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Goal: Stop Japan from resuming whale hunt disguised as “research whaling.”
Japanese media has reported that a controversial practice by Japan of “research whaling” that global activists are calling a cover up for whale hunting will resume again next year.
Alex Cornelissen, chief executive of Sea Shepherd, an ocean wildlife conservation group, said Japan must remember that the whales in the Southern Ocean are protected under international and Australian law, and that any violation of the sanctity of the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary or the Australian Whale Sanctuary is a criminal act.
The inhumane and unjust act of whaling must be stopped from continuing in the future. Tell Japanese officials they can’t resume this lie of research whaling that is actually a commercial hunt to profit off of innocent animals.
PETITION LETTER:
Dear Prime Minister Abe,
You were forced to abandon your 2014-2015 whale hunt in the Southern Ocean after pressure from international activists and regulators. However, Japanese media has reported that you plan to continue this controversial “research whaling” next year. Many have decried this practice as commercial whaling to profit off of the deaths of innocent sea creatures masquerading as scientific research.
You have not yet proven that the whaling is indeed for scientific purposes, and you have not been given the okay to resume this practice. The act of whaling for nearly any purpose is inhumane. I demand you do not resume this commercial hunt to profit off of dead whales disguised as “research whaling.”
Sincerely,
[Your Name Here]
Photo credit: Gregory Smith
Save Lolita's "Dammed" Family, Set the Water Free!
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"The World's Loneliest Orca" named Lolita might not a family to return home to when she's set free. All 3 pods (J, K and L) of Washington's endangered southern resident orcas are "dammed" and hungry. As reported in KING 5 News, the southern residents eat almost exclusively Chinook salmon, but the salmon have lost spawning grounds across the state to dams along the Snake River.
The killer whales are going hungry. They're also metabolizing their own blubber -- which can kill them. The salmon also determine the sex of the orca calves; less food means more males, who will not find female partners to reproduce with.
Fortunately, Washington activists see an easy solution: set the dam water free! They believe that releasing the water -- that spans over 5,000 miles of river bed -- "could restore more than a half million chinook" and feed the hungry killer whales.
Lolita needs a family to return home to. While we can't just set her free from that concrete tank at the Miami Seaquarium, we can set the dam water free to feed her relatives. Please sign and share this petition urging Washington's senators -- Senator Maria Cantwell and Senator Patty Murray -- to set the water free and save the endangered southern residents.
An Earsplitting Threat Is Endangering the World's Rarest Killer Whales. Noise pollution from ships imperils Southern Resident orcas that depend on sound to communicate and find food and mates.
For Southern Resident killer whales, which live in the Haro Strait between Victoria, British Columbia, and Seattle, sound is the foundation of their culture. They are unique in the animal kingdom in that they spend their entire lives with their families, even after they grow to adulthood. “Family is everything to them,” said Rob Williams, a whale and dolphin researcher who cofounded the Oceans Initiative, a nonprofit based on Vancouver Island. Each family makes a singular call, an acoustic dialect that no other family utters, and its use helps the orcas avoid inbreeding.
But this fundamental reliance on sound is why noise pollution can be devastating for whales, especially for a critically endangered species that is suffering from other threats. The population of Southern Resident killer whales has shrunk to just 85 individuals. The threats they face are myriad. The salmon that make up most of their diet have declined dramatically because of logging, which warms and silts spawning streams. Fish farms allow diseases to fester, and cities and farms divert and pollute streams. High levels of persistent organic pollutants introduced by humans also contaminate the whales.
Noise could be the final straw, said Williams. It’s not just intense, episodic noise from naval operations or industrial activity that can drive whales to beach themselves. Daily ship traffic, especially the gargantuan cargo vessels that bring us the vast majority of everything we wear, use, and eat are also harming whales and other marine life.
It’s like trying to chat when you’re walking along a busy road with lots of traffic. You have to raise your voice, and even so, when a particularly loud truck goes by, you might miss something critical.
Chris Clark, director of the Bioacoustics Research Program at Cornell University, can also hear these ships when he uses instruments to listen underwater. He likens the background noise from thousands of engines to smog. “There are places now, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, where the background noise level is 100 to 1,000 times above what it would be normally,” said Clark. “And it’s chronic.”
That means that whales’ signals don’t go as far. In effect, their world has shrunk because of ship noise.
“Median noise levels are high enough to cause killer whales to lose 62 percent of their ability to communicate with each other,” said Williams. “When it gets extremely noisy, when there’s lots of ship traffic, that rises to 97 percent.”
