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Brandon L. Southall
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START SOCAL-11 leg II and NEW BLOG SITE!!!
Posted Sep 16, 2011 at SEA Blog
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BOEMRE releases workshop report on status of acoustic mitigation and monitoring
Related to the overall effort and progress mentioned in the last post, here is some information on a meeting I attended on acoustic monitoring technologies: The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, Gulf of Mexico Region, announces the availability of a new study report titled: Status and Applications of Acoustic Mitigation and Monitoring Systems for Marine Mammals: Workshop Proceedings (OCS Study BOEMRE 2011-002). This report releases the proceedings of a November 2009 workshop that explored the capabilities and limitations of using passive and active acoustic systems to monitor and help mitigate adverse impacts of marine mammals in offshore... Continue reading
Posted Sep 11, 2011 at SEA Blog
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Special AGU Session: Acoustical Applications for Ocean Observing Systems
Hello everyone. I wanted me to call to your attention a Special Session at the 2012 AGU Ocean Sciences Meeting in Salt Lake City (http://www.sgmeet.com/osm2012/special_sessions13.asp). This session continues a number of ongoing efforts, including the International Quiet Ocean Experiment meeting held at UNESCO in Paris last week I attended, regarding the integration of acoustic monitoring capabilities into ocean observing systems. 171: Acoustical Applications for Ocean Observing Systems Organizers: Bruce Howe, University of Hawaii at Manoa, bhowe@hawaii.edu; Sue Moore, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, sue.moore@noaa.gov; Brandon Southall, Southall Environmental Associates, Inc., Brandon.Southall@sea-inc.net The oceans are largely transparent to sound, hence oceanographic,... Continue reading
Posted Sep 11, 2011 at SEA Blog
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End SOCAL-11 Leg I
Posted Aug 13, 2011 at SEA Blog
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Close...but no cigar
Well our offshore weather forecast didn't really pan out yesterday but we came close on a few priority species today. We worked up from Catalina by Santa Barbara Island yesterday and had very good weather in the morning and searched for about 8 hours for beaked whales in workable weather, but as we got into the Santa Cruz Basin the wind picked up on top of the swell and other than a few fin whale sightings it was a wash of a day. This morning we woke up in the shaddow of a massive cliff under misty fog on the... Continue reading
Posted Aug 11, 2011 at SEA Blog
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Closer on fins...finally good offshore weather
Posted Aug 10, 2011 at SEA Blog
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SOCAL BRS team at work
Posted Aug 7, 2011 at SEA Blog
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Trying for beakers...got offshore blues
Posted Aug 7, 2011 at SEA Blog
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Working offshore
Posted Aug 7, 2011 at SEA Blog
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Tag and CEE on a Risso's Dolphin
Posted Aug 5, 2011 at SEA Blog
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Slip Sliding Away...
Posted Aug 5, 2011 at SEA Blog
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Rollin with the blues...
Posted Aug 3, 2011 at SEA Blog
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Tagging whales and mapping prey
Posted Aug 2, 2011 at SEA Blog
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SOCAL-11 day 4 - had to work for it today
Posted Aug 1, 2011 at SEA Blog
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Tags on briefly, then too much wind
We started in the shaddow of beautiful Santa Cruz island this morning and picked of the flying fish we had been watching around our boat last night off the deck. Conditions were reasonably favorable south of Santa Cruz and Anacapa and we searched in deeper waters for some of the focal odontocete species like beaked or sperm whales or Risso's dolphins, but did not locate any. So we continued back toward the mainland and began to work in several canyons where we encountered large numbers of blue and fin whales last year. Around mid-day we managed to tag two blue... Continue reading
Posted Jul 31, 2011 at SEA Blog
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Blue whale CEE -- interupted by a sea lion
Posted Jul 30, 2011 at SEA Blog
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SOCAL-11 Day I -- Picking up where we left off
Short post here as we are in pretty spotty coverage off shore, but wanted to note that we succeeded in tagging two individual blue whales off Pt. Arguello just north of Point Conception today. Favorable offshore weather and good concentrations of animals enabled us to find multiple possible groups and attach a suction cup tag from each RHIB. After about three hours of baseline behavioral measurements and finding the right location to deploy the sound source in the right proximity to the whales but away from non-target animals. Quite a bit of time was spent getting away from a large... Continue reading
Posted Jul 29, 2011 at SEA Blog
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SOCAL-11 Behavioral Resonse Study to Begin: Mobilization
Posted Jul 29, 2011 at SEA Blog
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Oceanography article on International Quiet Ocean Experiment
