Only days before the cinematic release of a documentary about Luna - the killer whale that captivated the public before its death in Nootka Sound in 2006 - biologists are coming to terms with the loss of seven whales from the salmon-dependent southern resident population, including Luna's mother and younger brother.
"It's significant, a serious situation," Lance Barrett-Lennard, a killer whale scientist at the Vancouver Aquarium, said in an interview Tuesday. "But I don't think it's the death knell. It's a wake-up call to think about the fate of salmon stocks and the way we run our fisheries."
A total of seven killer whales are thought to have died since last fall, reducing the population of endangered southern residents to just 83 in three pods. That's up from 71 in 1973, but down from 100 in 1996.
Two of the seven were old females past their average life expectancy - K7, Lummi, estimated to be 98, and L21, Ankh, age 58.
Two others were newborn calves - L111 and J43 - thought to have a 50-per-cent chance of survival.
Most troubling for scientists is the loss of the remaining three, especially two breeding females - Luna's mother, L67, known as Splash, age 33, and J11, Blossom, about 36.
"This is of concern," said John Ford, a whale researcher with the federal fisheries department in Nanaimo. "Those two females were in the prime of their reproductive years. They normally have high survival."
Luna's younger brother, six-year-old L101, Aurora, is also thought to be dead.
Luna was an orphaned member of the southern residents who turned up in Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island and adopted boaters as his new family. After years of controversy over what should be done with Luna, the six-year-old male whale died in a collision with a tug's propeller.
Declining runs of chinook salmon, the favourite prey of resident killer whales, are thought to be playing a role in the whales' decline in the shared waters of the Strait of Georgia and Washington's Puget Sound.
As the southern residents decline, they are also at increased risk from inbreeding, oil spills and contaminants such as PCBs, ship noise and collisions, and whale watchers.
Ford noted that not all the news is bad: the latest census suggests the population of threatened northern resident killer whales has increased to about 250 animals from 120 in the early 1970s.
Saving Luna is an award-winning documentary directed by Suzanne Chisholm and Michael Parfit that is scheduled to open in Vancouver Dec. 5 at the Ridge Theatre, in Victoria on Jan. 16 and Toronto on Jan. 23.
A special screening will be held this Sunday, 10 a.m., at the Park Theatre, 3440 Cambie, to conclude The Vancouver Sun Film Series, with both directors as well as Barrett-Lennard in attendance to answer audience questions.
zaterdag 29 november 2008
donderdag 20 november 2008
Dog's nose for whale poop big help to B.C. orca researchers
Killer whale poop, sniffed out by a specially trained, excitable Labrador-cross, is showing that endangered southern resident orcas may not be finding enough to eat.
Researchers from the University of Washington's Center for Conservation Biology have just completed their third season testing whale scat around Juan de Fuca Strait and Puget Sound, looking for clues to why the population is shrinking.
"What pops out right away is that there are lower thyroid hormone levels in the years when there are higher rates of mortality," said Katherine Ayres, a graduate student who is working on the whale project with Sam Wasser, director of the centre.
"This suggests they are experiencing nutritional deficits. We can tell, according to the thyroid hormone, they are not doing as well this year as the year before," Ayres said.
This year seven members of the three southern resident pods have died, including two breeding age females, bringing the population to 83. The recent population high was 97 in 1996.
"Alarm bells are going off. It is pretty devastating for such a small population," Ayres said.
Lack of chinook salmon - the food favoured by resident killer whales - noise from marine traffic and toxins have been identified in previous studies as probable causes of the decline.
If funding allows, the Center for Conservation Biology hopes to expand its research to look at toxins and the effects of boat traffic.
"With these studies we can start giving answers before the animals die and we can take mitigation measures," Ayres said.
The slimy, green excrement is found by Tucker, a four-year-old Lab who stands on the bow of the center's research boat and goes into paroxysms of excitement when he smells whale poop, which means it can be scooped by researchers.
Last year, researchers tried following the pods more closely and scooping poop without Tucker's help, but it was found everything worked better with a dog.
"It was more a human learning curve than a dog learning curve," said Ayres, who believes Tucker is incredibly good at his job.
Program co-ordinator Heath Smith identified Tucker's talents. Tucker had already failed as a house pet and been rejected for police work.
"I went to look at him and I knew he would be good at scat work. We haven't had a dog that has caught on quicker. He just knew this was what he wanted to do."
Before the whale project started, the centre was using dogs to sniff out scat from other animals, from grizzly bears to giant armadillos. Samples are used to test stress, exposure to toxins and diet.
When Tucker came to work for the centre it was not known he would be put on the whale project. But, then it was discovered he was afraid of water.
"We wanted a dog that was not so focused on getting in the water," Smith said.
"He still doesn't like it at all. If he does jump overboard we know there's scat in the water," he said.
Tucker is supposed to be pure Lab, but, with brindle feet and a huge head, Smith doubts his pedigreed. "He's adorable. He's part of the family," he said.
Researchers from the University of Washington's Center for Conservation Biology have just completed their third season testing whale scat around Juan de Fuca Strait and Puget Sound, looking for clues to why the population is shrinking.
"What pops out right away is that there are lower thyroid hormone levels in the years when there are higher rates of mortality," said Katherine Ayres, a graduate student who is working on the whale project with Sam Wasser, director of the centre.
"This suggests they are experiencing nutritional deficits. We can tell, according to the thyroid hormone, they are not doing as well this year as the year before," Ayres said.
This year seven members of the three southern resident pods have died, including two breeding age females, bringing the population to 83. The recent population high was 97 in 1996.
"Alarm bells are going off. It is pretty devastating for such a small population," Ayres said.
