I Felt a Little Sorry for the Anchovies

A story from John Calambokidis.

A snap shot of whale tagging data

Founder and research biologist at Cascadia Research, John has his own whale-tagging story. While deploying those tags is a dangerous job, the rewards can be pure gold. John gives us a glimpse into the dynamic world of whales feeding on anchovies alongside sea lions, birds and other whales. And he gets us thinking about the value of those myriad little fish to the whole marine ecosystem.

JOHN CALAMBOKIDIS is a research biologist at Cascadia Research, a non-profit organization dedicated to the study primarily of marine mammals, but also other animals, especially those they can help serve through protection and conservation. Cascadia Research is based in Olympia, Washington.

John was born in Cairo, Egypt to a Greek father and American mother who met in Egypt. He and his family came to this country when John was about ten years old. They lived on the east coast where John grew up. John came to the west coast and Olympia, WA to attend Evergreen State College in 1974 and has been on the west coast ever since.

John got his Bachelor of Science degree at Evergreen where he was introduced to research, in his second year. He produced several papers from that project, then moved on to studying harbor seals, which also resulted in several scientific papers.

John started Cascadia Research in 1979 and notes that none of the founders had advanced degrees, all simply had Bachelor of Science or Bachelor of Arts degrees. Today the organization also has researchers with PhDs.

John’s interest in marine mammals started early in his career.  Back then he was particularly interested in the effects of human activities and pollution on wildlife, especially pollutants like PCBs, which were recognized as a problem in the 1970s. John suspected they were having an impact in the marine environment.

He initially started studying harbor seals, which ate a lot of fish in Puget Sound, an area with lots of contamination. But John began to realize it was hard to study about pollutants when we knew so little about the animals’ biology. Over time his studies started to get more into the basic biology of the animals. Then in the 1980s, he graduated to the big whales.  

By 1986, after seeing his first whale, John was pretty hooked on blue whales. Something about their size, their beauty and their mystery captivated him, and he focused his research on large blue whales, humpback whales, and gray whales.

All the whales John studies move up and down the feeding grounds along the west coast. One of the most productive areas runs from the bluff of the Farallon Islands to Monterey Bay. His focus has been on the central California coast including Monterey Bay, as well as the Southern California bight.  John notes that region of the world is one of the best for feeding blue whales.  Monterey Bay is unique not only due to the abundance of wildlife there, but it is also somewhat protected from weather, which always provides a window to operate in the morning in Monterey Bay. John often focuses his studies there due to ease of access, instead of trying to get out to the Farallon Islands, where the weather may be problematic. He finds he can focus his efforts in Monterey Bay, because he can work there a greater proportion of the time.

 You can watch John’s story on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/VcMOOzzy9og

I FELT A LITTLE SORRY FOR THE ANCHOVIES

One of my favorite stories of working in Monterey Bay actually occurred just last fall. We’d been trying to study humpback whales, and how they interact with other species and how they feed inside Monterey Bay. So to do that, we’ve been working collaboratively with several other researchers - Jeremy Goldbogen at Stanford, and Ari Friedlaender - deploying these suction-cup attached video cameras.

But on this day James Fallbush and I went out of Moss Landing, and we were looking for an area where we might have humpback whales feeding. And we found this dense group, as has become more and more common inside Monterey Bay, of humpback whales associated with lots of sea birds and a group of sea lions. We thought, well this is a really good opportunity. If we can get a video camera on one of these whales, we could get a sense of the sort of interactions that are occurring underwater between the different humpback whales, between the individuals, between them with their prey, and between them and all these other species that were present.

But I was a little worried about how to approach these whales who were surfacing more chaotically. We attach the camera with just a pole. I call it a long pole, but it’s really only about ten feet long. So it’s much less than the length of a whale, and with the whales coming up kind of unpredictably, how could we maneuver close enough to these whales who were surfacing unexpectedly all around us?

