Posted by jessmil on 07/19/2006 2:40 pm

The following posting is from Carroll, who is onboard in the Bering Sea...

This afternoon we entered the southern part of our search zone for humpback whales, in the area northwest of St. Matthew and southwest of St. Lawrence. It’s less than 200 miles between the two islands, but our search will take us back and forth across 700 miles of sea.

It seems like a long way, but it pales in comparison to what the humpbacks themselves do every year. The humpback whale has the longest migration of any mammal, making a ten-thousand mile roundtrip between its calving grounds in temperate seas and its feeding grounds closer to the poles. Even though the humpback is the most studied large whale on earth, our understanding of which humpbacks go where in their annual journeys is still incomplete.

Humpbacks have three major winter calving grounds in the North Pacific—off the coasts of Mexico and Central America; around Hawaii; and in the western Pacific from south of Japan to the Philippines. Scientists have also identified the major summer feeding grounds—off the U.S. Pacific coast from California to Washington; from northern British Columbia across the Gulf of Alaska; and in the Aleutian Archipelago and Bering Sea. But the connections between these areas are still being worked out. Most humpbacks from Mexico and Central America winter off California, Oregon and Washington. But there is a smaller, and seemingly distinct group, that heads farther north to British Columbia and the Gulf of Alaska. Some Hawaiian humpbacks also summer in the Gulf of Alaska. Still others, however, have been spotted in the Aleutians and southern Bering Sea. And what of the humpbacks from Japan? No one knows for sure yet, but one hypothesis is that at least some of these whales travel north into rich waters of the central Bering. It’s an open question, that hopefully this trip will help answer.

In 1999, a whale survey of the region identified significant numbers of humpbacks in the waters southwest of St. Lawrence, near the Russian border. The same waters we’re sailing through now. With any luck, we’ll encounter some of those humpbacks and get close enough to take the photo identification shots necessary to match the whales here to individuals already documented further south.

It won’t be easy. The 1999 survey had 10 humpback sightings in more than 6,000 miles of effort. Nearly ten times the distance we’ll be covering. But finding even one match will help us better understand the movements, and the habitat needs of this remarkable migrant and open an unexplored new feeding ground to humpback research.

It’s worth a few hundred miles at sea.

Carroll

Posted by jessmil on 07/19/2006 2:12 pm

The following posting is from Adam, who is onboard in the Bering Sea...

Another unusual day on the Bering sea. Then again they've all been pretty unusual so far, so that makes it normal I suppose. We came to the stunning conclusion last night that there is no point searching for whales in the dark and fog, so we decided to turn off the engine and just drift for the few hours of darkness, thus not missing a big chunk of the search pattern and saving fuel (think global act local!). The morning started off the same, cloaked in thick fog, visibility down to 20 metres at times. We adjusted our pattern a little to account for the lost time and set off again optimistic the fog would clear for us. Eventually, it finally did at around 2pm.

It can only be described as eerie out here right now. The water is like undulating molten glass. Biggish rolling swells but not a ripple in sight, all the way to the horizon. Naturally the lookout watch has resumed and as I speak Todd and James are up the rig peering into the distance with binoculars. I wish them luck, not just for the

environmental data we search for, but also for their sanity. It can be difficult for busy motivated professional people to be faced with inactivity that they cant do anything about. The ship's clean, engines are greased and happy, skipper's having a nap, all the good movies have been watched, it's so quiet there's not even a single seabird as far as the eye can see. And there's plenty of zig zags to go till we reach St Lawrence in a few days. Everyone's looking forward to that as there will be lots to do and plenty to film and record.

3 minutes to my turn up the rig so I'll finish this update later, after I spot the humpbacks!!!


Some time later...

Well I didn't spot any humpbacks but I did see a few birds, and a plastic wrapper. It's got me thinking that a hundred and something years ago there were something like 90% more whales in the Bering than there are now. Is it possible that a reason we aren't seeing any here is because most of them are gone? There are less than 1% of Blue whales left now, which is a tragedy. One would think that the experience of loosing the whales would make people think twice about fishing out whole fish populations in the region, but sadly it doesn't. That is the challenge environmental groups such as ours face- How to educate the people that they don't have to accept huge companies destroying their ecosystem for a quick mega-buck, and to find a way to stop them, as quickly as possible.

STOP THE OCEAN DESTROYERS!!!

Adam
ps the fog's back