Lack of chinook salmon - the food favoured by resident killer whales - noise from marine traffic and toxins have been identified in previous studies as probable causes of the decline.
If funding allows, the Center for Conservation Biology hopes to expand its research to look at toxins and the effects of boat traffic.
"With these studies we can start giving answers before the animals die and we can take mitigation measures," Ayres said.
The slimy, green excrement is found by Tucker, a four-year-old Lab who stands on the bow of the center's research boat and goes into paroxysms of excitement when he smells whale poop, which means it can be scooped by researchers.
Last year, researchers tried following the pods more closely and scooping poop without Tucker's help, but it was found everything worked better with a dog.
"It was more a human learning curve than a dog learning curve," said Ayres, who believes Tucker is incredibly good at his job.
Program co-ordinator Heath Smith identified Tucker's talents. Tucker had already failed as a house pet and been rejected for police work.
"I went to look at him and I knew he would be good at scat work. We haven't had a dog that has caught on quicker. He just knew this was what he wanted to do."
Before the whale project started, the centre was using dogs to sniff out scat from other animals, from grizzly bears to giant armadillos. Samples are used to test stress, exposure to toxins and diet.
When Tucker came to work for the centre it was not known he would be put on the whale project. But, then it was discovered he was afraid of water.
"We wanted a dog that was not so focused on getting in the water," Smith said.
"He still doesn't like it at all. If he does jump overboard we know there's scat in the water," he said.
Tucker is supposed to be pure Lab, but, with brindle feet and a huge head, Smith doubts his pedigreed. "He's adorable. He's part of the family," he said.
Deadly bacteria found on orcas
Researchers studying droplets emitted from orca blow holes have found drug-resistant bacteria.
They could be a sign of pollution and a risk to the killer whale population in Puget Sound, which is apparently in decline.
The Kitsap Sun says the independent research by biologist David Bain and veterinarian Pete Schroeder was presented at a Tuesday meeting in Friday Harbor on orca health.
Schroeder says the bacteria may come from human sources such as untreated sewage or stormwater.
Seven Puget Sound orcas are missing and presumed dead, bringing the population to 83, the fewest in five years.
They could be a sign of pollution and a risk to the killer whale population in Puget Sound, which is apparently in decline.
The Kitsap Sun says the independent research by biologist David Bain and veterinarian Pete Schroeder was presented at a Tuesday meeting in Friday Harbor on orca health.
Schroeder says the bacteria may come from human sources such as untreated sewage or stormwater.
Seven Puget Sound orcas are missing and presumed dead, bringing the population to 83, the fewest in five years.
woensdag 12 november 2008
Sounds Like My Favorite Fish
Some of the killer whales off the coast of Washington state are picky eaters, preferring Chinook salmon even though the coho and sockeye varieties are much more plentiful. Researchers report that the whales seem to be able to tell the three species apart by the sonar echoes bouncing off their swim bladders. The discovery should help efforts to protect these intelligent mammals and maybe someday lead to the design of new devices that could identify individual fish species remotely.
Sorting the three salmon species isn't easy even after you've landed them, but certain pods of Orcinus orca can discriminate between individual fish as they move around the dark and turbulent waters of the southern Puget Sound. Researchers suspected that the whales prefer Chinook salmon because they carry more fat and therefore provide more calories. "The whales get more bang for the bite," says marine ecologist John Horne of the University of Washington, Seattle. Horne and colleagues understood generally how the whales found their prey: by reading the echoes from their built-in sonar. But no one knew what acoustic characteristics could help the orcas tell one salmon species from another.
So Horne and colleagues bounced digital replicas of the orcas' clicks off live but immobilized specimens of the three salmon species. Their analysis showed that one characteristic--the structure of the echoing sound waves--differed among the coho, sockeye, and Chinook salmon. As bioacoustician and team member Whitlow Au of the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, reported Tuesday at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Miami, Florida, further study showed that the salmon swim bladders vary considerably in size. The Chinook's bladder is only half as large as those of the other two species. That's important, Horne explains, because the swim bladder is responsible for 90% of the reflected sound energy. "It acts almost like a wall," he says. The team concluded that the echoes from the three species differ enough for orcas to detect and discriminate single Chinook at distances of 100 meters or more. The remaining question, Horne says, is how killer whales process these signals. But even if that remains a mystery, the research could lead to the development of sonar devices or analytical techniques that could classify and identify individual fish species, making it easier to take a population census. "That would be the Holy Grail of fisheries acoustics," he says.
The findings are important, says killer whale biologist John Ford of the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo, Canada. "The question we've been stewing on for some time is how the whales differentiate among the salmon," he says. The research answers that question, but it poses another issue, Ford explains. The whales have evolved to feed on the Chinook, whose population is in decline, so it is essential that their access remain unrestricted. These findings mean we need to determine how much "underwater vessel noise might interfere with their ability to detect salmon in their critical habitats," he says.
Sorting the three salmon species isn't easy even after you've landed them, but certain pods of Orcinus orca can discriminate between individual fish as they move around the dark and turbulent waters of the southern Puget Sound. Researchers suspected that the whales prefer Chinook salmon because they carry more fat and therefore provide more calories. "The whales get more bang for the bite," says marine ecologist John Horne of the University of Washington, Seattle. Horne and colleagues understood generally how the whales found their prey: by reading the echoes from their built-in sonar. But no one knew what acoustic characteristics could help the orcas tell one salmon species from another.
