pleasure craft operators, the fisheries, you know, boat captains, other, you know, DFO cruises that not necessarily task the science, that are out on research and patrol, coastal residents, lighthouse keepers are some of our best observers, as well as just coastal residents, people who live on the water, people who are hiking along the edge of the ocean, paddlers, anyone can join. Te

ss showed this one before. This is the entire BC Cetacean Sightings days from now through just last year. We are now currently at about 80,000 sightings, and that includes one of every of those 23 cetacean species or populations that we have here in BC. We also have an honorary cetacean in our group. We've got three sea turtles because sea turtles on their own just can't hold their own sightings network. So we've taken them in as, you know, cetacean orphans. Now the best part is that we turn thi

s data around, and it's used for multiple research and conservation projects every year. So the federal government is responsible for creating management plans for species at risk. And we've become a sort of like clearing house for this kind of data because it's just not collected anywhere else. It just can't be. It's just not economically feasible, and we do that through the people of BC. One thing that we are trying to do now that our database has sort of reached sort of that, you know, 75,000

, 80,000 plus number is to try and get an idea on where at least there are hotspots in the Province. So we are not necessarily looking at abundance per se but we wanna know where most often we'd find cetaceans, and so the graph here that's up here first here is, you know, raw data. So you notice there is huge red clusters in and around where there's lots of populations. And that makes perfect sense. Where there is people, you'll see whales. But the green areas we don't know of that just because

people don't venture out there very often. Or is there in fact no whales there. And so we're doing some fancy math that I can't take credit for to kind of come up with some of these areas and correct for those areas of green, and take into account, you know, who is looking, who is reporting for us, where they live there, how often do those particular groups go there. And it's kind of a comeback aggregator to see where you might have some hotspots in the Province. So right now this example it's f

rom killer whales which are still probably the most numerically abundant type of sighting in our database. And here you can see some hotspots that are correlated with other some of these cetacean surveys that are done on the Tully and other vessels. So the east side of the Queen Charlotte Islands or Haida Gwaii, the northern part of Vancouver Island, Johnstone Strait are classic northern resident territory. In and around the San Juan where the southern residents tend to hang out. So we think we'

re doing very well, and we are eager to try this with other species of BC. So another major conservation concern is vessel disturbance. Now this is sort of acute, you know, one-off events where you have individual vessels that are in the way that are approaching whales, you know. This can be sport boats, sport fishing boats, individual recreational boat owners, anyone along that line, and some real problem that, you know, that could potentially interrupt a lot of natural behaviours, resting, fee

ding, a concern that I have never really considered before joining this group is the effects of exhaust that boat exhaust has on these animals. They don't have the same kind of adaptations that we have to deal with pollen and a variety of things. So their mucous membranes are not well suited to filtering out any kind of pollutant. And so they take this stuff in directly which is pretty nasty. The next one is interference with passive acoustic monitoring, all of that's disturbance for the whales

or disturbance for the researchers that are trying to listen to them with their hydrophones. But it's pretty, you know, the kind of noise you can have. I'll bring it up in another slide. And then the last one is that it increases the chance of ship strike which is actually really is a concern all of its own. So this is an example here of a humpback in BC, Slash, and you notice there on the back those three ridges, those are prop marks from this whale being struck by a propeller. And obviously th

is whale's continued to go on and do quite well but you have no idea how many other animals might be out that are struck and eventually succumb to these kinds of wounds. But luckily even though there is not a ton of research being done and besides what we can do with the sightings network data and a variety of other things is that we have a tool out there at least, an education tool, that we try to promote through our programs called the Be Whale Wise Guidelines. And these were developed by Fish

eries and Oceans Canada, by NOAA in the US and was guided through the process by our commercial whale watchers that we are trying to police themselves. And really, it's got three sorts of components to them. It has a speed component, a location component, and a positioning component. It's really three rules, three basic rules. The first is to stay out of the path of the whales. So try not to position yourself immediately in front of the whales or, you know, or leave your vessel sort of parked, y

ou know, zoom up right in front and cut the engine, and let them swim underneath you. Yea, it's to stay at the side. Another one is to reduce your speed, slow down to less than seven knots, you know, try not to charge in on them. And the last one is to always stay at least 100 metres away from marine mammals. And in the US it's, that's right, it's 200 yards. Thank you. And the last one is, you know, not encouraging dolphins or porpoises to bow-ride, as Tess said. Yea, we've got some species in B

