Earth & Sky

The following person was interviewed for today’s program. Our thanks to:

Jay Barlow
Head of the Coastal Marine Mammal Program
National Marine Fisheries Service
La Jolla, California

Interview with Jay Barlow:

Jay Barlow

Actually, I’m back at my office in La Jolla right now. The ship is continuing its course of study, and it is now in the Bering Sea. I just got word from them today that they had a fantastic sighting of right whales. This is and extremely endangered whale. We had been hoping that we might get a glimpse of one or two on the survey, and lo and behold they found one just yesterday.

Yes, there’s a very small population off the Atlantic coast, it numbers only 300. And there’s thought to be even fewer than that in the Eastern North Pacific, in the 10s of animals – and finding them is a rare delight.

ES:

JB: The overall project here is a survey of the abundance of all the humpback whales in the entire North Pacific. It’s a huge area. It’s not and actual head count, but our intent is to try and estimate the abundance using a statistical technique called mark-recapture. That’s where we use photographs of distinctively marked individuals, and than subsequent photographs of the same individuals, and try and estimate what fraction we have photographed, and from that estimate how many whales there are there. The impetus for the study is that we simply don’t know. This is a whale that’s listed as endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, and yet we don’t have an accurate count of how many there are in the North Pacific. We know that they were really decimated by whaling. They were probably reduced to less than 2000 and maybe under 1000 animals. And we’ve seen evidence of them recovering since then. They’ve been protected since 1966 in the North Pacific from whaling, and they can double every decade, if given the opportunity. So we’ve been anticipating finding something on the order of 10,000 or more whales in the North Pacific.

ES:

JB: When we started this, we only had the most preliminary notions. But we did have a retrospective study that showed that there might be 6-8 thousand in the year 1992. It was a very incomplete survey, there were huge confidence limits on that. But it was our first inkling that this is a population that might be returning to historical numbers where they can take their place once again as contributing members of the ecosystem, if you will.

ES:

JB: Humpback whales are relatively well-studied, but in a piece-meal fashion by a number of independent researchers throughout the North Pacific, but especially centered around Hawaii and Alaska. These researchers got together amongst themselves and decided that it would be really nice to pool resources and do a really intensive study for two or three years, and try to answer these very fundamental questions about how many whales are there, and what is the structure of the population, and what are the migratory routes. We’ve managed to convince the National Marine Fisheries Service to put in a bunch of initiatives to Congress,, and through that process we’ve managed to get an allocation of funding for these surveys. At least the initial funding came from that source and it got them off the ground. These researchers, there’s probably over a hundred researchers now involved with the project, from as far away as Japan and Kamchatka and Russia, down to Central America an Mexico, Canada, we’ve got the United States involved very prominently. It’s an international, interagency collaboration. And that’s one of the most rewarding aspects of this project, to be working with so many different people who are putting their own special interests aside and working towards a common goal. And, I think that’s why it worked for this species, because we had this huge foundation of researchers that were all interested in the species and all willing to work together for a common goal.

ES:

JB: On the ship, we have 15 scientists working. Everybody worked on a couple of different jobs, but the important jobs were what we call the observers. These are people that stand watch on the flying bridge of the ship Mac Arthur, looking for whales. They stand watches. The days are really long in summers, so they’re sometimes up there collectively for a period of 16 hours a day, although we rotate observers through every two hours so that they do get some time off. These observers search the horizon for whale blows using these incredibly powerful 25 power binoculars, and with those, we can easily see whales at the horizon, which is almost eight miles away from the ship. We’re able to then divert the ship, once we see a whale, close on it, and if it turns out to be a target whale that we’re working on, in particular humpback whales especially, then we’ll launch a small boat. We have a scientist driver, biopsy crew, and photo crew that goes out in about a 20 foot skiff with an outboard engine, and they’re able to approach much closer than the large ship is, and they’re much more maneuverable, so they can get closer, for the photographs. That team then photographs the whales. For the humpbacks, what we want to get is a really good picture of the flukes, and so when they flip their tail – what we call fluking up at the end of a dive, or at the end of a surfacing before they dive – we want to get a detailed picture of that fluke, and that really provides the fingerprint that will allow us to match it to future pictures of the same whale. After they’ve completed that, we also try to get matching dorsal fin photographs that will go with the fluke. We try to get shots of the side of the animal and what the tailstock, the part of the body going into the tail, because often those have scars from interaction with fishing gear or fishing or other types of vessels. So we’re looking for scaring patterns to try to indicate possible signs of human perturbations to these populations from human disturbance. And finally, what we try to get is a biopsy sample. Biopsies are key to figuring out what the genetic structure is of the population. We could figure out where individuals are going currently, using our mark-recapture, our fluke I.D. photographs, and we can match an animal, for instance, from Prince William Sound to Hawaii, but we can’t tell how long they’ve been doing that. Genetics really gives us a glimpse into the past. It allows us to look at how stable is the structure of the population, how long have they been doing what they’ve been doing. Because the genetics don’t change very quickly. They’re like swimming in molasses. They represent a long time series picture of what the population has been doing in terms of its structure. We also are going to be analyzing bits of this biopsy sample. This biopsy is taken with a crossbow, and it’s got a special tip that takes an eraser-size chunk of skin and blubber away from the whale and doesn’t hurt it in any way. And for the blubber part of that, we’re also able to analyze for pollutants. Evidence of other human impacts on these whale populations; find out what sort of pollutant burden they’re carrying and what sorts of pollutants they’re carrying. We can also tell a little bit about what they’re feeding on, because we can look at the fatty acids in their blubber, and we can look at the stable isotopes in the blubber, and learn a lot about what they’re feeding on without ever having to sample a whale or sample it’s stomach contents. These new technological developments have supplanted previous methods which would, 50 years ago, have involved actually taking whales to look at what they’re eating.

