“Thar She Blows!”

Desperate efforts to save the whales – and the Chinook salmon on which they depend – risk fishing communities losing a way of life

Days before the start of the summer fishing season, when guides and outfitters on Canada’s west coast gamble their financial prospects for the year, fishing lodge owner Ryan Chamberland received devastating news.

The coastal waters of Vancouver Island, which he and four generations of his family had fished for salmon, would be out of bounds. The unexpected closure was part of a desperate effort by the Canadian government to save an endangered population of killer whales….
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Gov. Jay Inslee’s task force on southern resident orca recovery released its first recommendations Friday to help Puget Sound’s orcas, on the brink of extinction.

Task-force members said at a news conference at the Seattle Aquarium that bold action is needed to save the critically endangered population of killer whales from extinction. Only 74 southern resident orcas remain.

The recommendations will depend on significant new funding from the state Legislature as well as new legislation to take effect, so the wish list is a long way from becoming reality for the whales.

Among the biggest changes called for is a 3- to 5-year moratorium on whale watching by any boat of the southern residents, to provide quieter waters for them.

Some of the most controversial issues considered by the task force were put off, including breaching of the Lower Snake River dams….
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The southern residents are struggling to survive amid waters influenced by more than 6 million people, between Vancouver and Seattle, with pollution, habitat degradation and fishery declines.

Yet just to the north, the orca population has more than doubled to 309 whales since scientists started counting them in 1974, and has been growing ever since, at 2.2 percent per year on average.

For scientists seeking to better understand the southern residents’ troubles, the northern residents are like a control group, said Sheila Thornton, chief killer-whale biologist for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

"Their environment has changed so quickly, over just two generations," Thornton said of the southern residents. "To keep up with these changes is almost an impossible task. How do they survive in the environment we have created for them?"…
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Sounds from another world. Underwater footage and awe-inspiring first-hand accounts of divers who are swimming with sperm whales that are trying to communicate. From author James Nestor’s 2014 talk at The Interval at Long Now.

“Humanity and the Deep Ocean” from October 2014, one in an ongoing series of long-term thinking lectures: Conversations at The Interval in San Francisco….
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In a study published last month in the journal Endangered Species Research, a team of South American marine ecologists and biologists analyzed images of flukes captured in the region from 1986 to 2015. These pictures accounted for a sample of 2,909 adult humpback whales and 133 calves from five breeding zones and two seasonal feeding locations. The team selected images showing flukes fully in focus so that rake marks could be distinctly attributed to killer whales, narrowing their data to identify 361 individuals with visible rake marks on their flukes. Humpback whales typically breed along the coastlines from Costa Rica to northern Peru. Once their calves are a few months old, they begin traveling southward toward popular feeding areas in the Magellan Straits near southern Chile and the Gerlache Strait in the western Antarctic Peninsula.

"Everyone believes [orcas] are confined to high latitudes but that’s not true," says Guzman. "We don’t have much information for the South Pacific population. What we have is more and more reports around the region in tropical and temperate areas that there are more sightings, but that might not be enough [to say the orca population is growing.]"

What the researchers do know is that humpbacks in the region have steadily recovered from centuries of intense whaling. In the 20th century alone, the whaling industry wiped out an estimated 2.9 million large whales. After a moratorium on whaling was put in place in 1985, humpbacks recovered so spectacularly that some call the gentle giants conservation’s "poster child." Today, nine of 14 populations worldwide no longer require protection under the Endanger Species Act, but remain protected under other federal regulations like the Marine Mammal Protection Act….
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Only recently have scientists discovered that baleen, keratin plates that grow from the upper jaws of filter-feeding whales, captures biochemical data as it grows continuously throughout the whale’s life. Like reading an ice core, analyzing Eg2301’s baleen from end to end provides a chronicle of changes in hormones and stable isotopes-chemical markers that offer clues to her health, travels, and meals; whether she gave birth; what stressed her out and when; and what ultimately killed her.

Eg2301 died in 2005, but it took years for scientists to validate and share the hormone-measuring method that has now enabled this tale to be told. Working in her Boston lab, Lysiak drilled samples from the dried baleen, which, she says, had been "transformed by a lot of Herbal Essences shampoo from a smelly thing into a long, shiny, beautiful triangle of data." She and her colleagues analyzed how the concentrations of steroid and thyroid hormones and stable isotopes changed throughout the last eight years of the whale’s life.

Alex Werth, a biologist at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia who was not involved in the study, says the advent of baleen analysis is "a clever and welcome means of learning about a poorly understood animal, including our impact on its survival."

In Eg2301’s baleen, that impact shows up as soaring stress hormones-specifically corticosterone-during her dooming entanglement. Mouth agape to…
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A group of prominent whale and dolphin biologists from across the globe have sent a letter urging a Russian federal agency to stop capturing free-ranging orcas in the Sea of Okhotsk for sale to marine parks overseas.

In a letter delivered last Monday to the Far East office of the Russian Federal Service for Overseeing Natural Resources, 25 scientists noted that such captures are highly stressful to free-ranging orcas, leading to injuries, deaths, fractured social networks within pods and potential long-term population declines.

According to recent media reports, Russian prosecutors are now investigating why 90 belugas and 11 orcas have been confined since the summer to tiny enclosures, dubbed "whale jails” by local activists, off Russia’s Pacific coast in the city of Nakhodka near Vladivostok. It is believed that many of the belugas and all of the orcas will be sold to Chinese aquariums. Some of the belugas may go to Russian aquariums….
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Whales are big, whales are long-lived, and whales have paddle-shaped flippers instead of dexterous hands. These three traits inexorably lead to a fourth: Over time, whales accumulate a lot of earwax.

Whale earwax forms like yours does: A gland secretes oily gunk into the ear canal, which hardens and accumulates into a solid, tapering plug. In the largest whales, like blues, a plug can grow up to 10 inches long, and looks like a cross between a goat’s horn and the world’s nastiest candle. Fin whale wax is firmer than blue whale wax, bowhead whale wax is softer and almost liquid, and sei whale wax is dark and brittle. But regardless of size or texture, these plugs are all surprisingly informative….
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