Project

4102

Chief Investigator

DOUBLE, Dr Michael (Mike) - Australian Antarctic Division

Title

Population abundance, trend, structure and distribution of the endangered Antarctic blue whale

Project aims

Half a century ago the Antarctic blue whale was perilously close to extinction. Over 350,000 were killed before the remaining few were fully protected. A decade ago this elusive and poorly understood species was estimated to be less than 5% of its pre-whaling abundance. This multi-national, circumpolar project will develop and apply powerful new techniques to survey these rare whales and gain an insight into their recovery and ecology. The project is the flagship of the Southern Ocean Research Partnership - an International Whaling Commission endorsed collaborative program.

Project gallery


Project Summary of the Season 2012/13

Over a third of a million Antarctic blue whales were killed during the industrial whaling era and only a few hundred survived when the species was fully protected in 1964. This multinational project aims to assess the recovery and better describe the ecology of this iconic species. Statistical analyses have identified mark-recapture (MR) as the most appropriate and pragmatic method to assess the status of these rare and remote whales. MR requires identification of individual whales through photography or genetics to build sighting histories over many years. However, to achieve a precise abundance estimate with reasonable effort and in an acceptable time frame requires a sightings rate higher than that from observation alone. In January 2013 an Antarctic voyage successfully used sonobuoys (directional listening devices) to locate singing blue whales and so greatly increase the encounter rate. 84 blue whales were sighted, 57 were photographed, 23 were biopsied and two satellite-tagged.

Project Summary of the Season 2013/14

No Australian Antarctic voyages were conducted this year towards this project, however, through the Southern Ocean Research Partnership of the International Whaling Commission further sightings, photo-identification and biopsy data were collected by South African, Argentinian and French vessel. These data will contribute towards the objectives of this multi-national project. In addition to supporting these voyages the research team has focused on the analysis and publication of data from previous voyages.

Project Summary of the Season 2014/15

A joint Australian-New Zealand (National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, NIWA) Antarctic voyage was undertaken to continue the collection of sightings, photo identification and biopsy data of the endangered Antarctic blue whale. In addition, the voyage also located and characterised the nature of Antarctic blue whale "hotspots," investigating prey fields and the movements of blue whales within and between "hotspots." Whales were located using directional sonobuoys resulting in encounters with more than 80 blue whales, photo identification of 58 individuals (including re-sightings) and the collection of one biopsy sample. These photo identification images and biopsy sample will contribute towards a new estimate of population size, rate of recovery and intra and inter seasonal movements of Antarctic blue whales. Detailed observations of the fine-scale distribution, movements, and acoustic behaviour of whales within "hotspots" were collected via visual sightings and photogrammetric video-recordings in conjunction with fine-scale acoustic observations of krill. Krill swarms in the vicinity of the located blue whales were found to be denser than those located outside of blue whale "hotspot."

Project Summary of the Season 2015/16

Significant progress has been made on analysis of data collected during the 2015 New Zealand-Australia Antarctic Ecosystems Voyage. In particular, hours of acoustic recordings have been analysed in order to define a density surface to describe the distribution of blue whales during the voyage for comparison with the distributions of krill measured on the voyage. Automated detection algorithms are being developed to enable this huge amount of acoustic data to be processed with little manual intervention. Data sets including historic discovery mark data, decades of photo ID data and satellite tag data are currently being collated to begin work on Antarctic blue whale movement within and between seasons.

Project Summary of the Season 2016/17

Significant progress has been made on analysing data from voyages undertaken during the project, i.e. the 2015 New Zealand-Australia Antarctic Ecosystems Voyage and the 2013 Antarctic Blue Whale Voyage. Hours of acoustic recordings have been analyses to define a density surface to describe the distribution of blue whales encountered and compare this to the distribution of krill measured on the 2015 voyage. Automated algorithms continue to be developed to enable this huge amount of acoustic data to be processed with little manual intervention. Data sets including historic discovery mark recapture data, decades of photo-ID data and satellite tags data are being collated to assist in the analysis of Antarctic blue whale data movement within and between seasons. Between January and March 2017, AAD employees participated in two legs of the multi-national. multi-disciplinary, Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition (ACE) voyage. Acoustic data from DIFAR sonobuoys were collected during ACE as part of the project entitled: Acoustic Mapping of Southern Ocean Marine Mammals. In collaboration with colleagues from France, Germany, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States, in 2016/17, 23 autonomous recording devices were deployed in the Southern Ocean at 19 different recording sites, and 17 previously deployed autonomous recorders were recovered from various recording sites around Antarctica. The data volume from all instruments totalled approximately 150,000 hours of underwater recordings. In association with this, creation of an annotated library of acoustic detections has been progressed to the point where annotation of acoustic data can commence. Work on the library will be ongoing throughout 2017/18 with the aim of creating a fit-for-purpose tool to assess the performance of automated detection algorithms for blue and fin whale calls across a wide variety of recordings made in different years, locations, and using different instruments

