A Whale Of A Week

Lolita

Speak Up for Lolita, the World's Loneliest Orca

Nearly half a century ago, Lolita, who is now protected under the Endangered Species Act, was taken from her family in the wild. Lolita is imprisoned at the Miami Seaquarium in the smallest orca tank in the U.S., and she hasn't seen another orca in more than 35 years. Check out the video of Lolita and add your name to the list of people who want to see her free. HELP US REACH 100,000 SIGNATURES


Endangered Right Whales Return to the East Coast! Here’s How We Plan to Keep Them Safe.
Over the past two weeks, more than 70 of the 500 remaining North Atlantic right whales have been within meters of the shores of Plymouth, Massachusetts, home to Whale and Dolphin Conservations’s North American office. This unique opportunity for residents and visitors to see one of the world’s most endangered whales is cause for both celebration and concern.

The Return of the Right Whale 

North Atlantic right whales come into Cape Cod Bay each winter to feed on tiny zooplankton and typically move out of the Bay each spring for greener (or in this case, reddish-browner) pastures of plankton further offshore. High concentrations of copepods (the preferred prey of right whales) have brought the whales near to shore where beach-goers have been able to closely see whales that recreational boats and other vessels may not approach within 500 yards. A federal regulation requires all vessels to actively maintain a 500-yard distance from right whales to reduce the risk of striking or disturbing these whales. That includes paddleboards, kayaks, ships and everything in between. The only exceptions are for federally permitted research vessels or fishing vessels hauling gear (which also must depart once they have finished hauling).
This opportunity to view the whales from land, or even just hearing about them in the media, is often a springboard for people to want to learn more about these fascinating creatures. At the WDC-NA office, our phones have been ringing quite a bit more frequently from people wanting to know where they might go to catch a glimpse of a right whale.eubalaena_glacialis-asmutis-silviaWDC

A Lurking Danger for Whales

And while it is very exciting to see right whales in Cape Cod Bay, their lingering presence into May is also concerning. Once hunted to near extinction, the biggest threats these whales now face are from vessel strikes and entanglements in fishing gear. It is important to note that neither vessel operators nor fishermen intentionally harm these whales. These unintentional interactions are incidental to normal operations, but exist like a Hunger Games ™ lottery of sorts; the chance of any single vessel or any specific piece of fishing gear injuring/killing a whale is low, but the overall chances of a whale being struck or entangled is high.
It is because of this assumed seasonal predictability of right whales in Cape Cod Bay that WDC worked to get a 10 knot speed rule implemented from January 1st- May 15th to reduce the risk of a right whale being struck by a passing vessel. It is also because of the assumed seasonality of right whales in the Bay that the National Marine Fisheries Service implemented a seasonal closure to lobster gear in Cape Cod Bay from February 1st through April 30th  in order to reduce the risk of a whale becoming entangled.
However, the continued presence of the whales here in May means they now share these waters with hundreds of miles of fishing line and eager recreational boaters who are finally able to launch their boats after a very long and snowy winter. While the vessel speed restriction remains in effect until May 15th, the speed rule only applies to vessels over 20 meters (65 feet), which does not include most recreational boats. Striking a whale at speed in a small vessel not only risks injuring the whale, but poses a significant risk to the vessel and its passengers.

So what happens when whales don’t get the memo about the timing about the protective measures?

Sadly, the answer to this is not simple. WDC worked with its conservation partners, state and federal agencies, and industry groups for over 10 years to get both the speed rule and the latest iteration of the entanglement take-reduction plan implemented. Thousands of hours of data analysis, document reviews, meetings, and litigation created these rules which were based on more than 30 years of distributional data, none of which predicted 70+ whales on the shores of Plymouth in May. Additional rule making will require a better understand of whether the events of the past couple weeks are an anomaly or a sign of things to come.
As a result of the recent sightings, WDC has reached out to the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Massachusetts Department of Marine Fisheries to request a strong enforcement and monitoring presence while the whales remain in the area. We have instituted a shore watch program to check area beaches for whale sightings, and are providing local outreach to increase awareness of their presence and the regulations that exist to protect them.
The work we have done to protect this species from extinction is only possible because of our supporters, but our work is far from over. North Atlantic right whales have recently shown a slow but positive increase in their population and WDC knows that the changes we are seeing now in right whale distribution will require years of work to enhance the existing protections. We are not giving up and we hope our supporters don’t either —right whales are depending on it!
Seaworld Actually Lost $40 Million More Than Quoted For Q1.


