One of those hypotheses — that family bonds play into the stranding phenomenon — is now subject to question, based on genetic analysis of hundreds of beached whales in New Zealand and Australia. The mothers of beached calves, for instance, often were missing entirely from the beach, says cetacean researcher Scott Baker, associate director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State. Given whales’ strong kinship bonds, this familial separation could signal some disruption prior to the stranding — a disruption that could, in fact, play a role in triggering the event.

“Rescue efforts aimed at ‘refloating’ stranded whales often focus on placing stranded calves with the nearest mature female” on the assumption she’s the mother, Baker says. “Our results suggest that rescuers should be cautious when making difficult welfare decisions … based on this assumption alone.”

Renee Albertson (Photo: Lee Sherman)

Rain was pouring hard the day Renee Albertson first connected, face-to-face, with a marine mammal. She was a 7-year-old visiting British Columbia’s Sealand aquarium (Canada’s now-defunct answer to California’s SeaWorld) with her mom and dad. The daily show had been cancelled because of the downpour. The usual crowds were absent. As the soggy trio from Portland stood looking into a small tank, the resident killer whale surfaced. The young whale — a rescue named Miracle — was balancing a plastic ring on her nose. And she was looking straight at little Renee. Again and again, Renee tossed the ring. Again and again, Miracle brought it back, always to Renee.

“There was just a low fence around the tank, and you could literally reach over and throw the ring,” recalls Albertson, a Ph.D. student in Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute. “She kept coming back to me. It was a neat connection. It really made an impact on me.”

Dolphins in the Marquesas (Photo: Renee Albertson)

That childhood encounter fed Albertson’s ever-deepening fascination with marine science and led her, eventually, to join the international research team of Oregon State cetacean scientist Scott Baker. “Increasingly, I knew I wanted to help conserve these intelligent animals,” she says. “I just didn’t know how.” But with stubborn single-mindedness punctuated by moments of pure serendipity — fortuitous convergences she characterizes simply as “perfect timing”— she found her way into an elite circle of researchers who follow cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) to the farthest reaches of the Earth.

Portland to Polynesia

Albertson always loved biology. But the notion of making a living helping whales seemed unrealistic and out-of-reach. Chemistry — now there was a practical path to a career, she decided. After earning a bachelor’s in chemistry at Portland State University, Albertson took a job in an environmental lab analyzing water and soil samples. But lab work was, for her, too solitary. So she got a master’s in education at Pacific University and taught chemistry at David Douglas High School for 10 years. She loved teaching. But in the recesses of her mind, the eyes of the captive killer whale were still on her.

On the island of Hao in French Polynesia, villagers gave Renee Albertson a look at this jaw bone from a sperm whale. They agreed to let her sample the bone for genetic analysis. (Photo courtesy of Renee Albertson)

Then one day she heard about renowned whale researcher Michael Poole from a friend who had taken one of Poole’s whale-watching trips in French Polynesia. Poole had deeply inspired the friend, who encouraged Albertson to meet him. She was intrigued. “My friend didn’t realize that his whale-watching trip would end up being a life-changer for me,” Albertson says.

She emailed Poole, offering (begging, actually) to assist in his research during her summer break from teaching. “I never heard back,” she recalls. “I emailed and emailed and emailed.”

Finally, she sent one last message. She told him she was coming, regardless, and that if he didn’t need her, she joked, she guessed she would just have to spend the summer drinking martinis while writing lesson plans on the beach. Two days later, Poole’s name popped up in her inbox. His Ph.D. student wouldn’t be coming to collect samples that year, he explained, and it was humpback whale season. There was no money available for salary or living expenses. But if she were willing, he could offer her an unpaid internship.

When she got to the island of Moorea, Poole handed her not a life jacket but a notebook. Inside the fat binder was a photographic catalog of humpback whales’ tails. Poole tasked her with comparing the tails of recently sighted whales with those of previous years. “If you still like biology when you finish this, I’ll take you out in the boat,” Poole said. For two weeks Albertson “sat in a little beach cabana with a little magnifying glass, matching whale tails.”

She had earned her creds. Soon after, she was on the boat learning about dolphins, whales and conservation and helping Poole collect new whale-tail photos for the catalog. They also collected skin samples from breaching whales for eventual mitochondrial DNA analysis as part of her master’s research.

Posts From the Boat

The work led her to the University of Auckland, where Professor Baker had just accepted a new position as assistant director of the Marine Mammal Institute located in (how ironic is this?) Albertson’s home state of Oregon.

Renee Albertson and colleague Marc Oremus just published the first genetics paper on rough-toothed dolphins. Albertson, Oremus and whale researcher Michael Poole are known locally as the "French Polynesia team." Albertson says, "Believe it or not, it isn't that warm there, as our jackets illustrate. I was freezing most of the time on the boat!" (Photo courtesy of Renee Albertson)

Since joining Baker’s Cetacean Conservation and Genomics Laboratory, she has studied humpbacks in Polynesia and Antarctica, rough-toothed dolphins from Hawaii and the South Pacific, and multiple species of dolphins and whales in the Marquesas archipelago, a “hotspot” for cetacean diversity. She is coauthor on a paper about the population structure of rough-toothed dolphins recently accepted by the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology. “Even though they live in the open ocean, they live in very discrete communities,” she says of the findings. She has presented to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Scientific Review Group on the status and restructuring of marine mammal stocks. And she’s back in the classroom, this time teaching courses on the conservation and biology of marine mammals, both online for OSU and at the Hatfield Marine Science Center.

