Grant helps new wildlifers purchase field gear

March 28, 2024 by Dana Kobilinsky

When Edwin Jacobo was studying migratory birds for his graduate project in Southern California riparian forests, he spent most of his time trudging through cold water in the mountains. In April and March, he would pull on his old waders and set out at 5:30 in the morning to conduct point counts and mist netting for species like western tanagers (Piranga ludoviciana).

The waders were so old, they ended up with holes that patches couldn’t cover up. “I tried to fix them, but it just didn’t work,” said Jacobo, a PhD candidate at Washington State University who had just immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico at the time. Money was tight, and equipment was too expensive. “So I just decided to not use waders at all,” he said.

But the cold interfered with Jacobo’s ability to focus and conduct his research. “It was pretty miserable, to be honest,” he said. “I was shivering all the time.”

Just when things were getting unbearable, Jacobo’s advisor told him about the Trail Blazer Grant, a TWS program to help students and early-career professionals purchase professional gear to conduct fieldwork. He secured the funds and was able to purchase brand new waders.

Edwin Jacobo used the Trail Blazer Grant to help him purchase waders for a migrator bird project. Photo Courtesy: Edwin Jacobo

“There’s a big monetary barrier to becoming an established professional in this field, simply because you need gear to do specific training, and if you don’t get that training, then you aren’t qualified for a position,” said Amanda Veals Dutt.

The chair of The Wildlife Society’s Early Career Professionals Working Group, Veals Dutt helped develop the grant with the Student Development Working Group. “This is an easy way for our working groups and TWS as a whole to really help start to break down some of those barriers,” she said.

A personal endeavor

The idea and framework for the Trail Blazer Grant was conceived through the combined efforts of past Student Development Working Group officers but was finally brought online in 2023 by then past chair Darwin Mayhew. Although the pandemic’s impact on the working group prevented Mayhew from being able to do as much as he wanted with the working group when he took over as chair in 2022, the framework of the Trail Blazer grant that had been handed down to him reminded him of his own challenges.

Starting a career in wildlife biology, Mayhew faced learning differences, but soon discovered that growing up “without much money” created a new set of obstacle for getting into the wildlife field.

“I grew up, myself, without having very much money and I didn’t want people prevented from fieldwork because of any limitation, visible or inviable,” he said.

Typically, students and early-career professionals get the research tools they need from their lab or employer, like camera traps or radio collars. But what about the basics, like boots, binoculars and backpacks? For biologists just starting out, basic gear can be out of their price range.

“Early-career professionals represent about a third of The Wildlife Society’s members, but I think we’re actually probably one of the most underserved groups, simply because we kind of get forgotten since we’re no longer students,” Veals Dutt said. “We no longer have a lot of student-specific travel grants or scholarships. And we are not established professionals. We don’t necessarily have multiple years in a position and solid financial status built up.”

Since it went live in 2023, the Early Career Professionals Working Group has supplied $500 for two $250 grants for early career professionals and students. The Student Development Working Group contributes $1,000 for two $250 grants for students and five $100 grants also for students. The outdoor company Vortex also donated five binoculars for the first year of the grant.

Interested in becoming a sponsor? TWS is seeking tax-deductible monetary and in-kind donations of gear. You may email TWS’ development manager Lauren Ruotolo at LRuotolo@wildlife.org for more info.

More info may be found here.

 How to choose

While the idea was solid, the working groups had to think about who qualified for the grant and how to choose recipients. They wanted everyone who was underrepresented to have access, but that proved challenging. The first year, the grant ended up being open only to TWS members who were part of either the SDWG or ECPWG, but this left some members—like those on six-month trial memberships, which are often utilized by the neediest students and early career professionals—falling through the cracks. As the grant evolved, it became available to all members, with priority given to those we are also members of one of the working groups.

