Podcast Transcript: 4. Orca sound & human noise, with Rob Williams
Justin Cox (00:01):
Okay, welcome to Pod of Orcas. I'm Justin Cox and I'm with SeaDoc Society board member, Kevin Campion. Kevin, how are you doing today?
Kevin Campion:
So good, man. Thank you.
Justin Cox:
Cool. Well today's conversation is with Rob Williams, who is, along with Erin Ashe, the co-founder of Oceans Initiative. And we're going to talk about noise and sound, which in this episode you're going to, if you don't already know it, you're going to hear about the distinction, but both of them are very apt to a conversation about killer whales.
Kevin Campion (00:28):
I know Rob kind of well, and I actually got to volunteer with these guys over the summer, which was one of my only days on the water this summer. And I got to go drive one of their researchers around in the dinghy while they put a hydrophone over to measure basically the sound levels from this device he mentions to dissuade seals from eating salmon. But anyways, yeah, huge fan of Ocean Initiative. They've been a good partner with SeaDoc. I've always just been super impressed with the creativity and the breadth of their work and the way they get at solving problems, like big questions with small resources. Super cool.
Justin Cox (01:15):
Yeah, Rob says in his bio that he loves identifying gaps that affect our ability to protect marine wildlife, working on pragmatic ways to fill those gaps, cheaply and well. I think you really do hear a little bit of that mind in this conversation and it's pretty cool. Something else I enjoyed about this conversation is (this is a little bit of like a nerd thing for me) but I enjoy the fact that this is a podcast and therefore it's an audio sound-based medium and Southern Resident Killer Whales, and killer whales in general, communicate through sound. They're acoustic animals. And this episode in particular is funny because we have all these conversations about life during the coronavirus pandemic and working from home and kids here and everything like that. And so you get a good little bit of my dog barking, I think a kid pops in, you get some good little sound textures in this one, nothing intrusive, but it sticks to its topic in some very organic ways.
Kevin Campion:
Yeah, sweet.
Justin Cox:
It's one thing to know that they rely on sound, and it's one thing to know that they're affected by noise, but he's got a good sense of… Just knowing and abstractly talking about that is a hard thing to use to leverage policy changes and work toward improvement, and so, like you talked about the kind of creative work they're doing. And I think that the process of essentially turning that stuff into quantitative information that someone can really grab ahold of and say, okay, here's how we need to improve or make change or adjust distances and things like that. It's a cool general abstract idea that you then can make very specific and scientific.
Kevin Campion (03:04):
Ocean Initiative is doing a good job of that with the ECHO Program at the Port of Vancouver, which he talks about a little, but there's things happening on the ground. And then they're also just setting the stage for things to happen that are going to have a direct impact on Southern Resident Killer Whales, if they happen. And ocean noise is a pollution that as soon as you stop the source of that, it goes away. You're going to talk to Peter Ross about chemical pollutants and how they get into the orca’s metabolism. You talk to Cecilia about salmon and all these things are so critical to work on, and they're going to take us the better part of a century to make whole, but with ocean noise, all you have to do is stop the ship and that noise goes away. And so it's one of the things that, I wouldn't call it low hanging fruit to fix, but as soon as you fix it, the problem goes away.
Justin Cox (04:11):
Well, let's kick it over to Rob. Again, Rob is co-founder of Oceans Initiative and here's our conversation. You can get the free SeaDoc Society monthly newsletter at seadocsociety.org/newsletter. And you can find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Thanks Kevin.
Kevin Campion:
Thank you, Justin.
Justin Cox:
This series is made possible by our amazing sponsors, Shearwater Kayak Tours, Rain Shadow Solar, Two Beers Brewing Co, Deer Harbor Charters and the Averna family, Betsy Wareham and West Sound Marina, the San Juan County Marine Resources Committee and Apple State Vinegar. Thank you also to an anonymous donor who sponsored in the memory of Nancy Alboucq. We are a science-based organization on Orcas Island, and we are part of the Karen C Drayer Wildlife Health Center at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. All right, Rob, welcome to the show. We're happy to have you on.
Rob Williams:
Thank you very much for having me.
Justin Cox:
So today we're talking about sound and noise. What term do you use actually, when talking about this?
Rob Williams (05:11):
That's a great question. You know, sound is actually the signal. And so that can refer to the sound of wind or rain or the calls that the whales are making. Generally, we use the term noise if we're talking about something that humans make that can kind of disrupt the natural sounds.
