#Marine mammal satellite tag gps tracks how to#

They've seen whales spending more time than anyone knew swimming under crumbly brash ice-the detritus of melting sea ice and glaciers.

#Marine mammal satellite tag gps tracks how to#

Footage shows them getting so much to eat that they have energy enough to roll and play with one another, a social strategy that helps whales learn how to cooperate and hunt together-and, presumably, get even more food. They've found the whales feeding in waters far deeper than expected. 'By linking where they are with where the krill and sea ice are relative to other predators we get a much better idea of the placement of these whales in this ecosystem.' 'If all we have is satellite tracking data and no camera then you don't know if they're feeding in ice, if they are around other whales,' Friedlaender says. But now they can track when humpbacks start to put on weight, see which foraging areas are most productive, and see what the environment around them is like. Scientists knew, for example, that these whales feast on great masses of shrimp-like krill in open water even as other creatures struggle to find enough krill near shore.

Up Close: Humpback Surfacing in Marina Surprising Finds Yet Friedlaender's cameras already reveal new dimensions to whale life in Antarctica. Research in Antarctica is so hard and expensive that even Friedlaender travels with a cruise company, One Ocean Expeditions, where he gives science lectures to tourists in exchange for access to company rafts that he can use to track down and tag whales.Д®ven so, with vast travel times and rough, unpredictable weather, it can be hard to get more than a handful of days of field work in on any given trip. But scientists have struggled in recent years to track how whales spend their time here after arriving in December and January from their equatorial homes near Panama and Colombia. Humpback ecology and behavior in places like California have been well-documented. What allows humpbacks here to be so successful that new mothers can be pregnant again even while theyвЂ™re still lactating and helping to feed newborn calves? This is happening even as ice-dependent minke whales struggle, and Adelie and chinstrap penguin numbers plummet at nearby colonies. They are rising here by up to 10 percent per year, filling in waters once shared with tens of thousands of blue and fin whales, which have been slower to recover from decades of slaughter. All that open water is helping humpback populations explode. There are now 80 more ice-free days a year on parts of the west side of the peninsula than there were when whaling ended in the 1960s. Warming temperatures are changing Antarctica's seas faster than most waters on Earth. The research is supported by the World Wildlife Fund. It's helping scientists piece together a picture of what a day in the life of a humpback is like as it swims along the icy bottom of the world. This simple but time-consuming research method does more than just provide new data. 'But now we're getting to see so much awesome stuff-feeding behavior, deep dives, social interactions. 'There's so much we don't know about these animals,' says Friedlaender, a National Geographic explorer and ecologist with Oregon State University's Marine Mammal Institute. Researchers then use GPS tracking to recover the tag before offloading its video. The devices track cetacean movements and take video images of everything in front of the whale for 24 to 48 hours before falling off and floating free. This temporary satellite tag and video camera is one of only six or eight a year that scientists like Friedlaender are able to attach to humpbacks in the waters along the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula. And it begins recording a whale's-eye view of a changing undersea universe, helping reshape our knowledge of whale life in the Southern Ocean. He uses it to gently slap the harmless satellite tag's suction cups onto whale flesh.

Every few moments the humpback lets loose a loud exhalation that sounds like a wet snore.ДЄs we inch to within 15 feet of the whale, Friedlaender drops the pole. Penguins arc in and out of the frigid sea. Towering icebergs and glacier-draped mountains rise around us. A fist-sized camera with gangly grasshopper-like antennae and suction cup feet sits on a pole resting on scientist Ari Friedlaender's shoulders. We're crammed into an inflatable black rubber zodiac on a blustery day in Antarctica's Gerlache Strait, puttering toward a motionless humpback whale. At least that's what this satellite tracking tag resembles. To see the world through the eyes of a 40-ton polar whale it helps to use a little bug.