Education & Monitoring

What does Straitwatch do?

Straitwatch works to minimize the potential disturbance by recreational vessel traffic of killer whales and other marine wildlife by:

Straitwatch boat

*promoting the Be Whale Wise Marine Wildlife Guidelines

*monitoring vessel activity in the vicinity of marine wildlife

*educating boaters about current ecological issues affecting marine wildlife locally and globally

*involving communities and individuals in developing and carrying out the program.

Straitwatch operates a stewardship vessel in the waters off Northern Vancouver Island from June to September and another vessel in the waters off Victoria, BC from May to September. Straitwatch also contacts boaters at marinas and community events.

Why are marine mammal guidelines needed?
The marine areas of northern and southern Vancouver Island have a high abundance and diversity of marine mammals and seabirds. These animals are vulnerable to impacts from chemical and noise pollution, fishing activity, global climate change and loss of habitat. The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada have listed the southern resident killer whales as endangered and the northern resident killer whales, transient killer whales and humpback whales as threatened. In response to the growth of commercial and recreation marine mammal viewing activities, guidelines (PDF) have been developed to help reduce the risk of disturbance by vessel traffic.

Animal health monitoring

The Straitwatch program often monitors animals that are in distress: injured, sick, stranded, entangled.

Here is some research that describes how vessels have an impact on whales:

Bain, D. E., Dahlheim, M.E. 1994. Effects of masking noise on detection thresholds of killer whales. (Orcinus orca). In: Marine Mammals and the Exxon Valdez. T. R. Loughlin (ed.). Academic Press. p.243-256.

Barrett-Lennard, L.G., Ford, J.K.B., Heise, K.A. 1996. The mixed blessing of echolocation: Differences in sonar use by fish-eating and mammal-eating killer whales. (Orcinus orca). Animal Behaviour 51(3):553-565.

Erbe,C. 2002. Underwater noise of whale-watching boats and potential effects on killer whales (Orcinus orca), based on an acoustic impact model. Marine Mammal Science 18:394–418.

Lusseau, D. 2003a. Effects of tour boats on the behavior of bottlenose dolphins: Using
Markov chains to model anthropogenic impacts. Conservation Biology 17:1785– 1793.

Lusseau, D. 2003b. The effects of tourism activities on bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops spp.) in Fiordland, New Zealand. Ph.D. thesis, University of Otago, Dunedin, N.Z. 245 pp.

Lusseau,D. 2003c. Male and female bottlenose dolphins Tursiops spp. have different strategies to avoid interactions with tour boats in Doubtful Sound, New Zealand. Marine Ecology Progress Series 257:267–274.

Lusseau, D. 2004. The hidden cost of tourism: Detecting long-term effects of tourism using behavioral information. Ecology and Society 9:2.

Lusseau, D. 2005a. The residency pattern of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops spp.) in Milford Sound, New Zealand, is related to boat traffic. Marine Ecology Progress Series 295:265-272.

Stockin K., Lusseau D., Binedell V. & Orams M. Tourism affects the behavioural budget of common dolphins (Delphinus spp.) in the Hauraki Gulf, New Zealand. Marine Ecology Progress Series

Blane, J. M., and R. Jaakson. 1994. The impact of ecotourism boats on the St. Lawrence beluga whales, Environmental Conservation 21:267-269.

Williams, R., Trites, A. W. and Bain, D. E. (2002a). Behavioral responses of killer whales to whale-watching traffic: opportunistic observations and experimental approaches. Journal of Zoology 256: 255-270.

Williams, R., Bain, D.E., Ford, J.K.B. and Trites, A.W. (2002b). Behavioral responses of male killer whales to a ‘leapfrogging’ vessel. Journal of Cetacean Research and Management 4(3): 305-310.

Williams, R., Lusseau D., Hammond, P.S. (2006). Estimating relative energetic costs of human disturbance to killer whales (Orcinus orca) Biological Conservation 133 (2006) 301–311