Justin Cox (05:29):
I love that distinction. Yeah. It's easy to think of them as synonymous, but now that you explained it that way, of course!
Rob Williams (05:35):
Yeah, you might think of it as, you know, sound is the thing you want to hear and noise is the thing that's getting in the way of you hearing the sound.
Justin Cox (05:44):
Amazing. Okay, so with that, before we jump further, we talk a lot about how killer whales in general, and Southern Resident Killer Whales for the purposes of this conversation, are acoustic animals. When we talk about them as…so they eat salmon and when we talk about them hunting salmon, what do we mean by that? What are they doing?
Rob Williams (06:06):
Yeah, it's a great question. You know, I used to say that sound is as important to the whales as vision is to us. I think the more time I spend with them, the more I think actually sound is as important to killer whales as all of our senses are to us. You know, I think they use sound to communicate. They listen for each other. They use sound to identify where other animals are in their environment. But also just one call can tell a killer whale that there's another killer whale around, which population it is from, which family it's from, probably which individual it is. They're using sound either through listening or through echolocation to kind of map out where all their food might be. Once they zoom in, you know, probably they use acoustic cues in the last few meters, but really for the broad scale, just probing their environment, getting through their daily lives, all of that information is conveyed through sound.
Justin Cox (07:09):
And when you say they're putting out a call and they can tell maybe what pod or what individual, like, can you sort of take us underwater? What's that call doing? And how is that information coming back to them?
Rob Williams (07:20):
You know, our colleague Dr. John Ford discovered this in the seventies, early eighties that each family, each matriline (we call them matilines, not necessarily that they're matriarchal, but that we ourselves track their family tree through the maternal line) he discovered that each family has at least one call that it makes that no other family makes. And so if you're talking about a population like the resident killer whales that are closed to immigration and emigration, if you're born a resident, you stay a resident your whole life. And no other killer whales in the North Pacific become Southern Resident Killer Whales. So you know, 75 is all we got. They choose a mate who sounds roughly like them. They choose a mate that sounds like a resident killer whale. They don't want to mate with the mammal eating transient killer whales. They don't mate with offshore killer whales, but within that, they choose individuals from other families, from other matrilines. So you can imagine you want someone who speaks English, but maybe with an accent in human societies or, you know, the most distantly related cousin that you've got in the Southern Resident community. So all of that mate finding and mate selection we think is mediated through sound.
Justin Cox (08:39):
Gosh, stuff like that. I mean, just learning that they hunt and communicate through sound is compelling, but then when you get down to … it's all the little levels of detail and sort of, I don't know, things that can elicit empathy as a human being, who we also have our patterns like that, and sort of sophisticated family units and feelings, the fact that they hunt and communicate through sound combined with that level of an animal that you can empathize with is just so interesting.
Rob Williams (09:12):
Yeah, I think it's okay to just say it's really cool. You know, we try to be dispassionate as scientists and say that, you know, we're asking this because it's an interesting scientific question, and it is, it's also just okay to be impressed by them. They're just really cool animals. And I'll never forget, you know, when Dr. Lance Barrett-Lennard at the University of British Columbia and the Vancouver Aquarium when he was doing his PhD work, you know, this was sort of pioneering days of genetic work on killer whales. I remember he was the one who first told me that, at least with the Northern Residents that he was starting to study, he was saying if Northern Residents were keeping track of like a stud book for mating, you probably couldn't design a better mating system than the one that the Northern Resident killer whales have come up with. They're mating as far apart as you can within that community while still staying within the community. And that's really stuck with me. And of course, with Southern Residents where we only have, you know, 75 individuals, there's a limit to how much diversity you can end up with. And now I think we're in a situation where the population is effectively all made up of first cousins, genetically speaking.
Justin Cox (10:31):
I've done a lot of work with the Wildlife Health Center down in Davis, and we talked about how large freeways were basically boxing in mountain lion so that they could only mate with other family and they could measure- in the shorter lifespans in smaller groups, they could measure that effect very quickly. It kind of means that the situation with Southern Resident killer whales is, of course we want to save them, of course we want to ensure their future, but just the very fact of them being down to the low seventies means, it's just another thing illustrating how much of an uphill battle it is for them, yeah?
