Animals of Glacier Bay National Park

We’re still out on the boat – how do you think we’re doing? Think we’ve found any corals? You’ll just have to wait until tomorrow to find out!

Stian has been kind enough to give me a few of his photos of some of the animals we saw in our first week in Glacier Bay National Park. The above shot is looking into the West Arm of Glacier Bay (check out the “map & timeline” tab to find out where that is).

 A stellars sealion. There are lots of colonies of sealions and seals in the park, how can you tell the difference? Sealions have ears and seals do not!

The largest marine mammal in the park, the humpback whale. These whales, like me, have come all the way from Hawaii to feed in the rich waters of the park, and pretty soon they’ll start their journey back to Hawaii to the Humpback Sanctuary inbetween Maui and Oahu. Who do you think will get home first, me or them?

Oyster catchers. There are over 200 species of birds within Glacier Bay National Park, making it a birders delight.

The symbol of America, the bald eagle. There is a healthy population of bald eagles here, in one day we counted over a dozen. I’ve only ever seen one or two before, so it is great to see them doing so well!

What animals do you think we’ll see while working up in the East and West arms? 

Out in the Bay!

And we’re off! Today is an early start 6am from the Park Service housing we’ve been staying in to head to Bartlett Cove and out on the boat. No, I didn’t get up super early to write this, I actually cheated just a little and wrote a blog for today and tomorrow that will post while we’re out. When we’re on the boat you see we’ll be totally cut off – no phone, no internet and even radio cover is patchy in places – when’s the last time you were totally out of touch? It’s quite refreshing, no disturbances and you can really concentrate on the science, fun!

Down at the docks, this sign welcomes the thousands of cruise ships, sail boats and kayakers heading out in the waters of Glacier Bay National Park.

Our home for the next two days (well, our work station. Our home is going to be a floating bunkhouse up in the West Arm, but you’ll have to wait until we get back to see that!). Stian checks out the RV Capelin.

Flying the research flag. There are many places in the park where motorized boats are not allowed to go, so the science boats fly this yellow research flag that tells everyone they are special, and can work in those areas. The flag doesn’t let you stay in those areas though, as soon as you’re done you have to get out of there! The reason motorized boats are not allowed in certain places is because the bay is home to many species of marine mammals and birds (over 200 species!) that nest and live on the shores of some of the many islands here. Motorized boats make lots of noise and can disturb these animals, so the park carefully regulates where they can and cannot go – and the places sometimes change every year.

That’s it for today, think of us as we’re out on the water, collecting seafloor images and water chemistry using the CTD, I hope the weather stays as great as it has been! 

Where to go?

It’s day 2 of setting up, and since it all came together pretty fast yesterday, today has been a lazy morning. We’ve been lucky enough to be put up in scientist housing provided by the National Park Service, so we’re staying out in Gustavus, around 10 miles away from Bartlett Cove (the parks headquarters). So today we’re going over maps, we’ll meet with the boat captain and we’re going to talk logistics and where we’re going to go.

So how do we choose sites? When you’re searching for corals how do you know where to go? Well first you have to start with a map.

Here’s a map of the central channel of Glacier Bay National Park (check out the “map & timeline” tab at the top to look at a full map) made by Kathy Scanlon & Lane Boyer (USGS). For some of it we have some good multibeam bathymetry (the colored section) which shows us what the bottom looks like underneath all that water. Multibeam bathymetry is made using beams of sound bounced off the bottom and collected on a receiver on the ship, so to collect those maps you not only have to have a boat with the right kind of equipment, but you also have to drive the ship everywhere in the park, so there are still many gaps where we don’t know what the bottom really looks like.

The multibeam maps we have of the park come from Guy Cochrane of USGS, who has been making maps and filling in the gaps, as well as taking camera tows to see what the bottom looks like (black lines). Guy was kind enough to lend us his towed camera video to look at for animals, and every red dot on there is where Kathy Scanlon and I saw corals on the bottom! So naturally, those are the first places we’re going to try and get some pictures of the bottom and take CTD measurements.

So how about areas where we don’t know there are corals or don’t have Guy’s towed camera images, how do we choose the right area to look? Well, it’s not easy, and many times you don’t get it right, but you make the best guess you can based on what you know about cold water corals. We know they like fast currents that bring in food and nutrients, we know they like bottom topography that sticks right out, we know they don’t like lots of sediment (that can suffocate them!) – so here on this map we have chosen A, B, C & D to look for corals. Do you think we’ll find them there? You’ll just have to wait until we’re back to find out!