So Horne and colleagues bounced digital replicas of the orcas' clicks off live but immobilized specimens of the three salmon species. Their analysis showed that one characteristic--the structure of the echoing sound waves--differed among the coho, sockeye, and Chinook salmon. As bioacoustician and team member Whitlow Au of the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, reported Tuesday at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Miami, Florida, further study showed that the salmon swim bladders vary considerably in size. The Chinook's bladder is only half as large as those of the other two species. That's important, Horne explains, because the swim bladder is responsible for 90% of the reflected sound energy. "It acts almost like a wall," he says. The team concluded that the echoes from the three species differ enough for orcas to detect and discriminate single Chinook at distances of 100 meters or more. The remaining question, Horne says, is how killer whales process these signals. But even if that remains a mystery, the research could lead to the development of sonar devices or analytical techniques that could classify and identify individual fish species, making it easier to take a population census. "That would be the Holy Grail of fisheries acoustics," he says.
The findings are important, says killer whale biologist John Ford of the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo, Canada. "The question we've been stewing on for some time is how the whales differentiate among the salmon," he says. The research answers that question, but it poses another issue, Ford explains. The whales have evolved to feed on the Chinook, whose population is in decline, so it is essential that their access remain unrestricted. These findings mean we need to determine how much "underwater vessel noise might interfere with their ability to detect salmon in their critical habitats," he says.
maandag 10 november 2008
Kite surfer's orca encounter
A chance encounter with a pod of orca whales provided a special thrill for Raglan kite surfer Matt Taggart last weekend.
A normal Saturday afternoon turned into a memorable moment for Mr Taggart when a pod of five or six orcas, including a mother and calf, came close to shore in search of stingray.
"A couple of the local guys, Olly and Keith, noticed them and said `come on, get back out there' ... to be honest I was bricking it. I know them as killer whales and I thought no way am I going out there with killer whales," Mr Taggart said.
"But I went out and was taking it quite carefully when the mother popped up right in front of me.
"I never thought I would ever do that ... it was crazily intense. She was literally metres away."
Mr Taggart was out on the water with the orcas for about 15 minutes, but lack of wind meant it was difficult to stay with them.
"I was just trying to enjoy the moment. I was absolutely blown away.
"They came through so quickly ... I guess I was fortunate to be there at the right moment."
Locals had told him orcas came in close to shore to flush out stingray before circling and eating them.
"I'm chuffed. I'm stoked I got out there. It would have been easy not to, but I'm glad I did."
Originally from England, Mr Taggart has made his home in Raglan since January after marrying a Kiwi girl.
He is the manager of Raglan-based Ozone Kites/Kitesurf Ltd.
"We make and design kites of all forms - land, snow, water, for families.
"We're setting up our whole base here, I love it. For kiting it is amazing."
zondag 9 november 2008
Killer whales up for risk assessment
An independent Canadian advisory panel will meet later this month to assess the status of one of the ocean’s top predators: the killer whale.
But whale experts suggest the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, known as COSEWIC, is unlikely to recommend sweeping changes to the species-at-risk designations of five distinct orca populations.
The designation of so-called "southern residents," a population of 83 whales found in Puget Sound and the southern end of the Strait of Georgia, is unlikely to change, said Lance Barrett-Lennard, an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia and co-chair of a federally-appointed orca recovery team.
The southern residents are currently designated as "endangered," the most serious risk assessment.
"They’re in pretty rough shape. At the time of the last COSEWIC assessment, they were given an endangered listing. Their situation hasn’t really improved since then," Barrett-Lennard said.
"That population, at 83 animals, is just hanging on by the skin of its teeth. If it was any other species, we’d think that they were very likely to be goners."
Barrett-Lennard co-wrote a paper to be presented at COSEWIC’s meetings in Ottawa Nov. 25-28, where the arm’s-length scientific body will assess the status of killer whales.
His paper will shape COSEWIC’s final report to Environment Minister Jim Prentice, who can accept the recommendations, reject them or send them back to the panel for further study.
Barrett-Lennard wouldn’t divulge his paper’s findings. However, he and other whale experts say it’s doubtful COSEWIC will recommend changes to the status of southern residents.
Watchers of the southern residents have reported declining birth rates, a loss of blubber and the onset of a condition known as "peanut head," a sign of starvation possibly resulting from a shortage of salmon the orcas feed on.
Seven of the southern residents recently disappeared off the north coast of Washington and southern British Columbia and are presumed dead.
The killer whales suffered a 20 per cent decline in population between 1993 and 2003 before recovering slightly. But some worry they are perilously close to extinction. "Pretty soon you’re getting to the point where there aren’t enough to significantly add to the population, or have any potential for adding (to the population). It would eventually die out, just natural mortality," said Ken Balcomb of the Center for Whale Research in Friday Harbor, Wash.
"It’s quite critical. We have about a dozen females now, and we had just lost two, so we’re down to a dozen. If we lost two a year for the next five years, we’re basically out of reproductive whales."
Eight environmental groups have taken Ottawa to court, demanding the government invoke the federal Species at Risk Act to protect the southern residents’ habitat. The environmentalists want the federal government to make some areas off-limits to vessel traffic and close some salmon fisheries to preserve fish stocks.
COSEWIC may also recommend Ottawa upgrade another pod of about 200 orcas, found in the coastal waters of northern B.C. and southeastern Alaska, from "threatened" to the more serious "endangered" designation.
But whale experts suggest the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, known as COSEWIC, is unlikely to recommend sweeping changes to the species-at-risk designations of five distinct orca populations.
The designation of so-called "southern residents," a population of 83 whales found in Puget Sound and the southern end of the Strait of Georgia, is unlikely to change, said Lance Barrett-Lennard, an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia and co-chair of a federally-appointed orca recovery team.
The southern residents are currently designated as "endangered," the most serious risk assessment.
"They’re in pretty rough shape. At the time of the last COSEWIC assessment, they were given an endangered listing. Their situation hasn’t really improved since then," Barrett-Lennard said.