Rob Williams (11:08):
You bet. And I think that that fragmentation of road building is a great analogy. And I think if you imagine from a killer whale’s perspective, the killer whales are fragmenting themselves from Northern Residents, from transients, from offshores. But culture is effectively the mechanism that's fragmenting these populations, and it's really quite extraordinary that you have two populations of resident fish-eating killer whales on either side, either end of Vancouver Island. And then you have two other ecotypes whose ranges overlap with the resident killer whales, the transients and the offshores, and all of those lines in the sand, and all of those relationships, are brokered, are mediated through sound. I think it's just an extraordinary thing to think of.
Justin Cox (11:56):
Very much. So we've talked about communication and language and everything. Something specific to the Southern Resident Killer Whales is that they do eat salmon. And I just want to have a sense for people of what a Southern Resident Killer Whale underwater chasing down a salmon looks like. How are they doing that? What are they doing?
Rob Williams (12:17):
I think you can imagine it on multiple scales. I think that probably mom, and grandmom… let's remember, this is one of the few populations, one of the few species aside from humans, where there is a really well-defined role for post-menopausal females. They have a long post-menopausal lifespan. I think that they, the older females, are the repository of that information about where do you want to be on the coast from Northern California to Southern British Columbia at which time of year. So I think on sort of a monthly scale, that's sort of ancestral knowledge, that's wisdom. You just kind of have to know where the salmon runs are going to be at which time of year, and that might get you in the right state, like literally California, Oregon, Washington, at the right season. Then I think you probably use sound to narrow down where the fish, within scales of miles or tens of miles. It is the case that when the whales are forging, you know, they spend their entire lives together from birth to death in these family units. And they travel together and they rest together, they socialize together, but when it's time to feed, they do spread out. And so you can imagine them covering, acoustically, a wider area. And so trying to find a Chinook is maybe trying to find a needle in a haystack, but by spreading out and listening, and echolocating, they're able to cover a much wider area. So you've got several individuals in the matriline who are all collectively looking for the same needle in that haystack. And then maybe that gets you to within, you know, a mile or two. And I think once you start to get those acoustic signals that you can search, you know, a finer and finer and finer scale. Once you really zoom, you know, get down to a couple of body lengths, I wouldn't be surprised if vision starts to play a much more important role in actually catching a Chinook salmon. Someone was asking the other day about the white oval eye patches behind a killer whale’s eye. And obviously light doesn't propagate very far into the ocean, light doesn't travel as well in the ocean as sound does, they're using acoustic cues mostly, but vision is still playing a role at short ranges. And, you know, they do have good eyesight above water and below water. I think they're probably using visual cues when they're spy hopping and sort of comparing notes. And then I think underwater, the flashes of white underwater, whether it's the white belly or the white oval eye patch behind their eye or the white saddle patch, I think that flash of white probably helps them coordinate some of their movements, especially when they're traveling together and hunting silently.
Justin Cox (15:26):
Wow. Okay. Well, now let's transition from a lot of the sound of communication to noise, which is the stuff that humans are putting into the water. I was reading your 2019 paper “Approaches to reduce noise from ships operating in important killer whale habitats” which you also worked on with your wife, Erin Ashe, who's also with Oceans Initiative. And so this conversation is mainly about large shipping traffic, right? Basically I want to use this to set the table for conversation about large container ships and sort of big boats making loud noise perpetually in this area, as the populations go up. And for a lot of reasons that are just part of living in a life where global trade happens. But I do ultimately want to go to thinking about smaller boats and everything - is one or the other the predominant threat? You just described all this stuff Southern Resident Killer Whales are doing underwater to live their life, primarily through sound. And now let's add a bunch of other noise that's happening at the same time to their world.