Humpbacks were the primary focus of our study, primarily because they’re abundant enough now that we could actually plan a cruise around their abundance estimation and have a reasonable chance of success. There are some of these whales that have not been doing as well since the stop of whaling. We managed on this cruise to encounter a total of six blue whales on the entire cruise so far, but these six blue whales were still many more blue whales were many more blue whales than we had ever expected to see. I was hoping that we might see one or two. Blue whales simply haven’t recovered from whaling. We couldn’t go out there and plan a survey and get a sample size large enough to estimate the abundance of blue whales because they’re just to rare. A similar situation occurs with right whales. I just got news today that the ship that is still up in the Bering Sea, still conducting the humpback whale survey work there encountered a group of Right whales and they were able to get photographs and biopsies from three right whales yesterday. And this is just fantastic, because there may be less than a handful to maybe a few dozen Right whales in the Eastern North Pacific, and so this gets us very excited, and it’s great when we can see them. But we certainly can’t plan a cruise around them. There are some other whales that we’re encountering on this cruise that also seem to be sufficiently abundant that we really could plan some sort of expedition like that, and that includes the Fin whales and the Sperm whales. But the problem with those is that they occur much further from shore. And most of our sampling is dependent on small, shore-based boat work. This cruise that I’m on is designed to cover all of those areas that can’t be reached from shore-based small boat work. And so we’re focusing a little bit further offshore. But we couldn’t do a study like this on Fin whales, which are predominantly found 100-200 miles from shore, or Sperm whales, which are found almost uniformly all the way across the Pacific. There are just as many 2000 miles from shore as there are close to shore. So it’s just the logistics of working on these other whales that is prohibitive at this time.

ES:

JB: We know that humpbacks feed on a variety of different food sources. Unlike some whales, they’re not extreme specialists. Some of them feed on krill, some of them feed on fish, the small schooling fish like herring. And, we really don’t have an idea, throughout most of their range, what is the predominant source of nutrition of these whales. And, with the chemical analysis of the blubber samples that we’re able to obtain, we can get a lot more detail. It’ll be a few years before these data are fully analyzed. We’re extremely encouraged about the possibilities.

ES:

JB: When a cruise like this ends, we’re then left with mountains of data that we’ll be analyzing over the next two, possibly three years. The highest priority will be analyzing the fluke photographs. And that can be relatively quickly done. By quickly, I mean within a year or so we could match the fluke photographs that we took on our cruise, to all of the photographs that were taken in Hawaii and Mexico, and Central America and Japan, over the previous winter breeding season when the whales are down in the lower latitudes. But some of the studies are going to take even longer than that. Genetic analysis of the skin samples, the samples have to come back to our lab unfrozen. We need to extract the DNA, then sequence the DNA, and do that repeatedly from many samples from all over the Pacific in order to figure out what the population structure is. Typically, studies of genetic structure, or population, will take two, possibly three years for full completion.

