Expedición Internacional Vaquita Marina 2015
In November 2015 I joined the Vaquita 2015 Expedition on the research vessel Ocean Starr as part of a team of scientists from the Southwest Fisheries Science Center (SWFSC/NOAA) and the Mexican government.
The vaquita porpoise is a critically endangered cetacean only found in the northern-most areas of the Sea of Cortez, Mexico. Only about 100 individuals of this species remain. The Mexican government has invested a lot of effort into protecting the vaquita over the past years.
The aim of this line-transect survey was to collect data to obtain a new estimate of how many of these porpoises remain and to evaluate if these measures had the desired effect. More information can be found here:
Or you can listen to a podcast on the topic:
Crossing the Pacific on an Oceanographic Mission
The Sripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO/UCSD) has a team of shipriders that join a fleet of volunteering vessels (mostly merchant marine cargo ships) on their way across the Pacific Ocean. I am one of these shipriders and have crossed the Pacific in various directions, e.g. New Zealand to Canada or Panama, Chile to New Zealand, California to Hongkong or Hawai'i to Japan.
During the crossing, we use XBT probes to measure the temperature of the water column, usually about the upper 900m, at predefined stations. These XBT drops occur about every 1 1/2 hours around the clock. We use a semi-automatic system which includes a GPS. Hence it knows when it has arrived at the next station and does the drop automatically.
We have a set of preferred routes that we cover multiple times per year. The data are then used to model the temperature household of the Pacific Ocean and to monitor global climate conditions. More details about the program can be found on the SIO website. For a map of the routes we cover and the data click here.
Eastern tropical Pacific surveys
Some dolphin stocks in the eastern tropical Pacific (ETP) such as the eastern spinner and pantropical spotted dolphins often associate with tuna. While the tuna travel at depth, the dolphins swim at the surface (because they need to breathe) making it easy to be detected by fishermen. Fishermen commonly used to set purse-seine nets around the dolphin schools to catch the tuna which led to large numbers of incidental bycatch of these dolphins.
The Southwest Fisheries Science Center (SWFSC/NOAA) started surveys to monitor the dolphin stocks in the ETP in the 1970ies. They have been taking a multi-disciplinary approach monitoring not only the impacted dolphin stocks but also the other dolphins and whales (using visual and acoustic line-transect methods) as well as other top-level predators (seabirds and turtles), other trophic levels (flying fish, plankton) and the physical environment (temperature, salinity, thermocline depth). I have been part of the team since 1998.
Photos courtesy NOAA: eastern spinner dolphin (top) and pantropical spotted dolphins (middle). Stop at Cocos Island (bottom).