Rob Williams (16:35):
Which scale are you talking about? You know, if you're talking about finding salmon at the spatial scale of, should I be in Canada or U.S., should I be in BC or should I be in Washington or Oregon in December, January, February? I don't believe that noise is playing much of a role in decision-making at that scale. That's ancestral. I think that's knowledge that's passed down from generation to generation, and I think they retain that knowledge and they get back in the right place. I think at the sort of broader, or sort of medium scale of coordinating group movements over the scale of kilometers or miles, yeah, ship noise can mask that. And I think what we're finding in our own work is that having measured chronic ocean noise levels from Alaska down to Washington state, you know, the Salish Sea is by far the loudest, by far the noisiest, and that on a typical day, Southern Resident Killer Whales are losing 62% of their opportunities to communicate over spatial scales of, you know, 8 to 16 kilometers. So if you think about how far a killer whale call, in terms of communicating within the group just a burst pulse killer whale call, how far that should travel under quiet conditions versus how far it travels under noisy conditions, whether that noise is coming from ships or other human sound sources, or if it's wind and waves and all that stuff put together, they're losing about 62% of their opportunities to communicate on a typical day relative to what that could have been under the ancient quietest conditions we ever measured. And I think on a very busy day, they may be losing up to 90%, 97% of their opportunities to communicate. So I think if we think of that as sort of clear cut logging of old growth coastal rainforest, noise from all of our activities are now a chronic habitat level stressor on that medium scale. I think on the finer scale of the last few hundred meters between a whale and a salmon, that's where small boats can have an impact. It really is a scale related question. I think ships are probably the ones that are affecting the habitat and smaller boats that stay with the whales are probably affecting their foraging behavior on sort of a finer scale. On the scale, you know, a few hundred meters. And I think you have to bear in mind that that is the case primarily because the Southern Residents, yes, they're using acoustic cues to find their food, but also they're incredibly picky eaters. I don't think we would have so much of a problem if Southern Resident killer whales were prepared to eat any fish in the sea, but they don't. Of all the fish in the sea, they choose salmon. And of all the salmon species we have, they choose Chinook salmon. And of all the Chinook salmon in the sea, they choose the biggest fattest Chinook of all. And so, because they have evolved to be extremely selective, extremely picky eaters, and because their food is limited because the Chinook salmon are in trouble as well, we really do have to worry about disrupting even a few forging opportunities.
Leigh Ann Gilmer (20:07):
Thanks for listening to Pod of Orcas. I'm Leigh Ann Gilmer, Regional Director for the SeaDoc Society, the nonprofit behind this podcast. I'm here to tell you about GiveBig, an online giving event on May 4th and 5th for people to join together to create the world that you want to live in. Head on over to SeaDoc’s website, Facebook, or Instagram to learn about how you can support science to heal the Salish Sea, and the killer whales that depend on this healthy ecosystem, with your gift today. And if you just can't wait to support the health of marine wildlife, early giving is open now. We've included a link in the show notes for this episode. Thank you for caring and for taking action to heal the Salish Sea.
Justin Cox (20:48):
Their home is a place that has the city of Seattle and the city of Vancouver. You need to go through the Salish Sea to reach these places. Where, for people to get a sense, where are the Northern residents?
Rob Williams (21:04):
If you go about halfway up Vancouver Island you know, Campbell River is sort of the dividing line between the Northern Residents and the Southern Residents, at least historically. You know, there's been some overlap, and some shifting around, and occasionally you'll get the Southern Residents passing through Johnstone Strait every year, but from, you know, halfway up Vancouver Island north up to Southeast Alaska is Northern Resident territory. Southern Resident territory is from about halfway up Vancouver Island down south to the Salish Sea, and then on the outer coast of Washington, Oregon and Northern California.
Justin Cox (21:42):
Yeah. And so is it safe to say that their territory is in a quieter space in the ocean?
Rob Williams (21:48):
Yeah, I think so. You know, northern Vancouver Island can get pretty noisy. It doesn't take a whole lot of boat noise to saturate a system. And so if you have, gosh, cruise ships that are going up the inside passage, that can ensonify, or saturate, a soundscape. If you have tug boats that are towing a log boom, that may take, I mean, they can't beat the tide very much., so it may take hours and hours and hours for a tug towing a log boom to get through an area. So I'd say that they are different kinds of noise, but yes, on average we're finding that Southern Resident Killer Whale critical habitat is a little bit noisier than Northern Resident Killer Whale critical habitat.
Justin Cox (22:35):
How is data helpful when it comes to quantifying something like this, something like the effects of underwater sound? In what ways can data be used to understand the situation better and potentially improve it?