ES:

JB: We have some idea of what the whales are doing now in terms of the migration pattern. We know that most of the whales in Hawaii are migrating to Alaska. We know that many of the whales in coastal Mexico migrate to California to feed. But we don’t know the migratory destination of some of these animals. In particular, there are a group of islands called the Rivea Jejados, off of Mexico. We have no idea where those animals are feeding, where they go up during the summertime. Genetics allows us to look at the population structure as it is now, as well as how it’s changed over the last ten thousand years or so. The reason is, that if populations are reasonable isolated, they tend to drift apart from one another, you get genetic differences that build up over time, and I’m talking over long periods of time. So if the structure’s been stable for a long number of years, just though genetic drift, you’ll get differences say, from Japan to Mexico. And these differences are stronger the more isolated the population is. So, if we find out that those differences are completely fixed differences, that is, there’s essentially no overlap at all, we know that there’s essentially no movement of animals from one side to the other side of the Pacific. We also want to try to match what are the important feeding areas for some of these breeding areas that we’ve identified, like the Rivea Jejados islands. We’ve got samples from the Rivea Jejados biopsied animals, and we know then what the genetic structure is from that particular breeding area, and then we can match that. We can find out where those animals are and the feeding is by analyzing the genetic sample there as well.

ES:

JB: On the survey, so far, we’re about 2/3rds of the way through the survey. We’ve got fluke photographs from over 600 humpback whales and we’ve got biopsy sample from over 300 whales. So this is far exceeding our goal. We had set an original goal of over 500 fluke photographs for the four-month-long cruise. So, we’re very pleased with where we are right now. In addition to this, we’re seeing probably an equal number of Fin whales. When we’re away from shore, in the Fin whale area, Fin whales are actually more abundant than humpbacks. So, as abundant as these humpbacks are, to imagine that you can see 600 of them in two months, the Fin whales are, in places, much more abundant. The other things that we run into very, very frequently are Killer whales and Sperm whales.

Killer whales, we had up to five different groups seen on the same day. They were, especially on the Aleutian chain, the most common cetacean that we were seeing up there. And, the other species that we were running into very frequently was Sperm whales. And with Sperm whales, we had an extra little aid to help us detect those, in addition to our observers, who are very good at spotting marine mammals. We had a group of two acoustics people who were listening to a hydrophone array that we were towing behind the ship. And these Sperm whales are compulsive echo locators, so, whenever they’re diving, they producing these echolocation clicks about one per second. And they travel for miles. We can easily detect them two or three miles from the ship. And, the acoustics people were able to detect this and get us to direct the ship to some of the Sperm whales that we ended up sampling.

Because we’re running into a variety of different animals out there, we tried to absolutely maximize the use of the ship. So although this was a humpback survey, and humpbacks were certainly the motivating force, and the emphasis on the survey, we tried to collect as much information as we can on every species that we encounter. So we were counting up every dolphin, whale, pinnaped, that we saw up there – pinnapeds are sea lions and seals – and collecting as much data as much data as possible on all of the species. We’ll also be matching our photographic catalog of whales with photographic catalogs that are maintained by others throughout Alaska and throughout the North Pacific, and we’ll be doing a similar thing with our I.D. photographs and genetic samples from the Sperm whales that we encounter.

ES:

JB: The Blue whales were quite a surprise on our cruise. There hasn’t been a documented Blue whale sighting before our cruise for the last 20 years, in Alaska. On Alaskan waters, Blue whales were just not heard of, and yet there were many, many thousands that were taken by whalers out of Alaskan waters. It was very, very obvious to us, even before the cruise that this colony was very seriously depleted by whaling and was not showing signs of recovery. I think the optimist in me would like to think that seeing six Blue whales on this survey in one year is a sign that they are recovering, that they’re reoccupying this area. However, one of the Blue whales that we saw on this cruise, we got a good photograph of this, and it matched to another individual that was previously photographed in California, off of Southern California twice before in the 1990s. So this is a whale that has existed for some time, but perhaps maybe the population isn’t growing so much as expanding the range to reestablish its previous range, which did include, we’re learning now, Alaska. There’s been a lot of speculation about this in the scientific literature, about whether the populations that we see off of California, which are substantial – we have about 2000 Blue whales that feed off of California in the summertime. Was this historically part of the Alaskan population? The general opinion before our cruise was that no, there was a separate Alaska population, and that they are nearly extinct, if not extinct. Now what we’re learning is that maybe not. Maybe the animals that feed in California simply have abandoned feeding grounds further north, either because there was no need to travel that distance, there was a lot of food resources here, with a low number of whales, or maybe the feeding was just bad in Alaska for a long period of time, and perhaps the feeding conditions have improved. At this point we really don’t know what’s going on. I think that this discovery that Blue whales have reinvaded Alaska and are present in numbers large enough to be found on a survey such as this really gives me a lot of hope that we can do future surveys on Blue whales. We’ve got the tools now that allows us to find Blue whales, we can find them acoustically, we can find them visually, I’m just hoping that we’ll be allowed to go back and find out what’s really going on and try to document why they’re feeding, why they’re located where they are in Alaska. It’s got to be closely related to food. But what is it that they’re feeding on, how large are these resources. There seems to be – as is always the case for science – a new discovery generates more questions than answers. That’s probably what makes it so interesting to us.

