Oil and gas companies looking for deposits offshore have touted their equipment as environmentally friendly. However, new research suggests that blue whales are having a hard time hearing each other over the seismic blasting that the search entails. Research has discovered that whales forced to compete with the seismic testing work, which involves bouncing sound waves off the sea bed, markedly increase the number of times they repeat the same calls [The Times].
The study, published in Biology Letters, was conducted in Canada’s St. Lawrence Estuary, and is the first report of whales increasing their calls in response to underwater noise. Researchers believe that the whales are repeating the calls simply because other whales can’t hear them, and they’re having trouble gathering to feed and mate.
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As the International Whaling Commission wound down this week with no progress made on the stalemate between pro-whaling and anti-whaling nations, some experts are beginning to question the commission’s central tool: the moratorium on commercial whaling established more than 20 years ago.Some experts wonder whether the ban is really protecting the world’s whale populations. Japan’s so-called “scientific whaling” program is a loophole in the ban, and the program is widely seen as a cover for commercial whaling. Japan catches more than 1,000 whales a year, and most cetacean researchers argue that whale populations exist at only a fraction of their former abundance and are far from large enough to sustain commercial harvesting for meat or oil — or even the culling of some 1,000 whales a year for science. Australia, a party to the IWC, campaigned this year to end any ”scientific whaling” that involves the deliberate killing of whales [Science News].
A report released by the commission on Monday also states that a quarter of the whales harvested from the Antarctic Ocean in the last seven months by Japanese researchers were pregnant. To many, the destruction of these whales and their unborn calves makes a mockery of the moratorium on whaling, given that the goal of the ban is to preserve whale populations. However, the Japanese Whaling Association contends on its Web site that “No whales have ever been hunted to extinction, nor are they likely to be. . . . [And] there are species which are abundant enough that marine management is needed,” such as for the Antarctic and northwestern Pacific minke whales and northwestern Pacific Bryde’s whales [Science News].
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The blue whale, the biggest animal that has ever inhabited the planet, seems to be on the move in the Pacific Ocean in ways that could reflect the revival of old migratory patterns disrupted by decades of intensive whaling in the 20th century [The New York Times blog]. Although blue whale hunting was banned in 1965, the whales didn’t return to the northern Pacific waters off the coasts of British Columbia and Alaska, where they were once plentiful.
Whalers formerly caught hundreds of blue whales in the northern zones, landing 1300 between 1908 and 1965. Yet despite the ban, they seemed not to recover there [New Scientist]. Now a new study, published in the journal Marine Mammal Science, reports that 15 blue whales have been sighted in the northern waters over the last decade, and some of them were confirmed to be the same individuals previously spotted farther south, off the shores of California. Researchers can’t yet say what led to the renewed migration: It could be a sign of a booming population, or a response to global warming.
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The paleontologists didn’t understand what they’d found when they first unearthed the fossil of a primitive whale nine years ago. Philip Gingerich was thrown off by the jumble of adult and fetal-size bones. “The first thing we found [were] small teeth, then ribs going the wrong way,” Gingerich said. Later, “it was just astonishing to realize why the specimen in the field was so confusing” [National Geographic News]. The answer to the riddle, he soon realized, was that the fossil represented a pregnant female proto-whale and her unborn calf.
The 47.5 million-year-old mother represents a transitional phase in whale evolution before the behemoths had fully committed to a life in the ocean deeps, researchers say. The findings lend credence to the idea that early whales — protocetids — were amphibious animals that fed in the oceans but came ashore to sleep, mate and give birth [Nature News]. Researchers reached this conclusion because the fossilized fetus was positioned with its head near the birth canal. While all large land mammals are typically delivered headfirst, so they can breathe during their birth, all modern cetaceans are born tail first to ensure they don’t drown during delivery [Science News].
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Behind closed doors, members of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) have been discussing a proposal that would give give Japan the right to hunt whales in its coastal waters. IWC officials say the controversial proposal is a compromise measure, as Japan would also have to agree to limit its hunts in the Southern Ocean, but opponents say it amounts to an official sanction of Japan’s whale hunts. The International Fund for Animal Welfare argues that the proposal is part of a dangerous drift towards commercial whaling in the 21st century.”This is Whalergate,” the global director of the fund’s whale program, Patrick Ramage, said [Sydney Morning Herald].
The proposal was put forward by American commission member William Hogarth, a Bush appointee, who has argued that a compromise is necessary to keep Japan from withdrawing from the commission. In recent years, the whaling commission … has been deadlocked between the anti- and pro-whaling camps. Rather than setting a clear direction for conserving and managing whale populations worldwide, its meetings have become contentious donnybrooks in which the two sides have competed for influence while little changed. Worldwide, three countries — Japan, Iceland and Norway — continue to hunt whales, either in the name of research or, in Norway’s case, under a commercial exception established more than 20 years ago [Washington Post].
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The oceans are getting noisier, and that’s bad news for whales, dolphins, and sea turtles who use sound to communicate and navigate, researchers declared at a United Nations wildlife conference. Rumbling ship engines, seismic surveys by oil and gas companies, and intrusive military sonars are triggering an “acoustic fog and cacophony of sounds” underwater, scaring marine animals and affecting their behavior. “There is now evidence linking loud underwater noises with some major strandings of marine mammals, especially deep diving beaked whales” [Reuters], says Mark Simmonds of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society.