Isa Mattioli purchased the funds to purchase spotting scopes, a field bag and a headlamp with the help of the Trail Blazer Grant to help complete their surveys for Pismo clams. Photo Courtesy: Isa Mattiolio

Choosing who received the funds was another challenge. How do you compare one person’s hardship to another’s? As a result, they decided to make it a lottery system. If recipients had some level of need, they all had the same chance of getting the funds, although they set aside specific slots to go to early career professionals, who have had less than 36 consecutive months of full-time, non-entry level employment.

The Wildlife Society and others have shared information about applying to the grant on social media to make people aware.

The ease of application helps, some recipients said. “I think that one of my motivating factors in applying was I looked at the page and was like, ‘oh, I could literally do this right now,’” said TWS member Isa Mattioli, an undergraduate student at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, who received the grant. “The reimbursement process was really easy. It really helped me buy field gear that was really important to starting my senior research project.”

Funding the future

Mattioli, who uses they/them pronouns, used the funds to purchase spotting scopes, a field bag and a headlamp to help complete their surveys for Pismo clams (Tivela stultorum) on California’s Central Coast, where sea otters (Enhydra lutris) prey on the clams. “I think that this grant really helps to attempt to level the playing field and gives people in underrepresented groups less of a worry about finances,” they said.

Kelsey Shepherd, a graduate research assistant at Iowa State University, also benefited from the grant. Not only did the grant help her purchase waterproof boots to help her get through rugged terrain in tallgrass prairie to study the federally endangered rusty patched bumblebee (Bombus affinis). She was also able to buy special sunglasses that she needs. “I have a genetic condition, and I’m blind in one eye,” she said. “I was able to protect my eyes from the sun.”

The chair-elect of the Student Development Working Group, Laura Young, has now taken on keeping the grant going. She hopes to improve the grant so that more people can take advantage of it at the right time during field season. “We are looking at potentially doing multiple deadline rounds because of different field seasons,” she said. “Some people don’t necessarily know what field gear they need until they’re hired for something. The deadline selection process may have already passed before they get hired.”

The working groups also hope to get even more applicants. “We had a pool of 77 applicants across our two working groups for the 2023 grant,” Veals Dutt said. “My hope is that we can get more folks to apply and just have this be a really solid continuing grant that we can offer.”

Is affording the right field gear a struggle? You may qualify for the Trail Blazer Grant provided by the Student Development and Early Career Professional working groups! Applications are open now through April 30.

Further details available here.

Bird flu is killing seals around the world

March 28, 2024 by The Wildlife Society

Biologists are concerned about the impacts of avian influenza on seals and sea lions. The virus, which has devastated wild bird populations and poultry operations around the world, but has also affected a variety of mammal species. That includes pinnipeds, which have died from the virus in various places across the globe.

Over 300 seals died from the disease in New England, several more died in Puget Sound in Washington, over 20,000 sea lions have died and Chile and Peru and thousands of elephant seals have died in Argentina, according to the Associated Press.

Scientists believe the mammals are likely contracting the virus from affected seabirds.

“The loss of wildlife at the current scale presents an unprecedented risk of wildlife population collapse, creating an ecological crisis,” the World Organisation for Animal Health said in a statement.

Read more from the Associated Press.

Endangered owls prey on endangered Hawaiian stilts

March 27, 2024 by Joshua Rapp Learn

It was June 2021, and researchers were trying to capture a pueo to fit it with a GPS tracking device as part of a larger effort to learn more about the owls’ movements around Hawaii.

They set up a net trap with a decoy owl during mating season and used a speaker to play the squeaks of a male pueo. The charade worked, and another adult female pueo was soon lured into the net, likely in an effort to lunge at the potential invader.

“The pueo heard the call, came, saw the fake owl, and ‘Vroom!’ attacked the fake owl,” said Marie-Sophie Garcia-Heras, who was working as a postdoctoral researcher studying the owls at the time with The Pueo Project, a program led by Melissa Price at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

The remains of a dead stilt chick were dropped in a net trap by a pueo. Credit: Garcia-Heras et al.