Rob Williams (22:49):
You know, there's an old cliche in business (I'm told, I'm not in business) but they say that what gets measured gets managed. And I think that in our own work, when our work was demonstrating, that, you know, if you drive a boat at a whale, a whale swims away. That was fairly qualitative, and I could show images, I could show illustrations of the whales adopting a zigzag path, but it really didn't trigger action. And I think once we started showing that actually not only can noise disrupt feeding, but also when boats are present, the resident killer whales are spending 18% to 25% less time feeding than when there are no boats around. That was a very specific quantitative measurable number and a piece of science. I think that's when people started taking the science seriously. Now, of course, that paper, I think showing that whales were spending 18% to 25% less time feeding when they're foraging was disrupted by boat traffic, that was published on Northern residents in 2006 and Southern residents in 2009, and both Canada and the U S have done quite a lot of work since then to move boats farther away from killer whales and to give whales a little bit of breathing room. I would expect that that impact should be diminished. Certainly when it comes to ship traffic, the Port of Vancouver has led really neat voluntary efforts to slow ships down, which cause them to make less noise, which causes the whales-, has less of an impact on the whales foraging behavior. All of those impacts should be reduced. One thing is it can be very difficult to build a compelling case for funding science that really is, it feels confirmatory. It feels like it's not super creative. It's not using the latest nifty technology. It feels like the kind of basic science that government agencies should be doing. But it's actually really essential, when we're managing human activities around a critically endangered population, it's really essential to fund the kind of science to see is our understanding of the system correct? And when we manage it, when we change human behavior around the whales, are the whales responding in the way that we expect them to? I think that's one of the things that we have learned. The other is just that humans simply cannot imagine what it's like to be a killer whale in an acoustic world. And putting some numbers to that helps us, I guess, empathize a little bit more. I think it becomes a little bit less subjective than if we're just talking about behavioral responses.
Justin Cox (25:36):
Yeah. When you, I mean, when you said earlier that I think you said 65% or 68%, and then at a certain level, it could diminish how far the sound can travel by up to 90 something percent. That places me, ideally in a quiet room where I could just speak to somebody across the room, no problem. Then put myself in a room where there's some other noise happening to some degree and how much more difficult it would be to communicate. And then now put myself into a very loud room. Am I way oversimplifying it with that? Or is that like, when you say people empathize, is that the kind of thing it allows them to do in their head?
Rob Williams (26:13):
No, I think that's fair. And I think, as you know, during COVID, as we've all been spending more and more and more time at home, I think we're starting to think a lot more about the quality of life and our surroundings. Imagine if you have to quarantine, would you rather be in a thousand square foot house? Or would you like to be in a cubicle? That's something we can all relate to. Now, that's an imperfect analogy because our lives don't depend on square footage. But if you are killer whales trying to hunt really scarce Chinook salmon in a big open ocean, the more square footage or the more cubic footage you can see acoustically, the more likely you are that there's going to be a Chinook salmon somewhere in that volume of water that you're probing with echolocation. So the more space we can give them, the more likely they are to find a Chinook salmon in that giant haystack.
Justin Cox (27:11):
We should pause this podcast and I'll like, bring my two kids in here, let the dogs start barking and you can do the same on your end. And we can see how much of a fruitful conversation we have.
Rob Williams (27:22):
Yeah. It's terrific. Just wait for someone to ring the doorbell and hear my dog bark, and yeah, all bets are off. There is no way I could focus or concentrate on anything we're talking about. And I think that's just it! It's not just mechanistic. It's not just three decibels higher equals you know, 10% reduction in forging efficiency. It's not that mechanical. I think there's just something to be said for distraction. And so it may not be the noise level itself. It's just giving whales one more thing in their environment that they have to focus on and that they have to pay attention to. That's something, I think we're all kind of starting to relate to. People talk about the COVID brain, you know, just having to constantly be on. Keeping in the back of your mind, oh my gosh, my kid has zoom classes and it's 2:30 and I gotta make sure she's on her zoom theme meeting with grade one teacher. You know, it's just having free time, time and space, to just focus on the task at hand is the greatest luxury we've got, isn't it? And right now I think the whales are working as hard as they can to find scarce prey in a big noisy ocean. And every time we throw one more disturbance at them, it just makes their job a little bit harder.
