Research Projects

Pop-Ups in British Columbia, Canada

Dr. Rob Williams has assessed the impact of human activities, such as noise, on marine mammals for many years. He is now surveying ambient noise off the coast of British Columbia where shipping lanes overlap with the distribution of different whale species. Specialized equipment called “Pop-ups” record all sounds: the noise of the ships as well as the sounds and clicks of the whales. The data are used to estimate the threat man-made ambient background noise poses to whales, to identify high-risk areas, and to plan a National Marine Conservation Area.

Jo Hastie interviewed Dr Rob Williams:

Tell us about your research on marine mammals in BC.
I have spent the last 12 years studying the effects of boat traffic and whale-watching on killer whale behaviour and energetics. And over the last few years it has become really obvious to me that whilst we have these well-studied populations of killer whales, we don’t really have an idea of how many of all the other whale, dolphin and porpoise species there are on the BC coast.

Was there something specific that made you think we need to know how many whales are out there?
After studying killer whales in BC, I went to the UK to do a PhD with Phil Hammond to learn how to design and conduct surveys to estimate how many whales there are in a population or in an area and I came home in December 2003 with these new skills and anxious to put them to work. And I didn’t realise that at that time there was enormous pressure to start doing seismic surveys off the BC coast. Initially it was an academic seismic survey called Batholiths designed to try and find out how the coast mountains formed. But of course the oil and gas industry representatives were also watching that, to see how easy it would be to get permission to do seismic surveys in British Columbia.

Why would you be concerned about seismic activities?
Well as you know, sound is as important to marine animals as vision is to us so that it makes sense that very loud anthropogenic noise can cause disruptions to behaviour. I’ve carried out experiments with even a single whale-watching boat following whale-watching guidelines to see how killer whales respond to it. However, I’ve figured that if we’re concerned about that, we must be concerned about sounds that are orders of magnitude louder. It just makes sense.

Why should we be concerned about BC?
The coastal waters of British Columbia form important feeding habitat for a lot of whale populations and species that are at risk – whales that have been hunted to near extinction through commercial whaling that stopped off the BC coast in the late 60s. We go out and do our surveys, we find that there are hundreds of humpback whales and fin whales feeding in those coastal waters in summer and fall.

What do you hope to get out of your current research?
The thing that I like most about the project that we are doing now, is that the information is useful inherently. The information doesn’t have an agenda. There are lots of reasons why you want to know how many animals there are and where they are. And that can be important if you are switching to ecosystem based fisheries management and you just need to know how many fish-eaters are out there.

If you have porpoises being caught accidentally in fishing nets, you need to know how many there are in the population to estimate how many can be removed accidentally through by-catch. And absolutely in the context of seismic surveys or oil and gas drilling, it’s very important to know where you see these animals and what constitutes critical habitat. What sort of habitat do they need to continue to earn a living?

Can you explain how past research has shown that animals of similar species might have very different reactions to noise?
For the last year, I have been partnering with a scientist called David Bain who has spent several years studying how marine mammals respond to airgun noise and one of the things that is emerging from that research is that species that have more or less identical hearing – species like harbour and Dall’s porpoise or California and Steller sea lion may show completely different responses to the same stimulus. So if you detonate an air-gun, some species are apparently unbothered by it, and others show dramatic avoidance responses. And so what I think that is telling us is that relying too heavily on audiograms and just saying the way that these animals will react to noise, is just a simple function of the their hearing abilities – it’s just, it’s too simplistic and you will get the wrong answer. So one of the things that we are learning, is that if you want to protect a particular species, you need to have a good understanding of how it hears, and more importantly what it is willing to tolerate. And that’s a behaviour thing. And that’s not just a law of physics.

I think it’s really important for us to look at what we are capable of providing, what sort of information we’re capable of providing as scientists. Because our ability to estimate animal abundance is getting better all the time, but there’s still always a lot of uncertainty with that abundance estimate. So I think I would urge people to look at trying to assess what’s the likely impact of this activity on individual animals rather than on populations because if you can prevent harm to individuals, that’s certainty the best way to prevent population level impacts from ever occurring.


For more information see Cornell Lab for Ornithology.