She knits, she sails and she studies whales: UCSC graduate student Lauren Fritz wants to know how tourism affects humpback whales

Lauren Fritz is knitting a scarf for her next trip to Antarctica. The scarf – blanketlike and chunky – is flung out over a clean, black lab bench, and it’s growing by the minute.

“This pink wool is from the Falkland Islands, which I just picked up on the last Antarctic cruise of our field season,” she says. “And then this white yarn is just from Joann Fabrics.”

Fritz, a doctoral student in ocean studies, looks at how tourism boats affect humpback whale behavior with UC Santa Cruz’s Bio-Telemetry and Behavioral Ecology Lab. She recently returned from a six-week expedition to Antarctica, where she and a colleague researched humpback whales, doubled as science educators on an Antarctic cruise boat and, in Fritz’s case, learned to knit.

Although she does most of her field research in Antarctica, where she works on expedition ships as a guest scientist to collect her data, Fritz and other members of the lab spent the spring studying the health and behavior of humpback whales in Monterey Bay.

Now is the season for spotting humpback whales here in Monterey Bay, where large groups of whales can be spotted off the coast as they migrate from colder, north Pacific Ocean waters to Mexico and Hawaii. “Springtime is amazing for whale watching here,” says Fritz, noting that a combination of oceanic upwelling and winds causes blooms of a sun-loving algae called phytoplankton. Those blooms in turn cause an increase in krill, one of the humpback’s favorite foods, along the coast.

Fritz hasn’t had a straight trajectory to whale research. She grew up in Idaho, far from the ocean, but got the opportunity to intern with a conservation organization running great white shark cage-diving tours in South Africa after her junior year of college. 

That’s when Fritz started to think seriously about working on boats and working on the ocean. She followed that impulse, and after she graduated from college in 2014, she spent eight years working on whale-watching and dolphin tour boats.

Those travels took her from Washington state’s San Juan Islands to New Zealand and she documented her work by blogging and posting photos to Instagram.

Then, she fell in love with humpback whales. She was enchanted by their charisma and long migration journeys. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, whale tourism jobs were drying up, and Fritz was itching to ease out of tourism. She applied for and received a competitive National Science Foundation grant, which has allowed her to study humpback whales in graduate school.

Fritz and her colleagues’ current research is a bit more intense than a typical whale-watching trip. They use drones to monitor the whales’ health and behavior in both Monterey Bay and in Antarctica, and even take tissue samples with modified crossbows. Darts from the crossbow collect tiny tissue samples from the whales’ blubber and then fall into the ocean, where they float on the waves before members of the lab collect them. 

While drone videos and photos help the lab monitor the whales’ movements and behavior, the tissue samples supply DNA, provide information about stress hormones and can even tell if a whale is pregnant. Fritz understands that people might worry about the tissue samples potentially harming the whales. But, she says, the whales react to the noise of the dart hitting the water more than the actual pinprick – so it likely doesn’t lead to any long-term distress.

Noise is a problem for whales worldwide, much of it caused by boats and underwater sonar that make it hard for them to navigate and keep track of other whales, predators and prey beneath the waves. Whales in areas with a lot of human activity are essentially living in the oceanic equivalent of an apartment over a nightclub, and it’s stressing them out. 

Fritz wants to know more about how our human activities are affecting humpbacks, and what humans can do to minimize noise and make the ocean a more habitable place for whales. She’ll return to Antarctica next year for one more field season, when she hopes to collect the last of her data on how tourism boats affect humpbacks.  

And the scarf? It will, of course, be going with her.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Lookout: What work is the lab doing in Monterey Bay?

Lauren Fritz: It would be silly if our lab didn’t do any research here in Monterey, because we’re at the doorstep of this incredible marine ecosystem with many different species of whales. And our lab has been doing biopsy work on these animals for a while. Now, we’re using drones and biopsy samples to look at the tissue and the hormone levels of the whales, and also to take photos from above. And if we continue to do this over consecutive seasons, we can look for important changes in the whales’ health, such as if their stress levels are changing.

Lookout: And how about in Antarctica? What is that research? 

Fritz: The project I was brought in to do was to focus on behavioral responses of whales to tour boats, so I’m looking at how tourism activities impact whale health and whale behavior. And my job was to design an experiment that would allow us to look at the short-term impacts of whale-watch tours in the Antarctic. The lab had already done a lot of work in the Antarctic before, but they hadn’t done any studies focusing on this aspect of tourism.

We also have to take into consideration the fact that whales are experiencing these disturbances in a rapidly changing climate and a rapidly changing environment. There are changes to their prey distribution, there are all sorts of things that could be affecting the animals, and so it’s really hard to just isolate tourism as a major disturbance, even though that’s something my study is trying to do and what science asks us to do.

Lookout: So, how do you do that?

