Blue Whales off Sri Lanka: Orcas attacking a beaked whale as a bonus

On 25 November 2013 we headed off from Mirissa hoping to see Blue Whales but in the GPS position some had been seen the day before there were two Orcas, or in old money, Killer Whales. You can see them on the video footage I took (below or directly on YouTube) along with the Blue Whales.

In looking for further information on orcas in Sri Lankan waters, I came across the brilliant Orca Project Sri Lanka (OPSL) which, to quote: is the first citizen-science project centred on studying orcas (Killer Whales) sighted off Sri Lanka. On scrolling down the posts I found that our two orcas were known to them. They were OM001 ‘King’ and OK008 ‘Arya’ and have been seen off Mirissa in 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014. After we saw them on 25 November 2013, they appeared again on 7 January, 12 April and 7 June 2014.

The two orcas.    AJP Photograph

Then things got even more interesting. A fellow traveller on the Naturetrek tour whale-watching extension sent us a still photograph which showed the orcas pushing what appeared to be some sort of dolphin with a brownish coloration around the base of a beak. I had missed it on video as I changed positions but could just see the end of the action as I began to film again. Other photographers had sent stills to OPSL and they in turn asked experts on marine mammals. Here is an extract from OPSL’s post of 19 December 2013 (the photographs are shown there):

…OPSL in collaboration with Josh McInnes of the The Transient Killer Whale Research Project are currently writing a small paper on a very exciting finding. When OM001 and OK008 visited Mirissa on the 25th of November, they decided to chow down on the local marine-life...so what's on their menu? Turns out they like Beaked whale, deep diving and little-understood cetaceans of the Ziphiidae family…Observation details include the orcas feeding on an unidentified object. In two of the images, a beak or rostrum can be seen with a patchy brown/green colouration to the surrounding skin. OPSL contacted Josh McInnes, who specializes in the study of mammal-eating (transient) killer whales of the Pacific Northwest, to offer his opinion on the ID. After looking at the photos, Josh concluded that the beak shape and brown/green colouration (caused by diatoms) appears to be consistent with that of a Blainville’s beaked whale Mesoplodon densirostris.

I had seen a report from the BBC which described research on the stealth mode Blainville’s Beaked Whale adopts when it is comparatively near the surface. In the depths the beaked whales are rather vociferous but on rising towards the surface for air sonar silence reigns. With orcas around I can see why that is a good strategy.

Links to this and other work on the fascinating world of ziphid cetaceans, written by the lead worker, Natacha Aguilar Soto, of La Laguna University in the Canary Islands, are here. A video showing their work on beaked whales is here.

The Smithsonian Institution has a Beaked Whale Identification Guide showing photographs of dead specimens. Another possibility, purely on the basis of one specimen stranded on Sri Lanka is Mesoplodon ginkgodens, a species known only from a few dozen specimens. It would be interesting to hear whether the marine mammal experts can eliminate this one. From a size comparison with the orcas, my impression, and it is only an impression, is that the beaked whale killed must have been not fully grown (and female?) when some of the clearer differences between the two species might not be evident. However, looking at the photographs in the Smithsonian collection, I do see where the experts are coming from. Whatever, the time must be ripe for some hydrophonics in the deep waters of Dondra Head even though the sound of ships’ engines will be a constant feature. Has anybody tried to pick up the sounds of beaked whales there yet?

NOTE ADDED 12 APRIL 2022

Well we did have a photograph of the orca battering the beaked whale. I was looking through AJP's still photographs and noticed it, taken what must have been seconds from the ones taken by a member of our party. The rostrum is clearly recognisable:

Blue Whales and Ships off Sri Lanka

Nearly a year ago we were off the southern tip of Sri Lanka to see Blue Whales. The chance of seeing the largest living animal that has ever lived was too good to be missed and the reliability of a sighting in the right season from the boats that are based at Mirissa was said to be extremely high. I am pleased to say that report was correct and if sea conditions are good then whales, as the photographs show, will be seen.

