Our Scientists – From Coast to Coast to Coast – Marianne Marcoux
Learn more about the role marine mammals play in their environment.
Transcript
My name is Marianne Marcoux, I'm a Research Scientist at the Freshwater Institute in Winnipeg.
I study the status of the population of narwhals and belugas in the Arctic.
My job is to make sure that we know enough of their ecology and their behaviour to be able to preserve them and conserve them.
Each summer typically, we setup a camp on a beach. And then we have a net that is perpendicular to the beach, and at the end of the net there's a buoy. And then we wait for whales to go by, and then when a whale gets caught, we can see the buoy moving. And then we need to send a team as soon as possible to bring back the whale. And then we start instrumenting the whale with the satellite tag.
So those tags are mini computers. It can log all sorts of information, typically we get the location of the whale. But we can also get some dive profile, we can get the acceleration of the whale to figure out a bit more what the whale is doing under the water.
We can get sound as well so when narwhals and belugas hunt, they emit echolocation clicks and when they get closer to their prey, the clicks go faster.
So from those recordings, we can infer when they're feeding. And with this information, then we can better plan protected areas to protect the species.
We started to use drones to study the behaviour of the whales. The advantage of using drones is that you have a new vantage point to look at them. It's easier to tell apart each class in male and female from the video on the drone and using this method, we are able to see that narwhals use their tusk to stun fish and then to feed on them.
We are developing methods to use drones to be able to count populations, so right now we are using big planes with people in it to be able to do our population assessment. But we're hoping in the future we can use photos taken from drones to be able to do a population assessment.
Narwhals and belugas are important for Inuits in the Canadian Arctic, they rely on them culturally and traditionally, that's why it's important to protect them.
Special thanks to: Pond Inlet Mittimatalik Inuit Community for their collaboration and support, Ocean Wise for sharing their footage, ocean.org.
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