Research

Biological Oceanography

During my 35 years at GSO, I have participated in two major research projects that were centered here, CETAP and SCOPEX. Both of them were linked to another project—the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium—one of the world’s most successful collaborative long-term studies of an endangered whale species.

The Cetacean and Turtle Assessment Program (CETAP) was a landmark study to understand the species diversity, distribution, seasonality, and abundance of whale, dolphin and sea turtle populations off the northeastern United States. CETAP was a federally funded effort designed to provide basic environmental assessment information relative to oil drilling on Georges Bank and in the mid-Atlantic. The resulting data remain a valuable source of information for environmental impact assessments of other activities, e.g., wind farms, as well as studies of individual species. The most recent was just in early 2014—a global assessment of the distribution of Risso’s dolphin. CETAP provided the first reliable assessments of distribution and abundance of the North Atlantic right whale, one of the world’s most endangered mammal species. CETAP surveys discovered the existence of the population’s primary springtime feeding ground in the Great South Channel.

The South Channel Ocean Productivity Experiment (SCOPEX) was a multi-disciplinary study of the marine ecosystem in the Great South Channel, with the objective of understanding what made it an important right whale feeding ground. SCOPEX included studies of whales, zooplankton, and physical oceanography—collaborating with other investigators at GSO and other institutions. Fifty-ton right whales feed on five-milligram copepods (a billion-to-one ratio) in extremely dense patches, and a principal result of SCOPEX was the understanding that the formation of those patches is primarily a physical process enhanced by the behavior of the copepods.

The North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium was created by GSO, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the New England Aquarium, the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies, and Marineland of Florida in 1986 as a venue for sharing information and collaborating in research on right whales. The Consortium has grown to include dozens of academic, research, non-profit, and governmental agencies from Florida to Atlantic Canada—all dedicated to the conservation of one endangered whale species. Database management for the Consortium has been based at GSO, building upon the data and associated expertise from CETAP. Consortium collaborations have resulted in significant publications on distribution, abundance, trends, ecology, reproduction, physiology, mortality, acoustics, and more.

Our research experience in marine mammal survey, data analysis, and environmental assessment has naturally expanded into such arenas as assessing and monitoring the potential impacts of wind farms, other industrial developments, and naval training activities on protected marine species.