                                     AJP Photographs

Heading out from Mirissa to the sea of Dondra Head to the east where the continental shelf ends, one is not slow to realise that as well as spotting whales one is also spotting ships heading west—a steady stream of very large container ships. It also does not take long to realise that the Blue Whales are living in that shipping channel. The odd traumatic meeting of very large mammal and very large ship seemed inevitable. Indeed, I find there are reports of an increased number of blue whale strandings in recent years with some carcasses showing blunt force trauma. However, strandings in Sri Lanka would be an underestimate of any fatalities since during the north-east monsoon bodies would be carried away from that coast. The key question, of course, is whether fatalities or injuries from collisions with ships are having an effect on the size of the population and its ability to recover from exploitation in the past.

The whales really are in the shipping lanes                                                                                 AJP Photographs

Recently, I came across a new paper presented at the International Whaling Commission’s Annual Meeting of the Scientific Committee, held in May 2014, that set out to investigate this problem. The survey work was done between February and April 2014 (the report for the meeting must have been prepared with commendable despatch).  The abstract of the paper, Preliminary results of surveys to investigate overlap between shipping and Blue Whale distribution off southern Sri Lanka, says it all:

Surveys were conducted off the southern coast of Sri Lanka during February to April 2014 in order to investigate the distribution patterns of blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus) in relation to current shipping lanes and further offshore. There have been several reported ship strikes of blue whales in this area and the IWC Scientific Committee has recognised the potential for ship strikes to have population level impacts on blue whales in the northern Indian Ocean. A total of 1413km of visual survey effort was conducted on 16 survey days along north south transects between 5° 28’ N and 5° 53’ N. The highest densities of blue whales were observed in the current shipping lanes, peaking at an average of 0.12 individuals km-2 in the westbound shipping lane. These high densities of whales combined with one of the busiest shipping routes in the world suggest a severe risk of ship strikes. Previous data on blue whale distribution and coastal upwellings indicate consistent and predictable patterns of whale distribution, suggesting there is considerable potential for effective measures to keep ships and whales apart. 

This is one of the figures from the report showing the sightings along the transects as well as the shipping lanes (westbound to the north and eastbound to the south).

The next map shows a cut-down Figure 8 of the report. It plots the sightings of Blue Whales by the whale-watching boat Raja & The Whales (used for the survey; the Captain is a co-author) in 2013 and 2014. On that I have superimposed my camera GPS data for our sightings on two days in November 2013. No wonder we seemed close to the westbound shipping.

The question then arises of course as to whether the data showing a clear coincidence of whales, ships and whale-watching boats will have any effect in either moving the channels to the south or in introducing speed restrictions which appear to be effective in preventing collisions with whales. A related but pertinent question is will development of the new Chinese-funded port at Hambantota, along the coast to the east from Dondra Head, have any effect on the density and route of traffic through the water frequented by the whales?

AJP Photographs

The following is the video footage of Blue Whales, Orcas, Bryde's Whales and Spinner Dolphins I took on 25 and 26 November 2013. It can also be seen directly on YouTube here and here.

Here’s a Pretty How-De-Do: W.S. Gilbert (but not Sullivan) and his Menagerie, with Lemurs to the Fore

I often think it's comical – Fal, lal, la! 

How Nature always does contrive – Fal, lal, la! 

That every boy and every gal 

That’s born into the world alive 

Is either a little Liberal 

Or else a little Conservative! 

Fal, lal, la!

..and you can say exactly the same about the dichotomy of opinions of Gilbert and Sullivan as of the words W.S. Gilbert put into the mouth of Private Willis of the Grenadier Guards on duty outside the Palace of Westminster and as ‘intellectual chap’ thinking of things ‘that would astonish you’ about the political parties of Victorian Britain. So, on the one hand, we have Sir Peter Medawar, brilliant essayist who’s views I usually agreed with, hating Gilbert and Sullivan, while, on the other, there is Stephen Jay Gould, brilliant essayist who’s views I often disagreed with, loving G&S; the latter indeed including the essay The True Embodiment of Everything That's Excellent in his 2002 book, I Have Landed.

So, in my now topsy-turvy world and firmly in the Gould camp on this one, I only recently discovered W.S. Gilbert’s zoological interests. I became aware of his knowledge of evolution when I nearly appeared in a school production of The Mikado (Asian flu sadly prevented the discovery of another Laurence Olivier). Pooh-Bah, Lord High Everything Else (every town still has one) averred: I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable. I can’t help it. I was born sneering. It is worth noting that Gilbert was a pupil of Thomas Henry Huxley’s father.

