Right whale, wrong place
 
Researchers rejoiced when the baby of Delilah the right whale, presumed dead for more than a year, showed up alive and well. Published: The Globe and Mail, Nov 6, 1993, FOCUS  BY DEBORAH JONES/HALIFAX IN a turn of events worthy of Dickens, a suckling, right-whale calf orphaned last year when a ship ran into its mother has appeared in the Bay of Fundy, alive and apparently healthy. The calf is a northern right whale - or Eubalaena glacialis - a member of the whale species considered one of the world's most endangered. Scientists are hoping to spot it again next spring when its herd returns north from unknown wintering grounds. Right whales were hunted nearly to extinction until their whaling was banned in the thirties. They were considered "right" by early whalers because they are slow, float when dead and their carcasses yield much oil. They also contain baleen, plankton-filtering head bones once used in women's corsets and still employed by industry. Today, a mere 300 to 350 northern right whales roam the Atlantic from Nova Scotia to Florida. Separate populations of right whales have been sighted in the South Atlantic and the Pacific. Even though the northerns are protected under international law, their numbers are increasing very slowly. Many continue to be killed when ships hit them or they become entangled in fishing gear and drown. The story of the lucky orphan began in the summer of 1992 when U.S. and Canadian scientists photographed a female whale they called Delilah and her calf, apparently her first-born. The birth of any whale is cause for celebration because scientists fear inbreeding within the small herd may have hampered females' ability to conceive or carry their calves to term. Scientists had photographed Delilah mating over the decade prior to the birth of the calf, and had feared she was barren. Scientists believe that under ideal conditions each of the fewer than 70 female whales in the Atlantic herd should give birth to a calf every three to four years following a gestation of 12 months, says University of Guelph researcher Moira Brown, a zoologist whose doctoral thesis is on right whales. "We see a lot of mating activity, but we don't yet know how much is leading to conception." Several weeks after the researchers spotted Delilah and her calf in the Bay of Fundy last summer, a fisherman found the mother's carcass washed up on a New Brunswick beach. A necropsy showed she had died of internal bleeding after being hit by the prow of a ship. With the help of fishermen and private whale-watching groups, researchers launched a search for Delilah's calf because they were concerned it was too young to survive on its own. The plan was to find the calf and monitor it. If it seemed to be starving, they would feed it until it was old enough to fend for itself. But after a search of several weeks, no trace of the orphan calf was found. Unlike some other marine mammals, especially highly intelligent toothed hunters like orcas, right whales do not have a sophisticated social structure, and it is unlikely another female would be prepared to act as a surrogate to the calf. "With right whales the only social bond is the mother-calf bond, which breaks up after weaning, when the calf is about 12 months old," says Ms. Brown. "You don't see females with calves other than their own and you don't see babysitting going on." Researchers gave up hope that the calf would survive. SOME good did come of Delilah's unnecessary death. The story attracted national media attention and served to heighten awareness of right whales' plight within the marine community. In the past year, in large part because of Delilah, about 40 shipping companies - about two-thirds of the Canadian companies in Eastern Canada - have agreed to order their ships to slow down or avoid areas populated by right whales, says Jerry Conway, marine-mammal co-ordinator for the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans. More than 3,000 fishermen surveyed by the department also said they would keep a careful watch for the whales. Another result of Delilah's death was the creation of an adopt-a-whale scheme. For $35, the public can join the Whale Adoption Program (East Coast Ecosystems, Box 36, Freeport, N.S. B0V 1B0). Adopters receive a certificate of adoption, a photograph of the whale, a fact sheet and composite drawing and a newsletter for one year. The publicity also boosted a proposal for the establishment of five whale conservation zones off the Eastern Seaboard, where ships would be required to slow to five knots. The zones are one element of a 150-year recovery plan, started in 1991, that aims to increase the population to a sustainable 7,000 animals. THE story of the discovery of the calf began this summer, when zoologist Brown and a team of whale scientists from the New England Aquarium in Boston returned to a research station at