"That population, at 83 animals, is just hanging on by the skin of its teeth. If it was any other species, we’d think that they were very likely to be goners."
Barrett-Lennard co-wrote a paper to be presented at COSEWIC’s meetings in Ottawa Nov. 25-28, where the arm’s-length scientific body will assess the status of killer whales.
His paper will shape COSEWIC’s final report to Environment Minister Jim Prentice, who can accept the recommendations, reject them or send them back to the panel for further study.
Barrett-Lennard wouldn’t divulge his paper’s findings. However, he and other whale experts say it’s doubtful COSEWIC will recommend changes to the status of southern residents.
Watchers of the southern residents have reported declining birth rates, a loss of blubber and the onset of a condition known as "peanut head," a sign of starvation possibly resulting from a shortage of salmon the orcas feed on.
Seven of the southern residents recently disappeared off the north coast of Washington and southern British Columbia and are presumed dead.
The killer whales suffered a 20 per cent decline in population between 1993 and 2003 before recovering slightly. But some worry they are perilously close to extinction. "Pretty soon you’re getting to the point where there aren’t enough to significantly add to the population, or have any potential for adding (to the population). It would eventually die out, just natural mortality," said Ken Balcomb of the Center for Whale Research in Friday Harbor, Wash.
"It’s quite critical. We have about a dozen females now, and we had just lost two, so we’re down to a dozen. If we lost two a year for the next five years, we’re basically out of reproductive whales."
Eight environmental groups have taken Ottawa to court, demanding the government invoke the federal Species at Risk Act to protect the southern residents’ habitat. The environmentalists want the federal government to make some areas off-limits to vessel traffic and close some salmon fisheries to preserve fish stocks.
COSEWIC may also recommend Ottawa upgrade another pod of about 200 orcas, found in the coastal waters of northern B.C. and southeastern Alaska, from "threatened" to the more serious "endangered" designation.
zaterdag 8 november 2008
Killer whales are discriminating diners
Sophisticated predators scan wide ocean regions listening for favorite fish
A killer whale's favorite meal is king salmon, according to a new study that found these sophisticated predators scan wide ocean regions listening for their favorite fish.
Echolocation, which involves creating a sound in order to produce an echo, allows the whales to zone in on king salmon, also known as Chinook salmon, at distances up to half a mile.
But why do killer whales go to so much trouble to hunt down king salmon, picking them out like sushi chefs even when they represent just 5 to 10 percent of the available salmon population?
"Salmon are not necessarily equally nutritious," Whitlow Au, who led the study, told Discovery News. "Chinook salmon has the highest concentration of lipids, or fats, that orcas seem to prefer."
Au, a marine mammal researcher at the University of Hawaii's Hawaii Institute for Marine Biology, and his colleagues mechanically recreated killer whale echolocation pulses at Lake Union in Seattle, Wash. The researchers tied Chinook, Coho and Sockeye salmon to a rotating net set out at different water depths.
Although these fish look similar to human eyes, the study showed the echo structure created by each type of salmon was unique and could be used by killer whales to discriminate among the various species.
"Fish gas" appears key to the process, as the study revealed echolocation tuned especially well into information released by each salmon's swim bladder.
Swim bladders are gas bags within a fish that help the fish to be buoyant at any specific depth," Au explained. "Gas bags are probably the best reflector of acoustic energy underwater."
Au likened killer whale echolocation to a person wearing a miner's cap with a blinking light on it. Each time the light blinks on, the individual receives information about what's around.
The study's findings will be presented at next week's Acoustical Society of America meeting in Miami, Fla.
Among whales, only toothed species use echolocation. Au therefore suspects other toothed whales, such as sperm whales, possess the killer whale's choosy, long-distance mealtime behavior.
Bottlenose dolphins appear to fall in the discriminating eater group too.
Marine biologist Ronald Schusterman of the University of California's Long Marine Laboratory told Discovery News that the new study results "are consistent with work done on bottlenose dolphins in captivity showing that they can recognize objects rather easily by means of echolocation."
A killer whale's favorite meal is king salmon, according to a new study that found these sophisticated predators scan wide ocean regions listening for their favorite fish.
Echolocation, which involves creating a sound in order to produce an echo, allows the whales to zone in on king salmon, also known as Chinook salmon, at distances up to half a mile.
But why do killer whales go to so much trouble to hunt down king salmon, picking them out like sushi chefs even when they represent just 5 to 10 percent of the available salmon population?
"Salmon are not necessarily equally nutritious," Whitlow Au, who led the study, told Discovery News. "Chinook salmon has the highest concentration of lipids, or fats, that orcas seem to prefer."
Au, a marine mammal researcher at the University of Hawaii's Hawaii Institute for Marine Biology, and his colleagues mechanically recreated killer whale echolocation pulses at Lake Union in Seattle, Wash. The researchers tied Chinook, Coho and Sockeye salmon to a rotating net set out at different water depths.
Although these fish look similar to human eyes, the study showed the echo structure created by each type of salmon was unique and could be used by killer whales to discriminate among the various species.
"Fish gas" appears key to the process, as the study revealed echolocation tuned especially well into information released by each salmon's swim bladder.
Swim bladders are gas bags within a fish that help the fish to be buoyant at any specific depth," Au explained. "Gas bags are probably the best reflector of acoustic energy underwater."
Au likened killer whale echolocation to a person wearing a miner's cap with a blinking light on it. Each time the light blinks on, the individual receives information about what's around.
The study's findings will be presented at next week's Acoustical Society of America meeting in Miami, Fla.
Among whales, only toothed species use echolocation. Au therefore suspects other toothed whales, such as sperm whales, possess the killer whale's choosy, long-distance mealtime behavior.
