Adult Blue Whale

It has been discovered that Blue whales are actually able to effectively tune the pitch of their calls with an astounding amount of accuracy, and are able to repeat this process call after call. This discovery was made during a recent study of the Blue whale population in the North Pacific. The results of this study were recently published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

The authors of the article have hinted that this control in the pitch of their calls could allow them to find a potential mate by simply swimming toward or away from the call.

“Blue whales in a given population have been observed to align their pitch to a common value, but we have now been able to determine just how accurately they are able to do so,” explained professor of Physics at San Francisco State University, Roger Bland.

Professor Bland along with colleagues have analyzed the recordings of over 4,000 Blue whale calls, their focus being the B calls – Those long sad sounding moans that manifest themselves in the second half of the Blue whale song that is distinct in the North Pacific population of Blue whales.

“We found that blue whales are capable of very fine control over the pitch of their call — both in reproducing their call at the same pitch every time and in synchronizing their pitch with others,” Bland went on to explain.

This just goes to show you that humans aren’t the only creatures on the face of the planet that are capable of amazing things… We should pay more attention to nature, we might actually learn something.

Sapphire Princess

When the Sapphire Princess pulled into Juneau it was actually stopped in it’s tracks this Past Wednesday, when a dead whale was found on the ship’s bow.

The public affairs officer for National Geographic and Atmospheric Administration, Julie Speegle, has commented that the whale was discovered at just about 8 AM, when the ship was approaching Juneau, new Tracy Arm.

“It apparently became lodged there overnight,” she commented.

When the whale was discovered, the ship contacted the US Coast Guard, who then turned around and told the National Oceanic and Administration of the happenings. Both agencies rushed to the scene.

Speegle has commented that the vessel came to a halt in an area south of Douglas Island, but did not dock while a diving team worked to dislodge the hapless whale. After it was successfully taken off the ship, the whale was immediately transported by tug boat to undergo a necropsy to figure out what caused its death. A press release was then published by Princess Cruises saying that the whale was taken away through the Stephens Passage.

The job of removing the whale was completed and the vessel was then cleared to get on its way just after 3 PM, arriving about an hour afterward.

Speegle explained that this particular species of whale could not be deciphered until they completed the necropsy, “We don’t definitely know but photos from (NOAA) Protected Resources say it appears to be a juvenile humpback.”.

PETA is lobbying for Sea World to be held criminally responsible for the death of Dawn Brancheau. Since that fateful day, PETA has been launching numerous campaigns against Sea World and their operational procedures.

Their first step was to publicly protest outside the theme park’s gates and now they are upping the ante.

PETA officials have been lobbying for the criminal charges, claiming that the attack on Brancheau, from a legal standpoint, is involuntary manslaughter.

“We think that is important for the attorney general to step in, investigate and prosecute this case because otherwise it is only a matter of time before another death or serious injury occurs,” explained PETA’s attorney, Jeff Kerr.

PETA’s case is clearly stated in a huge letter, address to Bill McCollum, the acting Attorney General.

PETA has said that because the officials of Sea World knew that killer whales were dangerous, and the whale which caused Brancheau’s demise was particularly dangerous, that Seaworld – which allowed employees to interact with these creatures – was in fact criminally negligent.

“Working in a dangerous job should not mean that you are exposed on a daily basis to being killed,” Kerr explained.

Of course, the officials at Sea World have a completely different view of the situation, explaining, “The allegations made by PETA today are as baseless … In our experience, both OCSO and the State Attorney conduct their work thoroughly and professionally. PETA’s letter appears to be another example of an organization more interested in media attention than assisting animals in need.”

While it was a terrible tragedy, one has to wonder, is it Sea Worlds’ fault? There is always danger when dealing with wild animals.. But could further steps have been taken?

Faroe Islands

On the 19th of July, some 236 pilot whales met a rather ruthless demise in the town of Klaksvik, located in the Danish Faeroe Islands. Thanks to the excellent work of an undercover operative of Sea Shepherd, who was amongst the locals to document “the grind”, the whole thing was caught on tape! The grind is a very inhumane practice of whaling which involves herding the pods of cetaceans in coves, before stabbing them in the back with a knife!

Peter Hammarstedt, a Sea Shepherd undercover operative who also happens to be the First Mate of Sea Shepherd’s vessel the Bob Barker, had been deeply undercover with these barbaric islanders for seven days when he heard the news of a grind taking place in Klaksvik over the radio. He jumped into his car and raced off to the scene. Unfortunately, he was badly outnumbered, and wasn’t in any way able to stop the massacre, so he caught the whole thing on video instead.

