Tula Quarterly Q3, 2026

Welcome to the Q3 2026 issue of Tula Quarterly.

Some things only become visible when you stay in one place long enough to notice them. A humpback photographed around Calvert Island more than a decade ago turns up there again. A faint trace of European green crab DNA surfaces in a sample of seawater collected for an entirely different purpose. An instrument rides the same column of water up and down, thousands of times, catching changes that occasional measurements would miss. This issue is about what comes from paying close attention to a place over time.

In this issue:

The Whales Who Know Fitz Hugh. A five-day survey documents 78 individual humpbacks along the Central Coast, including whales first photographed around Calvert Island more than a decade ago, adding to a growing picture of how individual humpbacks return to particular stretches of coast.

Before the Crabs Take Hold. European green crabs are appearing around Calvert Island in small numbers. Hakai and Heiltsuk are combining trapping, local knowledge and environmental DNA to understand an invasion while its signals are still faint.

Same Questions, New Ways. From a new landing craft to wave-powered Wirewalkers, Hakai's oceanography team is building a more flexible way to observe coastal waters, changing how often, where and at what scale long-standing questions can be asked.

Whether recognizing a returning whale, detecting a few molecules of crab DNA, or repeatedly tracing the same column of water, observations accumulated over time build a deeper knowledge of a coast and a better chance of recognizing when it changes.

From the water, Fitz Hugh Sound was foreign to Felicia Vachon. The humpbacks seemed to know it intimately.

Felicia, research coordinator with the Marine Education and Research Society (MERS), has spent most of her time with humpbacks around northeastern Vancouver Island. But during five days travelling the Central Coast this August, she watched animals behaving differently from the whales she knew farther south.

They disappeared on long, deep dives. Some rested quietly just beneath the surface during the day, their blows so faint they were difficult to see even in good conditions. Others gathered in large social groups. Near the mouth of Kwakshua Channel, Felicia and her colleagues watched about eight humpbacks socializing together, with another group of five nearby. In her work around northeastern Vancouver Island, Felicia had never seen such large groups socializing in daytime.

Over five days, the team documented 78 individual humpbacks, four of them first-year-calves, from Cape Caution to the mouth of Burke Channel, including nearshore on the west coast of Calvert Island. Fifty-eight of those, three of them calves, were encountered in Fitz Hugh Sound alone.

“It was almost impossible not to see a blow while we were on the water,” Felicia says.

Fitz Hugh has long been a data-deficient stretch of coast for humpback science, wedged between the range MERS regularly documents around northeastern Vancouver Island and the territory covered by colleagues at the North Coast Cetacean Society farther north. This August’s survey, one leg of MERS’s longer-running work on the Central Coast, was a chance to close part of that gap. What it found fits a larger pattern now emerging coastwide. A study MERS and partner organizations are wrapping up through the Canadian Pacific Humpback Collaboration is showing evidence that individual whales return to particular parts of the British Columbia coast year after year.

Each year, they migrate thousands of kilometres between feeding grounds in British Columbia and breeding areas in Hawaii, Mexico or Central America. Yet when they return north to feed, many appear remarkably faithful to particular stretches of coast.

For Jackie Hildering, education and communications director and co-founder of MERS, the logic is straightforward. After months away from their feeding grounds, humpbacks need to put on weight quickly. A whale that already knows where currents concentrate prey, how the bottom is shaped and which feeding strategies work in a particular place has an advantage over one starting from scratch. Or, as she puts it, if you need to get fat fast, you don’t waste time looking for a new restaurant.

A local way of being a whale

Fitz Hugh Sound is deep, and many of its humpbacks were making long dives. The team also watched whales bubble-net feeding close to shore, releasing curtains of bubbles underwater to concentrate small schooling fish before rising through them. Elsewhere they found bright pink whale feces at the surface, evidence that at least some of the animals had been eating krill.

Exactly what is happening beneath the surface isn’t yet clear. Five days provide a snapshot, not a complete picture. Jackie and Felicia can’t yet say whether some whales specialize in krill while others pursue schooling fish, whether individuals switch between the two, or how feeding changes through the seasons.

Humpbacks can learn feeding techniques from one another. In 2011, Jackie was on the water with photographer Tavish Campbell when a humpback named Conger did something unexpected: instead of lunging through a dense school of juvenile herring, he hung nearly motionless with his mouth open. The fish, held near the surface by common murres and rhinoceros auklets hunting from below, swam in. Conger closed his mouth.

MERS studied the feeding strategy and gave it a name: trap-feeding. More than 40 humpbacks are now known to use it, in waters from the Salish Sea to Haida Gwaii and Alaska. Group bubble-net feeding is also a learned behaviour.

Individual whales return to places they know, while their feeding techniques are shaped by the environment and prey they encounter there. They can also pick up successful strategies from other whales working the same waters.

“You get those little pockets of subculture along British Columbia,” Felicia says. Even after crossing an ocean, whales return to particular places where they know, as she puts it, “how to eat and how to feed.”

Fitz Hugh may be one of those places. Site fidelity is not necessarily permanent, however, and individual whales can change where they spend their time along the coast. Whatever this summer’s survey found is a snapshot, not a guarantee.

Calvert comes back

Among the whales Jackie and Felicia encountered was BCZ0006, known as Calvert.