“Ship noise is reducing acoustic habitat for killer whales in exactly the same way that clear-cut logging is reducing habitat available to grizzly bears,” said Williams, a Pew Fellow.
Other endangered marine mammals, including fin whales and humpback whales in the North Pacific, also at risk, Williams’ research discovered. And Clark and other scientists found that endangered North Atlantic right whales have lost about 65 percent of their communication space, on average, because of noise pollution.
The United States and Canadian governments have acknowledged that human-caused noise is a contributing factor to Southern Resident killer whales’ decline, but neither country has taken action to reduce this threat, said Williams. But unlike ocean plastic pollution, for instance, ship noise doesn’t take time to clean up. “We can stop tomorrow,” said Williams.
One thing he and other researchers are recommending: Keep quiet areas quiet. Some biologically rich areas, such as northern British Columbia between the mainland and the Haida Gwaii islands, are home to fin, humpback, and minke whales as well as other marine mammals. The area is quiet owing to low human activity. Protecting these “opportunity sites” now as critical habitat designation or marine protected areas would maximize conservation gains at minimal cost to society, wrote Williams and Clark in a recent paper in Marine Pollution Bulletin.
“It’s a new idea to map out the distribution of whales and our best estimate of noise throughout a big patch of ocean and see if there are places where we don’t have to request draconian measures from the shipping industry; we can just leave things as they are,” said Williams.
Acting now is important because those quiet areas are at risk of industrial development. There are proposals for liquefied natural gas terminals, oil pipelines to ship Alberta tar sands oil, and expansion of the Port of Prince Rupert, all of which could add thousands of ship trips a year to these waters.
Williams is also suggesting that marine authorities ask ships to slow down through important marine mammal habitats, “just like we ask drivers to slow down through school zones,” he said. As ships slow down, they become quieter.
However, Christine Erbe, director of the Center for Marine Science and Technology at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and a coauthor of the marine quiet zone paper, cautioned that it might not be so simple. “If ships go more slowly, they are quieter, but then they take longer to cross a habitat, meaning that sound exposure is longer,” she said. Biologists have not yet determined which would be better, and “the answer might differ from animal to animal,” she said.
The European Union is furthest ahead on legislative action to reduce undersea noise, said Michael Jasny, a lawyer and senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council. A policy called the Marine Strategy Framework Directive calls for member countries to meet set environmental standards by 2020, including the reduction of undersea noise. “Europe is the first region that is acting collectively across sectors to restore acoustic habitat in their water,” said Jasny. “Other jurisdictions have focused primarily on marine protected areas.”
The International Marine Organization adopted guidelines last year for the quieter operation of commercial vessels. These include taking measures like slowing down or cleaning barnacles off hulls and propellers to reduce drag noise. However, the primary focus is on new technologies that reduce noise, such as propeller and bow designs, and refurbishing older ships. The guidelines are voluntary, but Jasny said it’s encouraging that industry is beginning to consider the technical aspects of how to make ships quieter.
Ship classification societies—nongovernmental organizations that establish technical standards for ship construction and operation—have also set noise output standards for commercial ships. “Ships can apply to these societies to get a special notation to mark that ship as quiet,” said Jasny.
Because some ships are much noisier than others, quieting the loudest 10 percent would generate outsize returns—and also likely improve their fuel efficiency, according to studies by Russell Leaper, a marine scientist with the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
In British Columbia, where Southern Resident killer whales are struggling for their survival, the Port of Metro Vancouver has initiated a research program to better understand and manage shipping’s impacts on whales. It's called Enhancing Cetacean Habitat and Observation, and officials just installed a hydrophone in the inbound shipping lane at the port.
“We’ve been working with pilots to maneuver vessels over the hydrophone,” said Carrie Brown, the port’s director of environmental programs. “That way we can better identify the type of sound signature from that particular vessel,” she said. A report is expected in fall 2016.
Brown said that depending on study results, measures to reduce noise could be added to the port’s EcoAction program, which offers incentives to vessels that use environmental best practices, such as burning low-sulfur fuels or plugging into electrical outlets while docked rather than burning diesel fuel.
Twenty years ago, ocean noise was an under-the-radar issue, said Jasny. “But now there’s widespread recognition that ocean noise represents serious problems for the entire marine ecology,” he said. “It’s been taken up by the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on Migratory Species, the European Union, the International Marine Organization, and the International Whaling Commission.”
Williams and other researchers who dedicated their careers to studying whales emphasize that many of these tweaks don’t need to curtail human economic activity, and that win-win should make such changes a moral imperative.
