Far North Science

Thar He Blows!
The white whale was a type of orca that eats only fish.
Credit: H. Fearnbach/NMML NMFS permit 782-1719

Fisheries biologists cruising the remote Aleutian Islands on a pollock survey caught sight of one of the North Pacific’s rarest creatures: a white orca.

Rather than sporting the species’ iconic black-and-white markings, the animal swimming with its fish-eating pod two miles off Kanaga Volcano exhibited almost no visible pigment, according to scientists with the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Seeing the animal’s off-white dorsal fin breaking through the roiling waves as it cavorted with its family group made for an extraordinary moment.

“With hundreds of killer whales documented around the Aleutian Islands, this was equivalent to finding a needle in a haystack,” said Holly Fearnbach, a research biologist who was able to photograph the whale’s white fin and back.

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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.

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Pacific walrus
Source: USFWS

The summer meltback of the Arctic Ocean ice to the smallest extent in modern history wiped out the ice floes used by Pacific walruses as resting and hunting platforms over shallow water, forcing an extraordinary congregation of the tusked behemoths along the Russian Chukchi coast, according to a report by the World Wildlife Fund.

In a phenomenon first reported in the Russian Arctic a few years ago, something like 40,000 walruses hauled out near Ryrkarphy village on Kozehvnikov Cape, on the Chukotka Peninsula west of Alaska, according to an Oct. 10 dispatch posted online by WWF Russia.

The unprecedented gathering prompted Russian conservationists to push for some sort of nature preserve, and education, to protect the animals from hunting and harassment, the WWF release stated.

“Because of climate change, nowadays ice almost disappears from the Chukotka and East Siberian seas in summer”, says Viktor Nikiforov, WWF-Russia Regional Programmes Director.

“Multiyear Arctic ice moves northward, which means that in the coming years new haul-outs will appear on Chukotka Arctic coast. Walruses become exhausted after swimming hundreds of kilometers from pack ice to the coast, without a chance to rest. The sea without ice cover has frequent storms, which may lead to deaths of a large number of young walruses. Our common goal is to help walruses survive in this difficult time”.

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Steller Seal Lion
NMML photo library

Summer counts of Steller sea lions along Alaska’s rugged coast suggests the Far North’s most endangered pinniped may be continuing a slow recovery that first appeared three years ago.

But gnarly weather hampered the 2007 surveys and kept biologists from visiting some sites. Combine that difficulty with continued declines at certain central and western Aleutian locales, and the overall prognosis for the species remains very much guarded, according to a memo released this week by the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Still, this “mixed” news contrasts sharply with the precipitous plunge of the 1980s, when the number of sea lions between the Gulf of Alaska and the tip of the Aleutian chain seemed trapped in a population tumble that scientists could not explain and managers could not derail.

“Looking at western stock trends since 2004, our surveys show mixed results — increases here and decreases there — but the overall picture indicates that the Steller sea lion population west of Cape Saint Elias in 2007 was similar in size to the population in 2004,” said Doug DeMaster, director of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center in a press release from NOAA Fisheries.

“This year’s count, while incomplete, supports that big-picture impression.”

1978: Before the decline
Sea lions on Middleton Island
NOAA photo library

Declines are more prominent in the western part of the survey area, with some gains appearing further eastward.

The 2007 count in the Central Gulf of Alaska, from the central Kenai Peninsula through the Semidi Islands, is the first showing a population increase since the 1970s, when the time series began.

Even such an inconclusive finding offers good news in Alaska’s epic sea lion saga, a high seas conundrum that evolved into one of the most intractable scientific problems in the history of the North Pacific marine management.

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Source: NSIDC

Arctic ice of the Far North ocean has begun its inexorable wintery expansion as darkness spreads and temperatures fall. The latest report from the National Snow and Ice Data Center offers details, but it’s not very reassuring.

The extent of Arctic ice surpassed the previous all-time minimum record of 2005 only on Oct. 24. A gander at the fall and rise of 2007 ice cover reminds us of a startling fact: Vast expanses of the Arctic Ocean were ice free for the first time in history more than two months.

Amid all this slushy angst, the Pacific walrus had decamped to the northwestern Alaskan coast in such numbers that Native elders were stunned and marine mammal scientists were rattled, as FNS reported earlier this month.