Project Summary of the Season 2017/18

During 2017/18, Dr Brian Miller and the IWC-SORP Acoustic Trends Group used a grant from the IWC-SORP Research Fund to create an annotated library of Antarctic underwater recordings. The initial technical task of annotating every low-frequency sound throughout 800 hours of acoustic recording is complete. The Annotated Library will be the most representative collection of ground-truth sounds to date and will be made publicly available.

Data from AAD's moored acoustic recordings are being recognised as holding value outside of the context of the Antarctic Blue Whale Project with the IWC-SORP Acoustic Trends Project (AAS 4102 project component) becoming a Capability Working Group of the Southern Ocean Observing Systems. Data from these recorders also formed the cornerstone of an ARC Discovery Grant Proposal on Acoustic Niches in Antarctica. Additionally, acoustic data from moored acoustic recorders were used in a publication describing the seasonality and daily behaviour of Antarctic Sperm whales.

Regional abundances and distributions of Antarctic blue whale, Antarctic minke, fin and humpback whales have been incorporated in a preliminary risk assessment for the krill fishery in East Antarctica, which was presented to CCAMLR's WG-EMM in July 2017; it will again be included in an advanced risk assessment, which will be presented to WG-EMM in July 2018.

During the 2016/17 period, an application for vessel time on the Marine National Facility, R/V Investigator, was successful. This vessel time will provide opportunities to collect data that will augment and extend the scope of 4102.

Antarctic blue whale images collected by AAD staff, collaborators on 4101 and through relationships fostered between AAD staff and ships of opportunity, for photo-identification purposes, are contributing to a capture-recapture analysis for the production of a contemporary (new) estimate of abundance of Antarctic blue whales.

Project Summary of the Season 2018/19

For the last year, we have been preparing and coordinating a highly successful multidisciplinary research voyage that brought together 28 scientists on board the Marine National Facility's Research Vessel 'Investigator' to study Antarctic blue whales (ABWs), their prey and whether their iron rich poo fertilises the ocean. The 49 day ENRICH Voyage (Euphausiids and Nutrient Recycling in Cetacean Hotspots) was the first ever survey of Antarctic blue whales conducted together with a structured survey of their prey, Antarctic krill. The voyage resulted in the detection of 975 krill swarms, recorded in 3D by the ship's echosounders, as well as 41 target trawls providing information on krill size, maturity stage composition and growth rates in order to characterise krill population structure and condition on ABW feeding grounds. Ten different species of marine mammal were acoustically detected throughout the study area with ABWs most commonly heard. These detections lead to the ability to approach 19 groups of ABWs for photo-identification, from which 25 individual ABWs were identified. The distinctive dorsal fin of one ABW was immediately recognised as belonging to an individual previously photographed on the inaugural voyage of this project in 2013. UAV flights collected photogrammetry video data for 8 ABWs in order to get length measurements and one blow sample was obtained for bacterial microbiome analysis of the pulmonary system. The biogeochemistry team conducted 103 deployments (CTDs, XBTs, Drifters and TMRs) to describe the surface oceanography within the survey area, as well as to determine macro-and trace metal nutrient availability for the microbial loop in order to detect whale and krill related enrichment effects on primary production. The UAV enabled novel surface water sampling near icebergs to determine their effect on surface iron concentrations.

Final Summary of Project Achievements

During the 20th century over 350,000 Antarctic blue whales (ABWs) were killed by industrial whaling before the remaining few were fully protected. A decade ago these largest-of-all-animals remained endangered, elusive and poorly understood.

In an effort to determine the distribution, abundance and behaviour of these whales, the Australian Antarctic Division and collaborators developed and applied new, powerful, real-time acoustic tracking techniques to find these rare, remote and widely-distributed whales during four highly successful multidisciplinary research voyages (2013, 2015, 2017, 2019). These voyages collected valuable acoustic, sightings, tracking, genetic photo-identification and prey distribution data. The photo-identification and genetic data have now been contributed to global catalogues and are being used to determine the current conservation status of ABWs.