“Pilot whales are known to travel in pods of 200-300 members. Two hundred and thirty-six pilot whales were slaughtered last night in Klaksvik: bulls, pregnant and lactating females, juveniles, and unborn babies still attached to their mothers by the umbilical chord. An entire pod that once swam freely through the North Atlantic has been exterminated in a single blood bath,” explained Hammarstedt.

Pilot whales - Picture by: Clark Anderson

The local government is claiming that the deaths of these whales are over quickly and painless, however the footage Hammarstedt captured begs to differ.

“One whale had five to six brutal chops to her head,” Hammarstedt began, “The islanders basically used her as a chopping board. Her death would have been slow and extremely painful. Some whales are hacked repeatedly for up to four minutes before they finally die.”

It was also painfully apparent that “the grind” is indiscriminate as well as gruesome.

“Babies had been cut out of their mother’s dead bodies and left to rot on the docks,” reported Hammarstedt, who got quite a few shots of dead babies and even fetuses. “Pilot whale groups are strongly matriarchal; I can’t imagine the fear and panic that these mothers must have felt as their families were wiped out in front of them.”

The Faroese pilot what grind is very similar to the yearly Taiji dolphin slaughter perpetrated in Japan. The slaughter of dolphins is very well documented in the bone chilling documentary, “The Cove”. The thing that sets apart the two activities is that there are more than 18 different coves in the Faeroes where the grind can happen, as opposed to the single cove in Taiji. This makes it almost impossible to find out where the killings will take place, or to get there in time to help prevent this heinous act.

Now that this barbaric act has been brought to light, and into the public eye, one can only hope that there will be steps taken to help avoid this kind of thing in the future.

Anyone who wants to know more or see pictures from the slaughter can visit http://www.seashepherd.org/

Bowhead whales

No, they don’t need to take showers! Bowhead whales apparently have the ability to sniff the air!

This discovery could drastically change our theories on how baleen whales find their food, as researchers now have a sneaking suspicion that the bowhead whales actually sniff out swarms of krill, their main food source.

This discovery was made when scientists hacked open the body of a bowhead whale and noticed that there was olfactory receptors which linked to the nose and the brain.

Up until now, it was thought that whales, along with dolphins, had no sense of smell.

Professor Hans Thewissen, a Cetacean expert from the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine, and colleagues based in Alaska and Japan, stumbled upon this discovery while taking a gander at the size of the brain in bowhead whales.

The whales were reeled in as a part of the biannual Inupiat subsistence hunt, and Professor Thewissen’s team was granted permission to take a gander at the brain cavities, to figure out how much of the brain actually filled up the brain casing.

“Upon taking a brain out, I noticed that there were olfactory tracts, which, in other mammals, connect the brain to the nose,” Professor Thewissen explained, “I followed those to the nose, and noted that all the olfactory hardware is there.”

This really caught the scientists off guard.

“At first glance, it would appear that whales would not have much use for smell, since everything they are interested in is below the water,” Professor Thewissen explained, “Olfaction is, by definition, the reception of airborne molecules.”

He went on to explain that in most cetacean species which have been put under the microscope to date, which have mainly been whales with teeth like dolphins, sperm whales and orcas, the hardware needed for them to be able to smell was absent.
“Based on this most people assumed that no whale had a sense of smell.”

With a little more digging and prodding, and some extensive tests, it was confirmed that the discovery that the bowhead can indeed smell, is accurate.

Bowhead whales exhibit a large and developed olfactory bulb, which seems to be very similar in structure to the hardware other animals have which can also smell.

It was also discovered by researchers that the bowheads also have functional olfactory receptor proteins, and this is one quality that toothed whales are lacking. These receptors are what provide the biochemical infrastructure for them to be able to smell.
“It is remarkable that this animal, which appears to have very little use for olfaction, retained that sense,” Professor Thewissen said. “We speculate that they are actually able to smell krill and may use this to locate their prey. Krill smells like boiled cabbage.”

Also, unlike most other species of whale, the bowhead actually have separate nostrils, which leads scientists to think that they may be able to not only smell, but determine from which direction the smell is coming.

I guess this means the next time you go bowhead whale watching, remember to wear your deodorant.

Right whale with calf - The same type of whale as in the story

Well, this is interesting.. A whale which was showing off its moves in Table Bay, jumped up out of the water “Free Willy” style, and what happens? The whale lands on top of a sailboat.

The whale flattened the steel mass and brought down the rigging before gallantly sliding back into the water and swimming on its way.

“It was quite scary,” commented Paloma Werner, who had previously been enjoying the trip with her boyfriend come business partner, Ralph Mothes.

“We thought the whale was going to go under the boat and come up on the other side. We thought it would see us.” Ms. Werner continued.

However, this was not the case, as the boat had its engine turned off.