Nancy McIntosh

The chronicler of Gilbert’s menagerie was Nancy McIntosh, his sadly unsuccessful American singing protégé, who lived with Gilbert and his wife as their ‘adopted daughter’, who continued to live with his widow and who inherited Gilbert’s fortune. For those of a suspicious disposition there were rumours of what exactly McIntosh’s relationship with Gilbert, notably flirtatious and charming with young women while irascible with men. However, the biographers come to the view that there was nothing in ‘it’ and that Nancy was utterly devoted to the Gilberts as an ‘adopted daughter’.


Nancy McIntosh wrote an article which I have not seen for Country Life on the menagerie and another which can be found online for The Strand Magazine.

Gilbert and his wife brought two monkeys back from India and installed them at Grim’s Dyke, the house he bought near Harrow in 1890. A monkey house was constructed as others were acquired and other mammals (a lynx, for example) and birds, including parrots, joined the farm animals in the house and estate. His most notable animals were his Ring-tailed Lemurs (Lemur catta) which mated and bred. I presume they were obtained from one of the London animal dealers with their worldwide connections and collectors. The lemurs had the run of the house and grounds for most of the time and McIntosh describes their life. They bred to produce the first of the species to be conceived and delivered in Britain. The young lemur, ‘Paul’, was soon a house favourite:

He had a regular programme for his days, beginning with waking Sir William, in whose room he slept, at about half-past seven, wishing to play games. He dearly loved boxing, sitting up and striking out most bravely. After superintending Sir William’s toilet, during the whole of which he sat on either his head or shoulder, he rode down to the dining-room and breakfasted. After eating his banana he nearly always went to Lady Gilbert to be fed with brown bread which he like in the morning.

But things did not always go smoothly. Bram Stoker, of Dracula fame, and his wife looked after the first of Gilbert’s lemurs at their house while the Gilberts were abroad. It did not make itself popular. It sat on a chandelier and defecated profusely into a bowl of fruit. The Stokers learnt quickly that useful adage—never look after other people’s animals.

There is a Blogger site entitled Gilbert’s Lemurs. It appeared in 2009 with just two entries.

Gilbert died on 29 May 1911 in the lake at Grim’s Dyke of a heart attack while rescuing a schoolgirl who had got into difficulty while waiting for him to give her a swimming lesson. Lady Gilbert had the lake partly drained after this tragedy. In the lake are Great-crested Newts, Triturus cristatus. Grim’s Dyke is now a hotel surrounded by the gardens created by Lady Gilbert. I have not been able to find whether any of the buildings constructed for the menagerie remain.


Fal, lal, la

WSG. A portrait taken from around the time
he had the menagerie at Grim's Dyke

Nutrition, Exercise and Survival in an Extreme Environment: Scott, Wilson, Bowers, Oates and Evans of the Antarctic in 1911-191

As a result of my blog posts on the search for Emperor Penguin eggs that continued for decades in the 20th Century, I have been reading more and more about Scott, Amundsen and Shackleton and their expeditions. Every schoolboy knew the bare bones of the stories of the fatal end of Scott’s party and of how Amundsen got to the South Pole first. Indeed the memory of Captain Oates is evoked regularly but irreverently on the golf course as one of our party trudges off gloomily into the deep rough muttering to his companions, ‘I may be gone for some time’.

A few years ago I tried to get some impression of Scott from Fiennes’s book Captain Scott but I found it unreadable and quickly gave up. It was with some trepidation that I worked my way through hagiographies from the 1920s and 30s, the attempted demolition of Scott and all his works of the 1980s and 1990s, and the more balanced accounts of the 21st Century. The best is Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s (who was with Wilson and Bowers on the horrendous winter journey to the penguin colony at Cape Crozier) The Worst Journey in the World, first published in 1922. Before I started reading on this topic I was aware that the rations for the journey were, with hindsight, markedly inadequate for the energy expended in hauling sledges. I was not aware that scurvy was such a problem.

