It’s probably not much of a limb to go out on, but I’m pretty sure there is a clear majority and mandate by Americans to halt whaling, let alone lend official support and endorse such actions by other nations.  And I think I may enter the frigid waters and tackle our own policies regarding indigenous harvesting in another setting.  For now, I like to imagine that the approval rating for whaling is somewhere in the single digit range, but after reality sets in I doubt we have yet to reach the incredible homogeneity that the populace of Australia has been demonstrating.  As reported by Time, ” A national poll conducted in January [2010], 94% of Australians said they were against whaling.”

As for the U.S., the numbers I have on hand are two decades old, but it does speak to our disdain for a practice that seems only fitting for 160 year old novels and blurry monochromatic photos adorning museum walls. The poll found that 83 percent of American voters oppose killing whales, 61% “strongly” oppose whaling, 82 percent want government officials to speak out publicly against commercial whaling, and 55% believe the U.S. government should impose limited trade sanctions banning the import of seafood products from countries that continue whaling (Schoen & Berland Associates 1999).

Now that a new proposal to lift the ban on commercial whaling is making headlines, I am wondering if the voices of the American people are simply being ignored…again.  And I think there really might be a disconnect between governments, the International Whaling Commission, and the people when it comes to this particular issue.  WHALES ARE NOT ANIMALS.  And I think most of us inherently understand this ideology and have a connection to cetaceans that far surpasses something that can simply be chalked up to the love for a high profile, charismatic species.

So for those wondering what whales are if not simply animals, the answer is a BEING.  We are human beings and they are whale beings; it’s an existential connection based on mutual respect, based on intelligence, and based on the fact that we see us in them.  Yet it is so much more than mere anthropomorphism as I/we embrace them as colleagues in life.  Thus, many of us perceive whaling as an antiquated notion, whether or not done under the guise of scientific permits.

Now that we have established a background, it’s time to circle back to the proposal to end a ban on whaling.  In March 2010, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) produced a draft proposal to address:

…the problems within the Convention; conservation and sustainability; healthy whale populations; exploitation and protection; whaling under special permit (‘scientific whaling’); small type coastal whaling; benefits for developing countries; monitoring and accountability; sanctuaries; the commercial whaling moratorium; an interim period; governance mechanisms of the IWC; animal welfare; aboriginal subsistence whaling; international trade; reservations and objections; whale watching; bycatch and human impacts; small cetaceans; an acceptable “Package”.

Addressing problems is always a good thing, right?  Well, after waving away the smoke we find that the proposal not only recommends whaling for members of the IWC who are currently killing whales to legally do so for the next 10 years, but that the Obama Administration is backing the plan (Which by the way was announced in a press release on Earth Day 2010).  Additionally, the key is an “acceptable package,” which can be argued as strictly no whaling,  and is currently tied to the fact “that whaling catch limits are largely still to be determined.”  It is because of this ambiguity in the draft proposal that the International Fund for the Welfare of Animals (IFAW) is looking for support and involvement. 

“The plan can mean not only reversing the current ban on whale hunting by Norway, Iceland, and Japan for the next ten years, but will allow whaling in the internationally recognized whale sanctuary around Antarctica.” IFAW 2010

 Thus, I caught up with Chris Cutter, IFAW spokesperson, to find out a little bit more about this developing situation as they fight to protect a species in which we have so much in common.

Thriving Oceans:  What is your main concern with the new proposal and the backing by the current Administration?

Chris Cutter: Our main issue is that the administration is saying definitively that this deal would save X numbers of whales. The issue is that the current proposal has “draft” numbers in it.

 You could take the administration at face value and say the “intention” is to reduce the numbers of whales killed, but it’s inaccurate to say that the proposal would save X amount of whales without any hard figures to back that up.

Thriving Oceans:  Are we potentially jumping the gun by criticizing a draft proposal?