Only the trap didn’t work—a gust of wind made the net collapse just as the female was flying in. The bird escaped, much to the consternation of Garcia-Heras and her colleagues. They went to fix the trap, and to their surprise, they found the still-warm body of a dead ae’o chick, also known as a Hawaiian stilt, laying on the ground at the bottom of the net. The owl must have just captured the prey, then dropped it during the bungled capture.

Pueo project researchers weren’t entirely shocked by this finding. As described in a research note published recently in Ecology and Evolution, the researchers had witnessed a few similar cases since 2019 of pueo preying on Hawaiian stilts. It just wasn’t until now that they had cold evidence—a warm body—in their hands.

Researcher Marie-Sophie Garcia-Heras holds a pueo. Credit: Melissa Price

A tale of two endangered birds

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lists Hawaiian stilts as endangered. The shorebirds have drastically declined due to decades of habitat loss and fragmentation. Invasive species like feral cats (Felis catus), dogs (Canis familiaris) and mongoose (Herpestes edwardsii) also prey on Hawaiian stilts.

Pueo, also known as Hawaiian short-eared owls (Asio flammeus sandwichensis), are a subspecies of short-eared owls (Asio flammeus) endemic to Hawaii. These owls are a little more generalist than their mainland U.S. counterparts, which mostly stick to grasslands. In Hawaii, pueo can occupy wetlands and forested areas as well as grasslands. These birds are also threatened by habitat loss and fragmentation, especially on Oahu, where the state of Hawaii lists them as endangered. Researchers don’t have numbers, but they suspect populations have dropped as human activity has increased in Oahu.

In ongoing research, scientists are trying to determine whether the numbers in Oahu are really dropping or whether these birds are just migrating between the islands of the archipelago—Garcia-Heras said they have been tracked flying between islands.

The remains of stilts found in the area where pueo nested. Credit: Garcia-Heras et al.

Mounting evidence

It was in the midst of their Hawaiian stilt research that scientists first saw evidence that these owls may be preying on the shorebirds. They had set up a trail camera up near a stilt nest on Oahu—the birds typically lay their eggs on round bits of mud they form on the ground.

In 2019, the cameras captured footage of pueo activity around a nest at night. The trouble was that they couldn’t tell for sure whether the raptor had taken a chick from the footage. But the adults were absent—perhaps having fled the pueo to save their own skin.

In 2020, researchers conducting nest surveys of stilts witnessed a pueo chasing adult stilts around. While they didn’t see the outcome, they later flushed a pueo from a ground roost that contained long stilt leg bones. Garcia-Heras said the researchers also “found that stilts were very anxious when pueo were around.”

In June and July 2021, in the weeks following the event where the researchers were left with a freshly killed stilt chick in their net, researchers discovered the carcasses of 10 adult ae’o strewn about an area near where a family of five pueo had been observed. These carcasses were picked clean, leaving mostly wings and bones. Garcia-Heras said these kinds of remains are typical from raptor feedings rather than other kinds of carnivores, which might have chewed the bones more.

Hawaiian stilts, or ae’o, are endemic to Hawaii. Credit: Melissa Price

Pueo are the only raptors on Oahu other than invasive barn owls (Tyto alba). The latter typically prey on small mammals, though, Garcia-Heras said, and all the other circumstantial evidence points to the nearby pueo family.

While stilts are taller than pueo, the ae’o are all legs—pueo typically weigh about 290-340 grams versus the stilts’ 180 grams.

“The timing, the location just very much correspond to a pueo predation event,” Garcia-Heras said.

Given the conservation status of the pueo, many management actions, like removing the pueo, aren’t plausible. Plus, Garcia-Heras said that pueo have a high importance in Hawaiian culture as protective guardians.

Both of these birds are native and endemic to the islands, so predation is likely natural between the species. But researchers hadn’t previously considered pueo predation as a potential factor affecting stilt numbers.