Scott's party at the South Pole, from left: Oates (standing), Bowers (sitting),
Scott (standing), Wilson (sitting), Evans (standing).
Bowers used a piece of string attached to the camera shutter

I then found the recent essay by Halsey and Stroud, 100 years since Scott reached the pole: a century of learning about the physiological demands of Antarctica, published in Physiological Reviews in 2012. That essay shows plainly just how short the rations fell compared to modern measurements of energy expenditure made by Stroud during man-hauling in Antarctica. It seems that the polar party (Scott, Wilson, Bowers, Oates and Petty Officer Evans) wasted away in their efforts to reach the next and then the next food depot containing daily rations that were themselves inadequate. Add to that the effects of lack of vitamin C, and the unseasonal extreme cold to which the polar party are now known to have been exposed, and it is fairly easy to see how they did not survive.

In 1992-93 on a one-way journey to the pole, Stroud and Fiennes were burning an average of 6,000 kcalories per day. Over a 10-day period ascending to the plateau they were expending nearly 11,000 kcalories per day—that’s over 7 times basal metabolic rate and that, of course, included periods of rest. The rate of expenditure during man-hauling the sledges (10-12 hours per day) must have been extremely high by any standard. By contrast, Scott’s rations provided 4,200 kcalories per day on the ice-shelf and 4,500-4,600 on the summit.

Halsey and Stroud take into account the various factors that would have affected the polar party and the deterioration in their condition that became manifest after those chosen not to reach the pole turned for the journey home across the Antarctic Plateau, down the Beardmore Glacier and across the ice-shelf. Extreme cold, inadequacy of food and water, lack of vitamin C, sleep deprivation and high altitude must have all contributed to the steady and vicious circle of decline of all members of the party, starting with Petty Officer (to distinguish him from Lieutenant Evans—see later) Evans, then Oates and finally Scott, Wilson and Bowers.

I had not previously realised that the polar plateau is so low in oxygen; the partial pressure is only about 510 mm mercury, 30% lower than at the coast and lower than would be predicted from its average altitude of 2,300 m. The effective altitude in terms of the partial pressure of oxygen is about 2,800 m (over 9,000 ft). About 1 in 50 present-day travellers to the Amundsen-Scott Research Station suffer chronic altitude sickness.

Adélie Penguin and chick. Brown Buff, Antarctic Peninsula
26 January 2005

In reading Halsey and Stroud’s account, a few questions came to mind. Firstly, how long does it take the appetite to increase and the gut to adapt and thereby process the amount of energy-dense food needed to match the very high expenditure? Or, if indeed, given the combined effects of cold, altitude and exercise, can any such adaptation be sufficient? Halsey and Stroud noted that some individuals in Scott’s expedition could not  absorb a high-fat diet and that even though they must have been in a state of negative energy balance by Christmas Day 2011, Scott and Wilson could not finish their special dinner. But I can see why those who could not take a high-fat diet did not persist in order to see whether they could become adapted to it; diarrhoea, which a number in the expedition suffered at various times, at an average summer temperature of -25°C does not bear thinking about.

Secondly, what was the importance of the lack of vitamin C on their survival. My impression is that it was more important, perhaps, than some commentators, but not others, have argued. Petty Officer Evans’s initial decline appears attributable to scurvy, from the malaise and lethargy to the lack of healing. In this respect, the condition of Lieutenant ‘Teddy’ Evans (later Admiral Lord Mountevans), one of the Last Supporting Party which turned for the trek back to the coast on 4 January 1912, is worth noting (Halsey and Stroud concentrated on the five members of the polar party). He became ill, clearly of scurvy, with obvious signs by 22 January and only got back to recover because of the truly heroic efforts of his companions, Petty Officers Crean and Lashly and then the medical care given by Atkinson. Lieut. Evans and Petty Officer Evans (according to the reference to Fiennes for the latter in Halsey and Stroud) were averse to eating raw or nearly raw meat, unbeknown to them their only source of Vitamin C. However, the concentrations of Vitamin C in muscle meat are very low any my guess is that lightly-cooked meat from the ponies killed and left at their supply depots would have provided the merest smidgeon of ascorbate. Much has also been made of the absence of the classic clinical signs of scurvy in the polar party but there could well have been subclinical effects at work. In trying to find evidence on the latter I have been bedevilled by the plethora of claims from the dietary supplements industry, quacks and conspiracy theorists.

