Far North Science

Scott Schliebe / USFWS

Most of the world’s polar bears — including all of the bears living near Alaska — will disappear over the next 50 years with the immense retreat of the Arctic’s summer ice cap, according to a battery of studies released Friday by the U.S. Geological Survey.

Two-thirds of the polar bears scattered over Far North will die out, starve, fail to reproduce, cannibalize each other and drown because the disintegration of the summer cap will eliminate about 42 percent of their essential habitat. The process is irreversible, the scientists say.

Because of this ice loss, the species has been proposed to be listed as threatened with extinction under the federal Endangered Species Act. After receiving hundreds of thousands of comments on the proposal, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is now working on a final decision, expected by 2008.

The studies released Sept. 7 were conducted by USGS biologists, including polar bear expert Steve Amstrup, as part of this ESA review. A new story about the reports says more:

Credit: UNEP

Polar bears depend on sea ice as a platform to hunt seals, their primary food. But sea ice is decreasing throughout their Arctic range due to climate change. Models used by the USGS team project a 42 percent loss of optimal polar bear habitat from the Polar Basin during summer, a vital hunting and breeding period, by mid-century.

In addition to forecasts, declines in habitat have been recorded throughout the Polar Basin over the past 20 years of observations. To project future sea ice conditions, USGS scientists used 10 general circulation models that best approximated observed trends in sea-ice loss and could be expected to do the best job of simulating future conditions.

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Gray whales in Alaska
Credit: Sue Moore / NOAA

Many gray whales returning south from feeding grounds off Alaska have been passing observation posts in California and Mexico underweight, according to some scientists.

In some cases, the large bottom-feeding cetaceans were skinny enough that bones were showing, raising concerns that food stressed whales could be poised for another die off.

The eastern North Pacific stock of gray whales is one of the world’s great recovery success stories, rebounding from near extinction to get removed from the federal endangered species list. But now the fast-warming ocean off Alaska might be making food much harder to find. Or is something else at work?

So far, scientists only know that trained observers say many whales appear far too skinny for the season.

An Associated Press story this week outlined the most recent concerns by biologists, and has been picked up around the world. But a more comprehensive story appeared about two months ago in the LA Times, when the observers first began raising the alarm.

Published July 6, A Giant of the Sea Finds Slimmer Pickings reported one biologist noticing a scapula sticking out of a particularly scrawny female off San Simeon. It adds:

Scientists from Mexico to the Pacific Northwest are reporting an unusually high number of scrawny whales this year for the first time since malnourishment and disease claimed a third of the gray whale population in 1999 and 2000.

So far this year, scientists haven’t seen a decline in numbers, and they are not sure what’s causing the whales to be so thin. But they suspect it may be the same thing that triggered the die-off eight years ago: rapid warming of Arctic waters where the whales feed.

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Captive Beluga looks around
Robyn Angliss / NMML

Inupiat people from certain villages in Northwest Alaska were blessed with an unusual harvest of 70 beluga whales this summer, a bounty that had not been possible for more than a decade, according to Beluga Bounty — a story from the Arctic Sounder newspaper republished on Aug. 13 in the Anchorage Daily News.

The intelligent white whales had not been visiting the Kotzebue Sound area in large numbers since the 1990s, and biologists had experienced some difficulty counting the eastern Chukchi Sea stock of the species.

This situation changed for several villages along the northwest coast this summer, but it also raised some intriquing questions. As Tamar Ben-Yosef wrote in the Arctic Sounder:

Over the past 20 years, the Inupiat of the Northwest Arctic had come to terms with the fact that they might never be able to hunt beluga whales as they and their ancestors had in the past. …

And they could only speculate about what had happened to one of their main subsistence food sources, which in previous times would frequent local shores with the preciseness of a clock. No one really knows why the white whales stopped showing up in large numbers in the Kotzebue region.

Then in late July, another mystery swam to the shallow waters of the village of Kivalina: hundreds of beluga, mainly large males, coming from the north.

The surprise appearance of the belugas spread through the villages of Kivalina, Point Hope, Buckland, Kotzebue and Deering. Residents took to the beaches and harvested as many as 70 whales. And that sparked a local debate: Did they take too many?

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Gray whale take a peek
Credit: NOAA

Hunted almost to the brink of extinction, the gnarly gray whales of the eastern North Pacific have rebounded to about 20,000 animals. That population, protected from commercial whaling for many decades, now treks from the Baja to the Alaskan Arctic in one of the world’s great migrations.

Their Journey North along the Pacific Northwest and southern Alaska gets studied by scientists, watched by whale-lovers, tracked by school children. During the trip, it’s an undulating conga-line of muscle and blubber through the green-water swells.

Once in the Arctic, the 30-ton bottom-feeders churn up acres of muck in their quest to scarf down invertebrates, offering a snout-tilling boost to the seabed ecology that enriches the food chain. In turn, these grays get chomped by key pods of the rare mammal-eating killer whales, the ocean’s most elusive and intelligent predator.

In all, it’s a 5,000-mile-long spectacle that echoes the bounty once common in pre-industrial oceans worldwide. The eastern Pacific gray whale recovery is one of the world’s great conservation success stories, proof that scientific knowledge coupled with public resolve can create space for the ocean’s giant mammals to thrive.

Not so fast.

Sakhalin gray whale
Credit: ICUN / David W. Weller

There’s another population of gray whales in the Pacific, one that’s never been allowed to rebound. And if people don’t act, they may still be driven into extinction by failure to protect their only known feeding grounds.

