News from Rolex Award Winners

Well! It’s me again. Quite a few days have elapsed since I last wrote but I’m not yet bubbling with tons of information about the secret life of Black-browed albatrosses of Isla Albatross in the depths of the Chilean fiords. Wish I was! So the current score is; Albatrosses 1, DD 0! It does, however, illustrate that dealings with wild and wonderful creatures are not always as straightforward as one would like them to be. There were technical difficulties in ensuring that we could have access to the birds for the time we needed to deploy the DDs. In essence, setting the birds up with the units would have been easy enough but we couldn’t guarantee to be able to get back to the island to recover the DDs after the birds had come back from a single foraging trip within an appropriate time frame. This process was complicated by the weather, which decided to be gloriously wind-still initially (a condition that acts to persuade albatrosses to do nothing at all; not good for birds that are supposed to be leaving the nest and going on foraging trips), followed by storm conditions (which were enough to double the ship’s journey time back to Punta Arenas).

So the long and the short of it is that we did not even deploy any DDs! It sounds depressing, but on the bright side we didn’t lose any either! We’ll get them in the end though. The Wildlife Conservation Society did some great work though. They managed to ascertain that this extraordinary Chilean fiord, so far away from the open ocean even has some 30 rockhopper penguins in it. So they can be added to the other ocean wanderers that seem to have taken a liking to the spot. They include elephant seals, leopards seals and even the odd grey-headed albatross! No-one has told all these animals that they shouldn’t be there. It’s like discovering Bald Eagles in the chicken shed! Quite what they are doing there, we don’t know and won’t for a while. Shame that the DD didn’t help us for the moment but we’ll be back.

One final thing. I seem to spend my time talking about wonderful animals without providing any images. Sorry about that. It’s not always easy but in an attempt to make amends I’ve popped a photo of Black-browed albatrosses on Isla Albatross into this blog. Thanks to Jordi Plan, one of the team on the expedition, for taking the shot and letting me use it. He’s got other ones at least as lovely but we don’t want to be greedy, do we. Thanks Jordi, and thanks to the rest of the team for being as cool as they are!

Two Black-browed albatrosses in Seno Almirantazgo, Chile

Thought I’d sign in quickly before I popped off down South in search of the Black-browed albatross. Why? Because I said I would … and… well, somebody might even read it!

Just to set the scene, I’m sitting in an internet café in Punta Arenas. There’s a bloke opposite with the sultry, swarthy looks of the locals, chewing very industriously on his pen and not using his keyboard at all, despite the fact that he is staring intently at his screen. Bet he’s just waiting for the blog. Why else would he be doing that?

I also wanted to put in a note about ‘Q’ (aka Clive Francis – you’ll remember ‘Q’ from the Bond films… Clive does the same things for Swansea University). He and his partner in things technological, Steve Jones, from Engineering repeatedly help us with problems and they’ve done it again. I marched in on them at an impossibly late date sometime in late November making noises about having a special new housing for the albatross DDs Q sighed (he always does that though) but then, in the briefest of times possible, turned out (literally) 10 immaculate new housings with O-rings to make them water-tight, and out of anodized aluminium to be light and waterproof. The DD’s have been potted in resin inside them. They look wicked. Thanks Q! Hope the albatrosses appreciate them too. I’ll take photos and try and put them on the blog when I get back.