But there is more that can be added to this story. Dogs were used by Amundsen and by Scott, and ponies by Scott. Neither species needs exogenous vitamin C but both were underfed. The dogs were often driven, like the ponies, to complete exhaustion*. Amundsen saved his men from the fate of Scott’s man-hauling party at the cost of 41 of his 52 dogs used to pull the sledges to the Pole and back.

Halsey and Stroud conclude their essay by considering whether current physiological knowledge and technological advances would protect present-day man-haulers on a similar journey to that nearly completed by Scott in 1911-12. They conclude that they would not:

…the return journey to the South Pole from the Antarctic coast is only just within reach for the most capable of people. The four-month summer window each year, during which man-haulers must inevitably pull insufficient food in environmental conditions that conspire to induce rapid wasting, today still represents an enormous, potentially life-threatening physiological challenge.

While Halsey and Stroud provide a cogent explanation for the gradual decline of the polar party with time, I think they could have made more of their statement:

This cycle would have been accelerated during the final weeks both due to dehydration because of reduced resources to melt water and due to the unusually cold temperatures that they suffered during February and March; these would have served to further decrease pulling power, and increase the energy costs of sledge-pulling due to the friction of snow when below around 􏰀30°C 

Susan Solomon's† analysis of the weather records to me at least indicates the reason for the failure of the polar party (except of course for Petty Officer Evans who had already died, and possibly for Oates who already had, but did not report, frostbite that eventually limited his mobility) to reach safety. On the Ross Ice Shelf the weather was very cold, much colder than a few weeks earlier and much colder than average. Apart from the direct effect of the cold, the deterioration in the surface conditions meant that the huge effort of hauling a sledge did not translate in the coverage of sufficient distance each day. As frostbite in Oates and, eventually, Scott, supervened, the vicious circle of decline accelerated rapidly.

All writers on the fate of the polar party are left with the question of whether Bowers and Wilson could have survived had they left Scott in the tent who by then had a badly frost-bitten foot. I think the odds were on their survival, heavily in the case of Bowers, slightly less so for Wilson. Why they did not opt for a push to the depot is, though, a question best left to those with expertise in group psychology. My reading of it is that both found it impossible to leave Scott.

The relatively rapid end to the hopes of Scott and his party is well summed-up by Susan Solomon and Stearns in their concluding remarks to their paper in PNAS:

The observations of the extremely cold temperatures reported by Scott and his companions in March of 1912 do not imply that these frigid conditions alone caused their deaths. Indeed, one man perished before these challenges were encountered and another was already suffering from frostbite, as has been noted. But the unusually cold temperatures that prevailed over an extended period of several weeks substantially contributed to the tribulations faced by Scott and his team during the final stages of their battle for survival. In spite of their plight, the party continued to record the scientific data that provide key information regarding their fate. Those measurements show that they endured minimum temperatures more than 10°F lower than the average that can now be derived from multiple years of automated measurements for the period from February 25 to March 19 near 80°S on the Ross Ice Shelf. On some particular days in March, the daily minimum temperatures in 1912 were more than 20°F colder than the climatological average. These conditions likely contributed to frostbite and extreme fatigue in the men, as well as to the friction of the very cold snow surface that amplified the physical demands of the strenuous task of man-hauling their supplies by sledge, and thereby slowed their progress. Scott and his last two companions died near the 29th of the month, after enduring what might be dubbed “the coldest march.”

On reading the various suggestions—which often turned into assertions—of the causes of the loss the the polar party, writers have tended to promote a single cause while dismissing others. My firm impression is that it what was not a case or either/or but of a combination of circumstances that formed the perfect storm of a positive feedback loop, with the weather accelerating that final phase, and the descent, to mix metaphors, into a never-ending bottomless pit.