His identification number gives some indication of how long people have been watching humpbacks on this coast: Calvert was the sixth whale with a mostly white tail entered in the British Columbia catalogue. His name comes from the markings on his fluke, which Christie McMillan and Erin Foster, who were documenting humpbacks for Hakai at the time, thought resembled the shape of Calvert Island. Data from Fisheries and Oceans Canada place Calvert in Fitz Hugh Sound as far back as 1998, with additional sightings in 2002 and 2003. This summer, there he was again.

Calvert wasn’t alone in being recognizable. Whiskers, BCZ0200, appeared on four of the survey’s five days. Her fluke carries a marking that resembles a cat’s face, and she looked so large this summer that Jackie and Felicia wondered whether she might be pregnant.

Another whale, Prop Scar, BCX0321, carries the marks of an earlier encounter with a boat: propeller scars down her side and a line consistent with a vessel’s skeg. This summer she had a calf beside her.

Beginning in 2014, Christie and Erin documented humpbacks around Calvert Island and Fitz Hugh Sound, which Christie remembers as a gap in what was then known about humpbacks along the coast. They wanted to know which whales were using the area and whether the same individuals returned between seasons and from one year to the next.

They soon began recognizing individuals. Some whales appeared winter after winter but not during summer, Christie recalls, while others returned in summer and disappeared in winter. The photographs gradually became a record of individual animals using the same stretch of coast at particular times of year.

More than a decade later, some of the same flukes are still turning up. Seven whales identified in the 2015 catalogue were encountered again during the 2026 survey: Prop Scar, Calvert, Christmastree Lights, Sorbet, Marble, White Lightning and Big Dipper. Two of them, Prop Scar and Marble, were seen this summer with calves.

Christie knows some of those flukes well enough that the recognition has outlasted her time working regularly in Fitz Hugh. A couple of years ago, nearly a decade after leaving the area, she caught a distant glimpse of a mostly white fluke while on the water with Jackie.

“I know that whale,” she remembers telling her. “It’s BCZ6.”

It was Calvert.

To Christie, the whales appearing across that long record are evidence of how specific their knowledge of the coast can be. “These are individuals who have figured this out,” she says. “These aren’t just random whales who happen to stumble there.”

Photographs accumulated over decades can show where individual whales return, which other whales they associate with, where injuries appear, how feeding behaviours spread and eventually how generations of whales use the coast. Scientists working collaboratively in British Columbia are now following some humpback family lines into their fourth generation, possibly their fifth.

A newer kind of record may be joining the photographs. During the Central Coast trip, Felicia and her colleagues collected 16 environmental DNA samples for a project led by University of Victoria doctoral student Amy Migneault: after a known whale dives and moves on, the team collects two litres of water from the patch of ocean it has just occupied and filters out the cells it left behind. The method already lets scientists determine a humpback’s sex reliably. Work is underway to see whether this method can also tell us more about an individual’s genetics. If it works, a whale’s passage through the water could hold invaluable information about population structure, alongside the fluke photographs that have carried this work for decades.

No reliable estimate exists for the number of humpbacks using the British Columbia coast. Nobody knows how long they live, or their typical age at first calving.

“There’s things we’re never going to know about humpbacks,” Jackie says.

Sharing the sound

Just days before the MERS team travelled north, on Sunday, August 9, a Fisheries and Oceans Canada Conservation and Protection vessel, a 10-metre rigid-hull inflatable, struck a humpback whale in Fitz Hugh Sound, leaving visible damage to its bow. Two fisheries officers aboard were injured; DFO has kept the extent of their injuries private, citing their health and safety. The whale involved has not been identified, and given how these encounters typically play out, it may never be.

Jackie and Felicia knew about the collision when they arrived, and watched for a newly injured whale during their survey. They didn’t document any humpbacks with new, visible, severe injuries.

That doesn’t establish what happened to the animal. A humpback struck by a vessel can suffer serious internal injuries without any obvious external wound. Jackie has seen it firsthand, in a whale whose only mark of a fatal, blunt-force impact turned up once the necropsy began. Nor can the absence of one whale tell scientists what happened the way it might for most killer whales, whose family groups are documented closely enough that a missing individual can be much stronger evidence that it has died. For humpbacks, without that same long-term family structure, it is often not possible to know that a whale is missing, or dead.

A humpback may disappear on a long dive and reappear somewhere a boater doesn’t expect. Socializing whales change direction unpredictably. A resting humpback can lie almost motionless immediately beneath the surface, its blow disappearing into wind and waves. Felicia watched whales doing exactly that in Fitz Hugh.

Even experience isn’t a guarantee against it: the vessel involved belonged to Fisheries and Oceans Canada, whose officers spend their careers on this water. In a MERS survey of 4,000 British Columbia boaters, 50 percent did not know the legal approach distances from whales, and 40 percent believed humpbacks fed in warm water, gaps that carry far greater risk for boaters who don’t understand the whales’ needs and behaviour, and the kind that led MERS to build its Whale-Safe Boating course, an online resource combining boater safety information with Marine Mammal Regulations and best practices.

“Accidents do happen and anybody can have the terrible misfortune of hitting a whale,” Jackie says. “So much can be achieved by understanding what the whales are doing.”