Bottlenose dolphins appear to fall in the discriminating eater group too.
Marine biologist Ronald Schusterman of the University of California's Long Marine Laboratory told Discovery News that the new study results "are consistent with work done on bottlenose dolphins in captivity showing that they can recognize objects rather easily by means of echolocation."
dinsdag 4 november 2008
Salmon and whales
The killer-whale population has become a compelling example of the impact of the West Coast salmon industry. Nine killer whales recently disappeared from their pods off the south end of Vancouver Island, having probably died of starvation. Steps should be taken to make sure that fisheries allocations take into account the needs of species that cannot survive without Pacific salmon.
All along the West Coast, Pacific salmon - from pinks to Chinook - are under severe pressure.
The diet of resident killer whales consists mainly of salmon, especially Chinook salmon. Earlier this year, some of the 83 killer whales off the north coast of Washington and southern British Columbia, known as the "southern residents," showed signs of weight loss. Marine biologists believe the missing adult whales (including two reproductive females) starved to death. Meanwhile, the "northern residents," a comparatively stable group of about 200 killer whales that range around the northern end of Vancouver Island were hard to spot this summer in the Broughton Archipelago - an area where they used to hold large social gatherings.
There has been a massive drop in the pink salmon population in the Broughton Archipelago. This decline is widely believed to have been caused by sea-lice infestations in the numerous Atlantic salmon fish farms in the area though the research has been deemed inconclusive. Whatever the cause, pink salmon play an important role providing nutrients to the entire ecosystem and when the pink salmon suffer, other species, like the Chinook, can be expected to follow suit. The drop in pink salmon has definitely harmed the grizzly bears in the area that rely on the spawning adults to bulk up for hibernation. There have been reports of large males killing cubs for food.
The department of Fisheries and Oceans salmon-allocation policy should be influenced by the danger that one of the great sea mammals could face extinction, rather than aggravating the risk. Some biologists have suggested that the DFO allocate salmon to killer whales and grizzly bears, as well as to the First Nations, commercial and recreational fishery interests. This suggestion deserves further study.
The DFO's Wild Salmon Policy already recognizes the importance of maintaining the integrity of the ecosystem. The department should move now to achieve it.
All along the West Coast, Pacific salmon - from pinks to Chinook - are under severe pressure.
The diet of resident killer whales consists mainly of salmon, especially Chinook salmon. Earlier this year, some of the 83 killer whales off the north coast of Washington and southern British Columbia, known as the "southern residents," showed signs of weight loss. Marine biologists believe the missing adult whales (including two reproductive females) starved to death. Meanwhile, the "northern residents," a comparatively stable group of about 200 killer whales that range around the northern end of Vancouver Island were hard to spot this summer in the Broughton Archipelago - an area where they used to hold large social gatherings.
There has been a massive drop in the pink salmon population in the Broughton Archipelago. This decline is widely believed to have been caused by sea-lice infestations in the numerous Atlantic salmon fish farms in the area though the research has been deemed inconclusive. Whatever the cause, pink salmon play an important role providing nutrients to the entire ecosystem and when the pink salmon suffer, other species, like the Chinook, can be expected to follow suit. The drop in pink salmon has definitely harmed the grizzly bears in the area that rely on the spawning adults to bulk up for hibernation. There have been reports of large males killing cubs for food.
The department of Fisheries and Oceans salmon-allocation policy should be influenced by the danger that one of the great sea mammals could face extinction, rather than aggravating the risk. Some biologists have suggested that the DFO allocate salmon to killer whales and grizzly bears, as well as to the First Nations, commercial and recreational fishery interests. This suggestion deserves further study.
The DFO's Wild Salmon Policy already recognizes the importance of maintaining the integrity of the ecosystem. The department should move now to achieve it.
maandag 3 november 2008
Saving Wild Salmon, in Hopes of Saving the Orca
ECHO BAY, British Columbia — Growing up in Connecticut, Alexandra Hubbard did not want to be Joan of Arc. She wanted to be Jane Goodall. But instead of chimpanzees, her animals would turn out to be killer whales.
In 1984, 26 years old and armed only with a bachelor’s degree and enthusiasm for her task, she moved to the Broughton Archipelago, in the Queen Charlotte Strait of British Columbia, where the whales, or orcas, were abundant. She and her husband, Robin Morton, a Canadian filmmaker, lived on a 65-foot sailboat and followed the orcas in an inflatable boat with a shelter in the back, stocked with Legos and books for their son, Jarret.
She came to know the archipelago’s long-lived orca clans and the matriarchs who led them. She knew she would find them in Fife Sound at the ebb tide, or moving up Johnson Strait with the incoming tide. Using a hydrophone, an underwater microphone she hung from the boat, she recorded their vocalizations and began to recognize what she called the dialects of the clans.
Her husband drowned in 1986, when Jarret was 4, but Ms. Morton stayed on, supporting her work by writing articles and books, designing T-shirts and working as a deckhand on a fishing boat.
Today, she hardly uses her hydrophone. There’s no point, she says, “since my subject is so rare now.” These days, when Ms. Morton noses her workboat away from her dock here, she is on a crusade, seeking not orcas, but evidence against the salmon farms she believes drove most of the killer whales away, in part by infecting the wild salmon the whales eat with parasites called sea lice. Her work is a challenge to the salmon farm industry and to the Canadian and British Columbia officials who regulate it.
Once dismissed as an outsider and amateur, Ms. Morton has gradually gained the respect of fisheries experts like Ray Hilborn, a researcher at the University of Washington. “She doesn’t come from a science background but she has had a lot of influence in highlighting the issue,” he said. Daniel Pauly, director of the Fisheries Center at the University of British Columbia, calls her “a spunky hero.”