“It could be a problem if there’s one bird that starts hitting the Hawaiian stilt population,” Garcia-Heras said.

Alberta effort blows the whistle on wild pigs

March 27, 2024 by The Wildlife Society

A program in Alberta is helping the province manage its wild pig population. The Alberta Invasive Species Council says reported pig sightings have doubled over the three years of its Squeal on Pigs campaign. After receiving reports of wild pigs (Sus scrofa) from the public, trappers are dispatched to remove them. Since the program began in 2021, 314 pigs have been removed. Officials don’t know how many wild pigs are in the province, but a University of Alberta effort is deploying trail cameras to try to get an estimate.

Read more from the CBC.

Wild horse numbers take sharpest drop in decades

March 26, 2024 by The Wildlife Society

The number of wild horses and burros on public land has declined at its sharpest rate since 1985, marking the third year since 2020 that the overpopulation has decreased.

A March 1 report from the Bureau of Land Management estimated about 73,520 federally protected wild horses and burros roamed on BLM lands—9,363 fewer than was estimated in 2023. The estimate includes a range of uncertainty between 63,432 and 85,249 animals.

BLM officials say they can’t pinpoint the causes of the reduction, but the agency has been working to reduce the numbers. In the past year, the BLM removed 11,784 animals from overpopulated herds and offered them for adoption. The BLM has also worked to increase the use of fertility control vaccines. Deep snows throughout much of the West may have also reduced herds or dispersed some animals.

Despite the reduction, BLM officials say the population remains nearly three times what scientists estimate the lands can support. Its current plan calls for removing 20,000 wild horses and burros and treating 1,400 horses with fertility control in Fiscal Year 2024.

For TWS’ position statement on feral horses and burros, click here.

Read more from the BLM.

TWS 2023: How healthy are elephant hybrids?

March 26, 2024 by Dana Kobilinsky

When researchers determined that savanna and forest elephants were two separate species, it raised a whole new set of questions. Elephants from the two species were hybridizing, raising a number of concerns, including about the hybrids’ health.

“There are all these cases where hybridization starts, and it produces all of these hybrid animals that have lower fitness or are not able to cope as well as parental species,” said TWS member Savanah Bird, a PhD candidate at the University of Oregon.

Bird wondered if that was true for hybrid elephants, too.

Biologists had long debated about whether the elephants should be considered one or two species, based on physical and genetic differences between the two. Forest elephants tend to be smaller, with straighter tusks and rounder ears than their grassland cousins, and their populations have distinct genes.

When the International Union for Conservation of Nature decided to split African elephants into savanna (Loxodonta africana) and forest elephants (L. cyclotis) in 2021, it created new conservation concerns. Before the change, the IUCN listed African elephants as vulnerable. Since then, forest elephants have been listed as critically endangered, and savanna elephants were given an endangered status.

Savanah Bird and field assistant Isaiah Mwesige collect a genetic swab from an elephant dung pile while field assistant Jimmy Ogwang fills out a data sheet in Kibale National Park. Credit: Dr. Nelson Ting

“This is really helpful for their conservation,” Bird said, “They are ecologically, behaviorally, and morphologically really different and should be conserved and managed in different ways.”

But about 10 years ago, researchers discovered a large hybrid zone for the elephants in East Africa’s Albertine Rift, a biologically rich zone that stretches across parts of Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Tanzania. . Scientists aren’t sure if that’s something that has been happening for quite some time—the two species likely diverged some 5 million years ago—or if it’s more recent.

Bird wondered what the health of these hybrids was compared to that of each species and what other differences they may exhibit. “In the world of conservation, hybridization can be viewed as detrimental,” she said.

To determine the fitness and ecology of the hybrid elephants, Bird is looking at their diets, gut microbiomes and parasite loads. She presented her preliminary findings in a poster at The Wildlife Society’s 2023 annual conference in Louisville, Kentucky.