The irony is difficult to miss. The whales may know Fitz Hugh extraordinarily well. People are still learning how to share it with them.

For Felicia, that was perhaps the most striking thing about seeing Fitz Hugh Sound for the first time. The sound was new to her. To Calvert, Whiskers and the other humpbacks moving through its deep water, it was anything but.

For years, seawater has been collected from a monitoring station in Kwakshua Channel, the narrow waterway separating Calvert and Hecate Islands on British Columbia's Central Coast. The samples were part of a much larger effort to understand which fish were moving through coastal waters. Nobody collected them specifically to look for European green crabs.

Then people started wondering what else might be hiding in the water.

European green crabs have been moving through coastal British Columbia, establishing themselves in bays and estuaries where they can reach extraordinary densities. Finding them early presents an obvious problem: when there are only a few crabs scattered across kilometres of coastline, actually catching one can be remarkably difficult.

Environmental DNA (eDNA) offered another way to look.

Animals continuously shed tiny traces of themselves into their surroundings. Collect some water, extract the DNA it contains, and a sufficiently sensitive genetic test can reveal that a species has been somewhere nearby, leaving behind traces of its DNA, without anyone ever seeing it.

Matt Lemay and his colleagues at the Hakai Institute applied just such a test for European green crab. The idea was to see whether water already being collected through the Hakai Institute's Integrated Coastal Observatory could double as an early-warning system for the invasive species.

They started small. This was proof-of-concept work, not a coast-wide surveillance program.

From the long archive of samples collected at a station known as KC-10 in Kwakshua Channel, they tested three samples from July 2024.

Nothing.

They tested another three from August.

Nothing again.

The samples weren't analyzed for green crab when they were collected. Matt's team tested them later, as part of the same round of proof-of-concept work, the 2024 block alongside a second batch from early 2025: three samples from January, three from February, three from March. All three January samples came back positive for European green crab DNA. One of three from February was positive. In March, two of three were.

The quantities were extremely low, and the sample was small: six bottles negative, followed by nine, six of which were positive, but only at very low levels. They represented a tiny fraction of years of archived water nobody had thought to test.

The signal had been sitting in those bottles, unnoticed until someone thought to look for it.

The assay is designed specifically for European green crab and is sensitive to extremely small quantities of its DNA. A positive result provides strong evidence that green crab DNA is in the water. It could have been shed by an adult living nearby. It could have come from larvae drifting through the channel. And the absence of a signal didn't necessarily mean the absence of crabs either, particularly when their numbers were low.

There was another complication. The water from KC-10 was collected at the surface. European green crabs live on the bottom.

In other words, the team was using samples collected for an entirely different purpose to look for traces of an animal living in an entirely different part of the water column.

Matt has seen an early reading like this turn up somewhere green crab hadn't been confirmed before, elsewhere on the coast. His team's response, he says, is to retest before saying anything: "I was concerned early on … because I know they hadn't been known to be there yet."

Even once a signal holds up, he's careful about how much credit to give the tool on its own. A positive result can mean an established population, or it can mean larvae that drifted in from somewhere else and never settled. Confirmation, when it comes, tends to arrive independently, through someone eventually finding the animal itself.

"It was nice," Matt says of one such case, "because we were independently working on it. And then that validation came through."

Matt sees eDNA as a way to identify areas that warrant closer investigation than trapping crews could otherwise cover.

He describes the Kwakshua signal as a reason to treat the channel as "a good location for a follow-up survey." When trapping later confirmed crabs there, he calls it a validating case study, evidence the tool was working the way it should. Zach Monteith, who helped run the trapping, traces this year's survey to Heiltsuk's own effort to contain the spread of green crab in their territory, and to conversations about where coverage was most needed.

Those conversations helped narrow down where to look: habitats matching the mud flats and eelgrass beds green crabs prefer, in places close enough to the facilities at Hakai to reach and check regularly. Existing long-term monitoring sites in the area weren't quite the right fit. They hadn't been surveying as high up in the intertidal zone as green crabs tend to occupy, so even where the habitat overlapped, the sites were sampling too low to catch the small numbers of crabs now present.

A faint signal turned up first in the channel. When crews went looking there this summer, they found crabs.

Traps went into bays and inlets around Calvert Island. European green crabs appeared at sites scattered across the area, including Goose Grass Bay, Pruth Bay, Kiltik Cove, Sea Otter Inlet, and Kwakume Inlet.

At several locations, the catch amounted to a single crab. Goose Grass Bay produced more animals than anywhere else the crew sampled, a cumulative total of 13 crabs across two rounds of trapping, roughly 45 trap-days of effort, but even there the numbers were nothing like the dense populations found elsewhere on the Central Coast.

Zach and the Nearshore team think one possibility is that the Calvert Island region is seeing the front edge of the invasion as green crabs slowly expand into the area.

So far, the Nearshore team hasn't seen gravid females, large aggregations of newly settled crabs, or the dense populations that would indicate significant local reproduction. Many of the crabs appeared to the team to be roughly two or three years old, raising the possibility that a pulse of larvae arrived several years ago, carried in on currents or temperatures favourable enough to let them settle. But the age estimates are rough, and the team still doesn't know local growth rates or whether the crabs are reproducing locally.