ES:

JB: I think that the best evidence that they’re coming back is that we are seeing them. Where there have been surveys – we had a survey in Alaskan waters off the Aleutians late in the 1990s, and there wasn’t a single sighting. And here we had six sightings in a two-month period. I can’t help but think that that’s good news for the blue whales. But, the movement of Blue whales is complicated and we certainly don’t understand it. So, we’re so far from a full recovery in the North Pacific that it isn’t even worth considering using that word. They’re perhaps in the process of recovering. They’re certainly not showing any signs that they have recovered, because there are simply thousands of animals that were taken out of the Aleutian and Gulf of Alaska areas, and we’re not seeing those numbers. We’re not seeing numbers anything close to that now. So it’s an encouraging sign. We don’t know how to take that at this point. We hope for the best. What it would really take to document the recovery of a whale is a long time series, looking at the entire distribution of a population, and looking at changes in abundance over a long time period. We have that in the case for the Humpback whales, off of California. We have data stretching back to the mid 1980s, almost a 20-year time series that shows the gradual, but steady, 6-8% increase per year during that time period. That’s what we really need to fully document the recovery of a whale. We need a high abundance; we need evidence that the population is changing through time.

ES:

JB: Worldwide, what we’re finding is that most of the populations, once we’ve stopped whaling, do start to recover. We’re seeing evidence of that in the North Atlantic as well. Their Humpback populations have been estimated to be over 10,000, possibly as high as 13,000 – and that was 10 years ago. I think that we’re seeing Right whales recovering in the Southern hemisphere. There are a few populations though that seems to be giving us real problems, and that is, Right whales in the Pacific and the Atlantic. They both seem to be stagnating; they don’t seem to be showing any signs of recovery. And blue whales in the Pacific and the Southern hemisphere, for the most part, are a tiny, tiny fraction of what they used to be. And they probably were just hit too hard. They’re not showing signs of recovery. The good new is that most whale stocks are showing signs of recovery. And I think that one thing that people need to get used to is the fact that these whales are not always going to be endangered. They’re going to reach a point at some point when we can take them off the endangered species list. And, in the past, we’ve realized that there’s a lot of resistance to that. People think that, “oh, they’re not going to be protected if they’re off the Endangered Species List.” In fact, the Marine Mammal Protection Act will continue to protect whales in U.S. waters, and that’s the only protection that’s also provided by the Endangered Species List. We really need to start thinking about, is it time that some whales no longer need the protection of the Endangered Species Act, can we be moving those whales off the Endangered Species List and calling them recovered so that we can refocus our efforts on those whales and those other species that really need the resources, Blue whales and Right whales in particular. These are whales that are critically endangered, and if we don’t do something, they’re still not at healthy enough numbers that we can guarantee that they will recover. There may be active management that’s required, in terms of regulating ship strikes and fisheries interactions to help these populations along.

ES:

JB: Other than whaling, which is obviously devastating to whale populations worldwide, the biggest current impacts that humans are having on whales could fall into two categories. One is ship strikes. Shipping is growing more and more every year. There are more ships, and they’re traveling at faster rates of speed. Whale s have evolved to get out of the way of one another, and they’re traveling at two or three knots. They haven’t evolved to get out of ships traveling at 20-30 knots. And so they’re getting struck either by the ship or by the propeller. Probably half of the mortalities of whale stocks in the Atlantic right whales are caused by ship strikes. The other main factor that’s going on is entanglement in fishing gear. There’s thousands and thousands of crab pots and lobster pots, and animals, for reasons we don’t understand, wrap themselves up in this gear, and then they have a hard time swimming because they’re trailing a lot of gear behind. Drift gill nets are another factor that entangles marine mammals.

The things that are being done to prevent this is that, in some cases, shipping lanes are being redirected away from areas of known whale usage, and I think that is a really good thing. It’s hard to do because it takes international effort and it affects international shipping, and not all shipping is subject to anything that we can control within this country. But I think that the efforts in this area are fantastic. The other thing that’s going on is the development of fishing gear that has breakaway segments that allow the animals to escape without ending up with a lot of entangled gear around them. It’s obviously very difficult to say to fisherman in New England, “you can no longer fish lobster pots,” because that’s just too much of the engrained culture there. Alternatives have to be found, and I think that gear technology is really where the answers will be to find solutions that will allow fisherman to continue doing what they do for a living, and allow the whales to continue doing what they do.

