Tag, You’re It!
A story from Ari Friedlaender, PhD.
Humpback whales and California sea lions with the whale tagging boat in the background
Associate Professor and Researcher at UC Santa Cruz, Ari would rather be on a boat than behind a desk. Putting suction tags on whales using a long pole while standing in the bow of a skiff is Ari’s specialty. Here he takes us on one of his adventures in the Bay, where the whales wear cameras giving us a glimpse into their underwater world.
ARI FRIEDLAENDER is an Associate Professor and researcher at the University of California at Santa Cruz where he heads the Bio-Telemetry and Behavioral Ecology Laboratory. His previous lab was at Oregon State University. Ari is also a founder and one of the senior leadership members of the California Ocean Alliance, a non-profit collaboration of scientists, educators and conservationists.
Most of Ari’s research involves studying the foraging behavior of marine mammals and the impacts of human behavior on them. He and his colleagues study marine mammals in natural environments where they do what they do naturally, but he also does experimental work trying to understand the impacts of climate change, Naval sonar and fishing gear on these animals.
Ari was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He grew up on the Connecticut coast where whaling was a big part of the cultural history, but he was more into sharks as a little boy. Like most boys, Ari was into things that bite other things.
Ari knew he wanted to study marine biology when he was just three or four. His parents tell him he asked them to join the Cousteau Society on his behalf when he was four, and they got a letter back saying he was the youngest member of the Cousteau Society.
Ari’s academic background in marine science started in college. He originally went to school in Maine and then did his graduate work at Duke University in North Carolina. His undergrad advisor allowed him to study seals at the Mystic Aquarium. Then he took a course in marine mammal biology at Duke Marine Lab in the summertime, which introduced him more broadly to marine mammals. At that point he met some of the mentors he’d have later in life, like his masters and PhD adviser.
In his own words, Ari “ended up in the Monterey Bay area as a conscious choice to be in the best area to study a wide diversity of marine mammals in a pretty amazing environment close to a lot of places that do other research.”
You can watch Ari’s story on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/x_IJ0XyBdw4
TAG, YOU’RE IT – an elite view from the whale’s perspective!
I think my most memorable experience on Monterey Bay happened a couple of years ago. Myself, and colleagues - at Stanford, Jeremy Goldbogen, and from Cascadia Research, John Calambokidis – had been developing these new tags[1] to put on whales that measured the underwater movement of the animals, but also included video. The tags allowed us to see from the animal’s perspective when they’re feeding, what they’re seeing, what their environment looks like.
It was a day a couple of years ago when there were a lot of humpback whales close into shore. We knew there were a lot there because Jeremy and I had gone out the day before and seen a bunch of animals. We’d called John and said, “OK John, tomorrow morning let’s meet at 7:30 at the boat ramp over at Moss Landing. We’re gonna go out and deploy some tags.” And John is a field guy who believes in a ‘you start in the morning and you end when it’s dark’ kind-of-thing.
Jeremy and I hadn’t really told him the situation about how many whales were around, so we get there in the morning and John is loaded for bear. You know, he’s got enough food and water for several days. He’s got a backpack full of stuff, and Jeremy and I just kind of show up in our shorts and t-shirts, and you know, our life jackets, and John, I think, may have been a little skeptical as to whether or not we were equipped well enough.
We pulled out of the Moss Landing harbor, and took a left to go through the jetty, and we encountered our first whale. We were still in idle speed, and I didn’t even have my tag pole ready or anything, so we passed that one up. By the time we got to the end of the jetty, there were two more whales.
At this point I was ready, so I said, “Well, John, why don’t we go ahead and do this?” So we put a tag on right then. And then we moved about sixty feet and there were two more whales. We put another tag on, and this repeated for the next, I’d say, about eight or ten minutes. We put out all four of our tags in about 20 minutes. John never had the boat out of idle speed. Then we turned around and went back in.
It was about eight o’clock in the morning, and I could see John’s brain just kind of short-circuiting with like, “Wait a minute, we’re supposed to be out on the water all day. What just happened?” So we went and each got a burrito, a nice breakfast burrito, and then we sat on the beach, and the whales were literally right off the beach in front of MBARI[2]. We watched them go back and forth. You could see the tags on all the whales, and eventually one of the tags fell off. We could see it in the water. We waited a half an hour, and it basically washed up right on shore in front of us.
It was one of the easiest days of science I’ve ever had! What was great about it was there were a lot of people around. There were a lot of whale watching boats. There were a lot of tourists. There were people on the beach, and we could talk to the people that were also seeing those animals right there about what our tags were doing.
And then when we got the tags back, the video was unbelievable! It was one of the first times we had seen, from the whale’s perspective, what it looks like to feed in Monterey Bay. It was one of these events where there were birds diving. There were sea lions all over the place. There were humpback whales everywhere. And you can actually see all that from the whale’s perspective.
Each tag had a camera both on the front and on the back, and we could see, as the whale would come up from underneath a prey patch, you could see a school of anchovies. You could see them sort of move around as the whale got close to the patch. And as soon as the whale lunged, you could see diving birds, and shearwaters just hitting the water and grabbing fish right in front of the whale. Then behind it there’s a whole kind of rat pack of sea lions, back behind the whale, picking off the fish that kind of spilled out of the whale’s mouth and may have been stunned by the whale.
It was just this vision of how much life is going on under the surface, and what we can’t see from above. But from the whale’s perspective, it’s just happening all around. I mean it’s like controlled chaos! To see all these animals interacting and feeding on the same thing in the same place, it kind of set the spark in our minds of, “Ok, there’s a lot more going on here than we can tell just by being at the surface.”
So from a very simple morning, we got a pretty detailed and awesome, elite view of what this bay is like, and the richness of life that it promotes.
Whale tagging team, Ari is standing on the bowsprint with a tag in his hand
Snaphot of tag data from a humpback whale
