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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 33 Number 8
April 2006
Fishermen asked to watch out for Stellwagen acoustic whale buoys
SCITUATE, MA - Researchers have set out nine acoustic buoys in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary and are asking fishermen to return them if any should break their moorings.
The purpose of the buoys is to listen for the vocal sounds of large whales, such as northern right whales, as part of a study to learn more about the animals’ movements in the area.
The buoys are fully submerged and moored on the bottom. They have been designed to pop up automatically after three months to upload their data or to be brought up by a retrieval team using a handheld transponder.
The buoy data is considered critical to the success of a study being undertaken by National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and sanctuary scientists in cooperation with Chris Clark of the Bioacoustics Research Program at Cornell University.
If a buoy is lost, then so is the information it has collected, according to NMFS.
“There are a number of ways that a buoy could slip its mooring,” said Richard Merrick of NMFS’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center. “Storms, equipment failure, or snagging during fishing operations are all possible.”
Return if found
David Wiley, the sanctuary’s research coordinator, said the buoys were sited based on water depth and coverage area but that fishing operations were also taken into consideration.
“We tried to pick places that would be least affected by fishing or weather, but we also had to make sure that whale sounds throughout the sanctuary could be captured,” he said.
The round buoys are about 20" in diameter, encased in bright yellow “hard-hat” plastic, and weigh about 45 pounds. Each one bears a red and white placard with contact information explaining how to return it if found. There is a $250 reward for returning a lost buoy.
The NMFS/sanctuary project is scheduled to monitor for whale calls for a full year, which scientists hope will allow them to create “a portrait of localized right whale migrations throughout the year,” NMFS said.
Broader effort
This is not the first time acoustic buoys have been placed off the New England coast to listen for whale calls.
In 2004 and 2005, the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries collaborated with Cornell to set out a total of five buoys in Cape Cod Bay that delivered whale call information on a daily basis.
The International Fund for Animal Welfare has also been involved in efforts to set out acoustic buoys in the Great South Channel to evaluate their usefulness in tracking whale movements.
David Gouveia, NMFS marine mammal coordinator, noted that his agency has contributed to the funding of much of this monitoring work as part of a broader effort to identify effective strategies for tracking whale movements. The hope is this kind of information eventually can be worked into management decisions.
“There is a good relationship among all of these researchers and we’ve worked hard to collaborate and pool our funding,” he said.
Another project NMFS is involved with is trying to find ways to provide acoustic buoy information on whale positions to large ships through automatic identification system (AIS) units.
“With AIS, we’ll know where these massive ships are, we’ll know where the whales are, and we’ll be able to send messages instantly through AIS,” Gouveia said.
He added that NMFS is looking for solid information to work into both entanglement-reduction management actions through the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Plan (ALWTRP) and the agency’s ship strike strategy, which is expected to be announced in a proposed rule in June or July – the same time the final rule for changes to the ALWTRP are expected.
“Everyone has the same goal. Everyone wants to protect these animals,” Gouveia said.
For more information on the sanctuary acoustic buoy project, call Wiley at (781) 545-8026 or e-mail him at <david.wiley@noaa.gov>.
Lorelei Stevens
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