C, particularly Dall's porpoise, that are really fantastic, that like to come in close to boats, and they'll do it on their own. You do not necessarily have to bait them to do it. And if they choose to bow-ride then, you know, things we'd like to mention to mariners and people that are watching online is to maintain your course and speed, let them dictate when they wanna be next to you. So a major conservation concern and an emerging one for the BC coast and one that we are trying to get ahead o

f from the research side of things is to deal with ocean noise, and in particular, I'm gonna use an example here of commercial shipping. So there's been increased shipping in BC, particularly in the port of Metro Vancouver. Last year it handled 135 million tonnes of cargo. And that's up nine per cent from last year, and it was nine per cent from the year before. So it's a steady trend in BC. It's positioning itself as a major port in the Pacific room. That has to do with container traffic, coal.

Also it's a potential for liquid natural gas on the north coast, potentially pipeline traffic. And the problem with massive shipping noise in these kinds of ships is that it becomes pervasive. It almost sort of increases, you know, the overall background noise of the ocean which is already a fairly noisy place as the potential to block communication and other important activities. I'm gonna play, pardon me, a sound clip that has been loaned to us by one of the ENGOs on the central coast, OrcaLa

b, and it gives you an idea of a couple of killer whale calls, I guess, I'm a liar, there is some killer whales in this section, as they are busy trying to communicate and then interrupted by boat noise. I guess we have some technical issues. This is not gonna come along. Here we go. And here comes the shipping. Let's call that a day. and you can, it's really sad, you can hear in the middle of that passage and they try to sort of increase their vocalizations to get over the noise and then they j

ust give up as they go quiet. They've just had enough. So one of the ways we are looking at the ocean noise factor, sort of the ability to monitor things is a hydrophone network. So there is currently, you know, a series of existing and proposed hydrophones. A lot of ENGOs have been interested in noise or, you know, tracking whales in their own backyard for the last 20 years. And so you have this sort of de facto set of, you know, instruments that are already along the coast, and the trick is to

take them from where they are now which is where sort of pollution monitoring was maybe 50 years ago. We had individual companies or individual counties and cities looking at different parameters, using different types of instruments, looking at different things. And they wanted to know, you know, they were only concerned about what was in the backyard, and they had no ability to create this common set of standards and to look at things that way. And that's exactly what they're hoping and, of c

ourse, that changed, and everyone's looking at the same thing and trying to do the same thing now with a hydrophone network along the coast. And our research associate Kathy Heise is leading that charge and try to convince these different groups to look at the same parameters, to have their instruments calibrated, so you can create a monitoring network that sort of looks at existing conditions right now, potentially before shipping increases, and create a baseline on what the conditions are righ

t now. We are doing something very similar here at the Vancouver Aquarium. We are looking at not the noise in the environment, but, you know, noise is how it relates to hearing, so that's the second half of the equation, you know. We can do something like monitoring the noise in our pools which we do as a matter of fact, you know, through, for husbandry here for our animals here in the collection. But we also have the ability to look at the other half which is, you know, what do the animals hear

, what is their perception like? And so all of the animals here at the Aquarium have been part of hearing studies over the last couple of years, in all of these cases where they're collecting audiograms. So this is very similar to when you have a hearing test done or, you know, the mobile hearing booth pulls up at your office, and you go and then they give you the headphones, and we have the ability to sort of answer yes and no with the thumb pads, pressing as they, you know, as they change the

frequencies and change the volume. Eventually you can't hear it any more. And it's a very similar thing that's being done here with all of the animals, except we are doing this sort of a quick and dirty method, looking at it physiologically. We are not, you know, you can go through the training process and train them up to answer yeses and nos, and when they've heard, you know, heard various tones, but the quick way to do it is to do it this way where you have attached a hydrophone, a microphone

