“Mom, can you hear me?” season #2

By Valeria Vergara and Marie-Ana Mikus (guest researchers from Ocean Wise Conservation Association)

Time flies on the beluga research tower in Baie Sainte-Marguerite in the Saguenay-St. Lawrence Marine Park. It is hard to believe we are already in the middle of our second season! With more than 50 drone flights, 3 weeks of nearly continuous recordings, and belugas in the bay almost every day, we can definitely say this is proving to be a productive season. We’re a team of four this year, which makes the arduous journey to the research tower and setup and dismantling of our gear every day a little more efficient. The 2×3 m platform is as small as it sounds, so each of us tries to keep to a little corner, making sure to warn the others if there will be any movement at all towards another person’s “turf”.

Each of us has a task. Jaclyn flies the drone over groups with calves or yearlings, essential for her master project on cooperative care of young, directed by GREMM and Memorial University. Her study is highly compatible with our mother-calf communication study, which looks at how noise may disturb the important acoustic bond between mothers and their newborn calves (a collaboration between GREMM and Ocean Wise). Marie-Ana and I take care of the hydrophones and also fly the drone (yes, we are all certified drone pilots!), but focusing on the entire herd instead of on focal groups. Flying high, we obtain an accurate estimate of herd composition, the total number of individuals visiting the bay every day, and we count mother-calf separations and reunions, pairing this information with our acoustic recordings. We keep a close tally on the number of vessels, and their types and distances from the tower (and the whales). Josephine is responsible for photo-ID work, taking photos of every individual that swims near the tower, an important aspect of both projects.

The sounds picked up by one of our highly sensitive hydrophones blast through the speakers of our field computer every minute of our stay at the tower. When we hear beluga sounds, it’s a wonderful feeling. Just this afternoon, we were reflecting on how familiar these sounds are to us by now. We can understand the mood – such as whether some nearby belugas are fighting or being playful, we can perceive if we have a group with small calves near the hydrophone (lots of contact calls!) or a group of males (a very different, male-like series of sounds that we’ve gotten very used to!). But we are still very far from deciphering the exact content of their incredibly diverse signals. Marie-Ana compared this to being immersed in a foreign language for a while, when the sounds become familiar and one begins to get the gist of them but cannot yet understand the language.