Chris Cutter:You could flip that around and say it’s inaccurate for IFAW and other NGOs to criticize the plan for the same reasons. Without any numbers it is impossible to assess. Suffice it to say, given the history of the negotiations to date, the structure of the proposal itself, and the fact that all of the conservation benefits are based on dubious science, we’re skeptical.

 Thriving Oceans:  So we’re potentially hearing some environmental pandering as the Administration is claiming whales are going to be saved?

Chris Cutter:  The problem is that there will be hard numbers in the proposal when it is voted on next month. Until those numbers are written in ink, not pencil, no one should be talking about future numbers of whales killed or saved.

It is up to us to lead the effort in protecting these animals.

To learn about how you can get involved, please visit IFAW on Facebook or visit www.IFAW.org.

Spyhop – For more of the funniest videos, click here

It’s not rocket science!  When the vocalizations of an animal experience a world-wide decline one of the most obvious answers is a population decline…or is it?  Well, the answers definitely don’t fall within the territory of rocketry but are more suited for marine biology.  And researchers are beginning to wonder if the decline in the pitch of Blue whale songs is actually a signal of good things to come.  According to the Scripps Institute of Oceanography:

The sound level of songs blue whales sing across the vast expanses of the ocean to attract potential mates has been steadily creeping downward for the past few decades, and a scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and his colleagues believe the trend may be good news for the population of the endangered marine mammal.

Mark McDonald of WhaleAcoustics in Bellvue, Colo., along with John Hildebrand of Scripps Oceanography and Sarah Mesnick of NOAA Fisheries Southwest Fisheries Science Center studied blue whale song data from around the world and discovered a downward curve in the pitch, or frequency, of the songs. The decline was tracked in blue whales across the globe, from off the Southern California coast to the Indian and Southern Oceans.

“The basic style of singing is the same, the tones are there, but the animal is shifting the frequency down over time. The more recent it is, the lower the frequency the animal is singing in, and we have found that in every song we have data for,” said Hildebrand, a professor of oceanography in the Marine Physical Laboratory at Scripps.

The study’s results are published in the most recent issue of the journal Endangered Species Research.

The researchers examined a list of possible causes for the frequency drop-from climate change to a rise in human-produced ocean noise-and believe it may be explained by the increase of blue whale numbers following bans on commercial whaling activities.

While the function of blue whale songs is not known and scientists have much more to learn, they do know that all singers have been determined to be males and that the high-intensity, or loud, and low-frequency songs propagate long distances across the ocean. Blue whales are widely dispersed during the breeding season and it is likely that songs function to advertise which species is singing and the location of the singing whale.

In the heyday of commercial whaling, as blue whale numbers plummeted, it may have been advantageous for males to sing higher frequency songs, the researchers believe, in order to maximize their transmission distance and their ability to locate potential mates (females) or competitors (other males).

“It may be that when (blue whale) densities go up, it’s not so far to get to the closest female, whereas back when they were depleted it may have been that the closest female was a long way away,” said Hildebrand.

In the 1960s, when blue whale numbers were substantially reduced and recordings of the animals were first made, there may have been a tradeoff in which the male suitors chose to sing higher frequencies that were louder and heard over greater distances, Hildebrand said. In more recent years, as population sizes have increased, it may now be more advantageous for males to sing songs that are lower in frequency rather than louder.

“When they make these songs they need to use most of the air in their lungs,” said Hildebrand. “It’s like an opera singer that sees how long he can hold a note. The (male) songs are made to impress the females and/or other males, so I think that’s how the boy blue whales are impressing the girls, or are showing off to other boys: by making a loud and long song.”

The scientists say the same downward pitch phenomenon may be true in other whales such as fin and humpbacks, but the blue whale song, with a comparatively easier song to analyze, is a good springboard to study other species. Hildebrand says such knowledge about whale songs could be important in monitoring whale populations and recovery efforts.

During the study the researchers analyzed thousands of blue whale songs divided into at least 10 worldwide regions. These include the Northeast, Southwest and Northwest Pacific Ocean; the North Atlantic; the Southern Ocean near Antarctica; and the North and Southeast Indian Ocean. Blue whale songs have been recorded for the last 45 years through scientific and military applications by seafloor seismometers tracking regional earthquakes and dedicated whale acoustic recording packages.