The crabs being caught could represent the beginnings of something much larger, or conditions around this part of the coast might be slowing their establishment.

Diana Chan has seen what can happen when those numbers don't stay small.

European green crabs were first found in Heiltsuk territory in 2011, around Gale Creek, a large tidal lagoon. Heiltsuk Guardians began trapping and removing them as they were able, initially catching perhaps 10 or so crabs per trap.

For six or seven years, Diana says, the population remained relatively steady before increasing dramatically.

Today Gale Creek is the most heavily invaded area in Heiltsuk territory, and the difference can be seen in the sand.

On heavily affected beaches, Diana says, it has become extremely difficult, sometimes impossible, to find juvenile clams.

Science conducted with Heiltsuk and university partners, including teams at the University of Alberta, the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and the University of Guelph, has found that green crabs preferentially consume clams within a particular juvenile size range. Larger adult clams remain on some of those beaches, but the younger generation that would eventually replace them is disappearing.

"There's lots of adults now," Diana says, "but once they age out naturally, we're concerned that the populations won't be able to replenish themselves unless we are able to get a handle on the green crabs."

For Heiltsuk, that isn't an abstract ecological change. Clams are food, and they carry commercial value. Diana also worries about the potential for green crabs to damage eelgrass beds, although she says Heiltsuk haven't yet observed extensive damage of that kind locally.

Catching green crabs early, Diana says, is "the most important thing." At some sites in Heiltsuk territory, Guardians found small numbers of crabs, trapped intensively, and then stopped catching them.

They aren't declaring victory. Larvae can arrive again and the sites continue to be monitored. But the apparent success suggests that removing a population while it is still small may be possible.

At one beach within Gale Creek, Heiltsuk crews spent months using multiple boats every day to drive green crab numbers down. Gale Creek contains more than 20 beaches.

"If you're able to catch them early," Diana says, "that's huge."

A green crab trap is simple enough: bait it with herring, put it in suitable habitat, and come back. But traps generally need to be checked within 24 hours, both to release by-catch and because their effectiveness declines over time.

For this survey, crews used 10 traps at each site, distributed across the high intertidal, low intertidal, and shallow subtidal. Crews need boats, fuel, bait, people, and time. And even then, a trap can tell you there are no crabs inside it, not necessarily that there are no crabs nearby.

Diana has seen beaches where traps caught nothing and people later spotted green crabs walking in the intertidal.

A crew from Hakai had an even more direct demonstration.

They set traps and caught nothing.

Then a green crab crawled over someone's foot.

"We wouldn't use eDNA alone to say it's in a new area," Matt says. "But it provides … good advice on where to look."

For Diana, the appeal is practical. Trapping limits how many places a crew can investigate in a day. If eDNA could rapidly screen a larger number of sites and identify the ones most likely to contain green crabs, crews could concentrate their traps where they matter most.

"That would be a really very valuable tool to have," she says.

Heiltsuk have shared traps with the Hakai Institute along with years of practical experience about where to put them. Clam beds and eelgrass habitat are obvious places to investigate, and Diana says trapping in the intertidal has generally been most successful.

The team at Hakai, meanwhile, has a permanent presence around Calvert Island, an area that is a long boat run from Bella Bella and difficult for Heiltsuk crews to monitor as frequently as they would like.

"Having that concerted effort this summer has been really valuable," Diana says, "especially since it has resulted in those detections."

The partnership works differently with eDNA. The Hakai Institute brings expertise in developing the genetic tools, sampling resources, and laboratory analysis. Heiltsuk crews can collect samples across their territory and send them to the Hakai Institute for processing. Heiltsuk also bring local knowledge about where green crabs are appearing, where trapping should be prioritized, and connections to a broader network of science partnerships.

The aim, Diana says, is for those different streams of information to feed into an overall Heiltsuk plan for dealing with green crab across the territory.

The geography makes that coordination increasingly important. This year, new detections have appeared in places where green crabs hadn't previously been found. In the Koeye estuary, a trap placed below the narrows for the first time caught a single green crab high in the intertidal.

It isn't a single line moving steadily north. The invasion is patchy, established in some places for over a decade, barely present in others separated by only a few dozen kilometres of coastline. That's part of why Diana no longer describes Heiltsuk territory simply as the invasion's edge.

"We were that leading edge," she says. "And then now they've shot past us."

Green crabs are now causing problems as far north as Alaska.

"I think we're surrounded."

The small numbers around Calvert Island give the Hakai Institute and its partners a chance to study green crab while the animals are still difficult to find.

Matt and the Nearshore team are testing several methods side by side: collecting sediment, deploying passive eDNA samplers closer to the bottom, taking subtidal water samples, and setting light traps to see which is most effective at detecting green crabs.

In a parallel, controlled experiment, the team is comparing the strength of the sediment eDNA signal across enclosures holding no, low, medium, and high densities of green crabs, fixing the crab count so they can test, cleanly, whether a stronger signal reliably lines up with a higher crab density. If it does, the tool could eventually let a crew screen dozens of beaches in a day and send traps only where the reading says to look, rather than trapping 20 sites for a week to learn what a morning of sampling might tell them just as well.

There is also an archive waiting to be explored. Monthly samples from KC-10 stretch back years, but only a small fraction have been tested for European green crab. Matt would like to process the full sequence from roughly 2019 through 2026.

