{"id":31605,"date":"2020-07-07T00:05:14","date_gmt":"2020-07-07T07:05:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/?post_type=custom_features&p=31605"},"modified":"2022-12-20T15:19:26","modified_gmt":"2022-12-20T23:19:26","slug":"on-knowing-the-winged-whale","status":"publish","type":"custom_features","link":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/features\/on-knowing-the-winged-whale\/","title":{"rendered":"On Knowing the Winged Whale"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the middle of Johnstone Strait, close to the northern tip of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, a calm June day has dialed up a plate-flat sea. But that won\u2019t last long.<\/p>\n

\u201cHumpback,\u201d says Jackie Hildering from the cockpit of her runabout, Fluke<\/em>. She turns her head to a distant sound and a vertical cloud rising off the water.<\/p>\n

There it is. Or he, or she; gender indeterminate. Hildering, a humpback whale researcher, angles the boat toward the humpback and throttles the engine way back. She\u2019s just close enough to try\u2014with a telephoto lens\u2014to identify this individual by its unique tail flukes. Humpbacks are fairly slow swimmers, but this one\u2019s moving quickly enough to make her job hard. A mobbing is going down. A half-dozen or so Pacific white-sided dolphins are swarming the whale Hildering will later identify from photographs as an adult named Squall.<\/p>\n

The dolphins juke around Squall\u2019s head and flanks. Why are they messing with the whale?<\/p>\n

\u201cDolphins can be mystical and<\/em> complete jerks\u2014both things are true,\u201d says Hildering, cofounder and director of education and communication at the Marine Education and Research Society (MERS), a Port McNeill\u2013based nonprofit studying humpback and minke whales. These dolphins are potentially \u201clearning by provocation,\u201d as Hildering puts it. They\u2019re clearly having a ball. Not so the humpback. This \u201cmost gamesome and light-hearted of all the whales,\u201d as Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick<\/em>, described the humpback, must be feeling mighty put upon. The whale flexes its body, trying to shake off the harassers, and rolls, exposing one of those great pectoral fins, which can be as long as one-third of its body length, and which gives the humpback its scientific genus, Megaptera<\/em>, or \u201clarge-winged.\u201d Squall slaps it down, apparently in self-defense, like a sweet-natured grandmother whacking a mugger with her umbrella.<\/p>\n

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Humpback whales have shown up more often in British Columbia waters over the past two decades, and sights like these dolphins pestering the whales are not uncommon. Video by Grant Callegari<\/span><\/p>\n

As recently as a decade ago, this kind of scene was rare in BC waters. Dolphins routinely splashed about, but not humpbacks. Here in Johnstone Strait, the big show, the prime tourist draw, was killer whales\u2014the salmon-eating residents that prowl the neighborhood. As the humpbacks began showing up in greater numbers in the early 2000s\u2014here and across the North Pacific more broadly\u2014their reputation grew to almost mythic status. They\u2019re big acrobats and fascinating to watch. When researchers discovered that these filter-feeding baleen whales\u2014they prey on small forage fish and invertebrates\u2014will sometimes upend the marine mammal\u2013eating transient killer whales\u2019 dinner plans, that added even more to this new arrival\u2019s narrative. Humpbacks are known to swoop in and disrupt a killer whale hunt, sometimes pulling a targeted seal or sea lion pup safely onto their belly with one of those pectoral fins. You could call them the ocean\u2019s Justice League. \u201cYou know how you put your own oxygen mask on first before assisting others?\u201d says Fred Sharpe, a research biologist with the Alaska Whale Foundation who has been studying the species for over 30 years. \u201cHumpbacks aren\u2019t like that. They just wade right in to help those in need, as if they can\u2019t help themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spend time on the ocean watching humpbacks and you can\u2019t help but be \u2026 stirred. Their ingenious feeding strategies, their transoceanic ambitions, the mere fact of their global recovery after a precariously close brush with oblivion, invites a depth of feeling rarely experienced in the average human day. Whatever depths there are to plumb in the hearts of humpbacks, we have been given a second chance to find out.<\/p>\n

Hildering doesn\u2019t want us to blow it.<\/p>\n

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Until the mid-1960s, humans were the villains in the humpbacks\u2019 narrative.<\/p>\n

Hunted to near extinction\u2014as few as 5,000 remained, and they had disappeared from BC waters\u2014humpbacks were saved by a 1966 ban on commercial harvesting in the North Pacific. They are managing to bounce back and repopulate in earnest. Of the 14 distinct populations of humpbacks worldwide, only four are still considered endangered. An updated census is in the works, but a 2008 study estimated that the entire North Pacific has around 20,000 humpbacks. The northeast Pacific Ocean has less than half that population: 3,000 to 5,000 each for the Gulf of Alaska and the combined southeast Alaska and northern British Columbia area, 200 to 400 for southern British Columbia and northern Washington, and 1,400 to 1,700 for California and Oregon. The numbers are encouraging. In 2014, the North Pacific humpback whale population was recommended for downlisting from threatened to a species of special concern under Canada\u2019s Species at Risk Act, a change that came into effect in 2017.<\/p>\n