Fritz: First, I had to design an experiment, called a controlled exposure experiment. And basically, we try to control as many variables as we can, which is hard in the marine environment, especially when there’s a lot of other boats on the water. But essentially, we locate resting humpback whales because we need to be able to watch the whales’ behavior for the duration of the experiment. Once we find resting whales, we launch the drone. This important tool allows us to monitor the whales’ behavior from above for five minutes before we attempt any approach. We then use our research boat as the disturbance, and we drive the boat at the whale and look for any changes in behavior, and at what distance the boat is from the whale before it decides to dive or change direction.

Lookout: Is this something you could do in Monterey Bay?

Fritz: There already have been some studies here on whale-watching tourism in Monterey, and it’s also been going on a lot longer than it has been in the Antarctic. So theoretically, the whales could be more conditioned to the presence of boats here and it might not impact them as much. We can actually look at data on what ships are moving through what areas and for how long, and match that up with whale blubber samples to see if cortisol levels are higher when there are more ships around or ships are closer to shore. 

In Antarctica, we’re looking specifically at small whale-watch boats in order to have an idea of how it might be impacting whales before the tourism industry grows too big. 

Lookout: What’s something interesting that’s come out of your research?

Fritz: During the pandemic in the Antarctic, researchers were able to collect samples and found that cortisol levels were significantly lower than before the pandemic. There were also virtually no tourism ships at that time. So that can give us a hint that vessel noise and vessel presence can certainly impact a whale’s stress levels even if you’re not seeing behavioral changes, because there could be physiological changes. Doing similar work in Monterey will allow us to determine what human activities are most stressful to the whales and how we can mitigate those in the future.

Lookout: So, is it whales or bust for you?

Fritz: I would totally go study manta rays. I think manta rays are really cool.

Lookout: What are the pros and cons of doing research in the Antarctic?

Fritz: There’s a lot of great things about doing research off of tourist expedition ships. It’s a cool opportunity because they basically allow us free room and board on the ship, and it’s a funded opportunity to go down and get data. But it also means that research isn’t always the No. 1 priority and we have to work around the tourist operation schedule. Which makes sense and is totally fine – it just also means less time for research.

Lookout: How do you deal with being at sea for so long?

Fritz: This year I was on the ship for six weeks, and last year, I was on the ship for three months. Six weeks is the perfect amount of time before you start going a little bit crazy. It’s a pretty good setup, because you have no expenses and you’re not spending money on entertainment or food or anything like that. At the same time, it can be a bit exhausting. I’ve worked in tourism for a long time – I like talking to people. I like connecting with people, and showing them the marine environment and talking about whales. Since we’re onboard as guest scientists, it’s not like we’re on vacation. Depending on your level of extraversion, it can either be really exciting or really exhausting.

Lookout: How much whale tourism is happening in Antarctica?

Fritz: I would love to know the actual percentage of tourists that take trips to the Antarctic specifically for whales, but I think it’s just an addition to a lot of people’s trips. In terms of number of tourists, the 2022-2023 season saw over 104,000 visitors, an increase from the 75,000 who visited the year before the COVID lockdown began.

Lookout: A lot of people come to Monterey Bay to whale watch. How do you know if a whale-watching company is ethical?

Fritz: In the United States, there are some underlying laws that whale-watch operators have to follow under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. But just because there are laws in place doesn’t mean that all operators follow them. There’s a lot that you can find out through TripAdvisor and Google reviews. I tend to try and look at the reviews and look for people saying ‘this is a very ethically minded company, they have the whale’s best interests in mind.’ Or if you know somebody from the area, ask them because typically they know the reputations of operators.

Any whale watch is going to have an impact unless we can invent silent, invisible boats, which is impossible. But people can choose ways to minimize that by choosing an ethical operator. 

Lookout: Whales are a symbol of conservation for many people. Are we thinking about whales in the right way?

Fritz: I think that whales can be a really important mascot of conservation because of how charismatic they are. If you like whales, you tend to be ocean-minded and aware of some of the issues that might be facing them. But I wouldn’t say that everybody needs to think about whales specifically. I feel like if you have something that helps anchor you, that means you’ll fight harder to protect it. 

Realistically, whales are kind of hard to see if you don’t live by the ocean or don’t have the money to go out on a whale-watch boat. Try to find what you can connect with in nature, and figure out what you can do in your own community to help protect that. And if you’re lucky enough to live in Santa Cruz, that might be protecting the whales.

Madeline Reinsel is a 2024 graduate of the Science Communication program at UC Santa Cruz. Before graduate school, she studied turtle conservation in Virginia. She has a degree in environmental sciences and urban planning from the University of Virginia. She wrote this Q&A as part of UCSC professor and Community Voices editor Jody K. Biehl’s class. 

Note: The Bio-Telemetry and Behavioral Ecology Lab has obtained all relevant permits and permissions from governing agencies to conduct work in Monterey Bay and the Antarctic.