to their jaw, and, of course, these animals hear through their or they receive sound through their lower jaw. It's filled with oil, and that makes it a very good sound receiving source. They don't have external ear flaps like, you know, we do or like some of the pinnipeds do. So we put these jaw phones on, and the sound is played directly to them and then is relayed back to them. So essentially, you know, we are using some of the animals here in our collection to answer questions about what tho

se perceived levels might be. So here is an example of cetacean sound reception in general, and on the left we've got our porpoises Jack and Daisy who, you know, came to us through the marine mammal rescue program. And on the x-axis we have time, and that's in milliseconds, and the very start of those red lines is the instantaneous sound. It's almost like a little click that gets produced for them, and then, this is the response that's seen in their auditory nerve, through those little suction c

ups that are on the back of the animals, and so that's what we receive. And that's a very typical, sort of mammalian response, you know. You can clearly see that they heard something, a new chain, you know, and we can do that for. So those are the waves that indicate the activity in the centre of the brain. Then we could do it with the belugas, and on the bottom, our older animal, our oldest female, Aurora, it's a very standard sort of curve, and above is her daughter Qila who has, you know, not

nearly as significant a response. And so there is a potential that she doesn't hear as well as her mum does, and it's anyone's guess to why that's the case, but it's really interesting to know that not all animals out there have pristine hearing to begin with. So that's part of the, so we have one example here of, you know, of a very specific tone is being played and their responses to it, but you can put a whole series of these together and eventually get a hearing curve you are looking at dif

ferent frequencies, so I'm like the x-axis on the bottom you are looking at pitch essentially, so you can play different, you know, keys on the piano, sort of going from low to high. And on the y-axis is volume, and it always takes a really long time to figure out how to read these curves because the lower the line the better is your hearing instead of a certain pitch or a certain key or a certain frequency. So in this area here the dash line is the previous line from the only other time that it

has ever been looked at, so a couple of older animals in Europe. And then our Aquarium porpoises are various lines beneath them. And the lowest part is the region of best hearing. So that means that they can hear those sounds at the lowest possible volume at that particular frequency. So it's pretty interesting stuff, and it shows you that, you know, I think people's idea of what a porpoise could hear is well off, you know, when you've got different animals that you can look at, and so all of t

hose lines being below the dash line indicate that our porpoises' hearing, you know, young animals was much different than what was previously published on porpoises. So another major conservation concern getting back into the field is entanglement. Now when we are dealing with mysticetes, so these large whales, it's far more challenging to research ways than which to do them. And most of the research that goes into it deals with gear modification, changes to fishery practices, you know, monitor

ing during fishery openings, and such kinds of things. But in BC we have a really great mechanism there. If you do happen to see an animal that is in distress, you know, particularly a large animals that is in distress, you have the ability to report it to the BC Marine Mammal Response Network. And this number will be part of the slide that's made available online, so everyone can have access to this number. This is also the DFO radio room or the Fisheries and Oceans radio room, so it's manned 2

4 hours a day, 7 days a week. Dealing with entanglement, potentially by-catch for some of the smaller cetaceans on BC's coast, is something that we have tried to take a look at as a research community, in particular, some of the Pacific white-sided dolphins here at the Vancouver Aquarium participated in some of these works. So this is a picture of one of our white-sided dolphins, wearing eye-cups, and so essentially, visually blind but not acoustically blind in the pools. And you can see in the

background in the light blue there is a couple of line that are hanging down. So these are weighted lines, and her task was to go to swim around the pool and avoid these types of obstacles. And all of those behaviour's being recorded through hydrophones to get an idea on what type of echolocation is used by this particular species because they have this tool that they should be able to avoid all kinds of fishing nets, and yet they still end up as by-catch on occasion. So I've got a bit of a vide

o, so that was net avoidance. Another thing is, you know, potentially doing, finding fish or other prey in the ocean, and, you know, why do they end up if they should be able to find things, you know. If you can avoid things, you should also be able to find things. And this is the session where the trainers working very closely with the animal to put the eye cups on. And the eye cups are made out of gelatin. They are homemade; that's kinda great. They dissolve after a few weeks, and Kathy who is