In the United States, officials removed most humpback whale populations from the federal endangered species list in 2016, although the Mexico population that feeds off the coasts of California, the Pacific Northwest, and Alaska was only downlisted to threatened.<\/p>\n

We can embrace the humpback resurgence as a rare ecological good news story. Few animals that land on endangered species lists ever get off them, except for the wrong reason\u2014they go extinct. But downlisting has some problems.<\/p>\n

For one thing, it can paint a rosier picture than is actually the case. A humpback population can get a blanket bill of good health, while certain subgroups within it struggle mightily. In the Gulf of Alaska, humpbacks are not doing great, says biologist Jan Straley of the University of Alaska Southeast (UAS) in Juneau. \u201cI never thought I\u2019d see the day when zero calves would [return to] Sitka Sound.\u201d But for a few years there were no calves. The cause was probably a convergence of conditions six years ago that produced a Texas-sized patch of warm water\u2014called the Blob\u2014in the northeast Pacific Ocean that disrupted marine food chains and sent humpbacks into a nutritional tailspin.<\/p>\n

Which is another problem with downlisting. When a species is no longer officially threatened, the sense of urgency can be lost, protections may fall away, and then recovery stalls when they\u2019re suddenly dealt an environmental blow.<\/p>\n

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Counting migratory species is not easy, but there is a concerted effort by various organizations to keep track of humpbacks. Video by Grant Callegari<\/span><\/p>\n

Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) began tracking individual humpbacks in BC waters back in 1989 when their recovery was still in question.<\/p>\n

Wildlife populations are typically estimated in one of two ways: by sampling\u2014counting the number of animals through line transects and extrapolating to a broader area\u2014or by mark and recapture, whereby individual animals are caught, tagged, released, and then monitored. Humpback populations are unique in that you don\u2019t need to mark them. \u201cThey come pre-marked,\u201d as UAS researcher Ellen Chenoweth puts it, with those tails sui generis as a fingerprint.<\/p>\n

DFO researchers systematically photographed the black-and-white pattern on the underside of a humpback\u2019s tail and the pattern of bumps on its edge. They gave each photographed humpback an alphanumeric designation and sorted them into three groups\u2014X, Y, and Z\u2014based on the easiest shorthand visual: the amount of black or white on the tail. (So whale BCX004, for example, was the fourth mostly-black-tailed humpback documented in BC waters.)<\/p>\n

In 2010, DFO stopped documenting individual humpback whales. However, MERS and the North Coast Cetacean Society (NCCS) on remote Fin Island, over 300 kilometers north of Port McNeill, and a handful of other groups continued the effort. In addition, they are also collaborating to achieve an updated province-wide catalog for humpback whales sighted off British Columbia\u2019s coast.<\/p>\n

Right now a mystery lurks in the local head count: humpbacks cannot reproduce quickly enough to generate the numbers we seem to be seeing in BC waters. \u201cSo they\u2019re obviously coming from somewhere else,\u201d says Hildering. Researchers in southeast Alaska have been keeping tabs on individual whales for a very long time, and while a few of their research subjects show up in BC waters from time to time, it\u2019s nowhere near enough to account for the increase. To state the obvious, the ocean is vast and there are only a few scientists at specific locations keeping track of individual whales and comparing notes. It\u2019s easy to lose sight of a whale between feeding grounds in the North Pacific and breeding grounds in Hawai\u2018i, Mexico, Central America, or Japan\u2014one day you know exactly where it is, and then suddenly an animal the size of a city bus slips through your fingers.<\/p>\n

Three years ago, however, a new tool debuted to help with the count more broadly: an online platform called Happywhale, which has brought thousands of citizen scientists the world over into the mix as data contributors.<\/p>\n

\"humpback<\/a>

Drive a boat through the waters of the central coast of British Columbia in summer and you have to be on the watch for humpbacks. Photo by Nick Hawkins\/Minden Pictures<\/p><\/div>\n

