My Top Scallop Survey Moment: Right Place at the Right Time for a Right Whale

This year, I was fortunate to sail as a watch chief on all three legs of our science center's Integrated Atlantic Sea Scallop and HabCam Research Survey. Each leg had some pretty standout moments. Here are a few.

Leg 1: Stella, Puffins, and Right Whales-Oh, My!

Stella

The first leg began on May 4, sailing out of Lewes, Delaware. Owen Ceserano, an engineer from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, joined us for Leg 1, bringing along Tethys-class long-range autonomous underwater vehicle named "Stella." Stella was designed by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. It is owned and operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, equipped with WHOI-designed stereo imaging camera payloads. The goal is to eventually use Stella to collect data in offshore wind farm areas where our NOAA research vessels can't sample. Between HabCam and Stella, we were able to cover 582 nautical miles of the seafloor!

Atlantic Puffins

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I got to see Atlantic puffins five different times, while working 70 miles offshore of Cape May, New Jersey! As a bird enthusiast, puffins are now on my birder bucket list. I'd never been fortunate enough to see one puffin, let alone five of them.

Right Place, Right Time, for Right Whales

The other highlight that will always stick out to me from this trip was taking photos of a pair of whales feeding at the surface, near Hudson Canyon. The first whale was a Sei whale, but the second one stumped me for a moment. It had a smooth fluke, and no dorsal fin. I couldn't believe my eyes when I got back on the bridge, and started scrolling through the photos. I instantly understood what I saw was a North Atlantic right whale!

I grabbed a laminated sheet on reporting right whale sightings and the survey chief scientist Charles Keith called the NOAA hotline to report it. They requested I email my photos over, and not only were they able to identified it as a 16-year-old right whale named "ZigZag." This was the first confirmed visual sighting of him in more than a year. We weren't even supposed to be in this area that day. We happened to be transiting back to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, to fix an issue we were having with HabCam.

What really made this impactful for me was learning that our sighting was one of the original sightings that got our North Atlantic Right Whale Aerial Survey team interested in surveying near the Hudson Canyon area-about 100 miles off New Jersey. This was an area they hadn't planned to survey. Over a 3-day span, the team spotted at least 45 right whales -more than 12 percent of the population-in the Hudson Canyon area! There were approximately 370 animals alive during 2023, including fewer than 70 reproductively active females. This whole experience of reporting our sighting and it leading to surveys in an unexpected area where 12 percent of the right whale population was spotted will stand out to me for the rest of my life.

Leg 2: Just for the Halibut

We started Leg 2 on May 14 and headed to the Great South Channel, a deep-water area between Nantucket and Georges Bank, for more HabCam work. We had mostly great weather during Leg 2 except for 4 days where we had to take refuge in the lee side, or protected side, of Nantucket. While we were hunkered down, all we could do was annotate HabCam images collected during Leg 1. We review species identified by machine learning software, helping to teach computers how to identify sea life in millions of images of the seafloor. That's when we saw one of the biggest Atlantic halibut we've seen in many years of this survey. It was roughly 1 meter-about 3 feet long! Despite bad weather we were still able to cover 306 nautical miles of the seafloor during this leg.

Leg 3: Successful Firsts

Leg 3 started on June 24 aboard the NOAA Ship Henry B. Bigelow. This was the first time I participated in all three legs of the survey and served as watch chief for all three legs on two different vessels during the survey. This was also the first time HabCam had been towed on any NOAA ship and had a Channelized Optical System mounted to it. Scientists at WHOI built the instrument to collect near-continuous measurements of dissolved inorganic carbon and partial carbon dioxide or pH to better understand the marine carbon cycle and ocean acidification. With the help of WHOI scientists we were able to cover 727 nautical miles with HabCam and Stella. This was an incredible opportunity for more collaborative science between NOAA and WHOI, on a world-class research vessel.

Final Survey Thoughts

Over the three legs of this survey, we completed:

• About 1,400 nautical miles of Habcam transects
• Roughly 200 miles of Stella tracks
• Nearly 4.5 million paired HabCam and Stella images
• Around 86,000 images annotated.

I am excited to see what we're able to accomplish in the 2025 survey season!

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