To conduct the research, she and her colleagues looked for elephant dung in the Albertine Rift. Working with a team of Ugandans who lived near protected areas, she hiked down trails looking for dung to add to collections gathered before she began her project. “They’ve lived there their whole life,” she said of the locals. “They know the elephants so well.”

Savanah Bird and Isaiah Mwesige collect a sample from the interior of the dung bolus, which will be used for DNA metabarcoding. Kibale National Park. Image Credit: Dr. Nelson Ting

Collecting the best samples was a bit of a conundrum. They wanted to retrieve the freshest dung samples to get the highest quality DNA, but they didn’t want to get too close to the elephants producing it. “They’re not the biggest fans of humans, and sometimes they get startled and can charge,” Bird said. “It was kind of a careful balance. There were definitely some times that we had to hightail it out of there.”

Back at the lab, Bird took swabs of the dung and used metabarcoding to sequence DNA and determined which bacteria and gut parasites were present and what plants they had consumed. The DNA could also tell them if the elephant was a forest elephant, a savanna elephant or a hybrid.

So far, she and her team have looked at a small subset of their samples, including 23 elephants from Kibale National Park in Uganda. The subset had mostly savanna and hybrid elephants but only one forest elephant. The DNA told her there wasn’t a difference between what savanna elephants and hybrid elephants were eating. “This is interesting, because we know that savanna elephants and forest elephants do really have different diets,” she said. Forest elephants eat more fruit, and savanna elephants go after grasses and woody shrubs. 

She also found that both savanna elephants and hybrids were consuming crops, even if they were eating native vegetation as well, creating potential conflicts with nearby residents.

Savanah Bird with Isaiah Mwesige and Jimmy Ogwang in Kibale National Park. Credit: Dr. Nelson Ting

Bird hopes the research shows them what the hybrids are eating and their impact on the ecosystem. If they’re fulfilling a similar ecological niche as the parent species, she said, that can suggest the elephants have conservation value, even if they aren’t protected by the IUCN. “We’re trying to clarify the role that these hybrid elephants might play in conservation and what kind of value they add,” she said.

She also hopes to delve more into gut microbiomes and parasites to see if hybrid elephants are less fit than the parent species.

As for the hybrid elephants’ protection, Bird said each country has different approaches. “They’re kind of in this gray zone,” she said. “I think policy is going to catch up, but it’s really important that this research clarifies what these hybrid elephants are all about.”

The growing promise of eDNA

March 25, 2024 by The Wildlife Society

Environmental DNA is becoming an increasingly useful tool to detect hard-to-find species, from the endangered to the cryptic to the invasive. Collecting samples from the water, soil and even the air, researchers have been able to monitor species they may never see. The growth of eDNA research has prompted some biologists in the U.S. to call for a national strategy to improve consistency.

“Environmental DNA has become more and more important as we are putting increased emphasis on understanding biodiversity and importantly, biodiversity loss,” Adam Sepulveda, a research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center in Bozeman, Montana, told Undark Magazine.

The magazine recently explored the potential of eDNA research and robotic samplers to uncover wildlife that often goes unnoticed.

“There is a lot of life on this planet that we know very little about,” said Kelly Goodwin, marine molecular microbiologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “And the only lens we have to view it is through their DNA.”

Read more from Undark.

Header Image: George Mason University graduate student Sammie Alexander uses environmental DNA to track how vulnerable and invasive fish species are using fish passages in Northern Virginia. Credit: Virginia Sea Grant

JWM: Low-flying aircraft affect polar bear behavior

March 25, 2024 by Joshua Rapp Learn

A loss in sea ice due to climate change is driving polar bears to spend more time on land, where they might come into contact with humans, plans and helicopters more often.

By better understanding the minimum altitude at which planes and helicopters are able to fly before disturbing bears, wildlife managers can set better flight regulations in an airspace that’s growing increasingly busy as the north coast of the state develops.