Now, back to the CTD, the other piece of equipment we’re taking out with us. C (conductivity – measures salinity), T (temperature) and D (depth) is what a CTD measures. Here is a plot Lane Boyer made of some previous temperature data from the middle of the central bay (right outside Bartlett Cove). We can tell a lot from these plots. The blue here is winter (different lines are different years) and the red is summer and the X axis is temperature and the Y axis is depth. This plot tells me that at this location the water is really well mixed in winter – see how the lines are straight up and down. Usually warm water rises and stays at the top forming a layer, and colder water forms layers at the bottom. In the summer you can see this – the sun has heated the water on top making it warmer than that on the bottom, but the water is still well mixed, because usually you’d see a much bigger difference than that. What does this mean? Well, it means it’s probably quite a fast and jumbled current, mixing all the water layers together – just right for cold-water corals!

Here’s another Temperature plot, a bit more confusing – this time this is from right up in the West Arm. This time the blue for winter shows it’s colder on top than on the bottom, probably from ice forming in the top layers making it really cold. In the summer the water on top is much warmer than on the bottom – see the steep lines, in 2009 it was ~7C on top, but 4C down at 300m – that is quite a difference! This plot tells me this area is less well mixed, especially in the summer, so there might be less of a current here, or less of a jumbled current that mixes everything together.

Sometimes it can all be a bit of a puzzle, but we’re starting to collect the pieces. This year remember is just a reconnaissance year, next year we’re hoping to fill in many of the gaps! 

Getting ready

We're in Glacier Bay National Park, spent a wonderful week on the water checking out the park, and now it's to work. Having a few camera difficulties, but I hope to post some photos of the park pretty soon. 

We have 2 days to get ready, monday morning bright and early we're off on the boat for two days. Today we spent the day building and preparing the camera we'll use to drop onto potential coral sites. The camera was sent to us by Kathy Scanlon at USGS Woods Hole, and neither Stian or I had seen it before, so it's been an adventure putting it all together. 

The little shed out the back of the National Park Service buildings where we've been storing the camera system and getting it ready to go.

Lights, camera, action! Plugging it all together...and...it works! Next stop, the waters of Glacier Bay National Park!

The CTD, another instrument we'll be deploying alongside the camera system. This instrument collects data on temperature, salinity, depth and dissolved oxygen and has been loaned to us by Bob Stone from the Auke Bay Laboratory in Juneau. This will give us some good environmental data from sites where we see cold-water corals, or where we don't see cold-water corals within the bay. In the future we hope to be able to predict where to find corals based on environmental and geological data alone, so all these little pieces of the puzzle will help us in that goal. More about this little piece of equipment later!

More news tomorrow as we get our sites in order and get things ready to go!

Webcam

Well, it looks like it might be a wet one in the park! Lets hope for some sunny days in there. I'm headed up to Glacier Bay National Park tomorrow, coming all the way from Hawaii isn't possible in a day though, so i'm having to spend the night in Juneau and catching an early morning plane to the park. There are no roads that connect Gustavus and Glacier Bay National Park to the rest of Alaska, the only way in is by air or by boat, so it's pretty remote. The town of Gustavus only has 400 inhabitants - less in the winter!

Here are links to two webcams - Gustavus and Glacier Bay National Park - check out what weather we're experiencing in the park!

Aloha
Dr. W.

The Project

So what will we be up to in Glacier Bay National Park?

The 2010 expedition is a preliminary expedition, a chance to gain valuable insights on the logistics of working in the park and working with the National Park Service, and an opportunity to get a little bit of data to tempt the taste buds.

Glacier Bay National Park (GBNP) protects unique deep-water fjords, internationally recognized as a refuge for many species of marine mammals (humpbacks, orcas and sea otters to name a few). What lives below in the depths of the fjords, however, is still largely a mystery. A few years ago one of our team, Bob Stone, discovered Red Tree Corals (above) living at shallow depths within the park - to put this in context these corals are usually found much deeper (think 1000m) out in the open ocean. There has been little work deeper than SCUBA depths in the park, and so what lies just out of reach of man is really an unknown.

How much of this coral, and other corals, are there in the park? What other species lie protected in the deepest parts of the fjords? This project aims to find, catalogue and study these corals in an attempt to uncover how and why they live in such shallow areas. Uncovering extensive coral ecosystems in GBNP would also be the first discovery of it’s kind in a US National Park, and so is an important part of cataloguing the diversity of organisms these parks protect and preserve.

The first step this year is to make specific observations for cold-water corals using cameras and taking environmental measurements, and to look at the feasibility of working within a National Park, which will be more than a little different than working in an open ocean environment. So this trip is a small peek and what is down below, be sure to join us on the expedition!

Aloha

Dr W.