People don’t have a lock on complex culture, said Williams. “Every time we come up with a definition of what makes humans unique, someone finds a species—whales or primates or elephants or wolves—that share that same attribute, making them just as deserving of respect and dignity and protection as we are.”
Save Family of Orca Whales from Starvation
Target: President Obama, President of the United States of America
Goal: Demand the release of dams to save starving orcas.
Orcas are starving because dams are cutting off their food supply. The Lower Snake River dams are preventing the Chinook salmon migration from taking place. Without the salmon, the orcas are left without adequate nourishment. Urge politicians to breach these dams and give the orcas a chance for survival.
Washington’s orcas are starving due to the reduction of salmon in the Lower Snake River. Without their primary food source, the whales have been forced to digest their own blubber. This is dangerous. Whales survive primarily on salmon. The salmon, in turn, survive on highly toxic plankton. When the whales eat the salmon, the toxins build up in fat and remain in a benign state. However, when the whale digests its fat for nourishment those toxins are released into their body. A mother whale passes her blubber onto her offspring. The toxic blubber invades the calf’s body during pregnancy and creates a high infant mortality rate. In addition, the lack of food has caused the pods to split up, allowing fewer successful mating opportunities.
There are four dams in the Snake River. Removing these dams would open up 5,500 miles of spawning ground for the Chinook salmon. This would provide approximately 70 percent of the orca’s food supply. Sign below and urge the president to sign an executive order to breach these dams and save the starving orcas.
Dear President Obama,
Orcas are starving because dams are blocking off their primary food supply. Chinook salmon make their migration through the Lower Snake River and into the ocean. Dams on the river have cut off their traditional migratory path and prevented them from reaching the orca’s feeding grounds. We urge you to breach these dams and allow the orcas access to their food supply.
Orcas survive primarily on salmon. When salmon are scarce, the orcas feed on their own blubber to survive. This is dangerous due to the high toxicity of whale blubber. In addition, when a killer whale is pregnant, it passes its blubber to its offspring. This leads to a high infant mortality rate and puts the orca’s future at risk.
Breaching the dams would restore over half a million Chinook salmon to the Lower Snake River. This would account for approximately 70 percent of the orca’s food supply. We demand that you feed these starving orcas and give them a chance to thrive.
Sincerely,
[Your Name Here]
Photo Credit: clarita
2 Surprising Reasons Why Japan Won't Stop Hunting Whales
Japan just started hunting minke whales again, like this adult minke pictured here. Len2040/Flickr
Japan is dead set on hunting whales—international critics be damned. In 2014, the International Court of Justice ordered the country to stop hunting whales. But at the beginning of this month, Japan announced it would send a small whaling fleet into the Antarctic Ocean to kill 333 minke whales under the guise of a scientific program.
As you can imagine, the announcement inspired swift condemnation. "We do not accept in any way, shape or form the concept of killing whales for so-called 'scientific research,'" thundered Australian Environment Minister Greg Hunt. "Japan makes no secret of the fact that the meat resulting from its so-called scientific whaling programme ends up on the plate," the BBC reports.
"Japan makes no secret of the fact that the meat resulting from its so-called scientific whaling program ends up on the plate."
And yet Japanese consumers aren't exactly clamoring for whale meat. As Wired's Sarah Zhang recently pointed out, whale meat was only that popular across the island nation during a short period following World War II. Nowadays, consumption stands at 4,000 to 5,000 tons annually. That may sound like a lot—until you consider that the nation consumes about 600 million tons of total seafood each year, meaning meat from the charismatic sea mammals occupy a vanishingly small place on the nation's dinner plate.
What's more, Japan's whaling program is miniscule. According to the American Cetacean Society, the global population of minke whales stands at more than 1 million. The BBC reports that Japan has harvested 3,600 minkes since launching its current "scientific" program in 2005. As rotten as it is to envision 333 more being added to the carnage, Japan's controversial harvest isn't likely to result in a major shift in the minke's fate. Norwegian whalers also hunt minkes, with a quota of roughly 1,000 a year, as do the Icelandic.
So why does the Japanese government insist on scandalizing the globe's whale protection activists by maintaining a whaling habit, albeit a tiny one? As Keiko Hirata, a political scientist at California State University-Northridge, notes in a paper, Japan is typically quite cooperative in global environmental efforts. Indeed, the country was an original signee of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to curtail global climate change. The United States, by contrast, upholds impeccable anti-whaling policies, but its refusal to sign the Kyoto pact essentially derailed that effort. Japan also participated in the successful global effort to curb the use of ozone-damaging chemicals.