Listed as critically endangered on the ICUN’s red list, the westen gray whales number about 120 animals with only 25 to 35 breeding females. They migrate from southern China to eastern Russia in a paltry echo of their genetic cousins across the sea.

Where eastern Pacific gray whales find a quiet Chukchi and Bering sea to fill their bellies, the western whales struggle to forage along Russia’s Sakhalin Island in the presence of an oil-drilling cacophony that repeatedly drives them from their food.

Oil producers say they won’t change their practices to help.

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Gray whales swimming
Credit: Sue Moore / NOAA Magazine

When scientists moored a couple of acoustic recorders in the Arctic Ocean northeast of Barrow in October 2003, they wanted to eavesdrop on the songs of bowhead, gray and other cetaceans as they feast on the polar ocean’s summer bounty.

And then, as darkness fell and the ocean froze, the whales would exit though the Bering Strait and the sea would go silent.

After all, the great whales can die if caught in thick ice — three gray whales trapped in ever shrinking leads near Barrow triggered an international rescue in the fall of 1988. At least one animal disappeared before a Russian ice-breaker plowed a path to open water.

But a few gray whales didn’t get the memo.

Instead of joining 10,000 other Pacific grays on their 5,000-mile fall migration to wintering grounds in Mexico, the intelligent bottom-feeding invertebrate munchers spent the winter amid Alaska’s Arctic pack.

In a stunning finding that raises questions about accelerating climate change and undermines assumptions about gray whale behavior, an autonomous acoustic device anchored 4,100 feet beneath the surface of the frozen Beaufort Sea recorded gray whale calls throughout the winter of 2003-04.

“Because this is the first-ever winter-long acoustic study, we cannot be certain that gray whales have not over-wintered in the Beaufort Sea in the past,” the authors wrote in a report published in June in the journal Arctic. “However, a combination of increasing population size and habitat alteration associated with sea ice reduction and warming in the Alaskan Arctic may be responsible for the extra-seasonal gray whale occurrence near Barrow.”

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Photo by USFWS

A 20-year study of Alaska’s polar bears blames the steady disintegration of summer sea ice for the dramatic increase in pregnant and nursing females denning on land — where sows and their cubs may fare worse.

Landward and eastward shift of Alaskan polar bear denning associated with recent sea ice changes, published online in Polar Biology, offers yet one more confirmation that Arctic climate warming has begun to change the lives of Alaska’s polar bears by melting back their Beaufort Sea ice habitat and hunting platform.

Only a few decades ago, sea ice would start freezing close to shore by late September. Now the ice edge might be more than 125 miles out until later in the fall.

“In recent years, Arctic pack ice has formed progressively later, melted earlier and lost much of its older and thicker multi-year component,” said lead author Anthony Fischbach, in a USGS story about the research. “Together, these changes have resulted in pack ice that is a less stable platform on which to give birth and raise new cubs.

“Previous research had already shown that unstable ice can result in failures of on-ice denning attempts. Less ice that is suitable for denning apparently has led to an increased frequency of pregnant polar bears in this region choosing to den on land.”

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Tagging a beluga in Cook Inlet near Anchorage
Credit: NMML

More than 130,000 people have now emailed or written the feds about the fate of Cook Inlet’s depleted white whales. With a week to go before public hearings, here’s a glimpse of Knik Arm’s indigenous belugas.

On a summer day three years ago, a pod swam on the rising tide, only about 15 miles upstream from Alaska’s urban center in Anchorage. Their arching backs winked white against the brown water. Their breaths exploded in quick brilliant clouds that faded fast in the sunshine. A few whistled, making a faint and eerie sound.

These were some of the rarest belugas alive — one of the smallest distinct and genetically isolated populations of marine mammals on the planet. On that day in 2004, a couple dozen ventured within a quarter mile of a 12-foot skiff carrying marine mammal biologist Mike Williams and two others, Williams started the motor. He was conducting a survey as part of studies for the Knik Arm bridge crossing, and wanted to reposition the boat to get a better count as the whales swam by.

But the belugas — one of the smallest distinct populations of intelligent marine mammals on the planet — apparently recognized the droning of human presence. And what had been a smooth conga line of cruising cetaceans quickly swirled into a tight, water-churning group.

They veered toward the boat in a confused mob, whistling and blowing and trumpeting brassy notes. About 100 yards out, they cut toward shore — white adults and gray babies obscured by the roiling and splashing of the inlet’s silty flow. They were almost impossible to see, let alone count.

Though Williams had benign intentions, with a goal of gathering scientific data for their conservation, the whales wanted nothing to do with a skiff and outboard motor.

“It’s so easy to prescribe some kind of plot (to the whales’ behavior), but I don’t know,” Williams said, watching as the animals finally spread out closer to shore and turned north toward Eklutna near the head of Knik Arm northeast of Anchorage. “There are always going to be way more questions when we’re done.”

It’s now time to start answering those questions.

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Tagging a beluga in Cook Inlet near Anchorage
Credit: NMML

Should the genetically isolated beluga whales of Cook Inlet be protected under the Endangered Species Act? Can we afford the extra costs? Can we afford to let them die out?

People can answer these questions in person at two new public hearings scheduled on July 20 in Anchorage and July 19 in Homer by the National Marine Fisheries Service.

This genetically isolated population has been declining about 4 percent each year and numbers about 300 — a 70 percent decline since the 1970s. The animals never mingle with other Alaska beluga stocks and could disappear within a century if conditions don’t change.

Though overhunting in the early 1990s helped trigger the crisis, no one knows why the whales continue to slip.

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