Citizen Scientists Needed

See a whale? Tell us where!

The Virgin Islands sit in the middle of a large gap in what scientists know about marine mammals. Humpbacks, sperm whales, dolphins and several rarely seen species all use these waters, but very little formal survey work has been done here. For years the standard method was a research vessel that came through with observers on deck for a couple of weeks, then came back more than a decade later. Eventually even that stopped happening.

The rarely seen species are the biggest blank. Sperm whales are here year round and in greater numbers than most people realize, but they spend nearly all their lives in deep water, so almost nobody sees one. Kogia are here. So are goose-beaked whales and Gervais' beaked whales, both confirmed in local waters by acoustic recordings from a UVI research mission this spring. Most Virgin Islanders have never heard of these animals, let alone seen one.

Chapter II

Second heading

The UVI Ocean Glider Lab is working on that gap by listening. The lab's ocean gliders carry hydrophones and record continuously underwater, sometimes for months at a time. A glider has no engine running and no propeller turning in normal operation, so it hears the ocean without adding any noise of its own. That is a real advantage over a survey ship, which brings its own racket with it.

What comes back is sound, and sound carries more identity than most people expect. Each species has its own characteristic call. Displayed as an image, called a spectrogram, those calls are distinct enough that a trained reader can look at a recording and say which animal made it, and when and where. Reading those acoustic pictures and putting names to them is much of what graduate student Keiley Gregory does.

It goes further than species. Sperm whales communicate in short patterned bursts of clicks called codas, and those patterns are learned rather than inherited. Researchers working off Dominica, a few hundred miles southeast of here, have spent years documenting that sperm whales in the eastern Caribbean use codas that are not shared by sperm whales in other oceans or even in other parts of the Atlantic. It amounts to a regional dialect. Whales that use different dialects associate with each other, and avoid whales that do not, which sorts the population into groups defined by culture rather than geography.

Humpbacks do something different but equally strange. Males in a breeding population all sing the same song at any given time, and that song keeps changing through the season, with new versions spreading from one population to the next across an ocean basin.

None of this tells us what people are seeing at the surface. A hydrophone can pick up a sperm whale clicking in deep water kilometers away and completely miss a pod of dolphins that a ferry full of people watched go by. That part is up to you.

Chapter III

Report A Sighting

The lab has set up a free public database called Marine Mammal ID for the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. It runs on Anecdata, an open citizen science platform. Anyone can use it, and anyone can look at the results.

Online: Go to anecdata.org and search for Marine Mammal ID for the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.

On your phone: Download the free Anecdata app from the App Store or Google Play, then find the project inside the app.

Project instructions are available in both English and Spanish.