Barrow blogger Anne Brygger reports seeing a lone walrus swept along in broken floes off the coast, apparently caught up in shattered pans that just won’t freeze hard.

“For the last few days ice has been showing up from somewhere to the north & east,” she writes in the latest post from Tundra Garden. “It’s small chunks, but they have 6 inches or more thickness, so they’re not brand new.

“This is really late.”

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Scott Schliebe / USFWS

As Arctic ice melted to the smallest extent in human history — a loss that stunned scientists and exceeded worst-case scenarios in climate models — the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was collecting comments on new research into the fate of polar bears north of Alaska.

These nine studies, released in early September, predict that most polar bears will disappear if the Arctic ice continues to retreat during summer. Conducted as part of the agency’s proposal to list polar bears as threatened with extinction under the Endangered Species Act, the studies are sobering.

Credit: UNEP

Eliminate the ice habitat where polar bears hunt, rest and build dens, and you eliminate the bears. Two-thirds of the iconic white predators will starve, fail to reproduce, cannibalize each other and drown as their essential ice platform dissolves into slush. The process is irreversible, the scientists say.

Now people have additional time to digest the reports and make comments on the science, the agency announced this week. The comment period originally closed Oct. 5, but now remains open until Oct. 22.

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Remains of bearded seal (Erignathus barbatus) of all ages
have been recovered from the Amaknak Bridge site on
the Island of Unalaska in the eastern Aleutians. Shown
here are mandibles from a fully mature prehistoric
adult and a pup several weeks old (top). Bearded seals
give birth on sea ice in early April and nurse their young
for about three weeks.

Winter ice once clogged the Bering Strait until late summer and surrounded the rugged shores of the Pribilof Islands most of the year, according to a new study of ancient animal bones at an Aleutian archeaological site.

This frigid climate, occurring during a mysterious 2,000-year-long cold snap that ended about 2,500 years ago, was powerful enough to trigger decisive shifts in the migrations of whales and the breeding habits of Northern fur seals, ultimately creating a thriving ecology very different than the one observed during the past few hundred yeaers.

Two Canadian archaeozoologists — Susan Crockford and Gay Frederick of Pacific Identifications Inc — say the findings suggest a startling conclusion: that marine mammals like seals may be far more adaptable that people realize.

“Sea ice not only extended further south than it does today but persisted longer into the summer,” they added. “No other type of evidence has documented an expansion of sea ice in the Bering Sea during this time period, which appears to explain the prehistoric distribution of at least one North Pacific marine mammal.”

Among other things, the two scientists found remains of a newborn bearded seal pup, an ice seal, suggesting that floes existed near Unalaska Island as late as April.

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Gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus) return from Arctic
feeding grounds to lagoons in Mexico each winter to
give birth. New genetic results indicate that in the past,
the number of whales returning to these lagoons may
have been much larger.
Photo location: Laguna San Ignacio, Mexico.
Credit: Geoff Shester

With large numbers of gray whales swimming south from the Arctic in terrible condition, here’s another development that suggests something fundamental has shifted in the marine food chain of the Far North ocean.

Gray whales may have once numbered more than 96,000 in the North Pacific Ocean — churning up muck and plumes that fed millions of seabirds and replenished the Bering and Chukchi seas with nutrients, according to new research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This genetic analysis suggests the whales were once three to five times more numerous and, as a result, have not yet come close to recovering from decimation by commercial whaling.

The findings raise stunning implications about how little people really know about the marine world. We do not, even now, fully appreciate how much the ocean has changed from pre-historic times.

Gray whales were heralded as one of the world’s great conservation success stories and pulled from the Endangered Species list. When whales began showing up very skinny, with bones protruding, possibly near starvation, some biologists speculated that the population had expanded beyond its historic limits.

Now it appears that the grays haven’t actually rebounded. The population hasn’t broken historic limits. And their pending starvation may be a harbinger: Something has gone wrong in the North Pacific.

“Despite our best efforts,” said Stanford University marine biologist Steve Palumbi, in a story posted online, “these genetic results suggest gray whales have not fully recovered from whaling. They might be telling us that whales now face a new threat — from changes to the oceans that are limiting their recovery.”

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