TUESDAY

FEB 23, 2010

7:30 PM

ACS-LA LECTURE

Quest for Two Dolphins: Results of the 2009 survey to study common dolphin populations in the California Current

by Susan Chivers, Ph.D., Southwest Fisheries Science Center, NMFS, NOAA

Human activity has been altering the ocean habitat and having detrimental effects on its inhabitants for a long time. But few actions are as immediately harmful as the use of military sonar. Sound thousands of times louder than a jet engine at takeoff is projected into the water to “illuminate” quiet enemy submarines. The effect on cetaceans is tremendous, raging from immediate death debilitating injuries. The Natural Resources Defense Council has been leading the fight to get the US Navy to adopt safeguards to mitigate the effects of this technology, and Senior Attorney Joel Reynolds has spearheaded that effort. His lecture will detail NRDC’s history of involvement with sonar issues, highlighting various cases and emphasizing the marine species affected by ocean noise.

Joel joined the NRDC as a senior attorney in 1990, after ten years with the Center for Law in the Public Interest and the Western Center on Law and Poverty, both in Los Angeles. He graduated in 1975 from the University of California at Riverside with degrees in Music and Political Science and in 1978 from Columbia Law School. He currently heads NRDC’s Southern California Program, where he has focused on litigation and major domestic and international campaigns across a broad range of environmental issues, including children’s health, environmental justice, endangered species and coastal protection, transportation, parkland conservation, and marine mammal protection.  Since 1994, he has successfully prosecuted a number of lawsuits challenging the U.S. Navy’s illegal use in training of underwater explosives and high intensity military sonar – an issue that landed in the U.S. Supreme Court last fall. 

The archives of Joel’s blog can be found at http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/jreynolds/about/; to read an op-ed piece on the US Navy’s use of sonar coauthored by Joel Reynolds go to http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0402/p09s02-coop.html.

Whale Update: New insights into the status of humpback and blue whales off California and the threats they face, by John Calambokidis of Cascadia Research

The humpback and blue whale populations that summer off California and adjacent waters have been among John Calambokidis’ main research interests. His work has been instrumental in acquiring much of our current knowledge about these animals, including size, distribution and trends of these populations.

John will update us on his recent projects, including the multi-year SPLASH (Structure of Populations, Levels of Abundance and Status of Humpbacks) survey, one of the largest international collaborative studies of any whale population ever conducted. It was designed to determine the abundance, trends, movements, and population structure of humpback whales throughout the North Pacific and to examine human impacts on this population. This study involved over 50 research groups and more than 400 researchers in 10 countries. John also recently took part in an expedition to the Costa Rican Dome in search of the calving grounds of the local blue whales, that was featured both in a March 2009 article in National Geographic magazine, and in the documentary “Kingdom of the Blue Whale,” that aired recently on the National Geographic Channel. He is also looking at the blue whales’ use of the Santa Barbara Channel in the wake of a spate of recent ship strikes that resulted in the deaths of several animals.

This promises to be an exciting and enlightening evening with up to the minute and behind the scenes information on two of our most charismatic wild species.

John Calambokidis is a Research Biologist and co-founder of Cascadia Research (in 1979). He has co-authored over 30 papers in scientific journals and two books: the award-winning Guide to Marine Mammals of Greater Puget Sound (Island Publishers, with R. Osborne and E.M. Dorsey) and Blue Whales (Voyageur Press, with G.H. Steiger). He is a charter member of the Society for Marine Mammalogy and a scientific advisor for ACS.

More information about Cascadia Research and John’s work can be found at  http://www.cascadiaresearch.org/.

PLEASE NOTE!

The lecture will held on Thursday, May 14, at 7:30 p.m. in the Times Mirror Room at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, 900 Exposition Blvd., Los Angeles. The event is free and open to the public. Free parking is available in the staff parking lot off Vermont Ave. For more information call (310) 548-0966

It is a well established fact that photography is a powerful tool for conservation work. Bryant Austin takes this concept a big step further with the creation of high resolution, life size images of live whales in their natural habitat. Through his non-profit organization, Marine Mammal
Conservation Through the Arts, Austin exhibits his photographs all over the country and the world. His aim is to unveil the mystery of the whales by communicating their true-scale and depth. Austin works with whale researchers like Libby Ayre, in 2009, he plans to document five species; blue, fin, minke, Southern right, and sperm whales. He uses a state of the
art Hasselblad H3DII 50 megapixel camera. He will share some of his groundbreaking work with us.

Bryant Austin is an experimental multimedia artist engaged in  photographic projects to benefit humanity through consciousness-raising subject matter. He is based in Scotts Valley, California. He worked as an Associate Governmental Program Analyst with the Marine Wildlife Veterinary Care and Research Center, a hybrid marine mammal research facility under the auspices of the University of California at Santa Cruz and the California Department of Fish and Game. He volunteered with various non-profit marine mammal research and conservation organizations including the Marine Mammal Center, Monterey Bay Aquarium and Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, and founded MMCTA in 2005.