When Seaworld misquoted their Q1 loss for 2015 at a (-$3.6 million) loss instead of the actual number (-$43.6 million) in their news release above dated May 7, many were left scratching their heads....how legal is misquoting your loss by such a gross margin? Or any margin for that matter. Was it purposefully to bolster these sagging numbers?

Reducing $50 million in costs yet increasing their PR budget? Spending $10 million this year on PR hasn't paid back yet, and the $10 million promised to "wild conservation" is nowhere to be seen in the wild conservation world. Perhaps they meant bolstering their breeding program, since this somehow, in Seaworld's skewed perspective, is conservation to them.
NOAA Protects Blue Whales With High-Tech Tracking Of Krill
NASA Satellite Data Helps Protect Endangered Whales

Blue whale tagged by Bruce Mate and his team off the coast of southern California, 2014. Credits: Craig Hayslip/Oregon State University
Space age technology going online to help protect the blue whales that feed off the California coast. NASA will use satellite data to predict where environmental conditions are right for krill production; blue whales feed exclusively on krill. A research team developed the WhaleWatch computer program; it takes the monthly environmental data and calculates the likelihood of where whales will be present in the California Current, and then plots that data on a map. NASA is funding this new online tool, scheduled to be released this year by NOAA; it will help decrease blue whale mortality due to collisions with shipping and fishing gear. About 3,000 of the ~12,000 blue whales in the world live in the Pacific Ocean.
Alisa Schulman-Janiger; American Cetacean Society Los Angeles Census Director.

Scientists working with NASA's Applied Science Program have developed a new tool that uses NASA satellite data to track endangered blues whales in near-real time off the California Coast.

Bruce Mate has been tagging blue whales since 1979. After 35 years, he has yet to lose his sense of wonder. 
"The term 'awesome' is almost trite nowadays, people use it a lot. But for blue whales it's an appropriate term," said Mate, director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University. "They're the biggest animal that's ever lived on Earth, over 100 feet long, over 100 tons in weight, and their color is a sort of iridescent blue. When you see them rising to the surface you start seeing this glimmer that keeps getting bigger and bigger. They're just amazing," he said.

A new online tool funded by NASA that helps protect this endangered species is set to be released this year by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The WhaleWatch tool will help decrease whale mortality due to collisions with shipping and fishing gear.

About a fourth of the roughly 12,000 blue whales in the world today live in the Pacific Ocean, said Mate. Most of them, along with other endangered whale species, migrate up and down the California coast – along with heavy fishing and shipping traffic to and from the major ports of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Massive vessels navigating through their dining areas near the ports increase the chances that a whale will be injured or killed by a collision, while becoming entangled in fishing gear can hamper a whale's ability to feed or swim to the surface to breathe.

Mate is part of a team of scientists who have created the new WhaleWatch tool that will be used to address conflicts between humans and whales based on his tag data of four whale species and satellite observations from NASA and other agencies. WhaleWatch will show for each month the most likely locations of blue, humpback, fin, and gray whales along the West Coast of the United States and Canada based on current environmental conditions detected by satellites. In addition, WhaleWatch has a daily product that will predict the movements of blue whales for any given day. The project was funded by NASA's Applied Sciences Program and is scheduled to be released on the NOAA West Coast Regional website in late 2015.

"The real way to reduce the risk of a whale getting hit is to reduce the overlap [of whales and vessels]," said Monica DeAngelis, a marine mammal scientist at NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) West Coast Region in Long Beach, California, who was part of the project. NMFS is responsible for protecting endangered species like blue whales while they swim in U.S. waters, a zone that extends 200 miles from shore.

"When we sit down at the table to talk to people," including the fishing industry, shipping industry, U.S. Coast Guard, and anyone else interested in activities on the water, DeAngelis said, "the first question is where are the whales?"