ES:

JB: We’re just beginning to get some validated information on whale longevity. Whales have been generally thought to live something on the order of 30-60 years. But where on that range we really didn’t know. Several of the Humpback whales that we photographed on this cruise were matched to photographic catalogs that were started in southeast Alaska in the late 1970s. So we know that they’re 30+ years old. And I think that we’ll surprise ourselves with the longevity of whales. There’s some evidence now that the some of these whales, not Humpbacks, they’re probably not extremely long-lived, but Right whales and Bowhead whales, they may live to be over 100 years old. A Bowhead whale was taken by native Alaskans just a few years ago with a stone harpoon head in its blubber. It’s been there for a long, long time. That type of harpoon head has not been used for over a hundred years. So the possibility exists that some of these whale species are extremely long-lived, even compared to humans.

ES:

JB: Yeah, in my position, I end up going out to sea probably for one or two months a year, on average, and I’ve been doing that for 20 years. And, I think the greatest satisfaction I get in my job is when I’m able to spend time out at sea observing whales. It’s just fantastic to see a blue whale surface. It starts coming up to the surface, and you can just see the water begin to lighten, as it gets closer to the surface. It actually appears as a light, powder blue color that’s underwater. And then you start to see surface of the water bulge up, and then the head appears, and then an enormous plume of a blow appears that goes 20 foot into the air, you hear a whoosh of sound that’s equivalent to a volume the size of many cars just getting pushed through a hole in this animal’s head. And I think it’s just awe-inspiring, perhaps an overused phrase, but it’s what I feel when I see these animals in nature doing what nature has always intended them to do. And then coming back with results that show that populations are increasing, that the harm that we caused these whales is not permanent, that these whales are capable are recovering, I think that’s such an encouraging message for conservationists everywhere that all is not hopeless – that we really need to focus on solving problems, and that we can solve them. And it’s just surprising. Or not surprisingly, when we stop killing whales, they do come back.

ES:

JB: I think one of the most surprising things on this cruise didn’t have to do with Humpbacks, but it had to do with the killer whales. We would go through days and days where we would see very few species other than killer whales. We’d see many, many groups of killer whales. As we’re learning, not all killer whales are the vicious mammal eaters that you see pictures of sometimes in National Geographic specials. Most killer whales, it appears, are just obligate fish eaters. And, they’re supported relatively low on the food chain. And they’re not for the most part, hunting other whales. But, we did see some groups that were, and I think one of the most amazing memories of this cruise is to watch killer whales chasing a group of Dalls porpoise. They eventually narrowed their selection down to a single menu item, and they doggedly pursued that porpoise, and the poor thing eventually succumbed, but it was just an amazing thing to watch – raw nature in action.

JS:

ES: Whales have a huge resource of blubber, which stores their food. But this blubber is a very fatty tissue, it’s essentially all fat, and the fat tends to attract certain types of pollutants and holds them very well. The sorts of pollutants I’m thinking about are the DDT, and its derivatives, although DDT is not used by most nations of the world, the ocean is a vast pool of all this DDT product, where it has all ended up, and it’s all sitting out there and hasn’t degraded. PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls, are another human-made chemical that’s extremely persistent in the marine environment, and it just gets passed up the food chain, getting concentrated in each step along the way, and then ultimately, some of it, a lot of it, getting into the blubber of marine mammals. And it just stays there for the life of the animal. We have no idea to what extent this if impairing the health of the animals. We don’t know, for the most part, what the concentrations are. One of the main emphasis of this cruise, in addition to finding out basic population parameters, we want to know – what are the human impacts on these guys, and one of the most important has got to be the pollutant load that they’re carrying. Is it high enough where it could be impairing reproduction? Could there be other detrimental effects on the population, like increased probability to disease. We know that PCBs in marine mammals can cause increased susceptibility to disease. We really don’t know if the levels in Humpback whales are high enough to cause that. But it’s certainly one of those things we want to look at.

ES:

JB: We have very little idea what diseases are common in whale populations. We wish we knew a lot more about that. The marine mammal studies that have related PCB levels to higher levels of disease – we’ve been working mostly on seals. We know that diseases come through seal populations, and sometimes wipe out entire populations. We’ve seen 50% of the harbor seals lost in the North Sea when an epidemic came through a few years. We can only imagine that similar things might be happening with whale populations. And, the more we learn about whales, the more we will find out whether this is true or not.