Justin Cox (28:46):
Yeah. Even beyond the way something might affect you in a way that's just immediate and acute and measurable, an endless background noise is going to take its toll on you. And I think you are now comparing this to life at home with children, or even without children, just where all the lines are blurred during COVID-19. Rob and I are having this conversation at the end of December. I know I'm just a couple of days away from a holiday break that sounds pretty amazing about now. But it reminds me of a conversation I had once with (so I'm going to mention the UC Davis Wildlife Health Center again, which is where I did similar kind of communications work prior to moving up to Orcas Island with SeaDoc Society), they have a program down there. It's the Latin America program run by a woman named Marcy Uhart, who just a really awesome person talk to. And she does a lot of work with southern right whales and southern right whales had this phenomenon in this area of Argentina, where they live, where the gulls in the area are just landing on the whales backs and basically like pecking away at their blubber. So the whales come up and surface and when their backs are exposed, the gulls land and just basically eat away at them. And there's, I mean, it's affected the whale watch industry there, cause you're just basically watching these birds create open wounds on all of them. And so those populations have struggled. They can't say definitively whether the birds are having to do with it, but the gull population alone, like kind of in line with a rise in the amount of trash that was available to them and everything, has gone up. And the way she described it to me, it was like, okay, if we can't definitively say, this is what's causing this, what I can tell you is try and go through your life for the next, let's just say arbitrarily, like the next month with 10 mosquitoes just hovering around your head all day long, all the time. You have to cover up with a hood and then expose yourself again. And basically they're always there. Tell me how you would feel at the end of that month. And it's just stuck with me forever.
Rob Williams (31:02):
Yeah. And it's such a great analogy because you know, who would have thought that our landfills would have a ripple effect that manifests in the health of southern right whales. There are some intervening cause and effect linkages that you really need to be able to articulate, that the landfills lead to gulls, which lead to hungry gulls, which lead to pecking on right whales.
Justin Cox (31:27):
A lot of the conversation around Southern Resident Killer Whales, very understandably, kind of traces back to salmon. We've even talked about salmon a lot in this, and the way killer whales hunt. Let me rewind for a second. So I've had conversations with Joe about this stuff a lot - Joe Gaydos, our science director. And I think he's a very sort of-, he prioritizes people understanding the sort of stories behind these things and the nuance to them. And I think a lot of that involves making sure people understand that noise and contaminants are part of this, and it's not just purely a salmon issue. Is that a conversation you have had often as well?
Rob Williams (32:10):
Yeah, absolutely. And I, you know, at Oceans Initiative we have tremendous respect for Joe Gaydos and for SeaDoc. And the paper that he and Steve, Dr. Stephen Raverty, just published on necropsy results on Southern Resident Killer Whales has just been such an eye-opener that I think we need to, if we're going to recover this Southern Resident Killer Whale population, we need to be able to pay attention to the problems that we can see, and that are right in front of us. Things like skinny whales, whales that are not getting enough food, but do that in a way where we're not losing sight of the problems that are less apparent and that are maybe less obvious and are emerging. And so, you know, for Joe's paper with Steve, where they found that you know, of the 80% of killer whale deaths that do not result in a carcass we have to wonder what's killing those whales. And so they did a very careful literature review and looked at all of the causes of death in the carcasses that were recovered and found that although lack of salmon may have been an underlying cause, you know, of course that's what got them in trouble, what finally did them in, what finally killed them, could have been pneumonia, could have been ship strikes, all sorts of things that are intertwined. And so I think that's what we need to be able to do is, you know, when I talk about ocean noise, noise from boats, you know, in and of itself is not harming these whales. And if there were plenty of plenty of fish in the sea, I wouldn't be worried about noise. Noise is a problem because lack of Chinook salmon is problem. And so we need to be able to look at these problems as though they're intertwined. We need to be able to look at management actions and recovery actions as though those are equally intertwined. I think we get into trouble if we say, you know, we're looking for one single cause. The root cause of course, the thing that combines all of these threats that we're talking about, is that our Chinook salmon populations are just heavily depleted. But there are lots of intervening causes that get you from low Chinook salmon abundance to a critically endangered population of Southern Resident Killer Whales that's failing to recover in the way that we would expect.
Justin Cox (34:36):
Yeah. And when you're down to a number like 74, you need to think about all of these things at once, yeah?
Rob Williams (34:43):
Yeah and it could have been that, you know, if we had been bold and brave and had acted on prey limitation issues 20 years ago, when people first started pointing this out (that there's just not enough Chinook salmon to ensure survival and recovery of Southern Resident Killer Whales), if we had acted on that 20 years ago, maybe we could have had the luxury of not having to deal with inbreeding or disease. We could just address the root problem. If you wait 20 years and the population is down to, you know, 74 individuals, then our job is way, way, way harder. Because we have to start dealing with some of these other issues like contaminants and noise that are just thornier, just really much more difficult to resolve.