That may be because she takes the issue personally. The disappearance of the orcas in the Broughton “ruined my life, absolutely,” Ms. Morton said one day recently as she headed off to net baby salmon and check them for sea lice. “A lot of people have lost stuff they set out to do but, yeah, it ruined my whole plan.”
According to the British Columbia Salmon Farmers Association, salmon farms produce $450 million worth of Atlantic salmon a year in British Columbia. At any given time, 70 to 80 farm sites operate in provincial waters, perhaps 15 or so in the Broughton, a hardly inhabited area across Queen Charlotte Strait from the north end of Vancouver Island. Typically, each installation has a collection of net pens, usually crossed by metal walkways, floating in a cove or bay. Individual sites typically contain 500,000 to 750,000 penned fish.
As tiny young wild salmon, smolts, pass by these pens on their way to sea, they can pick up so many lice they die, Ms. Morton and other researchers have reported.
Farm operators like Marine Harvest, a Norwegian concern that is a major presence in salmon farming here, concede that penned fish are vulnerable to microbes and parasites but say drugs and pesticides minimize the problem, virtually eliminating the risk to wild fish stocks.
For example, Kelly Osborne, who manages farm sites in the Broughton for Marine Harvest, said penned fish were treated with an antilouse drug called Slice as smolts began their migration to the ocean. The drug is so effective, he said, that perhaps only 1 in 10 penned fish would have a live louse.
Government officials say it would be premature to blame the farms for declines in salmon runs seen here recently, because those numbers fluctuate naturally.
But Ms. Morton and researchers like Martin Krkosek of the University of Alberta and John Volpe of the University of Victoria predict that some local salmon runs will disappear unless the farms are altered or removed. And because salmon loom large in the diets of orcas, bears, eagles and other animals, their disappearance would unravel the region’s web of life.
“A lot of wild salmon populations have been on the edge for quite a long time,” threatened by logging, dams and “plain old overfishing,” said Ellen Pikitch, a fisheries biologist who heads the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science at Stony Brook University in New York. “The sea lice problem could be the nail in the coffin for some of these fish.”
(Dr. Pikitch also pointed out what some scientists say is an even bigger problem with salmon farms. It takes more than one pound of fish, processed into pellets, to produce one pound of salmon. Even though farms are working to bring the ration down — some say they have achieved a one-to-one ratio — Dr. Pikitch said the growing need to feed farmed salmon had greatly increased the demand for anchovies, herring and other fish, and “aquaculture is indirectly pulling the rug out from under the ocean ecosystem.”)
When Ms. Morton arrived at the Broughton, she was a graceful young woman with dark hair that flowed halfway down her back. “I thought she was another crazy hippie,” Billy Proctor, locally acknowledged as the Broughton’s master fisherman, said in an interview.
She still moves gracefully but her flowing hair is gray now. And she long ago won Mr. Proctor’s admiration for her devotion to the Broughton and its wildlife. When her husband died, Mr. Proctor took Ms. Morton on as a deckhand. They collaborated on a book, “Heart of the Raincoast” (Touchwood Editions, 1998), an account of his life and changing times.
Today, when Mr. Proctor and other fishermen find escaped Atlantic salmon in their nets, they often bring them to her. She cuts them open and records, among other things, whether they have been fed the chemicals that farms add to feed to color their grayish flesh a more appealing pink. Then she disposes of the bodies, usually by dumping them in the water for crabs and other scavengers to eat.
Meanwhile, in what she calls “partnered science,” she works regularly with experts from several universities. Typically, they design a research plan and Ms. Morton organizes the collection of field samples and other data to help carry it out.
At first, Ms. Morton reported her observations “naively,” Dr. Pauly recalled. “It was simply ‘Hey, look at this, wild salmon are riddled with parasites.’ ” Her opponents attacked her as inadequately credentialed, he said. In the years since, papers Ms. Morton has helped write have appeared in major scientific journals like Science, which in December published a study in which she and her coauthors link fish farms to precipitous declines of pink salmon in the Broughton. Scientists at the University of Alberta, Simon Fraser University and the University of Victoria are sending graduate students to the Salmon Coast Research Station she established here at
Echo Bay, a community of a few families that clings to rocky crags that plunge, beachless, straight down into cold, clear water. There is so little flat land that many people live in float houses — cabins built on rafts or “floats” of foot-thick logs lashed to the shore. There are no roads, no cars and no shops except the few shelves of staples in the post office in Simoom Sound, around a wooded promontory from Ms. Morton’s home, where mail arrives once a week.
The research station occupies a shedlike building on a float. The graduate students and other researchers live in a cluster of houses, their wooden walls untouched by paper or paint, perched on the rock slope inland. One is a former float house that Mr. Proctor lived in as a boy and which Ms. Morton and her son occupied after Mr. Proctor and other neighbors hauled it up onto the rocks, a disaster-filled episode she recounts in her autobiography, “Listening to Whales” (Ballantine Books, 2002). Jarret, who graduated from the University of British Columbia, works as an engineer in Utah now, Ms. Morton said.
Another is a house she built with Eric Nelson, whom she met several years after her husband died and who is the father of her 12-year-old daughter, Clio. Still another is a house she built herself, she said, when it was clear the couple would split up.
The station is supported in part by Sarah Haney, a retired nurse and environmental campaigner from Ontario whose philanthropic resources come from the game Trivial Pursuit — her former husband was one of its inventors and she was an early partner in the venture. One of her major interests is whales, Ms. Haney said in a telephone interview, so she learned about Ms. Morton and her work. When the compound came up for sale, Ms. Haney bought it and paid “a lot of money” for improvements including a new dock, and a laboratory building.