†The Coldest March. 2001. Yle university Press. Solomon S & Stearns CR. 1999.On the role of the weather in the deaths of R. F. Scott and his companions. Proceedings of the National Academy of the USA 96 13012-13016

*In this respect it is interesting to note the studies on Alaskan sled dogs covering 490 km in a race over 70 hours at -35 to -10°C; their energy expenditure was an enormous 11,200 kcalories/day. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9401699

South Shetlands. Livingston Island from Half Moon Island
27 January 2005

Russet Percher Dragonfly (Hong Kong)

Number 2 son sent me this photograph taken in Sai Kung Country Park, Hong Kong on Sunday. It is a Russet Percher (aka Fulvous Forst Skimmer in other parts of its range) Neurothemis fulvia.

Russet Percher                                                         Hong Kong              AJP

Curl-Crested Manucode: Seen and Heard

Curl-crested Manucode by William Matthew Hart
(1830-1908) for John Gould's Birds of New Guinea
(National Library of Australia)

Saturday 8 February this year saw us on Fergusson Island, one of the D’Entrecasteaux group, to the north-east of the eastern end of Papaua New Guinea. A morning walk had taken us from the point the zodiacs could land to the impressive hot springs. On the way back, a black crow-like bird landed in the top of a tree. The binoculars showed it had what can only be described as an unfortunate hair style. No sooner were we looking at it when it threw its head back, spread its feathers without raising its wings and made an amazing sound. It was a Curl-crested Manucode, a bird-of-paradise endemic to the D’Entrecasteaux and Trobriand Islands. Another, possibly a female, joined it in the same tree. Soon, other males appeared in trees on either side but some distance from the gravel track, each giving their display the full works. They were too far away for me to do anything with the camera I was carrying. However, I was delighted to find that the Curl-crested Manucode is very well shown, along with its song, in the recently completed Birds-of-Paradise Project by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.

Landing on Fergusson Island. Noble Caledonia Caledonian Sky Expedition Team Photograph

The Cornell video shows why the manucodes are famous for the length of their trachaea with loops and curls that travel under the skin the length of the bird several times. The trachea of the Trumpet Manucode, Manucodia keraudrenii, is the most impressive as the following diagrams from Mary Clench’s (1978) paper show:

Other birds that have loud or resonant calls have an elongated trachea and Darren Naish has an excellent blog post (with references to earlier research).

Unfortunately, the Cornell project’s video on this bird includes the tracheal elongation but makes no mention of the effect of a long trachea on respiratory physiology, nor draws attention to what is so special about respiration in birds    compared to mammals. A long trachea means more dead space. The tidal volume—the volume of gas inspired or expired per inhalation—must be greater than in a bird with a short trachea. No matter how efficient the avian lung is at exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide—and it is really efficient—the volume of air inhaled first into the posterior air sacs before passing through the lungs must be greater. Only birds, with their extensive system of air sacs, can afford such a long trachea (giraffes would be the nearest mammalian equivalent—to see how they do it) since only they can generate such a large tidal volume. But a long trachea must bear a metabolic cost since the fuel to power the muscles that generate the large tidal volume must be supplied continuously. In this respect it is interesting to note that Clench concluded that the increasing complexity of the tracheal loops occurs as the males age (in females the trachea stays relatively simple). So does a more successful male produce a sound more enticing to the female and thus signal the fact that it can afford to invest in a longer trachea, and/or to other males that if you come near me, I am older, fitter and can see you off? In either case the signal would be an ‘honest’ signal of the quality of the male.

Having watched the manucodes plus the other birds for half an hour or so we walked back to the landing where a zodiac soon has us back for what we thought was a well-deserved lunch.

Hot springs, Fergusson Island. Noble Caledonia Caledonian Sky Expedition Team Photograph

----------------------

Clench, M.H. 1978. Tracheal elongation in birds-of-paradise. Condor 80 423-430

Chinchilla Rat Extant not Extinct

In an error-strewn article The Guardian (not my favourite newspaper) carried the report on Friday that Cuscomys oblativa, a chinchilla rat or chinchillone, has been found alive.

Hiram Bingham—of Macchu Picchu fame—found skulls of this species in Inca pottery in 1912. Somebody decided that the species must have become extinct but as is so often the case with small mammals absence of evidence was interpreted as evidence of absence.

This chinchilla rat, now called the Macchu Picchu Chinchilla Rat is said to be arboreal.
-------------
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/26/extinct-cat-sized-chinchilla-found-in-shadows-of-machu-picchu