15.4.2012 was our first field research excursion on a beautiful day with sunhine and a totally mirrow flat sea and we encountered many puffins without their colourful beaks, cormorants with their white spot and the first grey geese on their migration north.
We found a lonely minke whale swimming around and heard about a small group iof orcas being in the fjord.
Today I wanted to search for the orcas, but my boat was still not fixed and the “dynamo” to charge the battery is broken   so,… I still have to wait…it is not smart to be in the middle of the fjord when the battery is flat..
But the weather forecast is excellent for the whole week and I hope I can give you an update soon!

For now our boat rates are secured but we still miss 25 000 Euros to pay it off to the bank and we need an additonal amount to be able to fill up the tank this summer, so please if you want to help our research project don’t be shy to use our donation bank account

Thank you!

Our center in Henningvsær is closed until 15.4.2012, if you want to get in touch with us please write an email: info@ocean-sounds.com

Thank you all, this is wonderful!! both small and big doantion came in and every day is a new surprise, I am very positive that we can keep our boat if we continue to have such nice supporters
Two more bank payments are secured…..and the sun comes back, so we can soon start out boat excursions to look for and study the whales.

More to that with pictures soon,

Grateful,   Heike

We have started a new project on which a Bachelor student, Ellyne Dudkowski  from the University in Nordland (UiN) Bodø is working on. She will search for group P, which we have found through matching of calls to be closely related to Morgan. Group P was seen in 2005 inside the Tysfjord carousel feeding and we could record 2 hours of underwater sounds. From these sounds we identifed calls, which we could match to Morgan’s calls (Vester & Samarra, 2011). Pictures were taken of the members of the group, which you can see below. We have collected and we are still collecting pictures from killer whales that were seen recently along the northern norwegian coast. It would be essential to find Morgan’s close relatives, proof that they are still around and can be found through simple photo matching to show the decision to put her in an amusement park in Tenerife was based on wrong assumptions!

If you have pictures and you care about sharing, please send them to us or contact us by email: info@ocean-sounds.com

A North Atlantic Killer Whale workshop is organized prior to the ECS conference on the 25.3.2012 in Galway, Ireland. We were invited to give a talk and Heike Vester (Ocean Sounds) and Sarah Hallerberg (MPI, Germany) will present our New Discovery of Salmon Feeding Killer Whales in Lofoten. These are new findings from the summer months of 2011. Killer whales were observed from April-November feeding on salmon. Before we always thought the killer whales in Norway feed mostly on herring, even though attacks on seals and whales have also been reported. However, these killer whales seemed to be specialized to hunt salmon.
We have investigated group composition through Photo-ID and sound analysis. Our preliminary results indicate context specific calls when the whales are  hunting and feeding on salmon. The calls and the behaviour is new to us and no comparable studies exists yet in other parts of the world. 2 Bachelor student at the University of Nordland in Bodoe are currently working on the Photo-ID of these whales.

We are excited to present these new findings and listen to other new killer whale studies from scientists all around the north Atlantic!

visit the ECS conference website and find out more about the workshop and conference. We are co-authoring 2 posters at the conference: Killer whale attackes on sperm whales and Photo-ID of long-finned pilot-whales with scientists from Andenes Whale Watching.

Radio show about Zip’s law by Trevor Pinch and Mark Lane, mentioning our work with Jan Nagler about analysing the whales’ language:

listen here

…you can even see them from the road, they are still in the Andfjord and close to the coast of Vesteraalen and Senja, and even Tromsoe!

here a couple of articles:

NRK Nordland

Fredrik Broms

the herring is still here in the north but will soon start it’s migration to the southern fjords of Norway to spawn. At least the orcas are known to follow the herring south, but the humpbacks should be heading to their wintering grounds far away (Africa or Caribbean). Unfortunately there is no herring and therefore no whales in the Vestfjord and since we have financial problems we are not able to go in the field to search for whales here or study the orcas further north!
I really hope we will be able to find a solution to our lacking research money soon…the situation now is not very good……

Good new year!

we could already collect 3 000 Euro for our boat and we only miss 27 000 Euro to finally call it ours and be free of paying money to the loan!
Once we reach 5 000 Euro donation we will core a winner for a hand signed printed photo of Orcas by H.Vester for the people that donated more than 100 Euro!

but more to that later (hopefully SOON , please spread the word and help us to reach our goal, thank you, you are wonderful!!!

New University Courses:

Spring 2012 Heike Vester/Ocean Sounds will start teaching animal behaviour (BI216F 000 Evolutionary Behavioural Ecology ( Spring 2012 )) at the University of Nordland in Bodoe and supervise a bachelor student.

We recommend all students that are interested in volunteering for Ocean Sounds to enroll at the University of Nordland and consider the bachelor or master courses for Biology. The selected students will then be able to do a project with us!

In 2010 I recorded strange signals outside Nappstraumen in the inside of the Vestfjord and thought immediately it could be signals from a ship using seismic activity to search for oil and gas outside Lofoten. I sent it to the WWF for further investigation. A couple of weeks ago, Dag Erland from the Norwegian newspaper “Kyst og Fjord“ investigated the sounds and found out that there were no activities outside Lofoten, but 170km more to the south west of Lofoten and the siganls most probably came from there! it is incredible how far these signals travel in the sea and it therefore astonishes me that there are hardly any regulations regarding sound control in the sea. It shows clearly that much more research needs to be done!
A new research article could show that humpback whale songs change in presence of noise 200km away: Risch D, Corkeron PJ, Ellison WT, Van Parijs SM (2012) Changes in Humpback Whale Song Occurrence in Response to an Acoustic Source 200 km Away. PLoS ONE 7(1): e29741. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0029741

you can find the newspaper article here and listen to the sound by clicking the link below:

manmade-sounds-Vestfjord-2010-07-02_heike_vester