The heavy rains currently beating down on the East San Francisco Bay Area has reminded me about the incredible amount of debris that will be entering our waterways and oceans.  We are all aware of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but there is an enormous amount of other debris that is left to surf the waves.  Take for instance fishing nets.  Unattended and discarded fishing nets pose danger to the entire ocean system, even whales.  Check out the following pictures from The Marine Mammal Center and the results of their necropsy of a dead sperm whale recovered in March 2008.

“On March 16, The Marine Mammal Center’s Director of Veterinary Science, Dr. Frances Gulland, assisted in the necropsy of a 51-foot-long sperm whale that  had washed up on a beach near Tomales Point in Point Reyes, CA. When the necropsy team reached the animal’s internal organs, they discovered nearly 450 pounds of fishing net, mesh, braided rope, plastic bags, and even a plastic comb in the whale’s stomach.“

The Marine Mammal Center, August 2008

Photo: Chris Whittier

Photo: Chris Whittier

Coming off the heels of Hope for small sea turtle populations, there is yet another stint of positive ocean conservation news; this time for our cetacean friends.  A new publication in Conservation Biology has actually documented voluntary cooperation by shipping vessels to avoid whale strikes. 

Fin, humpback, right and gray whales have the unfortunate distinction of being the most frequently reported victims of collisions based on historical records.  But whale strikes are not limited to only those species as deaths have been noted for sei, blue and minke whales as well.  However, one particular cetacean stands out above the whale strike crowd with victimhood reaching 2 orders of magnitude above the others.  Perhaps its affinity for urbanized coastal waters around the globe, the endangered North Atlantic right whale is in need of a little shipping compassion. Especially when a 2008 report found that  53% of North Atlantic right whale deaths were attributed to vessel strikes.

To curb the problem, conservation policies have been discussed and even implemented, including the establishment of an ‘area to be avoided.’  In 2007, “The International Maritime Organization adopted the Roseway Basin Area to be avoided on the Scotian Shelf as a voluntary conservation initiative to reduce the risk of lethal vessel strikes to right whales.”  This voluntary area to be avoided went into effect on May 1, 2008 and was designed to be seasonally effective from June 1 to December 31st of each year.  With shipping companies traditionally against the execution  of speed reduction regulations and alteration of shipping lanes (i.e. time is money), the notion of a voluntary avoidance area was definitely a concept that needed confirmation of compliance.

To my surprise, the researchers found:

” Estimates of vessel-operator voluntary compliance ranged from 57% to 87% and stabilized at 71% within the first 5 months of implementation. Our estimates showed an 82% reduction in the risk of lethal vessel strikes to right whales due to vessel-operator compliance. We conclude that the high level of compliance achieved with this voluntary conservation initiative occurred because the area to be avoided was adopted by the International Maritime Organization.”

But the caveat with ocean-going vessels avoiding a conventional shipping lane was that they needed to find a new travel route.  And although the newly adopted course was quite favorable to the right whale, it has the potential to increase fin whale ship strikes by approximately 7%.  The argument, however, is that the fin whale population is 250 times more than that of the endangered North Atlantic right whale, right whales are more abundant than fin whales in the ‘area to be avoided’ , and the ship-strike risk to humpback whales and to sei whales will be reduced by 11% and 74% respectively.

So what does a reduction in ship strikes ultimately mean to the endangered North Atlantic right whale, well it may very well be the difference between recovery and extinction.

“Preventing as few as two female deaths per year would increase the population growth rate to replacement levels that would initiate recovery.  Such prevention is particularly relevant given that contemporary probability estimates of deaths from vessel strikes could be as high as 10 individuals in any given year.”