Hidden in those bottles could be a genetic history of the invasion, showing when the signal first appeared and whether it strengthened, fluctuated, or followed no clear pattern at all.

The Integrated Coastal Observatory project that originally collected the samples has since wound down, but the archived samples remain and can now be compared with physical crab detections.

At Gale Creek, Heiltsuk are working to drive down a large established population and reduce the possibility that the lagoon becomes a source of larvae spreading elsewhere. At newer sites, the objective is to find green crabs quickly and remove them before they get the same opportunity. Around Calvert Island, nobody yet knows where the crabs sit along that trajectory.

For now, the crabs remain sparse enough that finding them is difficult. A trap can come back empty even when a crab is close enough to crawl across someone's boot. The genetic evidence can be so faint that it amounts to a few molecules in a bottle of seawater collected for an entirely different reason, tested only because someone eventually wondered what else might be in it.

Heiltsuk's experience suggests that faint signals are worth paying attention to.

By the time the evidence becomes obvious, the problem may be much harder to solve.

To learn more about the green crab invasion in the northeast Pacific, watch the Hakai Institute Nature Files video The Case of the Colonizing Crabs, the Long Story Shorts video How Do Invasive Species Take Over?, and read the earlier Hakai story Primed to Detect the Green Crab Invasion.

Until the anchors began sliding off the pallet, the crew could still have called the whole thing off. Months of preparation had led to this moment, followed by most of a day getting everything into position.

More than 700 metres of mooring line stretched ahead of the Hakai Institute’s new landing craft. At the far end floated Bute Inlet Ocean Observing Station (BIOOS), a large ocean-observing platform they had towed into Bute Inlet that morning. Beneath them was more than 600 metres of water.

If something didn’t look right, they could still reverse the operation. Haul the line back in. Reconnect the buoy to the Hakai Explorer. Tow it somewhere safe and try again another day.

“Once the anchor is sliding off the pallet into the sea,” says Chris MacKenzie, part of the Hakai team handling the deployment, “that’s it.”

The crew had deliberately carried the anchors past the point on the seafloor where they wanted them to land. A deep-water mooring does not simply fall straight down. As the anchors descend, the long line and the buoy at the surface pull against one another, swinging the system back through the water. Based on calculations and experience from earlier deployments, the crew had chosen a drop point roughly 200 metres beyond their target.

Now there was nothing left to do but let it fall.

Once the mooring had settled, the crew acoustically ranged on the releases. Those measurements were later used to calculate where the mooring had landed.

About 30 metres from the target.

“That’s really good,” Chris says.

The previous deployment of the same platform, using a chartered vessel, had landed about 350 metres from where the team intended. This time, the team deploying the equipment knew the boat, knew the mooring, and managed the deployment themselves from beginning to end.

Hakai has spent years building the capacity, equipment, and systems that made that possible.

BIOOS itself reflects the way Hakai used to approach this work.

The platform is old, large, and far heavier than the instruments it carries require. When the team recovered it from Bute for servicing, they discovered waterlogged foam and deteriorating fibreglass inside the float. They cut into it, removed the wet material, and rebuilt sections with new foam, glass, and epoxy.

They redesigned and replaced the bridle connecting the platform to its mooring. They designed and fabricated instrument mounts. They isolated parts of the tower to reduce the galvanic corrosion that can be particularly aggressive in coastal fjords. They also reworked the bottom of the mooring, replacing the heavy train wheels used as deadweight with lighter pyramid anchors and ground chain that gain some of their holding power from the seabed itself.

The work took about a month.

Then they had to get the thing back into Bute Inlet.

BIOOS is too large to fit aboard Hakai’s landing craft, so early on deployment morning it was put into the water at Heriot Bay on Quadra Island and attached to the Hakai Explorer, a converted water taxi.

They left at about 5:00 a.m. At about seven kilometres per hour, the tow took roughly eight hours.

Someone had to watch BIOOS the entire way. If the Explorer hit a patch of current at the wrong speed, the big platform could begin leaning alarmingly far over. The crew rotated through two-hour watches.

They also brought a barbecue.

“I made sausage and eggers,” Chris says.

By early afternoon, the Explorer had reached the deployment area in Bute Inlet. The landing craft came alongside, took over the mooring, and the crew began the deployment that would eventually put the anchors within 30 metres of where they wanted them.

For all its size and awkwardness, BIOOS works. It is providing the observations it was put there to collect.

But Chris sees the platform as a product of a particular stage in Hakai’s development.

“That’s with our old strategy,” he says. “Just take what you can get and then make it work.”

Then he describes what he thinks should replace that approach.

“Let’s get things that we can work with.”

He is talking about a buoy, but the distinction reaches much further.

For much of Hakai’s ocean-observing history, the Institute adapted equipment, vessels, and methods that already existed, some of them originally built for very different environments or scales of operation. The large buoy in Kwakshua Channel near Calvert Island is one example. It has produced an important long-term record, but servicing a system of that size requires a large vessel and all the logistics that come with one.

Wiley Evans, who leads Hakai’s oceanography team, began pushing toward systems better matched to those environments. Not smaller simply for the sake of being smaller, but fit for purpose.

The questions were not new: what is happening inside fjords and channels, how conditions change through the water column, and how those changes play out over days, seasons, and years. What was changing was the way Hakai could go about observing them.