In the past, NOAA has relied on boat surveys conducted from July to November during a portion of the whales' migration along the coast, but these surveys are conducted every five or so years and are just a snapshot, said WhaleWatch project leader Helen Bailey at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Solomons, Maryland. Researchers don't have the up-to-date daily, monthly, or even seasonal data on whale movements that would really inform decision-making.
That's where WhaleWatch comes in. To develop the tool, Bailey and colleagues started with 15 years of whale tag data and matched it in place and time with ocean depth measurements and satellite measurements of sea surface temperate, chlorophyll concentration and sea surface height. Bailey worked with Mate and researchers at NOAA's Southwest Fisheries Science Center, in Monterey, California, and Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to analyze the two types of data – and found patterns between environmental cues and whale movements.
Blue whale off the coast of southern California in 2014. Blue whales are among the world's most endangered species. In the first half of the 20th century, humans killed 336,000 blue whales in the Antarctic alone, reducing the population there to about 2,000 today, less than one percent of those hunted, said Mate.

Credits: Craig Hayslip/Oregon State University
On their northward migration over the summer and autumn, whales tend to stop at certain locations at certain times of the year – for example, blue whales often stop to eat their sole prey, tiny shrimp-like animals called krill.
Krill can't be detected directly by satellite, said Bailey, but satellites can detect the conditions that mean that krill – and therefore whales – are likely to be present. Krill are attracted to what are called nutrient upwellings, events that occur when cold deep water with an accumulation of dead organic matter rises to the sunlit surface. Acting like fertilizer, the organic matter full of nutrients sets off a bloom of microscopic plants called phytoplankton, whose chlorophyll are visible from space. The krill – and other marine life eaten by other whale species – come to feast on phytoplankton, bringing the rest of the marine food chain with them.
Putting all of the data together, the research team developed the WhaleWatch computer program that takes the monthly environmental data and calculates the likelihood of where whales will be present in the California Current, and then plots that data on a map. The tool isn't a perfect predictor, but the maps match up fairly well with Mate's tag data and NOAA's boat surveys, said Bailey. In addition, they show the often complex relationship between environmental factors.

"The wonderful thing," DeAngelis said, is that "to someone who might not be as familiar with this, they can literally look at a map and glean an understanding of just the complexity . . . that we're working with." The best available science is necessary to make recommendations for decisions like whether or not the U.S. Coast Guard will move shipping routes, which must balance the interests of fisheries, shipping, and recreational users with those of the whales. "Now we can share with a little bit more confidence, based on this project, that this is what we know, and what we don't know," she said.

This type of data has already helped humans adjust their movements around endangered right whales in the Atlantic Ocean, said Mate, and the early feedback the team has received from stakeholders in the Pacific has been positive.
"I don't think anyone wants to do harm to anything intentionally, but knowledge is power," said Mate. "If you don't have the information you need it's hard to make good choices."
Ellen Gray 
NASA's Earth Science News Team

Killer Whales in Captivity Live Shorter Lives; This Peer-Reviewed Paper Proves It.


A new study shows that killer whales kept in captivity live shorter lives than those that swim free in the wild.

"Here it is. This is as simple as it gets - a recent peer-reviewed paper shows what we have always said about captive orca survivorship - while it has improved over the decades, there is still a clear difference from the wild, where more whales live longer lives. SeaWorld's response? There is corruption in the marine mammal scientific community, which has an anti-captivity bias. I assure you, as a long-time member of the marine mammal scientific community, there is NO anti-captivity bias. If anything, there is a pro-captivity bias! Yet the only response SeaWorld has, once again, is the ad hominem attack (this time against the entire marine mammal scientific community!). If the only response SeaWorld has to the science is, the science is corrupt, then something is wrong within SeaWorld, not within the scientific community. Why doesn't SeaWorld submit the "uncorrupt" science to a peer-reviewed journal? Because it's not science - it's just propaganda and they can't risk it being scrutinized and rejected by actual scientists." - Dr. Naomi Rose, Animal Welfare Institute's Marine Mammal Scientist.
From Seaworld:
My name is Chris, and I'm a veterinarian at SeaWorld. My entire professional life has been focused on the care and welfare of animals, including killer whales.
You might have heard attacks from PETA saying our killer whales live only a fraction as long as whales in the wild. They say, "In captivity, orcas' average life span plummets to just nine years."
But the author of an independent study, Dr. Douglas DeMaster, of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, was quoted in The Wall Street Journal as saying, "Survival in the wild is comparable to survival in captivity."
There's no other way to say it … PETA is not giving you the facts.