Invented in 2015 by ecotourism operator and biologist Ted Cheeseman and rocket scientist Ken Southerland, Happywhale uses pattern-recognition software to identify whales. With Happywhale, you take a picture of the underside of a humpback\u2019s tail and the algorithm tries to match it with one of the known humpbacks in its global database. With a good shot, the algorithm is now 99 percent accurate. A digital match isn\u2019t the end of things, though; plenty of curation is still needed. Each entry is manually verified, and this is where local organizations like MERS and NCCS are invaluable. They provide the base data that Happywhale needs to solve the who\u2019s-who puzzle. While a huge, multinational SPLASH project identified nearly 8,000 individual humpbacks from 2004 to 2006 using the old-fashioned method\u2014eyeballing photographs of sighted whales and trying to find a match in a catalog\u2014Happywhale boosted that number almost fourfold. Through the app, people have identified over 30,000 humpbacks worldwide to date, simply through eyes on the water.<\/p>\n

Yet all this unsynced data can be confusing. Like international spies with multiple aliases, many humpbacks ply the oceans under different names. \u201cI think the most we have is eight for one whale, traveling between Hawai\u2018i, British Columbia, and southeast Alaska,\u201d says Cheeseman, who is a PhD candidate at Southern Cross University in Australia. Cheeseman is managing data from 74 different humpback catalogs worldwide. \u201cThe coordination,\u201d he says, \u201cis being figured out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hildering and Janie Wray, of NCCS, are relentless in their data collection, gathering information from their personal sightings and those of local whale watchers and private boaters. When someone submits a sighting to MERS, Hildering and her colleagues look for a match in the MERS catalog. If a match is found, the sighting information is entered into a database, a record that keeps track of the whale. If a match can\u2019t be found in any of the catalogs, the submission may be a first for an undocumented whale.<\/p>\n

Whatever the system, at the top of the data-collection funnel is still a pair of human eyes. And Hildering\u2019s are among the best.<\/p>\n

\n

Nikon dangling from her neck, Hildering steers her open boat out toward Weynton Passage. The wind blows her hair around. She stands five foot two (1.6 meters) but looks taller at the helm of Fluke<\/em>. Gulls are circling, and common murres are diving in and bursting out of the water. That catches Hildering\u2019s attention: the bird activity means there\u2019s likely schooling herring, the same diet humpbacks in these waters enjoy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere,\u201d she says, pointing. I see nothing at first, then, faintly, what looks like campfire smoke on the shore. It\u2019s a blow, two meters high and straight up. That\u2019s textbook humpback. \u201cWhat we do now depends on who this is,\u201d Hildering says. \u201cIf it\u2019s a known whale, we document its location. If it\u2019s a new whale we have to do more.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike killer whales, which can largely be identified by the shape of their dorsal fin, identifying humpback whales by their stubby little dorsal fin is trickier. \u201cIt\u2019s like identifying humans by their nose,\u201d Hildering says. \u201cYou can do it, but you can also go crazy trying.\u201d But sometimes dorsal fins are distinct enough to offer a nickname. Gender is trickier. If a whale is lying on its back, tail lobbing, a bump called a hemispheric lobe is sometimes visible. It\u2019s a telltale sign of a female. You can also tell a humpback is female if it\u2019s seen with a tiny calf. As for the chances of spotting a male appendage, unless somehow caught in the act of mating, a penis is never visible.<\/p>\n

\"Jackie<\/a>

Jackie Hildering, cofounder of the Marine Education and Research Society. Photo by Grant Callegari<\/p><\/div>\n

The whale Hildering has spotted dives and resurfaces, draped in seaweed; he\u2019s playing in the kelp beds. \u201cI\u2019m almost positive this is Ojos Blancos,\u201d she says, pulling out her little yellow notebook. That\u2019s white eyes in Spanish, named for the dots on the whale\u2019s tail flukes.<\/p>\n

\u201cWho gets namer\u2019s rights?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t get <\/em>namer\u2019s rights,\u201d Hildering says. The first to spot an unidentified humpback \u201cgets the privilege of making a suggestion,\u201d she says. The name ought, ideally, to evoke some distinctive physical feature of the whale. One local humpback has a dorsal fin with a little lean; it\u2019s called Pisa. Another\u2019s tail flukes boast what looks like a musical score\u2014dot dot dot stripe. Da Da Da Dum. <\/em>That\u2019s Beethoven. Names like Zephyr and Poptart and Jigger are more likely to make the cut than, say, Humphrey. (Wait: that one did <\/em>stick<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another reason to use names rather than serial numbers: it creates a connection. And connection is the royal road to conservation\u2014as environmentalists discovered when they started giving names (like Luna or the Carmanah Giant) to individual trees within forests they were trying to protect. Whales have an advantage over trees in that you don\u2019t have to split philosophical hairs about whether they\u2019re actually sentient beings. It\u2019s narrative engagement with humpbacks\u2014becoming part of their story\u2014that Cheeseman credits for the success of his Happywhale app. (After you report \u201cyour\u201d whale, you get an email notification when it\u2019s next spotted; you can track its progress as it lives out its life.) And that\u2019s also why a number of marine nonprofits, including MERS, have adopt-a-whale programs\u2014feeling a kindred spark with an individual humpback is a good way to open wallets.<\/p>\n