“We’re always trying to figure out new ways of approaching that same problem,” says Eric Peterson, cofounder of the Hakai Institute.

A Boat That Keeps Changing

For years, the Hakai Explorer was one of the most useful boats in the Hakai fleet.

It was also, increasingly, the wrong tool.

When the team first began working with a Wirewalker, an ingenious autonomous profiling instrument made by Del Mar Oceanographic, the Explorer was still the boat they used to service it.

The boat had a small davit capable of lifting some lightweight equipment, but not always raising it high enough to clear the side. So they would use a portable winch above the cabin, which someone had to operate from the roof.

Eventually, after years of fatigue, the davit broke.

“It just wasn’t designed to do that,” Chris says.

The landing craft was built around the jobs Hakai was increasingly asking its boats to perform. It has a bow ramp, a large hydraulic crane, and a capstan for hauling heavy lines. Just as importantly, its deck was designed to be reconfigured.

Threaded attachment points spaced in a grid pattern on the deck allow equipment to be bolted down wherever the crew needs it. After they started using the boat, Jon Bergshoeff, Chris, and the rest of the team began adding their own pieces.

They fabricated stands that hold reels of mooring line, so hundreds of metres of rope can feed directly from interchangeable spools instead of being laid across the deck in figure-eights.

They made heavy removable cleats that can be positioned on the deck where a particular operation needs them.

They added a smooth pipe across the bow so the Wirewalker’s fragile inductive cable can enter and leave the water without bending too sharply.

The capstan, which seemed like a minor feature when the boat was being designed, has become central to how they work.

Each deployment changes the next one.

“You try once and you find out what you did wrong and try again,” says Wayne Jacob, who helped develop the vessel.

The boat that arrived from the builder was only the starting point.

Catching a Wirewalker

The instrument spends its life travelling up and down a 250-metre section of cable beneath a surface float.

That motion is not powered internally.

Instead, it is powered by the motion of the waves.

As the surface float moves, a mechanism ratchets the instrument downward along the line. When it reaches the bottom of its travel, the mechanism disengages and the buoyant instrument rises back toward the surface before beginning again.

In favourable conditions, it can complete a profile through the water roughly every half hour.

Since February, the Bute Wirewalker has completed thousands of those profiles, travelling hundreds of vertical kilometres and generating tens of millions of rows of observations.

The sensors still rely on batteries, and every several weeks those batteries need changing. One way to service the instrument would be to trigger the acoustic releases on the seabed and recover the entire mooring: hundreds of metres of line, heavy downweights, and all the hardware connecting it to the bottom.

Jon wondered whether they could leave all of that where it was and simply catch the Wirewalker.

There was a problem.

The instrument does not normally stay at the surface. When it reaches the top of its cycle, a mechanical trigger sends it downward again. A crew arriving by boat would somehow have to intercept it during the brief period when it was floating.

Jon’s solution is elegantly simple.

He took a shrimp float, cut it in half lengthwise, and made it so it could clip around the Wirewalker’s line. He calls it the “Bumper Guard.”

The crew approaches the Wirewalker’s surface float, lifts it with the crane, and clips the Bumper Guard around the line.

When the instrument next rises, the float physically prevents the trigger from being depressed.

The Wirewalker reaches the surface and stops.

The crew can then secure the Wirewalker to the underside of the float with a short length of rope and lift both onto the deck as one package. They swap the deployed Wirewalker for the second instrument, put everything back into the water, and remove the Bumper Guard.

The mooring never has to leave the seabed.

Even that process has evolved.

The irony of servicing a wave-powered instrument is that crane work on the landing craft requires calm water. Sometimes the conditions are perfect for the boat and terrible for the Wirewalker: without waves, it does not move enough to complete its cycle and return to the surface.

At first, the crew drove the boat around to make wake.

More recently, they have used the crane to raise and lower the float, simulating the wave action that drives the instrument down the wire.

On a good day, the entire swap takes about an hour, and the mooring keeps producing an almost continuous record.

Nobody designed the boat, the Wirewalker, or the mooring with that exact procedure in mind. The crew figured it out by working with all three.

Before the Boat Leaves

The flexibility on the water depends on a lot of preparation beforehand.

Before a deployment, the crew may spend days or weeks in the shop preparing. Sensors are checked. Batteries changed. Hardware assembled. Voltages recorded. Equipment lists run down to individual shackles. The operation is talked through before anyone leaves the dock.

“We can sort of visualize the problem and discuss it,” Chris says, “before we’re even out in the field.”

On the landing craft, roles are broad enough to overlap. A three-person crew typically includes a captain, crane operator, and deck lead, but people rotate through those jobs. Beforehand, the same people may have been working together on the instruments in the shop.

Sam Albers, who works on the software side of Hakai’s ocean-observing program, describes the Institute as having “a bunch of curious people” who do not simply stay in their lanes.

Eric sees the same quality across Hakai. The people doing this work, he says, “embrace change, they embrace new ways of doing things, and really look for innovative ways of doing things.”

Chris adds an important qualification.

“I always say you have to work to your strengths.”

The value is not that everyone can do everything.

It is that enough knowledge overlaps for a small group to understand the whole operation, while still knowing who should be doing what when something matters.

