Warming May Be Hurting Gray Whales’ Recovery By Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post Staff Writer
As many as 118,000 gray whales roamed the Pacific before humans decimated the population through hunting, and human-induced climate change may now be depriving those that remain of the food they need, according to a study released yesterday.
The research, based on a detailed analysis of DNA taken from gray whales living in the eastern Pacific, highlights how human behavior has transformed the oceans, the scientists said.
Today there are only about 22,000 Pacific gray whales, including about 100 in the western Pacific. …
Federal officials took eastern Pacific gray whales off the endangered species list in the mid-1990s, but a rise in sea temperatures appears to have limited the whales’ available food. A recent spike in deaths among gray whales may suggest “this decline was due to shifting climatic conditions on Arctic feeding grounds,” the researchers wrote in the paper, being published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“There definitely are large-scale ecosystem effects going on,” said Stanford doctoral student S. Elizabeth Alter, the lead author, in an interview yesterday. …
The decline in gray whales has affected the ocean in a variety of ways, according to the researchers. Because the animals feed on the ocean bottom by sucking in and expelling sediment that contains shrimplike creatures called amphipods, the scientists wrote, historic populations may have redistributed enough sediment to feed a million seabirds.
Aboriginal tribes are currently allowed to kill as many as 125 eastern Pacific gray whales a year under International Whaling Commission rules, though this practice has sparked controversy. In light of the new data suggesting that the whales’ numbers were more depleted than was previously known, international officials need to reconsider the amount of gray whale hunting they currently allow, the researchers said. …
[I]f humans are affecting the ocean’s “capacity to support life, it’s got to make you worry, it’s got to make your wonder.”
– – – – –
Hunter not ashamed of killing whale without a permit By Lynda V. Mapes, Seattle Times staff reporter
Around 9:30, the crew saw another whale. This one, about 40 feet long, surfaced and came to the two boats.
“It chose us,” Johnson said.
Into the animal’s flesh, crew members plunged at least five stainless-steel whaling harpoons and four seal harpoons “so we wouldn’t lose it,” Johnson said. They then shot the whale with a gun powerful enough to fire a slug four miles.
The former captain of the whaling crew that in 1999 took the Makah tribe’s first whale in 70 years, Johnson confirmed that the hunt that shocked his own tribe and anti-whaling activists Saturday was carried out without the permission of his Tribal Council or Whaling Commission. …
“I’m not ashamed. I’m feeling kind of proud. … There is only a few guys in Neah Bay that can get a whale and bring everyone home safely. You think one of the only whaling captains in 77 years could give it up? I should have done it years ago. I come from a whaling family … It’s in the blood.”
The tribe needs to whale to keep its culture alive, Johnson said. “The time is now, when the people are still interested. And the whales are robust.“