We are wrapping things up here on the second leg of SOCAL-11. The winds have been calm and we have had a number of visual and acoustic detections the last few days offshore in the Santa Monica and Santa Cruz basins. However, our efforts have been somewhat compromised by those of others and we decided against doing a CEE for the one Rissos dolphin we tagged given the amount of other incidental noise it was being exposed to at the time already.
The orca interaction was interesting and seeing these animals in the wild is always inspiring. We decided against tagging these transient killer whales, but did take some excellent photos (above and below by T. Pusser taken under NMFS permit #14534) to contribute to the existing photo-ID databases, which is one of a number of contributions to the basic understanding of marine mammals our project has been eager to make. If you click on the link here <OrcaShortMovie>, you can see a short video clip of five of this group of eight animals as they surfaced passing quite close to our boat that was stationary as they approached us. As you can see by the photo below, even the most dominant animals in the ocean aren’t immune from human impact; this male has what appears to be a propeller scar on it’s dorsal fin.
Today is a packing day for SOCAL-11, unloading the myriad instuments, boats, and tools used in this multi-disciplinary project. I will provide a wrap up summary post in the next few days once we are completely dry. One final note is that it looks like the link to the 3-part blow hole on Santa Barbara Island I posted while we were traveling the other day didn’t work, but I have fixed it and you should be able to access that now from the preceeding post.