Much of what makes the crew efficient in the field happens long before the boat leaves. By the time they get there, many of the decisions have already been thought through.

Following the Observations Home

The same principle continues after the instrument comes out of the water.

A Wirewalker can generate vastly more observations than a conventional profiling instrument lowered repeatedly over the side of a boat. Then all of that data has to go somewhere.

Sam works on the systems that turn those observations into usable data.

While the Wirewalker is deployed, a smaller stream of information travels by satellite, telling the team whether the instrument is operating normally and whether the batteries are healthy.

The full-resolution record stays aboard until the instrument is serviced. Once recovered, the data enters a processing system Hakai had already built for oceanographic profiles.

The Wirewalker is a very different machine from a conventional instrument lowered from a boat. But both produce the same fundamental thing: a vertical profile through the water.

Hakai’s digital infrastructure was already built to process and store water-column profile data, regardless of which instrument collected it.

There is a similar flexibility on the landing craft. Its deck allows equipment to be added or rearranged without rebuilding the boat around each instrument.

And both still depend on people.

Before the data is considered ready for analysis, it still goes through human quality control. Automated checks can flag unusual values, but someone has to decide whether they reflect a sensor problem or a real change in ocean conditions.

The machines make it possible to observe more.

They do not remove the need to understand what has been observed.

Fit for Purpose

None of this makes large vessels obsolete.

The landing craft has some limitations. Crane work can quickly become unstable as waves build, and some equipment is simply too heavy. Hakai still relies on larger vessels for jobs that require that capacity.

The crew is also quick to point out how young the capability still is. They have been operating the landing craft this way for about a year and a half, largely in sheltered conditions.

“It’s all trade-offs,” Chris says.

BIOOS makes that transition particularly visible.

The platform now floating in Bute Inlet works because a crew spent a month rebuilding it, then spent eight hours towing it into the inlet, then used a new boat and a growing base of experience to put its anchors within about 30 metres of where they wanted them.

The next version of this system does not have to look like BIOOS or be deployed the same way.

Ask Wiley Evans whether all these new tools have fundamentally changed the questions Hakai is asking of the coastal ocean, and his answer is more nuanced.

“The base-level questions haven’t changed much,” he says. “Is the ocean changing? Why, how much, and where are the signals largest or smallest?”

What has changed is the scale at which those questions can be asked. Platforms such as the Wirewalker and ocean gliders can reveal changes over shorter periods and smaller areas than less frequent conventional sampling could resolve.

Wiley calls this “ocean weather”: the conditions marine life experiences over short periods, which can help set the stage for what happens over the coming months. Some of those signals were once too poorly resolved to distinguish from noise. Now they can be observed and their effects investigated.

The ocean still has to be observed over years. Temperature, oxygen, carbon, fresh water, and circulation do not become easier to understand because the instruments become smaller.

What has changed is Hakai’s ability to decide how to observe.

A boat can be modified. A servicing method can be invented. A mooring can be redesigned. A new instrument can be folded into an existing data system.

The questions may be much the same. The ways Hakai can approach them keep evolving.

On August 9, 2026, Zach Monteith and the rest of the Hakai Institute's Nearshore team were in the lab, gearing up for a day that was supposed to include dive work and checking green crab traps, when a pan-pan crackled over the marine radio. It was broken up, but two words came through clearly: whale collision.

The caller, a Fisheries and Oceans Canada vessel out in Fitz Hugh Sound, reported taking on water, one person injured aboard, and that he was heading for shore. The Canadian Coast Guard put out a relay, asking anyone nearby to help.

The team could hear both sides of the radio exchange, which told them the vessel in trouble was close. They pulled the coordinates: about 45 minutes away if they left the dock right then. They dropped the day's plans and went.

By the time they arrived, they were second on scene. A fishing boat had gotten there first, and someone aboard was already giving first aid. The stricken vessel was a rigid-hull inflatable (RIB) with twin 300-horsepower engines and a small cabin. One crew member had been injured in the collision; the other was unhurt. Exactly what happened to the hull is less clear. The first radio call reported the boat taking on water; a later one said the hull was dry.

With the injured man already being cared for and the boat holding steady, the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre (JRCC) asked the team to stand by as an escort while a coast guard RIB and lifeboat came in from farther away.

Neither the fisheries vessel nor the fishing boat that reached it first was broadcasting on the system that lets boats see each other's live position on a screen (AIS). So the coast guard units were working off the vessel's last known coordinates, even as it continued to move. Zach was watching his own AIS screen as the boat headed up Fitz Hugh when he saw the responding RIB's track stretch clean across the display at 81 kilometers an hour, bearing down on a spot the vessel had long since left. He radioed in to redirect it. At that speed, Zach reckoned the RIB could have been off Cape Caution within another half hour. Twenty minutes later, the same thing happened with the lifeboat, and he radioed again.

The team stayed on as escort for about an hour, until the coast guard boats caught up near Nalau Island and JRCC released them.

Zach says this isn't the first call for help the team has responded to. Asked why Hakai ends up useful in moments like this, he says: “We were just in the right place. Having people that are there on the water, familiar with the boats, competent operators, ready to go without too much thought about it. It didn't take too much to reflect, can I go there? Is it safe? Is the boat capable? It was an easy one to respond to, from our angle.”