Lubec, Me., to monitor right whales in their summer habitat. They found about 115 animals, the most ever sighted at one time, off the coasts of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The reason may have been unusually cold temperatures in the ocean that forced the whales to move farther into the Bay of Fundy than they normally do. On Aug. 20 the researchers photographed a group of about 30 whales. Weeks later, after the Boston team had returned to home base, close examination of the photographs revealed the presence of Delilah's calf. The identification was possible because of the work of New England Aquarium scientists Amy Knowlton and Scott Krause, who have spent 14 years building a database of about 330 whales aged several months to about 70 years. They were able to match a photograph of a young whale taken in August with photos taken in 1992 of Delilah's baby. The researchers made the match by comparing the unique white-on-black "collosity" patterns that develop on whales' heads soon after birth. Rough patches of raised skin grow on young whales' wide heads and become covered by white whale lice. The result is distinctive ridges that allow researchers to "keep track of families, and get to know them personally," says Ms. Knowlton. How Delilah's calf survived on its own remains a mystery - as does so much about right whales. While scientists have located the animals' summer grounds and several spots off the coast of the U.S. where the females give birth and spend the winter, no one knows where most of the population - about 200 adults and weaned youngsters - go each fall when they leave the waters off eastern Canada. Scientists have tried to track the animals by tagging them with tiny radio transmitters whose signals are picked up by satel lite. This method works with other marine animals, but right whales don't have a dorsal fin on which to affix tags; the ones fired into their hides were knocked off in six weeks during a big storm. Most of the work on right whales involves photographing them as they travel from Florida to Eastern Canada. Each summer scientists, funded by the World Wildlife Fund in Canada and the U.S., the New England Aquarium and other non-profit institutions, spend one or two months in Lubec conducting aerial surveys or watching the whales mating or caring for their youngsters from the station's research boat. In the winter, the New England Aquarium co-ordinates several U.S. conservation programs in areas where the whales winter. The work includes issuing marine advisories to vessels when whales are spotted. In Canada, the animals seem to converge in two areas to which they return each year. Mothers with calves and very young, weaned whales summer in the Bay of Fundy. Adults summer in the Roseway Basin, where they engage in boisterous mating, observed by whale researchers in their boats. "We're probably the worst peeping Toms going," says Ms. Brown, chuckling. "We take a lot of videos of their mating activity." During mating, the female floats on her back, calling to males in the area, which jostle for a chance to mate with her when she turns over to breathe. Whales are extremely promiscuous, and one female may mate with several males in one day. Scientists speculate that the male who inserts his penis the most often (whale penises, at up to 3.5 metres, are the world's largest) stands the greatest chance of fertilizing the female. Ms. Brown is also developing a database of each animal's genetic history. Using a crossbow, she fires darts into the whales while they're on the surface and extracts small plugs of hide for later genetic analysis. Working with other scientists, she has established that there are only three "matrilines," or female lineages, in the herd. "Down the road we hope to look at the level of inbreeding, or genetic diversity," she says. Scientists have found that the most distantly related whales are an uncle and a niece, and believe the population is still able to increase despite its limited gene pool. Accounting for the slow increase in the herd's size is the biggest issue facing marine researchers, however. "In the southern Atlantic the (right whale) population is increasing by 7 per cent a year, and our animals are increasing by no more than 2 per cent. The problem is, they are a coastal species and they occupy waters where there's a lot of human activity," says Ms. Brown, who believes the key to the right whale's survival is making shippers and fishermen more aware of them. "The right whale is in this predicament solely due to man's efforts to annihilate it. This whale was hunted to commercial extinction in 1750 and again in the 1800s. Now I think we owe them a chance." Deborah Jones is a regular contributor to The Globe and Mail. Copyright Deborah Jones 1993 Delilah’s death Right whale dies in a collision with a ship, and her suckling youngster is missing. It's tough being a whale in one of