Tag On

Another busy week and I’m ready for this project to be over. It has been fun, but the amount of people I’m constantly surrounded by is starting to get to me. I told myself that I wasn’t going to do HARC again next year, but it looks like they might want me and a few others to return and help manage the volies again. A year is a long time to plan, and I hope to be in grad school by then, but who knows. It is good experience, and it’s an excuse to spend more time surfing in Australia.

Had another boat trip a few days ago on the Beluga (the same inflatable used in Straddie to drop of the hydrophones). We left mid day from the Noosa River; the wind was light out of the South East and the swell small, maybe about a meter. Overall they were great conditions for a day on the small boats. We drifted offshore of Noosa heads for about 30 minutes looking for a good pod of whales to tag. We found a receptive pod of 2 adults, but they were travelling out of the study area to the north. Eventually one of the land based teams put us onto a fast moving pod of another 2 adults. We zipped over to them and one immediately flicked it’s fluke out of the water in an evasive maneuver. Mindi was up on the bow sprit with her pole in hand, waiting for the whales to surface close enough to reach. Our goal was to slap on a suction cup tag called a D-tag, which records the depth, pitch, roll, and acoustics of the animal as it moves through the water. It also has an accelerometer and clock to record the position of the whale based on the known GPS location of deployment. It’s programmed to release after 3 hours, and has a radio transmitter which broadcasts beeps over a known frequency. We then use a directional antenna to pin point the source of the beeps.

Our first tag attempt failed, and the whales reacted by swimming very fast away from us (an understandable move on their part). We had a 30 minute window to get the tag on, and were beginning to run out of time. Finally at the last 30 seconds, the whales popped up off the bow, Dave gunned Beluga right on top of them, and as the whales arched down for another evasive dive, Mindi slammed the pole down onto the peduncle (or tail stock). TAG ON! This all happened in a matter of seconds, just as Mike was calling in from base to tell us time was up. It was all very exciting. This was followed by 2 hours of boredom, as we followed the pod and recorded every behavior and kept track of the tag (which is worth about 10,000 US dollars). Luckily for us, but not for the data, the whales started breaching 45 minutes after deployment, and managed to knock the tag off, which meant that we didn’t have to wait 3 hours for it to release. At the end of the focal follow, we used a 22 caliber rifle with a modified cartridge to shot a skin sample of the tagged whale to determine the sex. The cartridge has a hollow tip with inverted barbs, which penetrates the skin and blubber and extracts a sample as it bounces off.

Other highlights from the boat included some passes by wedge-tailed shearwaters, a hammerhead shark, some manta rays, and really up close and personal looks at the old humpback whale.

We had a day off yesterday, which I spent watching baseball and recovering from a night of drinking on the beach. We played the guitar and watched the stars. The constellation Orion always makes me feel at home, since you can almost always see it wherever you are in the world. Once I recovered we played a game of touch on the beach, where I nearly through up the Vegemite sandwich I had for lunch, followed by a long body surf session. The ocean was a beautiful turquoise green, with an ominous dark blue backdrop full of grey and white cumulous clouds. The scene was highlighted by bright white caps illuminated by the setting sun to the west. Rain was approaching from the south, and the whole view was very poetic. The best part was the hundreds of Wedge-tailed shearwaters that skimmed the wave crests right along the beach, my first experience swimming with shearwaters. These birds are typically only found way out at sea, but approach the coast in eastern Australia for nesting. Some flew right over my head as I waded in the lapping white caps. It was incredibly relaxing.

Three days left on the hill and it’s all over. I will have another 3 days to spend here in Peregian helping with clean up, and then I’m off the Mackay for 6 days of MMO. Still feeling homesick, going to book my flight back home in a few days. Reef’s birthday is in 10 days, he’ll be turning 4. Hopefully someone bakes him a dog food cake.