Tagging a beluga in Cook Inlet near Anchorage
Credit: NMML
The official count of Cook Inlet’s beluga whales has increased for the first time in six years, suggesting that the depleted population that haunts the ocean near Anchorage may be holding steady instead of slipping further toward extinction.
Aerial surveys conducted in June and August — using trained observers and painstaking video of the fast-moving, difficult-to-see animals — produced an abundance estimate of 375, according to a report posted online this week by NOAA Fisheries.
That’s significantly above the 302 estimated for 2006, but generally in line with other estimates since 1998.
How should people read this latest news? With caution.
“While we are encouraged by this higher estimate, further surveys will be required to determine if this is a reliable upward population trend,” said Alaska Fisheries Science Center Director Doug DeMaster, in the agency’s release.
In what may be one of Alaska’s most intractable conservation problems, Cook Inlet belugas have declining about 4 percent each year almost for two decades — a 70 percent crash since the 1970s. The animals never mingle with other Alaska beluga stocks and could disappear within a century if conditions don’t change.
Belugas swimming off Anchorage
Credit: NMML
As a result, NOAA Fisheries has been considering listing the Cook Inlet belugas as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act. The proposal — pushed by the Center for Biological Diversity and other conservationists, and then backed by an agency assessment — drew more than 135,000 responses over the summer and packed public meetings.
If the agency ultimately lists the whales, people would be forced to weigh the health of a unique whale population that exists no where else on earth against human activity in Alaska’s urban heart. At the center of their plight lurks a mystery. Why haven’t the whales bounced back?
Though overhunting by Alaska Natives in the early 1990s helped trigger the crisis, no one knows why the whales continued to slip after hunting was all-but suspended. The National Marine Mammal Lab in Seattle has proposed about $500,000 worth of beluga studies that had gone unfunded since 2002. People have yet to investigate the impact of shipping, noise, discharges of drilling waste by oil production platforms, pollution and runoff from Anchorage, shoreline development, commercial fishing, changes in beluga habitat or diet, and the age-sex structure of the pods.
The issue over whether the whales now deserve the most stringent level of federal protection has already divided Anchorage and upper Inlet residents in a bitter test of values.
Should people spend extra money and possibly disrupt or cancel local projects to help give the whales a better chance to survive? Or is this beluga population — isolated from other belugas in Alaska for at least 10,000 years — simply not important enough by itself to interrupt local commerce? Or perhaps nothing can help these whales?
At the very least, a listing would require federal managers to mount a biological investigation, identify and then protect critical habitat, plus scrutinize human activities to make sure they don’t hamper the recovery of the whales.
On the other hand, taking this step might delay or increase the cost of the proposed bridge across Knik Arm. It might raise troubling or expensive questions about the handling of drilling waste from oil platforms, the dumping of treated sewage from Anchorage. It might challenge or restrict shipping, noise, development and commercial fishing.
Try to protect these whales? Or conduct business as usual? The decision is expected in spring 2008.