I’ve deployed hundreds of these tags. I usually like to drive the boat and control where the boat is and have a little more predictable sense of where the whales are than in one of these aggregations. So we slowly eased into this group. And it was about eight to ten whales feeding. I think we estimated about one to two hundred California sea lions were in the area, and many hundreds of sea birds.

And we ended up getting this beautiful opportunity here where this whale ended up surfacing right in front of us, not too close. And we were able to get the tag on the whale and then it dove down.

This particular tag had a video camera facing forward and backwards, and when we got the video back, it just…. You know, the beauty of these tags has been that, I’ve studied whales for decades, and not really gotten a clear sense of what these whales do and how they interact under water, and these cameras really open that up. The data they provide is fantastic, but the images kind of give you the ability to relate to what it’s like to be a whale.

And I think one of the most surprising things for me, that I’m still trying to process is that– when the school of anchovies would come into view it would just look like a solid mass. It was not even - it didn’t look like individual fish. It was so concentrated and packed, it just looked like a wall. And you could clearly see in and see the whale lunge into it. But the interesting thing was the interactions between the whales, and the interaction between the whales and some of the other species.

And I think the thing that surprised me most was, I was so used to thinking of humpback whales as cooperative feeders, and I think in many cases they are cooperating, but in this particular case it actually looked like they were kind of getting into each other’s way. And that could be because maybe they hadn’t quite worked out roles or routines, but you’d see the whale that we had a tag on, and it would be headed for a school of fish, and you’d think, ‘oh he’s got it lined up’, and then all of a sudden you’d see another whale beat him to it, and he’d have to peel off to the side and not get a lunge in. It seemed like almost the majority of the time, he was having to break off.

Now on the other hand, it was clear that the sea lions and the birds were benefiting tremendously by the humpback whale action. And it made me feel a little sorry for the anchovies, because the anchovies were kind of left with a lose/lose strategy. If they bunched up together tightly, that would be the way to avoid being picked off by the birds and sea lions that mostly like to pick off prey one at a time.  And so for that kind of predator, animals bunch together, so it’s hard to pick out one animal at a time. That’s why schooling serves as a defense mechanism against many types of predators.

But the one type of predator that it doesn’t work well for would be a predator that relies on them being tightly packed together, so it can engulf them in one bite. Well, here were the anchovies caught between a rock and a hard place. If they bunched together tightly, the humpback whales could just take them in one mouthful. If they scattered or got broken up by the humpback whales feeding, then you could see, and I hadn’t expected it, but right in front of the camera would be these anchovies that got broken up from the school by the humpback whale lunging through them, and you’d have birds picking them off right in front of the camera as these individual anchovies were swimming by.

It was such a rich, dynamic scene, and it kind of opened up that underwater world of how these animals were interacting with each other and with other species, that I’d never quite been able to see before. And it was so dynamic, I felt a little sorry for the anchovies. I don’t know, it seemed like there was no way out. It made me wonder, how do they survive this?

We ended up taking the first two minutes of that video, unedited, without making any changes going just from the point of the first two minutes, and it’s the most incredible thing to see. And when I get to show it to people, it’s pretty amazing. Then I get to tell them this is the first two minutes of six hours of video, and we haven’t tried to edit it yet.

So, I think that’s been one of my most incredible experiences. It was really important to me to see this, because it also drove home a key point that was notable at that time.

That was a time period when there was also a purse seine fishery going for the anchovies. And what this video ended up showing – I mean you can offer data, you can make the point that the anchovies are the food of whales, and the sea lions and the dolphins and the birds are all dependent on it, but nothing drove that point home like this video, that just in that first two minutes you saw this group of a half dozen humpback whales and these hundreds of sea lions and hundreds of birds all dependent on this school of anchovies. And then you imagine that school of anchovies being eliminated by fishing, and fishing that doesn’t necessarily even yield a particularly high return. My understanding is that the fishermen get a very, very low price for the anchovies, and yet these small fish are what fuels all this incredible wildlife.A story from John Calambokidis

Whale tagging team, John is at the helm

Thank you for sharing your story with us John!