The manager/scientist of the Cape Town Mammal Research Institute at the University of Pretoria, Meredith Thornton, shed some light onto the subject for us: “Whales don’t see much by way of their eyes but by sound in the water.”

Given that the whale had such poor eyesight, and that the water was particularly rough, Thornton commented that the whale, presumably a young whale most likely did not even realize the boat was in the way.

The hapless couple first spied the whale when it was a stone’s throw away, from their yacht. It jumped out of the water once, and before they could make a move, the whale was only a hair lengths away from the vessel.

“There was hardly any wind, so we couldn’t get out of the way,” countered Werner. “We didn’t have time to take any evasive action.”

This just goes to show you, when you are out gallivanting around, always keep your engines running.

whale meat

If you have your tongue set on eating some whale meat tonight, you may consider heading off to Ulsan. There has been a sharp increase in the number of local restaurants in this major city over the past year, they now tally over 100, the city government reported this past Sunday.

The number of restaurants has climbed nearly four hundred percent since last year, and the it is the city with the most since the International Whaling commission placed a worldwide halt on commercial whaling back in 1986.

The officials of the city have said that minke whale is the hottest item on the menu. However, hunting whales for commercial purposes is outlawed around the globe, that is of course unless they are caught “accidentally” in fishermens’ nets.

Korea specifically is one of the countries in the world which is the most strict when it comes to the enforcement of the laws which protect endangered species.

Nonetheless, a lot of “accidents” occur, and whale meat continues to be a traditional local delicacy in the city. These whales will sell for anywhere from 25 million won ($21,000) and up, when the supplies are low and the demand is high. On the black market, an illegally caught whale will go for somewhere in the 16 million won ($14,000) range.

The illegal trading of these endangered species is the main reason these restaurants can give you those delectable whale dishes on their menus. Many environmental groups are crying foul, and are pushing for more monitoring and higher penalties for illegal hunting of whales.

That being the case, you can expect to see many more “accidental” catches, and many more dishes to come.

Now some happy news from the ocean: blue whales have been spotted in migratory routes and feeding grounds in the Pacific that has been void of blue-whales for over half a century. Sightings are also increasing in the Atlantic, and recent research suggests that the Antarctic blue whale population is growing at a heartening 6% a year. About 440 blue whales have been spotted in the western Atlantic and about 200 in the eastern, including large numbers off Iceland. These are likely to be just a fraction of the total amount of blue whales present in these waters.

“The overall numbers are still tiny compared with the original populations before whaling started, but the trend is at last in the right direction,” said John Calambokidis, a marine scientist whose research on whale movements and populations has just been published in the journal Marine Mammal Science. “This may represent a return to a migration pattern that existed in earlier periods for the eastern north Pacific blue whale population,” he said.

Richard Sears, founder of the Mingan Island Cetacean Study in Canada, has noticed a similar trend with blue whale sightings increasing in the north Atlantic during the past few years. Sears is cautiously optimistic, but warns that the increase in sightings may be partly due to more people looking for whales. “There is still no room for complacency,” he said.

Until the 20^th century, blue whales were normally avoided by whalers since these oceanic giants were too large and too fast for traditional ships to handle. With a maximal reported length of over 30 meters and the capacity of exceeding 170 metric tons in weight, the blue whale is the largest animal even known to have existed on our planet and capturing it using an old fashioned sailing vessel is certainly no picnic.

Before the invention of the steam-powered whaling ship and the exploding harpoon, the estimated global population of the blue whale was somewhere between 350,000 and 400,000. By the 1960s, no more than 5,000 blue whales were left.

Unlike whales such as the humpback which has undergone a remarkable recovery since the international ban on whaling was imposed, the blue whale populations have not shown any clear signs of recovery during the last few decades and scientists have worried about them being too shattered and fragmented to be viable populations in the long run. Illicit harvesting has also been a problem – files handed to the International Whaling Commission by Alexey Yablokov, environmental adviser to Boris Yeltsin, showed that the Soviet Union killed over 9,000 blue whales from the time of the ban until 1972.

“These revelations go some way towards explaining why blue whale populations stayed low for so long,” says Dan Bortolotti, author of the book Wild Blue. “It also suggests that they may now have a chance to recover — but only if the ban on hunting all large whales stays in place.”

The annual whale expedition off the Japanese port city of Kushiro ended this weekend after having caught 59 minke whales, the Japanese Fisheries Agency said in a statement.

The whales where caught as a part of a research program that whaling opponents claim is just a cover for commercial whaling. A maximum capture of 60 whales is allowed under this research program, which is authorised by the International Whaling Commission (IWC).

The Fisheries Agency says the goal of the hunt was to study the feeding patterns of the whales and their effect on fish stocks. Initial examination of the stomach contents of the killed mink whales revealed mostly pollack, krill and anchovy. The complete results of the study will be presented at next year’s IWC meeting.