there on the dock needs to make some more. So you can see the animal accepts the eye cups. Here she is. And rings have been distributed around the pool, and so, completely blind she is asked, tasked with finding these objects in the pool. And again the same time the hydrophone's running the whole time so they were able to record the type of echolocation that she is producing. And the reason why this is pretty unique for BC animals, not a lot of work has been done on Pacific white-sided dolphins

anywhere. A lot of the echolocation work that is so similar in the '70s and in the early '80s was done on bottlenose dolphins. So that we are finding lots of different, well, the mechanism might be the same, there is a lot of, you know, devil in the detail; it's different species by species. So it's becoming pretty spectacular stuff for dolphins. And the video continues on but a very challenging spot is in the back corner of the pool, of the habitat here at the Aquarium; there's a little extens

ion there, and so she is able to go and find the ring, so it sort of continues on through that back. So I'll skip that stretch. So some of the research has been done, particularly, dealt mostly with the Pacific white-sided dolphins but I can easily see this extending to the porpoises that are here. We are looking at both, at search and avoidance, and a really, really cool project that's about to get started is net discrimination, and so we've talked about, you know, looking at some of the behavi

ours that animals do physiologically, and this is one that we are actually gonna have the trainers train up for us. And it's the ability for them to answer those yes or no questions like when you are in a booth, you know, can you see something, or if you are at the doctor's office doing an eye chart, you know, half eye down, can you go? So the idea is that we are gonna change the various types of nets that are presented to them while they are acoustically, sorry, visually blind but acoustically

can use their echolocation and tell us is there a drop-off point, is there some kind of net that's out there that they can't see. And that will have some real implications for fisheries management. And again, that's all to help understand, help our understanding in behaviour of the wild dolphins, and this is again led by Kathy Heise who is a research associate here at the Aquarium. So Lance mentioned a major conservation concern for killer whales is this link between Chinook salmon runs and mort

ality, and so, that's a really fantastic story and a great correlation but it's not well-known for very many other species along the BC coast. One way to look at sort of food supply, particularly for large baleen whales, is to conduct some, some coordinated studies that use some of the tools of the fisheries trade. So fisheries managers and fisheries biologists have long known, you know, long used sonar and various other, you know, naturals, test fisheries to get an idea on what type of fish is

out there, what type of species are there. And we plan a, it's now being used, you know, a pilot study between the Aquarium and Hakai Beach Institute to look at the type of prey that would be available for humpback whales and some of their feeding hotspots on the BC coast. So the first cartoon there shows a side scan sonar that's imaging fish. On the right hand side is an equivalent idea of what you'd actually see on the monitor. The sea floor is in red; the school of fish there is in blue. You

could get the species, depending on what they are and depending on how technically savvy you are with your sonar. You can also do naturals to figure those kind of things out. Not only is it usually done in BC just for fish but we are also extending it to krill which, of course, is a major species that's sort of used for, that's required for some of the large baleen whales, and why they are here in the summer in BC in the first place just to really fuel up on this energy-rich food supply. A nice

addition to the study was that we were looking at some of the diving of humpback whales in the vicinity of some of these schools of prey. So we had one boat that was tasked with simply doing sonar runs, and another boat that was out there trying to put dive tags on some of these large animals which is a first for the Aquarium and, you know, a really interesting step on the BC coast. They were successful. We have a tag successfully attached to this one particular individual, able to follow it. Th

is is along the Central Coast, just north of Fitz Hugh Sound up towards Denny Island and Shearwater. The big cluster of pink on the bottom is when the tag is active and still on the boat on the end of that pole. And it's a suction cup down on the end. So you can see it took a lot of time circling around, doing our best to get close to that individual. And then finally when it takes off, and the parallel line there, the tag is on the whale. And we are following along. And there is just a really a