I guess I should also seize the day while I’m in the internet and tell you more of what’s going on in things ‘albatross’ anyway.. There is a team of people backed by the Wildlife Conservation Society going out to Seno Almirantazgo to look at the wildlife there. Seno Almirante is located south of Punta Arenas. Punta Arenas is, of course, in the Chilean deep South. The Wildlife Conservation Society is particularly interested in what is thought to be a new colony of Black-browed albatrosses on ‘Isla Albatros’ located well away (in fact about 250 km) from the open sea. The colony is, in fact, at the bottom of a long leg of a Chilean fiord that runs approximately South-East. You can find it on google earth. Given that albatrosses are birds of the open ocean (ask the Ancient Mariner) and are always known to nest right next to it, it seems extraordinary that this colony should have decided to set up shop so far away. Perhaps this is a new trend? There is certainly something strange going on. Do these birds really commute the length of their fiord and then some to get to the open sea to feed? What are the consequences of the commute to the ocean, which would take them many hours? Perhaps they are actually foraging in the fiord? Why travel all the way to London to eat in a restaurant if you can shop in the local supermarket? Albatrosses in general do the gliding thing extremely well so maybe the transit to the sea is not particularly energetically costly though they still have to invest the time of course. Their single chick brood might not appreciate waiting ages between meals (they feed the chicks by regurgitation of stuff they’ve stored in their stomachs – sounds horrid, but not if you’re an albatross). Long waits between meals mean slow growth rates and slow growth rates mean low fledgling weights and that compromises survival of the newly airborne. No, overly long waits between mealtimes are definitely not good.

The other thing about nesting on an island at the end of a long thin fiord is that it might complicate the costs of flight. Albatrosses use the winds over the ocean waves to move using a clever technique called dynamic soaring. We’ve all seen the films of the albatrosses gliding for long periods with barely a wing-beat. It looks soooo easy and indeed studies have shown that albatrosses use incredibly little energy to fly like that. However, for dynamic soaring to work albatrosses need wind and, ideally, they should be flying with the wind coming from the side or slightly behind their general direction of travel. If they have to fly directly against the wind they have to work harder, flapping more. Not surprisingly, albatrosses seem to pick the directions they leave their oceanic islands according to wind direction, always going with the easy option. Seems sensible enough and it’s certainly something you can do if you nest on an island in the middle of the vast ocean.

But what of our birds in Seno Almirantazgo? If they are located at the bottom of a long fiord, they can only fly out in one direction which is, let’s face it, unlikely to always be ideal with respect to wind direction. So much for free will! Beyond that, they might even have compromised wind conditions due to the sheltering effects of the land on either side of the fiord. So it would seem that the birds on Isla Albatross might just be working more than they should for a variety of reasons. Is this the price of choosing an extraordinary and exclusive residence? Anyway, if all goes according to plan, the team, working with the DD, should figure some of this out in the next few days.

Stay tuned….

My pen-friend has gone (I think he swallowed the top) and so should I. Still need to program the devices.

It’s been ages since I put anything in the blog. We’ll put that down to my experience and being busy. But it’s good to know that there are people out there is reading this, and reminding me that I should be saying more. Well, here’s more!

We’ve been looking at the diving behaviour of Sperm Whales off the Azores for a start. Sperm Whales are phenomenal divers. In fact, it’s incredible to think that these air-breathing creatures can go down to depths in excess of 2000 m to forage in the black, cold waters of the deep sea. Finding out what they get up to is certainly a job for the DD since no SCUBA diver is going to go down there with them to observe them! At those depths the pressure is 200 Bar, which results in the equivalent of a weight of nearly 3000 pounds pressing down on every square inch of their body. For those interested in zany facts, that’s like having a car on an area the size of your big toenail! Either way it’s enough to make you feel uncomfortable. Obviously, if we’re going to put the DD onto animals going down that deep, it’s got to be resistant so the version we put on Sperm Whales was potted in lots (and lots) of resin. We still worried when it went down though.

I should tell you how we fixed the DD to the whales because the attachment procedure of the DD depends critically on the animal (I’ll cover the options as we go through the various creatures all in good time). Whales don’t have any useful parts to which DDs might be attached so it was stuck to a special whale suction cup system, like the sort of thing that people dealing in glass for windows sometimes use. The complete apparatus was also attached to a special pressure resistant foam to act as a flotation device to bring it to the surface after it dropped off (as suction cup systems fortunately invariably do when they have been attached to whales for a couple of hours). Lastly, there was also a tiny radio-transmitter stuck to the DD so that, when the whale finally shed the unit and it had floated to the surface, it could be tracked down using radio-telemetry from the boat. To attach the DD and associated package, the boat sneaked up alongside a whale resting at the surface between dives and a talented whale expert, well versed in the procedure, simply pushed the suction cups onto the whale’s back using a long pole with the system on the end. The different tagged whales reacted differently, as people might, I suppose. Some shrugged, some dived, some seemed less bothered. But the suction cup system is harmless and temporary and standard procedure for attaching things to whales and some dolphins for short periods.