This summer, she deeded the whole place over to Ms. Morton. “This is one of the most important philanthropic ventures I have ever been involved with,” she said.
When Ms. Morton first came to British Columbia, she did not have a traditional academic background. She was a prep school dropout (Milton Academy in Massachusetts) who had worked in California for John Lilly, an eccentric researcher who studied dolphin communication. By then, she had taken enough college courses to earn a bachelor’s degree, she said. She first encountered orcas at Marineland, an oceanarium in La Jolla, Calif., and decided she had to see them in the wild. She had thoughts of returning to school for a doctorate. Instead, she said, “I met Robin and just fell so crazy in love with him that before I really thought about it I just totally jumped tracks.”
Skip to next paragraph Ms. Morton acknowledges that “the three Ws: widow, whales, wilderness” draw a lot of attention to her work. She embraces it. “The problem with this whole issue is if nobody sees it nothing happens,” she said one day recently as she motored past one of the farming operations. And because most of the fish farmed here end up in trucks heading down I-5 to California, she said, “it can’t just be the Canadian public. It has to be the American public.”
So just as Jane Goodall speaks for chimps, Ms. Morton said, she wants to tell the world about the troubles afflicting the orcas, not as a crusader, but as “a woman cleaning house.”
In September, after decades off the grid, Ms. Morton moved to a small town on Malcolm Island, in the Queen Charlotte Strait, where she will stay until Clio finishes high school.
She will live in a house on the water, a fixer-upper, she called it, and she will visit the research station by boat. Because she won’t have to chop wood or perform other Echo Bay chores, she’ll have time for projects like studying statistics online. And she is looking forward to conversation. In a tiny community like Echo Bay, she said, encountering new people with something new to say is a real treat.
“Billy and I now have a bet,” she said, referring to Mr. Proctor. “He says nobody ever comes back. But I have a research station here. My life is here.”
Meanwhile, she will be putting her hydrophone in the water again, just in case.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/04/science/04prof.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1&ref=science
In 1984, 26 years old and armed only with a bachelor’s degree and enthusiasm for her task, she moved to the Broughton Archipelago, in the Queen Charlotte Strait of British Columbia, where the whales, or orcas, were abundant. She and her husband, Robin Morton, a Canadian filmmaker, lived on a 65-foot sailboat and followed the orcas in an inflatable boat with a shelter in the back, stocked with Legos and books for their son, Jarret.
She came to know the archipelago’s long-lived orca clans and the matriarchs who led them. She knew she would find them in Fife Sound at the ebb tide, or moving up Johnson Strait with the incoming tide. Using a hydrophone, an underwater microphone she hung from the boat, she recorded their vocalizations and began to recognize what she called the dialects of the clans.
Her husband drowned in 1986, when Jarret was 4, but Ms. Morton stayed on, supporting her work by writing articles and books, designing T-shirts and working as a deckhand on a fishing boat.
Today, she hardly uses her hydrophone. There’s no point, she says, “since my subject is so rare now.” These days, when Ms. Morton noses her workboat away from her dock here, she is on a crusade, seeking not orcas, but evidence against the salmon farms she believes drove most of the killer whales away, in part by infecting the wild salmon the whales eat with parasites called sea lice. Her work is a challenge to the salmon farm industry and to the Canadian and British Columbia officials who regulate it.
Once dismissed as an outsider and amateur, Ms. Morton has gradually gained the respect of fisheries experts like Ray Hilborn, a researcher at the University of Washington. “She doesn’t come from a science background but she has had a lot of influence in highlighting the issue,” he said. Daniel Pauly, director of the Fisheries Center at the University of British Columbia, calls her “a spunky hero.”
That may be because she takes the issue personally. The disappearance of the orcas in the Broughton “ruined my life, absolutely,” Ms. Morton said one day recently as she headed off to net baby salmon and check them for sea lice. “A lot of people have lost stuff they set out to do but, yeah, it ruined my whole plan.”
According to the British Columbia Salmon Farmers Association, salmon farms produce $450 million worth of Atlantic salmon a year in British Columbia. At any given time, 70 to 80 farm sites operate in provincial waters, perhaps 15 or so in the Broughton, a hardly inhabited area across Queen Charlotte Strait from the north end of Vancouver Island. Typically, each installation has a collection of net pens, usually crossed by metal walkways, floating in a cove or bay. Individual sites typically contain 500,000 to 750,000 penned fish.
As tiny young wild salmon, smolts, pass by these pens on their way to sea, they can pick up so many lice they die, Ms. Morton and other researchers have reported.
Farm operators like Marine Harvest, a Norwegian concern that is a major presence in salmon farming here, concede that penned fish are vulnerable to microbes and parasites but say drugs and pesticides minimize the problem, virtually eliminating the risk to wild fish stocks.
For example, Kelly Osborne, who manages farm sites in the Broughton for Marine Harvest, said penned fish were treated with an antilouse drug called Slice as smolts began their migration to the ocean. The drug is so effective, he said, that perhaps only 1 in 10 penned fish would have a live louse.
Government officials say it would be premature to blame the farms for declines in salmon runs seen here recently, because those numbers fluctuate naturally.
But Ms. Morton and researchers like Martin Krkosek of the University of Alberta and John Volpe of the University of Victoria predict that some local salmon runs will disappear unless the farms are altered or removed. And because salmon loom large in the diets of orcas, bears, eagles and other animals, their disappearance would unravel the region’s web of life.
“A lot of wild salmon populations have been on the edge for quite a long time,” threatened by logging, dams and “plain old overfishing,” said Ellen Pikitch, a fisheries biologist who heads the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science at Stony Brook University in New York. “The sea lice problem could be the nail in the coffin for some of these fish.”