simple example of some of the data that can come off of those instruments. If I hadn't mentioned that already, I'll mention it again. The instruments are put on via suction cups. So they only last a couple of hours. So this is a deployment that is just over two hours, and the black line there in the middle is the animal as it moves through the water column. On the y-axis it's depth, and on the bottom it's just time. So as you go across the very top you've got, here we go. So at the very, so thi

s is the surface of the water, this is the animal. Actually this is the tag still on the pole. So this is its waving up and down in the air as it goes, and finally, it's on the animal, and you get a fairly, you know, sequence of dives through the whole process. And it collects a whole lot of variety of information, weather information, light levels. And we are hoping to pair that with the surveys that were done by the boats in the vicinity of the whales to get an idea of how they are actually in

teracting with those prey and, not only what type of prey they are relying on but how well that they are able to consume it. Here we go. So that all looks at the amount of prey that's available to them in a, but the other half of that equation is how much energy do you need to go through. And an example of some of the stuff that's done here at the Aquarium has been looking at the energetic needs of various species, in this case again back to the Pacific white-sided dolphins and our colleague Eri

n Rechsteiner. So we've got an animal that's in a floating metabolic dome. And that's just the frame of it in this picture but if you can imagine, that almost turned into a little tent with a clear plastic and wrapping around it. The animals were just trained to basically station, which means hang out, you know, not be active which is incredibly challenging to do for a Pacific white-sided dolphin, just about sit there and rest in a dome. And then some very fancy equipment was brought out, and th

e air was drawn through it, through a port, and you start to see how much carbon dioxide they were producing, and how much oxygen they are consuming. And again some fancy math later, you end up with resting metabolic rates for a whale species which is pretty fantastic. And again, this is sort of the gold standard, you can, there is other ways to do it but open circular respirometry is, you know, considered the best and the most accurate. And they came up with a number, you know, 15,000 calories

a day required to fuel a Pacific white-sided dolphin, pretty high energetic requirements. And so cetaceans in BC, we had a lot of conservation issues, and hopefully tried to provide you some examples of research activities that are meant to pair with them. Lots of conservation concerns in BC, and they are pretty indicative of conservation concerns for cetaceans as a whole. There is a lot of active cetacean field programs. Fisheries and Ocean, the Aquarium, a lot of ENGOs are putting their time a

nd resources into this as well. Most of it focuses on acoustic, but there's been a little bit of energetic work, and some of that's been done primarily through the Aquarium. And I can't leave out the BC Cetacean Sightings Network because it's a catch-all for both field and office and modelling work that's done. So thank you very much. And Jonathan has, actually Lance has a few things to say, his closing words maybe. [inaudible] Okay. Sounds good. Sure. So we'll open up to any questions that migh

t be left, either for myself, for Lance, Tess. Carla's answering questions online but I'm sure she will be happy to take some. There she is. Yea, go ahead. [inaudible question] Sure. So, the question or the comment is, you know, that we haven't earlier addressed, the state of fisheries in BC in relation to its ability to support various cetacean species, you know, in their numbers. And that's true, but that's an incredibly challenging link to make. I think the best information that's out there i

s the link between Chinook salmon and killer whale mortality. And even with that information we are unable to draw any conclusions against sort of a noisy background in terms of the fluctuations that we see in fisheries. Yea, go ahead. [inaudible question] Sure. I gonna let Lance to answer that question because it actually deals with transboundary issues that he is more than comfortable dealing with. Yea, I think, you are probably referring to those, oh sorry, the question was whether there were

, whether the taking down of dams on the Columbia River has had a positive impact for resident killer whales. Is that a fair way to summarize it? Yea, well, one of the things that came out of the workshops that I mentioned was this realization that the background fluctuation in salmon populations is greater than the annual fisheries take in the present fishery, sport and commercial fisheries for Chinook. And so one of the take home message for that is that habitat enhancement or conservation of

the fishes' spawning habitat is super important for resident killer whales. So there has been some movement there to enhance habitat for Chinook salmon, particularly in Washington State. We don't see effect of that yet but again, we are dealing with a very long lived, slowly reproducing critter in case of killer whales, so it may be some time, but I think anything that increases the food supply of those, particularly the critically endangered southern resident killer whales is gotta be good. Can