Hakai Institute cofounder Eric Peterson says that presence continues year-round. “Later in the year, when the tourists and meeting attendees have all gone home, Hakai continues as a year-round working facility,” he says. “We continue to be one of the few places on this remote coast where the lights are on year-round. We remain ready to provide whatever support we can to travelers in need and to address emergencies as they arise, working with the Coast Guard, RCMP, BC Parks Rangers, and First Nations Guardians.”

This summer, a new sign went up beside the entrance at 1002 Wharf Street: the Hakai Institute, in the familiar red letters, mounted where anyone walking the Inner Harbour can see it.

Long before there was a building at 1002 Wharf Street, there was a coastline. The harbour sits within the traditional territory of the Lekwungen people, who harvested camas bulbs and seafood along a shoreline dotted with sites of cultural and spiritual significance. That relationship with the water changed abruptly in 1843, when the Hudson's Bay Company arrived and Fort Victoria went up as the company's main depot west of the Rockies. Fifteen years later, the discovery of gold on the Fraser River sent as many as 30,000 miners flooding through the harbour, the first of several rushes that would keep Victoria's waterfront busy through the mid-1860s. By the late 1800s, the harbour had become the off-season home of the Pacific fur sealing fleet, as many as 100 schooners tied up along the same shore.

It was into this working harbour, in 1874, that the federal government built a customs house. The Old Victoria Custom House was constructed in 1874–75, only a few years after British Columbia joined Confederation, to a design by T. S. Scott, Canada's first chief architect of public works. It was built in the Second Empire style then favoured for new federal buildings: three storeys of brick, painted a dusty rose with cream trim, on a high stone foundation, a steep mansard roof, hooded dormers, stone quoins at the corners. A lower floor served as a receiving warehouse, offices occupied the floors above, and a rooftop viewing platform gave officials a clear view of the harbour and its traffic.

That waterfront position wasn't incidental. The lot had been reserved decades earlier by the Hudson's Bay Company for public purposes, and passed to the new Dominion government after Confederation. A local newspaper account from 1873, while the building was still being planned, noted approvingly that the site "has a water frontage, which will be found useful as a landing."

The building housed three federal departments: Customs, Inland Revenue, and Marine and Fisheries. Ships arriving in what was then British Columbia's leading commercial port were logged and duties collected on the main floor, in a Long Room whose five windows looked straight out over the harbour. When gold was discovered in the Klondike in 1897, prospectors rushed to Victoria and lined up by the hundreds at the Custom House, spilling out along Wharf Street, waiting for a mining licence, a scene captured in a photograph from February 1898 that still survives in the British Library's collection.

Its purpose kept shifting after that. Customs operations moved elsewhere in 1899, and the building settled into a slower life as offices for various federal departments, including, for a time, the harbour master. In the 1940s it briefly served as a naval mess, renamed the Marine Building. Then, in 1952, its interior was substantially renovated to house a new tenant: HMCS Malahat, a Royal Canadian Navy reserve division. The building took on the name it's still sometimes known by today, the Malahat Building, and remained a naval facility for roughly the next decade, before returning to civilian office use.

The harbour outside its windows was changing too. By the early 1900s, the working waterfront of warehouses and sealing schooners had begun giving way to steamships, ferries, and floatplanes, and eventually to the condos and hotels that line much of the Inner Harbour today.

In 1987, long after the navy had gone, the Old Victoria Custom House was designated a National Historic Site of Canada, recognized both for its connection to the era when Victoria was the dominant commercial centre on Canada's Pacific coast, and as one of the country's rare surviving examples of a 19th-century federal building in the Second Empire style.

In the early days of Hakai Magazine, around 2014, Tula Foundation founder Eric Peterson simply wanted an office in Victoria, and left the search to colleagues Jude Isabella and Dave Garrison. They came back with a suggestion: basement and attic space in an older downtown building. The price was right, so Eric said yes without asking many questions, including, as it turned out, the address. "I thought no more about it," he says.

It was a month or so later, on a visit to Victoria, that he finally asked where the office actually was. "I was astounded to find that the building was HMCS Malahat, aka the Customs House," Eric says. "I was thrilled at the location." The discovery wasn't entirely a surprise to him. In the late 1950s and 1960s, his father ran an architecture firm in that part of town, later moving it to nearby Langley Street, and as kids, waiting for rides home from the movies or the ice rink, Eric and his siblings used to hang around a harbour that looked nothing like today's polished waterfront.

That first Hakai office was a modest fit. The organization shared the building with a law firm occupying the middle floors, and the basement and attic space needed considerable work before it was usable. That arrangement held until late 2023, when Hakai moved up into the middle floors and the law firm left the building for good. Hakai gave up the attic around the same time; a whale watching company, Prince of Whales, moved in instead. Hakai kept part of the basement, which today serves mainly as meeting space, though Hakai's own archaeology lab still works out of it. By the time Hakai moved into the middle floors, much of the renovation there was already complete, and Eric describes that walk-through in far warmer terms than the first. An open house on March 23, 2024, marked the space's official opening.

"Happy coincidence," Eric says of the building's history, "but the history of the place is a huge asset to us now."

The sign says Hakai. The building behind it has been looking toward the sea for 150 years.