More information about Bryant Austin and his work can be found at Studio Cosmos and Marine Mammal Conservation Through The Arts.

John will discuss the use of passive acoustic monitoring for studies of
whales and dolphins. Advances in the technology for monitoring underwater sound has provided insight into cetacean behavior and distribution. Specific examples discussed will include blue and fin whales, as well as beaked whales and white-sided dolphins.

Dr. John A. Hildebrand is a Professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego. He obtained a B.S. degree in Physics and Electrical Engineering at the University of California San Diego, and a Ph.D. degree in Applied Physics from Stanford University. He has been on the research staff of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography since 1983. During this time he has chaired ten graduate Ph.D. thesis committees, and regularly teaches classes on bioacoustics, and experimental laboratory acoustics. He has contributed to more than 100 referred publications, on topics ranging from acoustic wave propagation, to sound production by marine mammals. His recent research has focused on ambient noise, acoustic techniques for marine mammal population census, and the effects of high intensity sound on marine mammals.

Four endangered blue whales were killed in or near the Santa Barbara Channel in the fall of 2007. A thorough investigation revealed the cause to be ship strikes in a year when the blue whales' food source, krill, was abundant in the shipping lanes leading to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Michelle Berman and Paul Collins necropsied three of the dead whales and also studied an aborted fetus associated with one of  them.  Four blue whales deaths plus one fetus was an unusually high number for a single year; the museum has only documented six other blue whale dead strandings since 1980. The population of blue whales that feeds off California and Baja California in the summer is estimated at just over 2000 individuals and constitutes the largest and healthiest population of this still critically endangered species.

Michelle and Paul will discuss their investigation into the deaths of the
whales, what was learned from the events, follow up research, and will
discuss measures taken to prevent such incidents in the future.  Paul Collins joined the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History as Curator of Vertebrate Zoology in 1973. He earned his B.S. and M.A. in Zoology from
the University of California, Santa Barbara. Michelle Berman is the
Associate Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at the same institution. She
received her B.S. from Colorado State University and her M.A. from the
University of Central Florida. She is the California Marine Mammal Stranding Network's central coast stranding coordinator for cetaceans.

For more reading, please see this overview on the SBMNH site and an article in the Santa Barbara Independent.

Apes and dolphins: primates and cetaceans. Could any creatures appear to be more different? Yet both are large-brained intelligent mammals with complex communication and social interaction. In the first book to study apes and dolphins side by side, Maddalena Bearzi and Craig B. Stanford, a dolphin biologist and a primatologist who have spent their careers studying these animals in the wild, combine their insights with compelling results. Beautiful Minds explains how and why apes and dolphins are so distantly related yet so cognitively alike and what this teaches us about another large-brained mammal: Homo sapiens.

Noting that apes and dolphins have had no common ancestor in nearly 100 million years, Bearzi and Stanford describe the parallel evolution that gave rise to their intelligence. And they closely observe that intelligence in action. The authors detail their subjects’ ability to develop family bonds, form alliances, and care for their young. They offer an understanding of their culture, politics, social structure, personality, and capacity for emotion.

Maddalena Bearzi is the President and co-founder of the Ocean Conservation Society, Director of the Los Angeles Dolphin Project and is a visiting scholar in the Departments of Anthropology and Biological Sciences, at UCLA. She holds a BS degree from University of Padova, Italy and a Ph.D. in Biology from UCLA. Maddalena has studied dolphins and whales and other animals in many parts of the world; her main focus at the moment is on dolphins and other marine creatures in the Santa Monica Bay and nearshore Southern California waters.

Visit Maddalena’s website and the Beautiful Minds website.

Among the victims of Hurricane Katrina were several captive dolphins who were relocated in advance of the storm and some of which escaped during the event, were recaptured and nursed back to health in advance of their move to the Atlantis, Paradise Island resort in the Bahamas. Veterinarian Pamela Govett wrote about the travails of the sixteen dolphins in a chapter of the book “The Rhino with Glue-On Shoes and Other Surprising True Stories of Zoo Vets and Their Patients.” She will share the story of the Katrina Dolphins and some of her experiences in caring for captive animals.

Pamela Govett, DVM, Dipl. ACZ is Assistant Professor of Marine Mammal Medicine at the Western University College of Veterinary. She has long held an interest in ocean life and after graduating from the University of Arizona with a BS in Ecology, began her career researching cetacean vocalizations. She received her veterinary degree graduating with honors from the University of Florida in 2000. She interned at the University of Georgia, completed a residency at North Carolina State University and worked as interim associate veterinarian at the New England Aquarium in Boston She served as Head Veterinarian at Atlantis, Paradise Island resort in the Bahamas, where she assisted them in gaining American Zoological Association accreditation and developed the veterinary program and facilities, looking after dolphins, sea turtles, sharks, rays, fish, and birds.