Researchers have long worried that high-powered sonar pulses confuse whales and dolphins and may cause the animals to beach themselves. Marine mammals are turning up on the world’s beaches with tissue damage similar to that found in divers suffering from decompression sickness. The condition, known as the bends, causes gas bubbles to form in the bloodstream upon surfacing too quickly. Scientists say the use of military sonar or seismic testing may have scared the animals into diving and surfacing beyond their physical limits, Simmonds said [AP]. He points to two recent strandings as possible results of the noisy waters (although a link has not been proved): the 100 melon-headed whales that were found on a Madagascar beach, and the two dozen dolphins that got stranded in southern England.
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The U.S. Supreme Court has sided with the Navy over the Pacific Ocean’s whales, declaring that the Navy can continue its military exercises using high-powered sonar, despite environmentalists’ arguments that the sonar can harm whales’ ears or cause the panicked animals to beach themselves. The court ruled, in a 5-4 decision, that national security needs override these concerns. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, stating: “Of course, military interests do not always trump other considerations, and we have not held that they do. In this case, however, the proper determination of where the public interest lies does not strike us as a close question” [ABC News].
The lawsuit centered on 14 sonar exercises that the Navy wanted to conduct off the coast of Southern California to train seamen in detecting enemy submarines. In his opinion, Roberts stressed the military threat posed by modern subs. “Modern diesel-electric submarines . . . can operate almost silently, making them extremely difficult to detect and track.” America’s potential adversaries have at least 300 of these subs, he said. “The president — the commander in chief — has determined that the training with active sonar is ‘essential to the national security’” [Los Angeles Times].
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How do you get a snot sample from a shy behemoth of the deep? That question stumped researchers studying whale health, who wanted to give the animals check-ups without corralling and traumatizing them. Now, researchers have come up with an ingenious answer, flying a remote-control helicopter through the jets ejected by the whales’ blowholes. The helicopter has petri dishes strapped to it, which collect any bacteria, fungi, and viruses that were in the whales’ lungs.
The collected samples could make a big contribution to scientists’ understanding of infectious diseases in whale populations. Researcher Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse explains: “We don’t know much about them because they are so big and they are in the water all the time, and that makes it really difficult to obtain biological samples that are relevant to determining health in these populations; unless they’ve already stranded or unless they are in captivity, which are hardly representative of a normal population” [BBC News].
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The Supreme Court heard arguments today on whether environmental laws can be used to prevent the U.S. Navy from conducting sonar exercises off the coast of California, where some researchers believe the sonar could harm whales and other marine mammals. Last March, a federal judge strictly limited the sonar practice, but the Navy appealed the decision to the Supreme Court.
The lower court’s order disrupts the Navy’s war-game exercises, which are “critical to the nation’s security,” said U.S. Solicitor Gen. Gregory Garre. He also disputed claims that the piercing sound of the sonar causes severe harm to the whales. But Los Angeles lawyer Richard B. Kendall described the sonar as like the sound of “a jet engine in this room multiplied by 2,000 times.” He said beaked whales, in panic, dive deeply to escape the sound, and they sometimes suffer bleeding and even death when they try to resurface [Los Angeles Times].
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A new fossil study has pinpointed the moment when whales lost their distinct legs and tail and developed flukes, sometimes called tail fins, instead: Flukes are the two wide, flat triangular lobes on a whale’s back end and are made of skin and connective tissue, with bones in the middle [National Geographic News]. Researchers say that the Georgiacetus vogtlensis, whose fossil was found in Alabama, was one of the last whales to have powerful back legs and a tail like a dog’s, and that whales evolved flukes between 40 and 38 million years ago.
Paleontologists already knew that the ancestors of whales once strode on land on four legs, just as other mammals do. Over time, as they evolved to dwell in water, their front legs became flippers while they lost their back legs and hips, although modern whales all still retain traces of pelvises, and occasionally throwbacks are born with vestiges of hind limbs [LiveScience].
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The International Whaling Commission’s annual meeting is almost always a quarrelsome affair, with Japan pressing for less stringent rules on whale hunting and environmental groups shouting about the need for stronger protections for the marine mammals. But this year’s meeting, which began on Monday, became strangely peaceful yesterday, as opposing sides celebrated a rare agreement–an agreement not to talk about the hard stuff until next year’s conference.
The most controversial topics before the commission are Japan’s demand to lift the ban on commercial whaling in its coastal waters, and a proposal by South American nations to create a whale sanctuary in the South Atlantic where hunting would always be prohibited. The international commission agreed to table both of these questions, and decided that over the next year a 24-nation working group … will meet in private to thrash out the most contentious issues that have left the whaling body so deeply divided [Australian Associated Press (AAP)].
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The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to take on the above question in its next term, when it will wrestle with a complicated lawsuit between the Navy and the Natural Resources Defense Council. For years, the environmental group has been fighting to limit the Navy’s use of sonar in training exercises off the California coast, arguing that the sonar injures and disorients whales and other marine mammals.
Environmentalists successfully sued the Pentagon over the practice in March, forcing major changes in the Navy’s annual offshore training exercises. A federal judge ruled it was “constitutionally suspect” for President Bush to issue a national security exemption so no environmental impact assessment was carried out [CNN]. The Supreme Court won’t try to determine whether the sonar is causing confused whales to beach themselves, but will instead weigh in on whether the executive branch had the right to preempt an environmental law by granting the exemption to the Navy.
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