Thursday, March 24, 2016

Great weather!

Well, two field days down. We are running a project to address the sound levels patterns of humpback whale song. And weather has been great. Light (Kona) winds. Note how calm the waters are below. We are measuring the sounds a few ways. One is directly next to the whales, sauntering over with the kayak and a WHOI DMON (digital acoustic recorder). We are also measuring how far away we can hear those sounds. So we take our main boat, the Coho, away from the whale and kayak, measuring the whale songs as we drift away. The Coho is owned and operated by Marc Lammers of University of Hawaii and Oceanwide Science Institute.

Below you can see Tammy Silva, one of the PhD students paddling in the kayak. It's a double kayak. Aran is paddling in the back of the kayak and taking the photo.
Tammy looking for whales. Pretty calm water, eh!


Tammy still looking for whales. If you look close, you can see a whale flipper to the left of Tammy. 
Despite this great weather, we've been struggling a bit with whales. We had one singer the first day. While we've seen lots of whales today, and heard lots of singers (in the distance) we couldn't find any singers today. 
 

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