Justin Cox (35:29):
You gave some numbers earlier and you've done a lot of work with data. Is it possible to put a number to how much we need to reduce sound by? Or a way to-, like you said, having something concrete and quantitative like that can help influence policy as well, it can also help move people and motivate people to make change. Is there something quantitative like that? That people can shoot for, to try and achieve this kind of change?
Rob Williams (35:59):
Yeah, I think so. You know, a couple of years ago I helped a group led by Dr. Bob Lacy from Chicago Zoological Society. He invented a modeling tool called Vortex, which is a population viability analysis software tool that runs tens of thousands of scenarios of individual based models. And what we did is we brought together the best available information we could find to quantify the relative importance of all three of the main risk factors of prey limitation, too much noise, and contaminants (because, of course, PCBs and other contaminants can cause reproductive failure, but also failure of calves to survive). And it was the first time we managed to put all three of those threats into the same quantitative model. And what we found is that even if you could get back to some of the best Chinook salmon numbers, you know, years on record, we have waited so long and the task is now so hard that Chinook salmon recovery alone will not get us to the 2.3% population growth rate that NOAA has specified as a recovery objective. That in fact, you can only get to that 2.3% population growth rate for the next whale generation or two, for 28 years, if you reduce noise and increase salmon. And there are any number of combinations of salmon restoration and noise mitigation that will get you to that recovery target. One that struck us as pretty reasonable is a 30% increase in Chinook salmon abundance, and cutting noise and disturbance by half. But once you go from the modeling, from the science, to what do you do with that science, you know, once you start making those policy decisions, that's where everyone gets a vote, you know, in terms of how much of our mitigation do we want to come from salmon restoration and how much from noise mitigation. You know, we should all have a discussion about which sectors, which dials we'd like to turn. If we want to address salmon issues, whose salmon should we be giving up, and should we be talking about taking less salmon from the sea or trying to get more in there? Those are societal decisions that reflect our values. In terms of noise and disturbance, you know, we should really have a conversation about, do we want to mitigate noise and disturbance by addressing, you know, boats that are within a few hundred meters of the whales? Or do we want to address the shipping industry or oil tankers? Those are legitimate discussions about how do we get to a 30% increase in salmon and a 50% reduction in noise and disturbance. And so we at Oceans Initiative, don't take a policy stand about whose salmon should support Southern Resident Killer Whale recovery, or whose noise budget do we have to start cutting into, but it looks like we need to do something about both. It looks like we need to be able to address both prey limitation and noise mitigation quickly, or we're not going to get a recovered killer whale population.
Justin Cox (39:24):
I admire that. It sounds like if you lay out a scenario where this population of killer whales will not recover even if more salmon start showing up, which we don't have any indication that more salmon are going to start showing up, so even that already is a hopeful scenario, but even if they did show up, noise would still need to be reduced to get to what we think is the level of improvement they need over the next generation of whales.
Rob Williams (39:55):
Yeah, and I think Joe Gaydos led a literature review a few years ago where he looked at the industrialization of the Salish Sea. And even if you don't take a particular policy stand on any one of those proposed activities, whether it's a pipeline, or a container ship export expansion, or building a gravel mine, or, you know, any of them, it doesn't matter what it is, if you look at all of them that are proposed, boy, would that ever increase noise levels in an already noisy Salish Sea. It is worth kind of keeping these things in mind that if-, what the whales are telling us is that they need more salmon and less noise. We should have that discussion now, before we start having discussions about adding more noise or taking away even more salmon from future human activities.
Justin Cox (40:50):
Yeah, so what are you all up to now? In the world of killer whale noise, both in terms of the work you're doing at Oceans Initiative and just where we sit in the attempt to conserve this species, where are we and where does it feel like we're headed?
