Thursday started off calm but foggy. This can be a little interesting coming out of Long Beach across the busy shipping lanes, but this is where the animals live. Our objective today was to retrieve some of the tags deployed yesterday that had still been riding around on multiple animals overnight and then work back into deep water to focus on more offshore species with the increasingly optimistic weather forecast. Several of the tags were found over twenty miles from where they had originally been deployed, so this took a little bit of searching.
For the second day in a row we managed to attach a suction cup acoustic monitoring tag on a Risso’s dolphin (above: A. Friedlander – taken under NMFS permit #14534), one of the deeper-diving cetaceans that are fairly common along the California coast. These are remarkable animals with some very interesting social structure we continue to learn more and more about. They are a priority species for us in SOCAL-BRS and we have been focusing on them more since continuing to learn the best approach strategies for tag attachment in this somewhat challenging species. Having the success we have with them has been a productive development for us.
On Friday we will be heading back further offshore to some of the more distant Channel Islands. The forecast is for calm seas through Sunday. Consequently, we will likely be offshore for the next few days and may have some radio silence with the lack of internet coverage 50 miles out. We hope to be able to find and tag one of the elusive beaked whales that live in the area. This is always hard, but hopefully the seas will glass out and we will be in the right place at the right time. We will let you know how things go when we are back in range, probably Sunday. Thanks as always for the interest and questions about our progress.