The NOAA Fisheries Office for Law Enforcement (OLE) is dedicated primarily to the enforcement of laws that protect and regulate the living marine resources of the United States and their natural habitat. NOAA Fisheries' special agents and enforcement officers have specified authority to enforce over 37 statutes, including the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 (MMPA), the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA), the Marine Protection, Research and Sanctuaries Act (MSA), as well as numerous treaties related to the conservation and protection of marine resources and other matters of concern to NOAA. The Office for Law Enforcement also plays a key role in the enforcement of Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) as they relate to marine wildlife.

More information at NOAA Fisheries: Law Enforcement web page.

Christina Ramirez is an Enforcement Officer with NOAA Fisheries Office of Law Enforcement’s Southwest Division in Long Beach. She has a Master's and Bachelor's degrees in Criminal Justice from CSULB and CSUF, respectively. She has a family background in law enforcement and started out as an intern at OLE. Her passions include sports and the protection of the environment, and she is a big animal lover. The presentation will include an introduction of OLE, its operations, the main regulations enforced, and an OLE case example.

In his new book In Defense of Dolphins: The New Moral Frontier, philosopher Thomas White argues that the scientific evidence is now strong enough to support the claim that dolphins are, like humans, self-aware, intelligent beings with emotions, personalities and the capacity to control their actions. Accordingly, White argues, dolphins should be regarded as "nonhuman persons" and valued as individuals. White also concludes that, from an ethical perspective, the injury, deaths and captivity of dolphins at the hands of humans are wrong. Looking at everything from the structure of the dolphin brain, to cetacean emotional abilities and social intelligence, and the implications of the fact that humans and dolphins have dramatically different evolutionary histories, In Defense of Dolphins explores the idea that, in the person of dolphins, humans have truly encountered an "alien intelligence."

Thomas I. White, Ph.D., is the Conrad N. Hilton Professor in Business Ethics and Director of the Center for Ethics and Business at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. The author of five books and numerous articles on topics ranging from sixteenth-century Renaissance humanism to business ethics, Professor White is a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics in the United Kingdom and an Ambassador for the United Nations’ Year of the Dolphin program. He is also is a Scientific Advisor to the Wild Dolphin Project, a research organization studying a community of Atlantic spotted dolphins in the Bahamas.

Read: Interview with Dr. Thomas White at the Los Angeles Loyolan and a press release about Dr. Thomas White.

Another strange gray whale watching season in Southern California is coming to an end. The whales were late, there seemed to be fewer whales and there were very few calves. After recovering from heavy exploitation, the Eastern Pacific gray whale population has steadily increased, culminating with its removal form the Endangered Species Act list in 1994. Six years later, the gray whale population suddenly plummeted by one third during three seasons of high mortality and low calf production. As the numbers inch slowly upwards again, scientist have noted many new trends and behaviors. NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center biologist Wayne Perryman will update us on the recent upheavals in the gray whale population.

Wayne Perryman has been involved in developing and implementing recovery programs that led to removal of the gray whale from protection under the Endangered Species Act, and has been monitoring the population ever since. He runs the gray whale calf census at Point Piedras Blancas in Central California. He has also developed techniques to count and measure marine mammals from the air, and has used the to assess the health of the migrating gray whales.

Sleep and rest states in marine mammals differ radically from those in terrestrial mammals. Recent work indicates that some marine mammals can be continuously alert for weeks. Cetaceans do not appear to have REM sleep, the sleep state associated with dreaming in humans. This talk will discuss sleep and rest states in marine mammals, compare them to those in land mammals and discuss the implications of marine mammal sleep for sleep evolution and function.

Jerry Siegel majored in Psychology at City College of the City University of New York, and obtained his Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Rochester. He has been a Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA since 1989 and has been teaching there since 1978. He is the director of the Siegel Lab at the Center for Sleep Research in the university's Department of Psychiatry. He has authored and co-authored a long list of publications. For more information on Dr. Siegel's work, visit his Sleep Research site.

Killer whales are highly intelligent social learners, and communicate using
a wide range of complex vocalizations. Although these vocalizations have
been described in great detail, little is known about the vocal development of killer whales. Studies have shown that during its first year of life, a killer whale calf will preferentially learn from its mother. However, little is known about the vocal development of killer whales after this time period, and it is thought that killer whales may have a "learning window" where they reach a point in their lives where they can no longer learn new vocalizations and their repertoire of calls becomes crystallized.

Jessica Crance studied the vocalizations of the killer whales at SeaWorld
San Diego over a five-year period. In particular, she is looking at the role of social status, age, and affiliation on the vocal development of killer whales, and how their call usage changes as they age, mature, associate with different individuals, and if they can continue to learn new calls throughout life

Jessica was born and raised in Phoenix, AZ. She majored in biology at the
University of Arizona for with minors in chemistry and Spanish.  Immediately after graduating from U of A, she started at the University of San Diego as a graduate student in their Marine Science Department. She plans on graduating and defending her thesis in May. Her advisor is Dr. Ann Bowles of the Hubbs SeaWorld Research Institute.

TUESDAY
FEB 26, 2008
Monthly ACS Lecture
Living Submarines: Respiratory and cardiovascular adaptations that enable
seals to live in the marine environment
by Hrvoje Smodlaka, DVM, PhD