“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service tries to minimize disturbance to [polar bears],” said Todd Brinkman, associate professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

As a result, the agency has set altitude guidelines on how low aircraft can fly in polar bear regions. But these are based only on guesses about what might be a safe height to avoid disturbance.

Polar bears aren’t that easy to spot in a white background, so researchers conducted their surveys before snow on the ground returned. Credit: Gwendolyn Quigley

In a study published recently in the Journal of Wildlife Management, Brinkman and his colleagues set out to test levels of disturbance by actually disturbing the bears.

“To me, it still is a little bit crazy that we were flying over and disturbing this threatened species,” Brinkman said. But, he said, this was the only way to retrieve data that could better inform pilots to stop disturbing them in the future. “The short-term disturbance will likely generate long-term conservation benefits for generations of bears.”

Polar bears seemed less sensitive to planes than to helicopters. Credit: Gwendolyn Quigley

For a week in September 2021 and another week in September 2022—a period before the sea ice came back and before the snow on the ground returned and made it much more difficult to spot white bears from an aircraft—Brinkman and his colleagues flew around in both helicopters and airplanes searching for bears on the north coast of Alaska.

“It’s almost surreal at times—you just feel so fortunate to do this as your job,” Brinkman said.

Once the team spotted a bear, they would fly over it at a certain height, then turn back and fly at a lower height. They typically started at about 1,500-2,000 feet above a bear. They would fly back and forth over the bear multiple times until the bear showed a strong response, or until the aircraft reached 100 feet. If the bear showed any strong response, such as running away, or if a female stopped nursing a cub, for example, the researchers would record the altitude and leave the area.  

In total, the team sampled 115 bears. They found that bears sometimes reacted to flyovers as high as 1,500 feet in both planes and choppers.

The researchers’ surveys can help inform developers about potential disturbances. Credit: Gwendolyn Quigley

Overall, bears were more sensitive to helicopters than they were to planes, they found. The probability of disturbance increased when researchers flew lower than 450 meters above bears in helicopters. With planes, the chance of disturbance only substantially increased when they flew lower than 300 meters over the animals.

This could be because helicopters are noisier. In other cases, individual bears might have had previous encounters where wildlife managers chased and captured them from helicopters—they may recognize these aircraft as a threat.

They also found that active bears were more likely to respond to aircraft than bears that were lying down. If they were already vigilant, they were more likely to react.

In general, Brinkman said these results suggest that pilots would want to avoid altitudes less than 1,500 feet above bears.

This information can inform future planning for wildlife management, particularly with regards to permitting new developments in the area, such as oil and gas. When planning for new oil fields or other such developments, for example, these industries are only allowed a certain number of takes or disturbances. Now wildlife managers can better predict how many disturbances the aircraft from these areas might cause.

“[The standard for safe flying] needs to be defensible and not arbitrary,” Brinkman said.

This article features research that was published in a TWS peer-reviewed journal. Individual online access to all TWS journal articles is a benefit of membership. Join TWS now to read the latest in wildlife research.

Urban Cooper’s hawks face a range of threats

March 22, 2024 by The Wildlife Society

Collisions with windows are a leading cause of death for urban raptors in New Mexico, researchers found. But the biologists also uncovered another troubling cause of death. Humans had intentionally killed eight tagged hawks, some of which were bludgeoned to death.

Over 11 years, TWS member Brian Millsap and his colleagues at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service fitted Cooper’s hawks (Accipiter cooperii) in Albuquerque with GPS transmitters. When the birds died, researchers were able to determine what caused their deaths.

In a study published in the Journal of Raptor Research, the team looked at causes of deaths for female raptors in their first year, when the birds are more vulnerable, and after their first year.

Mortality was highest in the first four months of independence, researchers found. Regardless of age, disputes over territory or mates were the leading cause of death. Collision deaths were also high, but Millsap was surprised how many hawks were intentionally killed.

“I, like many others, had been falsely thinking that the days of rampant hawk shooting the U.S were behind us, but we are learning that is not the case.”