SeaWorld has several killer whales in their 30s and one that is close to 50 — right in line with what is seen in the wild. In fact, a July 2014 Associated Press (AP) report analyzing 50 years of data from the federal Marine Mammal Inventory Report found that killer whales born at our parks "had an average life expectancy of 46 years." - Chris, a vet at Seaworld. via their Seaworld Cares site
Seaworld turns to misquoting research again.

The scientist Dr. Douglas DeMaster who is quoted above (inaccurately) has applauded the latest peer-reviewed paper confirming wild killer whales live longer.

Article below is by Susan Cosier. Published May 12, 2015
Killer whales held in captivity live shorter lives than wild whales, according to a new study. This may not be the most surprising scientific finding, but the data adds to the debate over the ethics of keeping captive whales.
Twenty years ago, scientists published a study looking at how well killer whales fare in captivity. They found that before 1995, killer whales in captivity had a 94 percent chance of surviving the next year compared to a 98 percent chance in the wild. Since 2005, that percentage for captive animals has crept up to match the number for wild killer whales.

In this latest paper, published in Marine Mammal Science, the journal of theSociety for Marine Mammalogy, researchers found that although captive and wild whales now have the same likelihood of surviving from one year to another, those in tanks haven't fared as well over the long run. The researchers concluded that only 27 percent of captive killer whales live until they're 15; in the wild that number is estimated to be around 80 percent.

As the researchers found, not all aquariums are equal. Comparing longevity at American theme parks to similar tourist attractions in Russia and China, the researchers found that killer whales in the United States live roughly eight years longer than the ones held in foreign facilities.

"I just can't express enough how important this paper is—to have scientifically robust and up-to-date assessments of the data is invaluable," says Ingrid Visser, a marine biologist from New Zealand's Orca Research Trust, an advocacy organization, that was not involved in the study.
Doug Demaster, science and research director of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center and co-author of the paper published in 1995, says his data, which he updated in 2013 and presented at that year's Society for Marine Mammalogy meeting but hasn't yet published, supports the paper's findings. "They did a real nice job of adapting one of the medical techniques used for looking at survival," he says. "Peer reviewed publications are the gold standard in our business, so they get a lot of credit for working this up and getting it published."

SeaWorld trainers emphasize in their advertising material that killer whales live as long in their facilities as in the wild. But this peer-reviewed study challenges that claim, showing that when taking 30 years of data into consideration, that's not the case. "There's something going on in the captive environment—specifically for captive-born whales—that's notably different than for whales in their natural environment," says lead author John Jett.

Jett is a visiting researcher at Stetson University in Texas, but he is also a former trainer at SeaWorld. Jett and the other author who worked on the paper—Jeffrey Ventre, a rehabilitation doctor and former chiropractor from Washington State—also both appeared in the 2013 documentary Blackfish, a film critical of theme parks like SeaWorld.
But their analysis, says Todd Robeck, a reproduction biologist for SeaWorld, is "not only inaccurate and misleading, it's inconsistent." Using the same data sources, Robeck says he can't replicate the paper's results. What's more, he says, is that the paper's conclusions on how wild killer whales may survive past certain vulnerable ages don't jibe with the currently available longevity data.
"I know there's a fairly large anti-captivity sentiment in a lot of the members of the [Society for Marine Mammalogy], which is fine, but I didn't think it would spill over into science," says Robeck. "I assumed it was an objective forum, but I'm questioning that now, which is very disappointing for me from a professional standpoint."
"My duty as a researcher is to be objective," says Jett.
"Do I believe captivity is not a good thing for the animals? Absolutely, and I'll be the first one to tell you that. But anyone who understands the science will read it and immediately they will recognize that I had no agenda."
The debate over captive whales is a complex one, but what this most recent study could do is help researchers better understand what causes killer whale deaths in captivity, says Jett. The detailed survival curves he and Ventre compiled illustrate at which life stages captive killer whales' health suffers most.

Separating calves from their mothers, for instance, could increase the chance of the calf dying from stress. Spatial constraints and infections that force caretakers to give killer whales a constant stream of antibiotics could also play a role, he says. Those are factors scientists could investigate further. Hopefully, says Jett, the findings can affect change—or at least better inform decisions.

Geographic Region: RussiaEast AsiaNorth AmericaSpecies: Marine MammalsScientific Fields: Biology,ZoologyCite this Article: Susan Cosier, "Tanked: Killer Whales in Captivity," Hakai Magazine, May 12, 2015, accessed May 13, 2015, http://bit.ly/1zSElyX.