 

Reference: Vanderlaan, A.S.M., Taggart, C.T.(2009) Efficacy of a Voluntary Area to Be Avoided to Reduce Risk of Lethal Vessel Strikes to Endangered Whales. Conservation Biology

Now that I’ve covered ‘Whale Wars’ and the ‘Institute for Delicious Whale Research’ over the last week, I thought I’d keep on topic and present some information over the very controversial  “Scientific Permit Whaling.”

The 1946 International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling established Article VIII that provides a means by which whales may be killed for scientific purposes.  But what is most interesting and surely limits any authority of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) is that issuing a scientific whaling permit is actually decided upon by individual nations.  Although the nation has to submit a proposal, the Convention says,

“…it is the member nation that ultimately decides whether or not to issue a permit, and this right overrides any other Commission regulations including the moratorium and sanctuaries.”

So what does this all mean for whales?  Well it means that the IWC has no direct effect on preventing the continued slaughter of whales.  IWC established sanctuaries are in reality not off limits to whaling, and harvesting can continue under the guise of research without any Convention/Commission repercussions.  The IWC is limited to Resolutions that ask governments to abstain from issuing scientific whaling permits, but as per their own words:

“While the Commission cannot interfere with the right of a member nation to issue a permit, it can comment on the permit, after receiving the report of the Scientific Committee.”

Unfortunately comments, strong words and resolutions are not enough of an incentive for some nations to refrain from sinking a harpoon into the side of a fleeing whale.  And as if the situation couldn’t become even more laughable, the IWC member nations, for instance, could not even come to a unanimous decision whether to vote in favor of a 2007 resolution against Japan’s Antarctic whaling program or not.  For all practical purposes the resolution did pass with 40 votes in favor, 2 votes against and 1 abstention, but there were 27 countries that “decided not to participate in the vote as they believed that the submission of the proposal was not conducive to building bridges within the Commission.”

But  there is an environmental  irony with  Japan’s Antarctic whaling program, known as JARPA II, as well.  According to what was presented to the IWC by Japan, the objectives of this so-called scientific harpooning are:

1. monitoring of the Antarctic ecosystem;
2. modeling competition among whale species and developing future management objectives;
3. elucidation of temporal and spatial changes in stock structure;
4. improving the management procedure for Antarctic minke whale stocks.

Since the feasibility study has been completed, the JARPA II program will commence under full-scale research with scientific permits issued for 850 (plus 10%) Antarctic minke whales, 50 humpback whales and 50 fin whales per year.

Hmmm…now I am starting to see the light. Saving, improving and monitoring the Antarctic ecosystem by removing species vital to its health must be sound science.

As  ‘Whale Wars’ season 2 finale rolled its credits a couple weeks back I have been left contemplating whether or not I would actually broach the topic on Thriving Oceans.  To be honest I have been throwing the idea back and forth ever since season 1, but I always managed to find something else to capture my attention (perhaps on purpose).  Now that the season is over and I’m sure has already circulated throughout the blogs, I am left with what may just be a passé post.  But, since I already started I decided to continue on and see what happens to pop onto the page.

In nothing less than a rollercoaster ride of emotions, the last two episodes brought whaling out of the shadows and plastered it over television screens throughout the world.  Sure I’ve seen the sickening whaling footage captured by the likes of Greenpeace, but in a sense of irony, as I am watching a program about whaling, I was not fully prepared to witness the slaughter in a Friday night context.  And if you’re thinking this is a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ on my part you are indeed correct.

What I found most interesting was the fact that while I was (and still am) truly appalled by the Japanese whaling activities and left mocking their propaganda-esque banners claiming they are “taking tissue samples,” or “studying stomach contents,”  I found myself wondering if a line had been crossed when the Sea Shepherds collided with the Yushin Maru #3 harpoon ship.  Did I betray my own beliefs by asking such a question?  I just saw a number of whales loaded onto the processing ship and a whale finally succumb to a very graphic death at the hands of the Japanese whaling fleet , so how could I even mull over whether the collision was justified? Especially since there is no doubt with whom I side.