Hirata attributes Japan's pro-whaling anomaly to two factors. The first is cultural. Unlike Americans, Japanese people don't tend to see whales as charismatic mammals that should be protected from human consumption by a universal taboo. Hirata points out that in Japanese, "the symbol for whale (pronounced kujira) includes within it a component that means fish." Since whales are considered just a really big fish, she writes, "most Japanese lack any special love of whales and disagree with Western animal rights activists who insists on whales' rights." Sanctimony about whales translates as cultural prejudice:
To the Japanese, it is hypocritical that Westerners consider it morally wrong to kill certain mammals such as whales but that they consider it acceptable to kill others such as kangaroos (in Australia) and baby cattle (in the United States).
The second factor is political, she writes. Japan's whaling efforts are overseen by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries, which operates under very little domestic political pressure to end Japan's whaling program. Maintaining it in the face of global condemnation, she writes, is about maintaining political turf. "Given intense inter-ministerial rivalries in Japan," she writes, "it is not likely that these bureaucratic actors would voluntarily concede one of their areas of jurisdiction." In short, if the whaling program ended, certain officials would find themselves out of work.
Because of these factors, "Japan is unlikely to change its pro-whaling stance in the near-to-medium term, barring any major unforeseen event," she concludes.
Lamentable as the stance is, at least global accords have hemmed in Japan's whaling ambitions to a small effort targeting the minke, which is not currently endangered. If only that were true of the bluefin tuna—an endangered species for which Japanese eaters maintain a voracious appetite.
Tell NMFS: Give Sperm Whales the Protections They Need.
To: Dr. Perry Gayaldo, Deputy Director, Office of Protected Resources, National Marine Fisheries Service
I am writing in response to your request for comments on the National Marine Fisheries Service’s proposed permit authorizing the incidental take of the endangered sperm whale (California/Oregon/Washington stock) and the endangered humpback whale (California/Oregon/Washington stock). The National Marine Fisheries Service has made a preliminary determination that incidental taking from commercial fishing will have a negligible impact on these marine mammals.
I am concerned that NMFS’s justification for negligible impact is not precautionary and deviates from well-established methods. In 2013, NMFS determined that emergency regulations to reduce the risk of sperm whale mortality and serious injury were necessary to meet the conditions of the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act. The regulations included hard caps that would have immediately shut down the fishery if a single whale were caught and injured or killed. Without any new data, NMFS is now reversing its 2013 conclusion that emergency measures were necessary to ensure a negligible impact. Instead, the agency appears to be changing the way it analyzes the same data to support removing regulatory protections for this endangered species. Specifically, the agency is now using a longer time series to inflate sperm whale estimates far above what have been observed in recent surveys (for example, the most recent 2008 abundance point estimate is only 300 whales). It is also deflating estimated bycatch mortality by adding years of data in which no bycatch was observed.
I am concerned about the health of sperm whales and our ocean and have entrusted NMFS to protect our priceless marine mammals. I find the agency’s preliminary determination irresponsible. With the expiration of these regulations in August 2014 and the proposed decision to do away with hard caps, NMFS is now unable to ensure that the risk of sperm whale takes is negligible.
The proposed protections do not go far enough to protect sperm whales. This fishery should not be permitted to operate without protections that are at least as strong as the emergency measures put in place last year.
Please immediately reinstitute hard caps to protect sperm whales in the drift gill net fishery.
Sincerely,
[Your name here]
A lucky freediver had an unprecedented close-up view of a killer whale's MOUTH as it chased fish beneath him.
Humpback Whales’ Feeding Frenzy Captured By Drones
A DRONE captures a group of hungry humpback whales lunge feeding on huge shoals of herring. Shot in November by wildlife filmmaker Patrick Dykstra, 36, in Northern Norway, this incredibly rare footage shows the giant sea mammals hunting in unison. The US photographer saw around 100 humpbacks in the same area, each weighing around 30 tons. Lunge feeding involves whales swallowing massive amounts of fish and then pushing out the water with their tongues. Colorado born Patrick, who has swam with humpbacks on five different continents, revealed it is unusual to see this type of behaviour happening in groups.
Videographer / Director: Picture Adventure Expeditions
Producer: Mark Hodge, Nick Johnson
Editor: Joshua Douglas
To join filmmaker Patrick on one of his amazing adventures - visit http://pictureadventure.com/