Hildering finally gets a positive identification on the seaweed-draped whale\u2014and I can practically feel her vibrating with satisfaction when she does. It is Graffiti, so-named because of the patterning on its tail flukes\u2014to me, a pretty good facsimile of a Jackson Pollock painting.<\/p>\n

While we do have an idea of where Graffiti, or Zephyr, or Poptart roam in any given year, humpbacks keep researchers on their toes: a couple of studies have shown that individual whales sometimes switch breeding grounds. One left the eastern North Pacific feeding grounds to breed in Japan one year, and went to Hawai\u2018i the following year. Another whale, spotted in Hawai\u2018i one year, was sighted in Mexico the next. Overall, what we know is still swamped by what we don\u2019t know about humpbacks.<\/p>\n

\"humpback<\/a>

Even though humpback whales have become almost commonplace in coastal waters, researchers have a lot of unanswered questions. Photo by Ralph Pace\/Minden Pictures under NMFS Permit #19225<\/p><\/div>\n

They don\u2019t use echolocation like toothed whales do\u2014<\/em>so how do they navigate to their breeding grounds? \u201cFive degrees off and they\u2019d blast right by the Hawaiian Islands,\u201d says Hildering. One theory: animal magnetism. Biomagnetite crystals have been found in whale brains.<\/p>\n

How do they hunt? There are only theories, and one of the more fun ones is that they listen for the farts of their prey. The truth is, however, that \u201cnobody on Earth knows how baleen whales find their food,\u201d Hildering says.<\/p>\n

How long do they live?<\/p>\n

\u201cWe haven\u2019t had enough time to figure out how long they can live,\u201d Hildering says.<\/p>\n

Why do they sing?<\/p>\n

Hildering leans close.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been studying the question for over 40 years and still nobody knows why humpbacks sing.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The first whales Hildering had the privilege of seeing in the wild weren\u2019t humpbacks but killer whales\u2014the matriline A12\u2014here in Johnstone Strait. \u201cLet\u2019s call it what it was\u2014an epiphany,\u201d Hildering says. She heard them before she saw them: that telltale crunching of stones, through the hydrophone of the whale watching boat hovering outside the Robson Bight Ecological Reserve where the whales were rubbing their bodies in the shallows full of smooth pebbles. Then, together, they swam out of the reserve. \u201cAnd slowly, I saw this family in unison. It felt like I\u2019d been slapped upside the head,\u201d Hildering says. \u201cI realized that I\u2019d drifted off course.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the time, Hildering was visiting from the Netherlands where she worked as the deputy head of Rotterdam\u2019s international school. The killer whale encounter changed everything. Hildering moved back to Vancouver Island, where she\u2019d grown up. Stubbs Island Whale Watching, the company that had delivered her transcendence, gave her a job as an interpreter. It was 1999 and humpbacks were still an absolute rarity in these waters. But as her boat tours ranged the area in search of killer whales, humpback sightings became more frequent. A true naturalist with insatiable curiosity, Hildering had to know who these whales were. Her position out on the water allowed her to do just that.<\/p>\n

And so, aboard the tour boats, she told the humpbacks\u2019 story.<\/p>\n

How each spring they leave their tropical breeding grounds and make the long return trip back to their feeding grounds as far north as the Bering Sea\u2014the second-farthest mammalian migration on the planet (gray whales are thought to swim farther). Humpbacks can put as much mileage on their odometers each year as the average North American puts on a car\u2014up to 16,000 kilometers round trip.<\/p>\n

Because Hildering was out on the water every day, she kept track of the local humpbacks: just seven in 2003 and double that the next year. The summer of 2019, she identified 93, perhaps more when all the data is logged. Hildering, a biologist and teacher by training, built her credibility as a humpback researcher through sheer dogged reporting\u2014just observing the animal, taking notes, and reporting what she finds. The first humpback she ever identified\u2014BCX0022, aka Houdini\u2014hasn\u2019t been seen in years, but some of her calves are still around. There are over 380 individuals in MERS\u2019s catalog, and Hildering can often pretty much anticipate their movements. \u201cOnce Argonaut comes back, I know very likely where he is,\u201d she says. \u201cI know what Slash does when she has a calf. \u2026 Some of them are incredibly predictable in how they behave. But then suddenly things will change. Like, there\u2019s a whale called Freckles that has incredible site fidelity, and then this year, she wasn\u2019t sighted in our area at all; she was sighted in Alaska. Like, what the heck, Freckles?!\u201d<\/p>\n