Rob Williams (41:06):
Yeah. Well, one of the things that we have decided to do is, you know, just stick pretty close to home, again during COVID-19, but also just feeling like we need to do something. Our friends at University of St. Andrews, in partnership with a company called GenusWave, have invented a pretty clever technology, I think, that turns the acoustic disturbance thing on its head and use a sound to spook seals out of rivers where they're eating endangered salmon. And so we tried that at Ballard Locks where the salmon are bottlenecked through a narrow fish ladder, and that seems to have spooked the seals, you know, a few hundred meters away and it helped cut down on the seal predation rate on Chinook salmon. We then took that up to Whatcom Creek near Bellingham and tried it on chum salmon. And sure enough, it kept the seals a little bit farther away from the fish ladder at the hatchery at Whatcom Creek. And that we think helped increase the number of chum salmon that were getting through the fish ladder and we hope will result in more chum salmon out at sea in the next generation. So we'd like to expand that work. It somehow grounds our academic, or sort of pure science work, with something that just feels really practical and real world, you know, helping to get more salmon through to spawn and reproduce. It feels like a practical thing to do. Then the other thing is that we're just sort of gearing up. The whales will return to San Juan Island, we hope, in spring and every year we try to do land-based tracking of the killer whales movements and behavior to see how, you know, do the whale spend more time feeding when we have fewer boats or boats stay farther away, or if the boats slow down. When COVID-19 hit our team formed a socially quarantined household, but they replaced one of their observers with photogrammetry tools. So we invested in some pretty expensive camera gear, and you can count the pixels and use that with your high school trigonometry to figure out where were the whales and where were the boats, and how fast were the boats moving, and do the whales spend more time feeding. And so right now we're analyzing the data from last summer to see, you know, did all of the management actions that Canada and the U S took last summer, did they help the whales spend more time feeding? And given the proposals to change boat traffic around killer whales even more this upcoming summer, we'd like to be back out there for sort of June, July and later into the summer and fall. So we want to make sure that our team is there and ready to go.
Justin Cox (43:57):
Great! Well, cool. This has been super enjoyable and I've learned a lot in this conversation. Does it feel like there's anything you want to make sure to say about this that I haven't asked you?
Rob Williams (44:08):
I think one is just that, you know, the Port of Vancouver-. You know, when I first started publishing a lot on chronic ocean noise, there was a pledge from an nonprofit in Germany called Okeanos that said, let's cut noise levels in half in the next decade. And the Okeanos pledge was considered radical, and pie in the sky, and just really impossible. But I think the Port of Vancouver showed that you can do that by just creating incentives for ships to slow down as they go through Haro Strait. And I think in a couple of years, they actually did get us most of the way to a 50% drop in ocean noise from the ships that participated in that slowdown trial. And I'm really heartened by the fact that the Ports of Seattle and Tacoma seem to be indicating that they're going to do something like the Port of Vancouver’s ECHO program. So I think we can get Ports of Seattle, Tacoma, and Vancouver all creating economic incentives for ships to slow down as they're going through important habitats for Southern Resident Killer Whales. We might be able to lead globally on just being good neighbors and, and operating our businesses in critical habitats for critically endangered whales. So I think that's one place where I think we see a lot of hope
Justin Cox (45:26):
Just being good neighbors is a beautiful way to put that. And that is very helpful.
Rob Williams:
Yeah.
Justin Cox:
You kind of need to see, I mean, if Port of Vancouver led on that, very cool on them, but it's so much easier for another city or another person or anything to replicate something they've seen done already. And so that's a big win.
Rob Williams (45:49):
It's always easier to go second than first. And the other neat thing about the physics of sound in the ocean is that this is one of those places where you don't need 100% compliance. In our work with Dr. Val Veirs and Dr. Scott Veirs, we're finding that about half of the noise is coming from the noisiest 15% of ships. So if we could just get 15% of shippers (ship owners, ship operators) to come on board and either slow down or replace their noisiest ships with quieter ones, we could actually have, you know, a meaningful impact on killer whale habitat, and on killer whales, without having to get everyone to do something that's expensive. We just need 15%.
Justin Cox (46:37):
Well, that sounds like the exact perfect spot to tie a bow in our conversation. Rob, thank you so much for joining. Where can people find you and your work?
Rob Williams (46:47):
We are at www.oceansinitiative.org.
Justin Cox (46:52):
Well, thank you so much. And it was a pleasure talking to you.
Rob Williams (46:56):
Thank you very much. You guys too. Take care.
Justin Cox (46:59):
Huge thanks to all of you who've been listening to the series. We're past the halfway point and the next episodes are really good. SeaDoc is a science-based organization, but we know outreach and storytelling is crucial to enacting change. That's why we made this podcast. Please take this moment to rate and review the show in your app because that really helps other people find it and feel free to even just tell a friend or family member, pass it along. You can reach me at justin@seadocsociety.org if you'd like to ask a question, or just get in touch. See you next week when we talk, not only about orcas per usual, but also gorillas. The whale sounds in this episode were provided by the Whale Museum and our logo was created by float.org.