Well, perhaps this says something about my character and perhaps it is also a case of filling the role of an armchair captain that drove my initial reaction.  But after careful introspection I, firstly, cannot say what I would do in the heat of witnessing such ocean atrocities, and secondly I just cannot  bring myself to say it was the wisest of all decisions.   My uneasiness  with the collision was not the byproduct of compassion for the whalers themselves, but for the cause I support.  Had someone been critically injured I am left wondering how that would have detrimentally affected direct/indirect action, whether by Greenpeace, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, or other non-profits, against whalers in the future.  We need to ensure those groups are available to continue their campaigns and not locked up in an international legal incident.

While policies need to change for the elimination of all whaling, thwarting Japanese efforts to fill their quotas in the meantime should be conducted in ways  that will not harm the ultimate goal. With that said I have no problem with riding the edge to protect whales in the Southern Ocean.   And while the whale warriors prepare for another season of cetacean protection, the vast majority of us are left simply watching from afar.  Instead of being mere observers we should also embark on a journey…a journey of support, of letter writing campaigns, and of boycotts to aid all of the great organizations working to bring an end to the harpooning of whales.

Sometimes it takes a man in black (or people in black in this case) to walk the line and bring a cause back  to the worldwide stage.

*Check out a great interview of Paul Watson conducted by TreeHugger

Video released by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography

“The resulting video, recorded using ambient light at 100 meters (328 feet) depth, not only successfully gave the fishermen a clear idea of how the thieving whales were stealing the fish-they pluck the line at one end to jar the black cod free at the other end, somewhat like shaking apples from a tree-but it gave scientists a chance to match the animal’s acoustics with video depictions of its physical features.”

Watch the video here

“Scientists have documented the first known migration of blue whales from the coast of California to areas off British Columbia and the Gulf of Alaska since the end of commercial whaling in 1965.”

Read the NOAA press release

Well, like the masses I ended Earth Day not quite as in touch with the planet as I should have been unless plopped in front of the television is eco-living. To my defense I did tune in to ‘Jean-Michel Cousteau Ocean Adventures:  Call of the Killer Whale’ and was left in awe as usual after indirectly witnessing the complexities of marine mammal communities.

In this instance, human-orca parallels are easy to draw as the interconnectedness amongst individuals is undeniable, social structure is a necessity, communication is key, and culture is unmistakable. There are resident orcas, transient orcas, and offshore orcas that have developed specialized skills to fill a niche and capitalize on available prey.  Even more interesting is the fact that marine biologists believe the residents and transients have been genetically isolated from each other  for the last 10,000 years.

And as the information continued to flow throughout the program, I was reminded why I forego any invitation to attend an amusement park showcasing orcas.  Every documentary I have seen shows nothing less than incredible intelligence as members of a pod utilize teamwork to raise their young and ensure the survival of the group. Plus, most ironically, these are the same characteristics that trainers pass along to cheering crowds as if morality dictates 5 tons of sophisticated ocean-going genius must be confined within concrete walls and rollercoaster backdrops solely for our entertainment.  Yes, I see the Victorian era pseudoscience logic (i.e. money), but shouldn’t we officially abandon a thought process that exterminated the great auk?

After poking around the web, I found a few bits of herring (PBS, Wikipedia, Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, Humane Society) that indicate the captive population is just about 50 and the capturing of wild orcas has declined in favor of captive breeding programs and artificial insemination. But, the argument still stands and is reminiscent of a Twilight Zone episode,  People Are Alike All Over , in which Roddy McDowall as Captain Conrad lands on Mars and the welcoming inhabitants eventually put him on public display.  Just because the most basic of needs are met does not replace freedom…ask Captain Conrad who was confined to an unnatural environment forced to live in a life of deprivation and most certainly suffering a lower than expected lifespan.  Does that ring the captive orca bell?

As a note: Since 1961 there has been 133 orcas captured and acquired by aquariums.To the best estimate, as of November 1997, 102 of the 133 captured killer whales in marine parks and aquariums worldwide have died.  One escaped.  30 are still alive, and a further 18 captive-bred are also alive. (PBS FrontLine, Nov. 1997)