Read the study here.

Warming climate shifts bowhead whale migratory path

March 22, 2024 by Dana Kobilinsky

Warming weather is contributing to bowhead whales moving the time and location of their migration in the Arctic.

Most baleen whales—cetaceans that use a filter-feeding system to eat—migrate to higher latitudes and have long migration routes and distinct feeding and breeding regions.

But bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) live exclusively in the Arctic and make more of a circular migration. Their wintering grounds are in the southern Bering Sea, then they migrate northward through the Bering Strait, a narrow connection leading to the Arctic Ocean. Once there, they take a hard right and follow the coast of Alaska to the Canadian part of the Beaufort Sea, where they typically feed in the summer. But on their return to their wintering grounds, they typically take a more roundabout way through the Chukchi Sea before crossing back through the Bering Strait.

“I knew that things were changing pretty rapidly in the Arctic,” said Angela Szesciorka, a research associate at Oregon State University and the lead author of a study looking at bowhead whale migrations published in Geophysical Research Letters. She wondered if sea ice loss was going to start changing the patterns of their migration paths and timing.

Three bowhead whales breathing near ice. Credit: Kate Stafford

For Szesciorka’s PhD research, she had been studying blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus) in Southern California using passive acoustic data. She used their calling patterns to determine when they arrived in the region and when they left. She wondered if she could use this same technique to study the migration patterns of bowhead whales.

Luckily for Szesciorka, some of her colleagues had already been deploying hydrophones, or underwater recorders, for years in the western Beaufort Sea and Chukchi Sea. The researchers then examine the sound spectrograms, searching for the unique signatures of bowhead whale vocalizations. “It’s a wonderful system,” she said.

These particular recorders were left out for about a year or two at a time before they were replaced. They provided Szesciorka with data from 2008 to 2022 that could help her understand how sea ice loss may have changed the whales’ travel patterns. “It’s really fun as you’re going through it, but it’s tough too,” she said. Blue whales, for example, have simple patterns that are easy to identify—researchers can even use artificial intelligence programs. But bowheads have “complex songs” that are often overlapping with noise from other animals and the environment, making it difficult to use algorithms to identify them.

A bowhead whale song from the Bering Strait recorded in January 2011.

After the arduous task of analyzing the data, Szesciorka found that instead of all of the whales going into the Bering Sea, some are now spending their winters just north of the Bering Strait in the southern Chukchi Sea. They are also spending more time in the summer feeding in the Chukchi Sea.

Szesciorka said this is likely due to the food availability there. A warming climate may be changing nutrient pulses, and therefore, the distribution of krill and copepods that the bowhead whales feed on, she said. “Bowhead whales are opportunistic. They will feed whenever they can,” she said.

The recordings also suggested that the whales had shifted their winter departure from the western Beaufort Sea 45 days later in 2022 than they had in 2008. “With less sea ice out there, they stay longer for the season,” Szesciorka said.

These changing patterns can be challenging for Indigenous people who subsist on bowhead whales. There are 20 villages from three federally recognized Indigenous groups around the Bering Strait, she said.

Szesciorka is also concerned about the whales now coming into contact with more boats. She is currently looking at vessel trends in the Arctic, and has found that vessels are overlapping in the fall and winter with bowhead whale presence in the Chukchi Sea and Bering Strait. Boats can kill whales through strikes, and the noise the vessels make can hinder the marine ability to communicate.

Creating dynamic speed limit zones or banning traffic in areas where there are whales, could potentially mitigate these issues. Right now, Szesciorka said, there are no speed limits or other regulations. But multiple Tribes, states, provinces and countries would need to collaborate in many cases since the whales don’t abide by human-set boundaries. “How do you create rules and know everyone’s going to follow them?” she said.

The silver lining is that the whales have been able to adjust their migration in the face of climate change. But her fear is that “when things get more and more extreme, at some point you can’t keep adjusting.”