I’m going to guess about how the DD was set up to record because I’m writing this away from the lab where the details are noted, but I think that the units logged heading (3 channels for that) and acceleration (3 channels for that too) five times a second and depth and temperature, once a second. Anyway, thanks to invaluable help from the local researchers, all went according to plan and we got data on the secret life of Sperm Whales diving off the Azores. No animal went below 800 m but there were fascinating patterns of movement, ranging from strange sweeping movements of the head to rolling and twisting at the bottom of the dive. We’re still working on the data but it’s hard to describe the complexity of what went on here and now! The pity is that we have been working on a special program called ‘KEYHOLE’ which is to take the data from the DD and then create a virtual reality model of animals moving through their environment so that people can actually see what animals equipped with the DD get up to (from any angle the watcher might care to choose). It would have been great to have just provided a web link so that people could have seen the Sperm Whales antics. It will be freeware on the web but we’re not there yet. In fact we’re still trying to finance the programming so who knows when it’ll finally come out. So much to do.

It’s got late again and I’ve just scratched the surface of what we’ve been doing. Before I go though, I will say that the next two applications of the DD are on Scallops (those delicious shellfish – think of ‘Coquilles Saint Jacques’ – that can propel themselves through the water if they so desire) in French coastal waters and Black-browed Albatrosses breeding at a special island in Tiera del Fuego…..

Well, I guess there’s got to be a first time for everybody. I’ve never written anything in a blog before so, aside from not knowing if this is going to work, I’m fascinated by the whole process. I wonder who will read it. If you are one of those people reading it and wondering what this is about, I should really set the scene. I guess that I should first say that I’m typing this in South Wales, sitting (not lying) on the dining room sofa with the gentle late summer Welsh evening behind me. It’s been a glorious day. Enough of that though. I should be telling you about the latest in the ‘Daily Diary’ news. The ‘Daily Diary’ (which I shall subsequently refer to as the ‘DD’ because I’m already tired of typing it) is a complex electronic gadget about the size of a matchbox that is designed to be put on enigmatic animals to find out what they get up to. It can record on up to 16 channels at an astonishing 32 times per second. Really though, it’s not about the speed at which it can record or the size of its memory (currently 1 Gigabyte for the geeks reading!!), it’s what it actually tells us about its wearers that is so fascinating. Like manic scribes, DDs frantically record every step, wing beat or tail wag of their animal wearers as well as where they go and how much energy they expend living their lives. In addition DDs also write down the precise environmental conditions (temperature, humidity, pressure, light intensity etc.) experienced by the wearers. The beauty of DDs is their complexity and doggedness. They record all this information without political bias or fatigue, irrespective of whether their wearers are flying in the cold thin air high up in the Andes, cruising the black depths of the ocean 1 km underwater off the Azores or snuggled up tight in some warm burrow metres underground. The obvious advantage is that DDs can be with animals when we cannot and thus, when we recover them, they can tell us the things, extraordinary things, that go on in animal lives to which we may not be privy. This is particularly important when it comes to animal conservation. Let’s face it, if we want to conserve an imperilled species we do need to find out what it needs and what it’s not getting. That, in a nutshell, is what the DD is all about. There’s more, of course, but there’ll be time for that. That’s what the blog is for. It’s now got late though so I’ll stop but get back shortly and perhaps write about a few of the fascinating animals we’ve been looking at (and are going to look at) and why.