(Dr. Pikitch also pointed out what some scientists say is an even bigger problem with salmon farms. It takes more than one pound of fish, processed into pellets, to produce one pound of salmon. Even though farms are working to bring the ration down — some say they have achieved a one-to-one ratio — Dr. Pikitch said the growing need to feed farmed salmon had greatly increased the demand for anchovies, herring and other fish, and “aquaculture is indirectly pulling the rug out from under the ocean ecosystem.”)
When Ms. Morton arrived at the Broughton, she was a graceful young woman with dark hair that flowed halfway down her back. “I thought she was another crazy hippie,” Billy Proctor, locally acknowledged as the Broughton’s master fisherman, said in an interview.
She still moves gracefully but her flowing hair is gray now. And she long ago won Mr. Proctor’s admiration for her devotion to the Broughton and its wildlife. When her husband died, Mr. Proctor took Ms. Morton on as a deckhand. They collaborated on a book, “Heart of the Raincoast” (Touchwood Editions, 1998), an account of his life and changing times.
Today, when Mr. Proctor and other fishermen find escaped Atlantic salmon in their nets, they often bring them to her. She cuts them open and records, among other things, whether they have been fed the chemicals that farms add to feed to color their grayish flesh a more appealing pink. Then she disposes of the bodies, usually by dumping them in the water for crabs and other scavengers to eat.
Meanwhile, in what she calls “partnered science,” she works regularly with experts from several universities. Typically, they design a research plan and Ms. Morton organizes the collection of field samples and other data to help carry it out.
At first, Ms. Morton reported her observations “naively,” Dr. Pauly recalled. “It was simply ‘Hey, look at this, wild salmon are riddled with parasites.’ ” Her opponents attacked her as inadequately credentialed, he said. In the years since, papers Ms. Morton has helped write have appeared in major scientific journals like Science, which in December published a study in which she and her coauthors link fish farms to precipitous declines of pink salmon in the Broughton. Scientists at the University of Alberta, Simon Fraser University and the University of Victoria are sending graduate students to the Salmon Coast Research Station she established here at
Echo Bay, a community of a few families that clings to rocky crags that plunge, beachless, straight down into cold, clear water. There is so little flat land that many people live in float houses — cabins built on rafts or “floats” of foot-thick logs lashed to the shore. There are no roads, no cars and no shops except the few shelves of staples in the post office in Simoom Sound, around a wooded promontory from Ms. Morton’s home, where mail arrives once a week.
The research station occupies a shedlike building on a float. The graduate students and other researchers live in a cluster of houses, their wooden walls untouched by paper or paint, perched on the rock slope inland. One is a former float house that Mr. Proctor lived in as a boy and which Ms. Morton and her son occupied after Mr. Proctor and other neighbors hauled it up onto the rocks, a disaster-filled episode she recounts in her autobiography, “Listening to Whales” (Ballantine Books, 2002). Jarret, who graduated from the University of British Columbia, works as an engineer in Utah now, Ms. Morton said.
Another is a house she built with Eric Nelson, whom she met several years after her husband died and who is the father of her 12-year-old daughter, Clio. Still another is a house she built herself, she said, when it was clear the couple would split up.
The station is supported in part by Sarah Haney, a retired nurse and environmental campaigner from Ontario whose philanthropic resources come from the game Trivial Pursuit — her former husband was one of its inventors and she was an early partner in the venture. One of her major interests is whales, Ms. Haney said in a telephone interview, so she learned about Ms. Morton and her work. When the compound came up for sale, Ms. Haney bought it and paid “a lot of money” for improvements including a new dock, and a laboratory building.
This summer, she deeded the whole place over to Ms. Morton. “This is one of the most important philanthropic ventures I have ever been involved with,” she said.
When Ms. Morton first came to British Columbia, she did not have a traditional academic background. She was a prep school dropout (Milton Academy in Massachusetts) who had worked in California for John Lilly, an eccentric researcher who studied dolphin communication. By then, she had taken enough college courses to earn a bachelor’s degree, she said. She first encountered orcas at Marineland, an oceanarium in La Jolla, Calif., and decided she had to see them in the wild. She had thoughts of returning to school for a doctorate. Instead, she said, “I met Robin and just fell so crazy in love with him that before I really thought about it I just totally jumped tracks.”
Skip to next paragraph Ms. Morton acknowledges that “the three Ws: widow, whales, wilderness” draw a lot of attention to her work. She embraces it. “The problem with this whole issue is if nobody sees it nothing happens,” she said one day recently as she motored past one of the farming operations. And because most of the fish farmed here end up in trucks heading down I-5 to California, she said, “it can’t just be the Canadian public. It has to be the American public.”
So just as Jane Goodall speaks for chimps, Ms. Morton said, she wants to tell the world about the troubles afflicting the orcas, not as a crusader, but as “a woman cleaning house.”
In September, after decades off the grid, Ms. Morton moved to a small town on Malcolm Island, in the Queen Charlotte Strait, where she will stay until Clio finishes high school.
She will live in a house on the water, a fixer-upper, she called it, and she will visit the research station by boat. Because she won’t have to chop wood or perform other Echo Bay chores, she’ll have time for projects like studying statistics online. And she is looking forward to conversation. In a tiny community like Echo Bay, she said, encountering new people with something new to say is a real treat.
“Billy and I now have a bet,” she said, referring to Mr. Proctor. “He says nobody ever comes back. But I have a research station here. My life is here.”
Meanwhile, she will be putting her hydrophone in the water again, just in case.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/04/science/04prof.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1&ref=science
Abonneren op:
Posts (Atom)