't be bad. Any other questions? I'll take one. Go ahead. [inaudible question] The question was about the overhead filming that we did of killer whales and whether there was a difference between the Bigg's killer whales and the resident killer whales. The focus of that study was on resident killer whales but we did, and so we had many hours actually of total flying time over residents. We did fly over Bigg's killer whales once. So we didn't get enough aerial footage to say much about behaviour bu

t we could see that they were robust but not massively robust. We thought, I thought, they might be even, you know, sort of, have a greater width length ratio than the residents. That wasn't the case in the five animals that we saw on that particular occasion. One thing that was really interesting that I hadn't, wasn't expecting was that the widths of their heads is quite massive. They look a bit like sculpin from the air. We know they have heavy, you know, heavy mandibles and robust skulls. We

don't know if that's environmental, if that's the result of sort of exercise as they eat and as they forage or whether it's genetic but we may learn about that from these photos. We could see that they have got big heads, and those big heads, even, there was one young animal in the group, and even that one had a wide head. So that made us think that maybe it's genetic. But that's the only thing that really jumped out at us, that one sequence of the single group. I have an online question that I'

m gonna go ahead and read out. So are there any comparative studies that have done between the Saint Lawrence belugas and the belugas here at the Vancouver Aquarium? It's a good question. There's certainly has been one classic study that's used information, I'm not sure if it's comparative exactly, to, from work done at the Vancouver Aquarium to sort of test questions in the wild in the Saint Lawrence, and that was the work that our resource associate Valeria Vergara did in the course of her PhD

thesis, and she looked at vocal learning, in particular the use of contact, these so-called contact calls that she discovered. The killer whales [belugas] in the Aquarium used to, this sort of seems to be an affiliative behaviour between females and their offspring, and the rate of contact calls go up when the animals are highly excited or stressed or separated. And so she and I actually went off to the Saint Lawrence about four or five years ago and did some recording there and found that, yes

, the killer whales, I mean the belugas in the wild use contact calls as well. And that they were something that we only heard with mother calf groups, not with all male groups. So that's one connection, I guess. Of course, we have a new Ocean Science Pollution Program here at the, Ocean Pollution Science Program, I think we call it, at the Aquarium led by my colleague Dr. Peter Ross. And Peter will be doing some contaminant, has done a lot of work on contaminants in belugas in the Arctic, and w

ill be doing studies in the Saint Lawrence as well. And how that links to studies here at the Aquarium remains to be seen but certainly there is an opportunity to look at the way that our own belugas clear contaminants. We wouldn't feed them contaminants deliberately and watch them to clear but like all animals and like humans they are getting some in their feed. And so by comparing what they intake of contaminants and their clearing rate we can learn about what to expect in the wild. And so we'

ll look forward to those studies over the next few years. Right, great. Thank you very much. I'd like to say thank you to all of our speakers tonight. Thank you very much for joining us. We are gonna wrap up this evening's class. Our next class is going to be on October 14th. It'll be the subtidal marine organisms class, same time. If you need to share the link for this class, you can share it probably tomorrow. It'll be up online. So you can watch this class again if you'd like. We will provide

a handout that's primarily texts without photos, and we'll make that available on the class web page. So if you are interested and looking at some of the things we talked about tonight, we'll provide the text that we shared tonight but not the photos for copyright reasons. And then one date that we hadn't mentioned for the class which I just wanted to put out, save the date for December 2nd. So I'm thinking about doing a kind of a public program thank you event for the end of the year and gradu

ation ceremony for those of you that chose to take the exam, pass the exam and then receive your certificate of completion for the course. So I did have a copy of what the certificate will look like, and of course, you can put it on your resume if that's what you would like to do. So if you have any questions, you can contact me. This is my contact information up here, my phone number. I have the longest email address, or maybe Lance has me beaten there but a long email address to make it diffic

ult. Please be in touch if you have any questions. Thank you very much, and we'll see you guys in a couple of weeks. Take care.