We also developed and deployed a regional network of fixed passive acoustic monitoring devices as a major contribution to a circumpolar data collection effort. These devices record and store the repeated, loud, low frequency and long-travelling calls of ABWs and provide an extremely efficient means of identifying their presence in the remote Antarctic and Southern Ocean waters. This cost-effective method has delivered broad spatial and long-term temporal coverage to examine trends in ABW population growth, abundance, distribution, seasonal movements and behaviour. With these thousands of hours of recordings, we have undertaken passive acoustic studies focusing on the calls of ABWs as well as acoustic data processing and analysis methodology.

In world firsts, satellite tags were deployed on two ABWs to study movement and habitat use and the 2019 Antarctic voyage was the first to collect simultaneous whale, krill, and biological oceanographic data to investigate ABW prey preferences and test hypotheses about the role of whales in recycling of nutrients such as iron in the Antarctic ecosystem.

This project has demonstrated that large scale, multi-national, multi-year collaborative Antarctic research projects are achievable and productive even when focused on one of Antarctica's rarest animals. It can also can also deliver high quality research outputs: 44 peer-reviewed publications, 37 reports delivered to the International Whaling Commission and the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources and 26 datasets delivered to the Australian Antarctic Data Centre.

Category 1: Peer-reviewed literature

Double M.C., Andrews-Goff V., Jenner K.C.S., Jenner M.-N. , Laverick S., Branch T.A., Gales N.J. (2014) Migratory movements of pygmy blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus brevicauda) between Australia and Indonesia as revealed by satellite telemetry, PLoS ONE 9(4). e93578; [Ref: 15346]

Peel D., Miller B.S., Kelly N., Dawson S., Slooten E., Double M.C. (2014) A Simulation Study of Acoustic-Assisted Tracking of Whales for Mark-Recapture Surveys, PLoS ONE 9(5). e95602; [Ref: 15354]

Van Opzeeland I.C., Samaran F., Stafford K., Findlay K., Gedamke J., Harris D., Miller B. (2013) Towards collective circum-Antarctic passive acoustic monitoring: The Southern Ocean Hydrophone Network (SOHN), Polarforschung 83(2). 47-61; [Ref: 15648]

Calderan S., Miller B., Collins K., Ensor P., Double M., Leaper R., Barlow J. (2014) Low-frequency vocalizations of sei whales (Balaenoptera borealis) in the Southern Ocean, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 136(6). EL418-EL423; [Ref: 15649]

Miller B.S., Barlow J., Calderan S., Collins K., Leaper R., Olson P., Ensor P., Peel D., Donnelly D., Andrews-Goff V., Olavarria C., Owen K., Rekdahl M., Schmitt N., Wadley V., Jason G., Gales N., Double M.C. (2015) Validating the reliability of passive acoustic localisation: a novel method for encountering rare and remote Antarctic blue whales, Endangered Species Research 26. 257–269; [Ref: 15650]

Harrison L.-M.K. , Cox M.J., Skaret G., Harcourt R. (2015) The R package EchoviewR for automated processing of active acoustic data using Echoview, Frontiers in Marine Science 2. 9pp; [Ref: 15651]

Miller B.S., Leaper R., Calderan S., Gedamke J. (2014) Red shift, blue shift: Investigating doppler shifts, blubber thickness, and migration as explanations of seasonal variation in the tonality of Antarctic blue whale song, PLoS ONE 9(9). e107740; [Ref: 15652]

Peel D., Bravington M., Kelly N., Double M.C. (2015) Designing an effective mark-recapture study of Antarctic blue whales, Ecological Applications 25(4). 1003-15; [Ref: 15653]

Miller B.S., Calderan S., Gillespie D., Weatherup G., Leaper R., Collins K., Double M.C. (2017) Software for real-time localization of baleen whale calls using directional sonobuoys: A case study on Antarctic blue whales, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 139(3). EL83-EL89; [Ref: 15900]

Aulich M.G., McCauley R.D., Miller B.S., Samaran F., Saunders B.J., Erbe C. (2022) Seasonal Distribution of the Fin Whale (Balaenoptera physalus) in Antarctic and Australian Waters Based on Passive Acoustics, Frontiers in Marine Science 9. 864153; [Ref: 16470]

Miller B.S., Calderan S., Leaper R., Miller E.J., Bell E., Double M.C. (2021) Source level of Antarctic blue and fin whale sounds recorded on sonobuoys deployed in deep-ocean off Antarctica, Frontiers in Marine Science .; [Ref: 16535]