Last year I was fortunate to be involved in the innaugural meeting centered around the concept of an International Quiet Ocean Experiment in Rhode Island. We recently published an article in Oceanography regarding the outcomes of this meeting. You can find this article available on-line at: http://www.tos.org/oceanography/archive/24-2_boyd_il.pdf If you are interested in this idea, please note that there is a follow-on meeting in Paris later this year, which you can find more information about at: http://www.iqoe-2011.org/ Continue reading
Posted Jun 28, 2011 at SEA Blog
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Recent developments on tidal power -- ORPC deploys new research vessel
FYI -- some recent interesting developments in tidal power, including the deployment of a new research support vessel by Ocean Renewable Power Company. Please see: http://social.tidaltoday.com/intelligence-brief/fortnightly-intelligence-brief-9-june-%E2%80%93-22-june-2011 Ocean Renewable Power had a chance to show off its research vessel and beta tidal turbine this month at the Portland Ocean Terminal. The boat and turbine were open to the public to tour, according to Maine news reports. The turbine prototype is less than half the size of the actual turbine that ORPC plans to install by the end of the year on the ocean floor in Cobscook Bay's 100-foot deep waters. Jim... Continue reading
Posted Jun 28, 2011 at SEA Blog
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Recent presentation on vessel-quieting efforts at IMCC2
A cross-disciplinary partnership of several of us working to advance the implementation of vessel-quieting technologies on large commercial ships recently gave an update presentation on progress within the International Maritime Organization at the IMCC2 meeting in Victoria, BC <see: http://www.conbio.org/IMCC2011/>. The title of the presentation and abstract is given below, as well as the authorship (but note that Michael Jasny actually gave this talk on our behalf). 18:15 Ongoing efforts to reduce underwater noise from large commercial ships. Brandon Southall , SEA, Inc. and University of California, Santa Cruz; Kathy Metcalf Chamber of Shipping of America; Leila Hatch National Oceanic... Continue reading
Posted Jun 4, 2011 at SEA Blog
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Recent Article on Environmental Impacts of Marine Hydrokinetics
With some of our partners including Ocean Renewable Power Company (ORPC) and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratoy (PNNL), SEA is increasingly working on offshore alternative energy issues including marine hydrokinetic technologies. These rapidly evolving systems offer the potential (and now the reality) of obtaining clean and renewable energy from the movement of water (both salt and fresh) without the use of dams. A very interesting and comprehensive recent article on these technologies and the work underway to understand and mitigate their environmental impacts (which features some of the work being done by ORPC and PNNL) is avilable at: http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2011/05/hydro-fishing-for-evidence-identifying-how-marine-and-hydrokinetic-devices-affect-aquatic-environments Continue reading
Posted Jun 4, 2011 at SEA Blog
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Two recent on-line videos on marine biology
SEA Bloggers, Two recent multimedia pieces on different marine mammal issues have come out recently I thought I would bring to your attention. Both of these involved some contribution from our colleagues at Wharton Media, who continue to make fantastic contributions to public awareness and appreciation of natural history and of science. The first piece is on a species near and dear to my heart, northern elephant seals: http://www.kqed.org/quest/television/into-the-deep-with-elephant-seals The second is a CBC documentary on mysteries of the deep, which includes some of the fantastic work by another of our colleagues, Dan Costa at UC Santa Cruz: http://oneocean.cbc.ca/series/episodes/3-mysteries-of-the-deep Both... Continue reading
Posted Jun 1, 2011 at SEA Blog
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"Layperson" summary of B. Southall presentation on new acoustic system initiative available
The 161st meeting of the Acoustical Society of America will take place in Seattle, WA later this month. Dr. Brandon Southall, SEA Inc. president, will give three technical presentations at this meeting, one of them entitled: "Listening to the Ocean and Marine Life Using a Fiber-Optic Monitoring System" The concept is the integration of acoustic monitoring systems into a state-of-the-art fiber-optic cabled system being deployed off Washington and Oregon for the next 25 years. A "layperson" summary of the presentation was prepared for general public and media interest in the subject, which is available at: http://www.aip.org/asa_laypapers2011/Southall.html Continue reading
Posted May 14, 2011 at SEA Blog
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New paper on predator-prey interactions - beaked whales in the Bahamas
A new paper entitled "The Relationship among Oceanography, Prey Fields, and Beaked Whale Foraging Habitat in the Tongue of the Ocean" was just published in PLosOne. This excellent work was part of our multidisciplinary collaboration to study marine mammal biology and behaivoral responses in the Bahamas in 2007-08 <see: http://www.sea-inc.net/science/#brs> You can get the full text of the paper (Open Access) by Elliot Hazen et al at the below link; the paper abstract is copied below as well. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0019269 Abstract Beaked whales, specifically Blainville's (Mesoplodon densirostris) and Cuvier's (Ziphius cavirostris), are known to feed in the Tongue of the Ocean,... Continue reading
Posted May 4, 2011 at SEA Blog
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