MOSS LANDING –– One recent foggy morning, Kate Spencer stirred the calm waters of Moss Landing Harbor when she arrived aboard the black, 33-foot boat she “drives” to work.
After picking up her six passengers, Spencer, owner of Fast Raft Ocean Safaris, steered the whale-watching boat to the center of the underwater Monterey Canyon while continuously glancing at her fish-finder radar. If the device spotted a large school of fish –– most likely anchovies –– that meant whales could be nearby.
Next to the radar, the boat captain kept a camera at the ready.
Scientists who study the behavior of whales say photos such as Spencer’s carry valuable information. So the scientists are now turning to whale-watching businesses and their customers for help gathering critical data needed to keep whale populations healthy.
“There’s so much that we don’t know about whales that any data is welcome,” said Jeremy Goldbogen, an assistant professor of biology at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove. “Even if it’s just a photograph of a fluke with a time and a place, that would be fantastic.”
Since ancient times, Monterey Bay has served as a popular stop for hundreds of whales migrating along the California coast. The giant marine mammals now attract tourists from all over the world hoping to witness the whales filling their bellies with krill and other sea life.
But the majestic creatures face a slew of troubles once they get here: collisions with ships, urban and maritime noise, entanglements with fishing lines, and the effects of climate change –– which is making the oceans warmer and more acidic, reducing food supplies.
Worried about the whales’ fate, scientists are trying to collect as much data as they can to understand how the behavior of whales has changed over the years. The researchers say they also need to learn a lot more about how the whales feed and interact with each other in the bay.
In this first-ever collaboration with scientists in local waters, whale-watching crews and their customers will use GPS locations and photographs to document their sightings. This will help researchers determine how whales move and keep themselves fed, revealing how healthy they are. It will also aid the scientists in coming up with recommendations for improving conservation efforts, such as better management of fisheries and identifying the best locations for shipping lanes to avoid deadly collisions.
Ari Friedlaender, a marine biologist at UC Santa Cruz, recently began reaching out to whale-watching crews and is now organizing workshops with them to establish the best way to log whale-sighting data.
“The whale-watching industry is really critical for us because the crews have all of this knowledge about where animals are at different times in the year,” said Friedlaender, co-founder of the California Ocean Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting marine mammals.
Humpback whales were hunted to near-extinction in the Pacific Ocean during the 1800s and throughout most of the 1900s. But ever since the humpbacks received federal protection a half-century ago, their numbers have been steadily increasing.
The last several years, however, have been a tough time for whales migrating up and down the West Coast. The worst year was 2016, when officials discovered 71 whales entangled in fishing gear –– the highest number ever recorded. Although 2017 was a better year, with 31 reported entanglements, preliminary numbers for last year indicate that 45 whales were found entangled –– 35 of them in California waters.
In 2017, scientists estimate, the number of blue whales killed by ship collisions on the West Coast was almost eight times higher than the acceptable threshold under the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act. For humpback whales, the number of collisions was twice that threshold.
Goldbogen and Friedlaender began aggressively studying the whales of Monterey Bay two years ago, setting out on small, inflatable boats to look for the animals. When they find one, they carefully attach a “tag,” a device with suction cups that not only records video but also the depth, speed and even the heart rate of the whales. The tags fall off within 24 to 48 hours.
“You just put this on their back, and the whales basically do the job for you,” Friedlaender said.
The recordings provide a “whale diary” for scientists –– revealing how each whale moves, what it eats and how it communicates with other whales, he said. The research team also takes aerial photographs to gauge the size of the whales, an important measurement of health.
The team conducts this research only a few times during the year, however, because it’s expensive and several months are needed for a seven-person team to analyze the data gathered from each diary.
But a small flotilla of whale-watching boats ventures out into the Monterey Bay every day.
“They’re passionate about what they do,” Friedlaender said of boat captains like Spencer. “They’re out on the water all day looking at animals, understanding these animals.”
Spencer, a Pacific Grove resident, said she often recognizes individual whales and takes photographs when they show off their flukes, which serve as “whale fingerprints” because they are unique to each animal.
A former scientific illustrator, Spencer has led whale-watching tours in Monterey Bay for 18 years. During this time, she has developed a special relationship with whales, while gaining a wealth of anecdotal evidence on how the animals behave in the bay.
On one recent tour, Spencer spotted a male humpback with a gash on its crooked dorsal fin. She dubbed him Notch 12 years ago and has spotted him nearly every year since — and his name has affectionately morphed into Nacho.
“I’m watching the whales every day, getting to know the personalities of every individual, watching them grow up and start having calves,” Spencer said.
Several customers on recent whale-watching tours expressed excitement about the new collaboration.
“I think it’s so incredibly important,” said Heather Gillette, 48, an entrepreneur from Woodside. “I think it’s cool to leverage all of the different people who witness all of the whale activity, taking that knowledge and putting it all in a central place to track the whales or identify them.”
By gathering the data from whale-watching crews that have been diligent about keeping records over the past three to four decades, scientists will be able to look back to determine what species of whales are in Monterey Bay at different times of the year and how that has changed over the years.
Although the crews didn’t have GPS or fancy digital cameras until recent years, they logged their whale sightings with pens and paper –– records that scientists hope to soon digitalize.
Friedlaender said that these historical logs could reveal arrival and departure patterns of migrating whales, allowing researchers to determine how those patterns correlate to the abundance of prey or water temperature changes.
“We can start to show that over time those things have shifted,” he said. “That can be a really big red flag –– an indicator of change in the ecosystem.”
Scientists suspect that humpback whales have spent their time very close to shore in recent summers. While this is great for tourists, Friedlaender said, it might not be a good sign for the bay’s health. It could be an indication that their food is closer to the shore, meaning that perhaps there’s not a lot of food in the middle of the bay because of overfishing –– or warming waters.
The new data might end up proving that the scientists’ theory is right. And that could result in new policies for commercial fisheries being put into place.
The whale-watching businesses will also benefit from the data compiled by scientists because it will help crews provide their customers with more complete life histories of the whales they spot.
An example of how photographs from the whale watchers can be used for research can be seen at Happywhale.com, a website where people can upload whale-sighting images and coordinates. An automated process will then identify the whale.
“When you start talking about hundreds or thousands of photos, there’s real value there,” said Ted Cheeseman, a local conservation biologist who developed the website in 2015. “And what’s great about Monterey Bay is that there are so many whales and so many whale-watching vessels.”
Spencer, who has contributed nearly 7,000 of her photographs to Happywhale.com, said the site gives whale-watching customers a chance to know that they’re contributing something to the protection of the animals.
“It’s neat that I can look up the whales that we saw, like Nacho,” Gillette said. “When we do whale-watching again, I would want to say, ‘Oh, that’s him –– he’s back this year!’”
For Gillette, however, the collaboration between scientists and whale-watching businesses is about much more than just being able to know more about her favorite whales. A wildlife enthusiast, Gillette said she knows that conservation projects can work, pointing to the recovery of the West Coast’s humpback whale population. And she finds that inspiring.
Said Gillette: “I feel like despite all the changes in the environment, there are a lot of efforts like this one that are actually paying off.”