Smith A.J.R., Nelson T., Ratnarajah L., Genovese C., Westwood K., Holmes T.M., Corkill M., Townsend A.T., Bell E., Wuttig K., Lannuzel D. (2022) Identifying potential sources of iron-binding ligands in coastal Antarctic environments and the wider Southern Ocean, Frontiers of Marine Science 9. 948772; [Ref: 16599]

Miller B.S. (2021) An open access dataset for developing automated detectors of Antarctic baleen whale sounds and performance evaluation of two commonly used detectors, Scientific Reports (Nature) .; [Ref: 16777]

Double M.C. (2017) Documentation of a New Zealand blue whale population based on multiple lines of evidence, Endangered Species Research .; [Ref: 16830]

de la Mare W.K. (2014) Estimating relative abundance of whales from historical Antarctic whaling records, Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 71. 106-119; [Ref: 15167]

Miller B.S., Collins K., Barlow J., Calderan S., Leaper R., McDonald M., Ensor P., Olson P.A., Olavarria C., Double M.C. (2014) Blue whale vocalizations recorded around New Zealand: 1964-2013, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 135(3). 1616-1623; [Ref: 15256]

Category 2: International meeting papers

Bravington M., Jarman S., Skaug H.J. (2014) Antarctic Blue Whale surveys: augmenting via genetics for close-kin and ordinal age, International Whaling Commission Scientific Committee meeting (SC65b), Bled, Slovenia, May 2014 SC/65b/SH17; [Ref: 15345]

Miller B.S., Gedamke J., Calderan S., Collins K., Johnson C., Miller E., Samaran F., Smith J., Double M.C. (2014) Accuracy and precision of DIFAR localisation systems: Calibrations and comparative measurements from three SORP voyages, International Whaling Commission Scientific Committee meeting (SC65b), Bled, Slovenia, May 2014 SC/65b/SH08; [Ref: 15347]

Miller B.S., Gillespie D., Weatherup G., Calderan S., Double M.C. (2014) Software for the localisation of baleen whale calls using DIFAR sonobuoys: PAMGuard DIFAR, International Whaling Commission Scientific Committee meeting (SC65b), Bled, Slovenia, May 2014 SC/65b/SH06; [Ref: 15348]

Miller B.S., Leaper R., Calderan S., Collins K., Double M.C. (2014) Source levels of Antarctic blue whale calls measured during the 2013 Antarctic blue whale voyage: preliminary results, International Whaling Commission Scientific Committee meeting (SC65b), Bled, Slovenia, May 2014 SC/65b/SH11; [Ref: 15349]

Miller B.S., Wotherspoon S., Calderan S., Leaper R., Collins K., Double M.C. (2014) Estimating drift of DIFAR sonobuoys when localizing blue whales, International Whaling Commission Scientific Committee meeting (SC65b), Bled, Slovenia, May 2014 SC/65b/SH09; [Ref: 15350]

Miller B.S., Barlow J., Calderan S., Collins K., Leaper R., Kelly N., Peel D., Olson P., Ensor P., Double M.C. (2013) Long-range acoustic tracking of Antarctic blue whales, International Whaling Commission Scientific Committee meeting (SC65a), Jeju Island, Korea, June 2013 SC/65a/SH18; [Ref: 15351]

Olson P.A., Ensor P., Olavarría C., Schmitt N., Childerhouse S., Constantine R., Miller B.S., Double M.C. (2013) New Zealand blue whales: initial photo-identification of a little-known population, International Whaling Commission Scientific Committee meeting (SC65a), Jeju Island, Korea, June 2013 SC/65a/SH12; [Ref: 15352]

Robbins J., Zerbini A.N., Gales N., Gulland F.M.D., Double M.C., Clapham P.J., Andrews-Goff V., Kennedy A.S., Landry S., Mattila D.K., Tackaberry J. (2013) Satellite tag effectiveness and impacts on large whales: preliminary results of a case study with Gulf of Maine humpback whales, International Whaling Commission Scientific Committee meeting (SC65a), Jeju Island, Korea, June 2013 SC/65a/SH05; [Ref: 15353]

Category 3: Conference paper

Miller B.S. (2012) Real-time tracking of blue whales using DIFAR sonobuoys, Proceedings of the Australian Acoustical Society; Acoustics 2012 - Fremantle, Australia, 21-23 November 2012 7pp; [Ref: 15257]