the world's busiest waterways Published:  The Globe and Mail, September 19, 1992. FOCUS  BY DEBORAH JONES/HALIFAX DELILAH, the right whale, was in the prime of her life. She was also one of a mere 62 breeding females left among North Atlantic right whales. For a decade, Maritimers had watched and worried that she was sterile. Finally this spring, in the whale nursery of the Bay of Fundy, Delilah gave birth to her first baby. Last week, Delilah's carcass washed up on a New Brunswick beach. Massive internal damage suggests she was killed by a blow from a ship's blunt prow. Her suckling calf was nowhere to be seen. For days, Canadian and U.S. fishermen and whale scientists have been desperately looking for the nursing baby, hoping to find it alive. Their plan is to capture the youngster and force-feed it. Delilah's death was an especially unhappy event for Moira Brown, a University of Guelph biologist stationed at a U.S.-Canada whale-research base in Lubec, Md. Just three weeks ago she had photographed the mother whale and her baby "and both were doing well." When a fisherman reported finding the whale's body beached on Grand Manan Island, Ms. Brown and other researchers had just returned from showing senior federal officials the right whales' breeding grounds in Roseway Basin off the southern tip of Nova Scotia. "We had spent two fabulous days out, had seen a lot of mating activity, a lot of whales. We came back to shore, sat down to dinner, and got a call from Lubec to find out a whale we know very well, who is a mother, was lying on the beach. It was very disappointing." Since commerical whale hunting was curbed six years ago, the populations of most of the world's whales - blue, sperm, humpback, fin, grey and bowhead - have begun to recover. That includes right whales found off the coasts of Asia, Africa and South America. But the right whales of the North Atlantic, which do not breed with the others, are the rarest whale species in the world. They number only about 350 and remain dangerously close to extinction. No one knows exactly why, but Ms. Brown and colleagues are fairly sure that humans are to blame. "Sixty per cent of right whales catalogued have marks directly attributable to collisions with ships and entanglements in fishing gear," she says. "They live in the most industrialized piece of ocean around, the Northwest Atlantic between Florida and Nova Scotia. It has huge amounts of shipping traffic and noise and chemical pollution. We don't know the exact effects of noise pollu-tion or chemical pollution, but it's there." Jerry Conway, a marine mammal co-ordinator with Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans, notes that right whales were hunted down for 500 to 600 years by whalers on both sides of the Atlantic. Their name refers to the fact that the slow-moving animals were the "right" ones to catch: "When they died they floated, and when rendered down, they produced a lot of baleen (whalebone) and a lot of oil." The breed was hunted almost to extinction. "In 1935 the League of Nations banned hunting of right whales, and at that point it was believed there were less than 100 in existence." Mr. Conway says Canada is considering a proposal to establish two seasonal conservation zones in the Bay of Fundy where the whales mate and nurse their young - and where huge container ships travel. While it is sad that Delilah died, it provided an unprecedented opportunity to dissect a female right whale. Last weekend, her 14-metre, 32-tonne carcass was towed behind a fishing boat to a ramp, hauled aboard a truck and taken to a gravel pit on Grand Manan Island. There, without winches and without a refrigerator large enough to accommodate the animal, a team of veterinarians and scientists from Canada and the U.S., with the help of a steam-shovel operator, pulled off Delilah's 2-centimetre-thick skin and layers of blubber. Ms. Brown said the necropsy lasted two days. Delilah's insides had decomposed beyond recognition. "It was gruesome . . . it stunk, and so did we. There's probably a few restaurants we won't go into again on Grand Manan." The scientists discovered the whale had suffered massive internal bleeding, pointing to a collision with a ship as the most likely cause of death. Further genetic studies on tissue samples are being made. Ms. Brown said Delilah's death will not be entirely in vain if it increases awareness of the effect humans have on the environment, and causes ships captains to look more carefully for whales - especially the endangered right whales. Deborah Jones is a regular contributor to The Globe and Mail. Copyright Deborah Jones 1992 About this website: Text and photos by Deborah Jones except where otherwise noted. Please contact me for reprint rights. All material copyrighted ../About.htmlshapeimage_1_link_0
It’s tough being a slow whale in a fast lane
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