Japan also catches about 1,000 whales in the Antarctic Ocean and the northwest Pacific Ocean each year under another IWC research programme.

Minke Whale Facts

· Once perceived as asingle species, the minke whale population has quite recently been recognized as consisting of two distinct species: the Northern Mink Whale, Balaenoptera acutorostrata, and the Southern Mink Whale, Balaenoptera bonaerensis.

· Also known as Little Piked Whales or Lesser Rorquals, Mink Whales prefer icy waters but are found world-wide.

· Balaenoptera acutorostrata is listed as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, while Balaenoptera bonaerensi is listed as Data Deficient since it was recognized as a separate species so recently.

· Together, the two species are believed to form a population of over 1 million Minke Whales world-wide.

In the ocean, krill live together in swarms, some of them stretching for tens of kilometres. Krill swarms are some of the largest gatherings of life on the planet and this naturally poses some puzzling questions to science: Why are krill living together? How do they find each other? Why are some swarms enormous when others are more moderately sized?

In an effort to shed some light on the mystery, a team of British Antarctic Survey (BAS) researchers headed by Dr Geraint Tarling set out to study the composition and structure of 4525 separate krill swarms in the Scotia Sea. Despite its name, the Scotia Sea is not located close to home for these British scientists – it is a vast expanse of water situated partly in the Southern Ocean and partly in the Atlantic; between Argentina and the Antarctic Peninsula.

Using echo-sounding equipment, the Tarling team tracked down the krill living in this 900,000 km² area and what they found surprised them. According to this new research, krill normally gather into two different types of swarms. The first type is relatively small, typically not exceeding a length of 50 meters and a depth of 4 meters. In this comparatively small type of swarm, the density of krill isn’t very high – you will just find an average of ten krill per cubic meter.

The other type of swarm – dubbed “superswarm” by the researchers – is on the other hand a very densely packed group with up to 100 krill per cubic meter. These dense congregations are the ones that grow really big, often stretching over one kilometre in length and averaging almost 30 meter in depth.

“I was coming at it thinking there might be small swarms tightly packed, and then large swarms that were a bit more diffuse,” says Dr Tarling. “But what we actually found was the opposite. There were small swarms that were quite diffuse and large swarms that were tightly packed.”

This means that a majority of the krill living in the Scotia Sea at any one time will be found within one of just a few enormous superswarms.

“We talking trillions of krill in one aggregation,” explains Dr Tarling. “Ten or 12 swarms could explain 60 or 70% of the biomass in an area the size of the eastern Atlantic. It was astonishing how much biomass could be concentrated into such a small area.”

A fishing flee scooping up a whole swarm of krill may therefore be removing the majority of krill from the Southern Ocean in just one short fishing trip if they happen to target one of the superswarms instead of a small swarm.

How does a superswarm come about?

Although they weren’t able to fully answer this question, Tarling and his colleagues managed to pinpoint certain factors that make superswarms more likely to appear.

“The factors we identified included whether there was more likely to be a lot of food around or not, and when there wasn’t that much food around, they tended to form larger swarms,” says Dr Tarling.

Age is also of importance. The smaller, diffuse swarms typically contained adult krill, while the enormous superswarms consisted of densely packed juvenile individuals.

“Where the animals were less mature, they were more likely to form the larger swarms,” says Dr Tarling, adding that he doesn’t know why.

It might be a question of safety in numbers; it is common among prey animals to live in large groups to reduce the risk of getting eaten, and krill is after all a favoured meal by a long row of sea living creatures.

“All types of swarms are probably to a greater or lesser extent an antipredator response,” Dr Tarling says.

But although living in a swarm reduces the risk of being eaten, it also means having to compete with all the other members of the group for food. Juvenile krill are more buoyant than adults, which mean that they spend less energy swimming. Perhaps this is why adult krill prefers to live in smaller congregations; their negative buoyancy forces them to eat more so they can’t afford living in a huge swarm densely surrounded by competitors.

On the other hand, being in a swarm has been shown to be more energetically efficient than being isolated.

“For a juvenile that wants to grow very quickly, saving energy could be a bonus for them,” says Dr Tarling.

Night-time mystery

As a scientist, you often find yourself in a situation where new findings answer one question but simultaneously create three new ones. One of the new conundrums that Dr Tarling has brought back home from his research trip is the following: Why are superswarms more likely to form at night?

“That is more puzzling for us to explain,” says Dr Tarling. “Up until this point, most polar biologists believed that the swarms dispersed [at night], because that’s the time they feed. When daylight comes they get back into the swarm again for the antipredator benefit. But we found the opposite to that.”

The research has been published in the journal Deep Sea Research I.