Credit: Wilfredo Alarcon

Throughout my time working in the south of Chile, I have never kept a diary and have been pretty terrible at communicating what I am doing and experiencing. So after much hassling from family, friends and colleagues, I thought I should start posting some short pieces on the work I am and have been doing in this beautiful and remote part of our world. This piece is a little longer and sums up how I got here and what the hell I am doing here.

I arrived in Chile in 2007 with some acoustic recording equipment very kindly lent to me by my master’s thesis supervisor at the University of St Andrews, Dr. Luke Rendell, who I had been working with up until then on sperm whales in the Mediterranean. This all came about after meeting a Chilean up a mountain in Scotland: now my firm friend Max Bello. Max was one of the founders of the Blue Whale Centre, or Centro Ballena Azul, a Chilean NGO dedicated to blue whale and marine ecosystem protection in the south of Chile, headed by Dr. Rodrigo Hucke-Gaete, a professor of ecology at the Austral University of Chile. In 2001 Rodrigo lead an expedition down to the Corcovado Gulf and discovered the blue whale feeding and nursing ground that we now know. Additionally, I was lucky enough to get financial backing from One World Wildlife, a UK based NGO, who has supported this project over the years, even though there was no clear promise of results at first.

Credit: Susannah Buchan

So I arrived in South America for the first time, to the fishing village of Melinka, with no notion of where Chile was, no Spanish and some acoustic equipment to work with Rodrigo and try to see if we could start a new line of research at the Centro Ballena Azul in blue whale bioacoustics, i.e. the study of blue whale vocalizations and songs. I was supposed to stay for 5 months, and that was 5 years ago.

Credit: Susannah Buchan

Credit: Susannah Buchan

Over the past five years I have spent long and tedious hours, mixed in with mind blowing and life changing moments, recording the sounds of the Corcovado Gulf off an artisan fishing boat. All my moments surrounded by blue whales, feeding or singing or exploring the depths of the waters of southern Chile, have seemed eternal and have changed me forever. And during this time, we have successfully recorded the songs of the Corcovado blue whales, which have yet not been described in the scientific literature. This work is helping Rodrigo and I better understand the population identity and movements of Chilean blue whales to and from their feeding ground, all within a conservation perspective to protect this endangered species. This work is also now the main focus of my PhD studies in oceanography and blue whale ecology at the University of Concepcion, where I have the great good fortune to be supervised and supported by Dr. Renato Quinones, who oversees the oceanographic aspects of my research, while Rodrigo oversees the blue whale biology aspects of my thesis.                                                                                                                       

Credit: Cesar Guala

Returning to oceanography, which I studied as an undergraduate, has brought me back to examining more ecological aspects of the Chilean blue whales and their feeding ground. In particular, last year I started trawling for krill to try to understand the distribution of krill throughout the feeding ground and therefore understand the movements of blue whales within their feeding ground, between the various feeding patches. This work is related to the acoustic work which elucidates blue whale movements to and from the feeding ground. The occurrence of these relatively
predictable feeding patches is because krill has a patchy, non-uniform distribution throughout the Corcovado Gulf that is driven by oceanographic processes that occur in this complex ocean environment, where Subantarctic waters mix with terrestrial waters within the channels and between the islands of Southern Chile.

And so all this brings me to Melimoyu and a change of location for the 2012 field season. On the other side of the Corcovado Gulf from Melinka, Melimoyu is a completely different setting. It is a total immersion in the terrestrial wilderness of the Southern Chilean mainland, at the foot of the Melimoyu volcano, with its glacier, rivers and waterfalls, and pristine temperate rainforest like I have never seen before. Such a treat!