Visit Albertson’s blog for a day-by-day account of her most recent research expedition http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/marquesas/

Learn more about marine mammal studies through the South Pacific Wale Research Consortium.

For more information about education abroad opportunities for OSU students, contact the International Degree & Education Abroad (IDEA) office at 541-737-3006.

Varvara and Flex are western grays, an endangered species of only 130 individuals worldwide. However, not all scientists are convinced that western grays are distinct from eastern grays (the species that whale watchers are most likely to spot from the capes and headlands of the Oregon coast). This study will help sort out that question.

“Western gray whales could be a separate population, they could represent an expansion of eastern gray whales, or there could be some of both sharing the same feeding grounds off eastern Russia,” says Greg Donovan, head of the International Whaling Commission and coordinator of the project. “It is clear that we need to re-examine our understanding of the population structure of gray whales in the North Pacific and any conservation and management implications that arise from that under- standing.”

Varvara, who travels at least 100 miles each day, headed for the Sea of Cortez, a well-known breeding ground for eastern grays, according to the researchers. She visited three lagoons there before turning back north. At the end of March, she was near Sitka, Alaska. You can follow the whale’s progress online at www. mmi.oregonstate.edu

“Charismatic megafauna,” my professor said with disdain. “That’s all you guys ever want to talk about.” I exchanged knowing glances with my classmates as we settled in for a rant about the popularity of flashy, impressive species.

It was the last day of my vertebrate biology class, and I was thrilled to finally hear about my favorite, the mammals. I’d endured hardships to get to this point. First were the slimy, less-than-appealing hagfish. From there I learned about cartilaginous fish, bony fish, fish that bore live young, fish with bizarre mating rituals. Things started to pick up with the amphibians and reptiles, and the birds were charming, but my focus remained steadily on the mammals.

To my bitter disappointment, mammals were barely given an hour of discussion. “If you want to learn about mammals, take a mammology class,” was my professor’s explanation for skimming over Class Mammalia.

The Pacific coast is home to the entire U.S. population of California sea lions, according to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. (Photo: Amy Schneider)

Disheartened, I shuffled home to comfort myself with pictures of beluga whales and wallabies on Google Images. Despite what my professor said, I think it’s fairly normal to be captivated by animals with fur and big, glossy eyes. It’s no coincidence that the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) chose a cuddly giant panda as its figurehead. I admit, the iconic, lonely polar bear stranded on a melting iceberg tugs at my heart. It’s hard to stand idly by when these animals are at risk or in pain, and that’s probably why Kim Raum-Suryan and her Steller sea lion research arrested my attention.

“I’ve been interested in animals since I was a kid,” Raum-Suryan said with a laugh. A kindred spirit, evidently.

In the 1990s, Raum-Suryan, a research assistant with Dr. Markus Horning at OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute, was working for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, making observations on Steller sea lions in order to understand the reason for their declining populations. Steller sea lions were listed as a threatened species in 1990, and a subpopulation became endangered in 1997.

Traveling by research vessel, Raum-Suryan and her colleagues navigated the Alaskan waters in search of sea lion clusters, collecting blood samples and taking pictures to learn more about the giant pinnipeds. As Raum-Suryan gathered more sea lion photographs, she was disturbed to notice how many of the sea lions were adorned with tight rubber or plastic loops around their necks. These loops, a symptom of litter in the ocean, cut deeply into the animals’ flesh, causing painful wounds that could result in death through strangulation or infection.

Oregon Coast

In 2000, Raum-Suryan started taking photographs of the entangled Steller sea lions and decided to survey how many sea lions were in similar situations. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s data set spans eleven years in Alaska and Raum-Suryan’s data set spans five years in Oregon.  Off the coast of Oregon alone, she has observed 72 entangled Steller sea lions, and with the popular literature citing only one or two occurrences a year, the difference is significant.

“The number was definitely higher than we were expecting, and that’s just including the animals we actually see,” Raum-Suryan said. “So we’re dealing with the low estimate because it’s very likely that many [entangled] animals die before they ever come to shore.”

These entangled sea lions, with their blubbery bodies and whiskery faces, prompted a movement in Newport, Ore. last year. Several Oregon organizations, including the Oregon Veterinary Medical Association and OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute, funded and installed a giant capture cage at Port Dock 1 where California sea lions love to “haul out” and relax before plunging into the ocean for their next meal. The capture cage floats near the docks with its doors open, providing an inviting place for the sea lions to hang out. Ideally, when an entangled sea lion enters the cage, the doors are then shut and the sea lion can be safely tranquilized and disentangled.

Naturally, I love this idea. But I have a feeling that people like my vertebrate biology professor would call into question the necessity of building such a device, and he may have a point. While thousands of animals mark the endangered species list, it’s admittedly easier to relate to the plight of the sea lions than to the equally imperiled corals that face issues of their own.

Cuddle Up to Coral

The corals are undoubtedly important. Their role in the marine ecosystem is foundational, and it’s frightening to think what might happen if they disappear. Still, people flock to animals like sea lions, and that will always be the case. It’s much more fun to watch sea lions frolic than corals filter-feed. The WWF giant panda is there for a reason – it’s meant to engage a broader audience.

If someone cares about sea lions, they must care about the entire marine ecosystem by default. The biological world is one of connections where many organisms are dependent on each other for survival. A wild California sea lion thrives only in a healthy environment, which means we need to conserve the fish, water and air quality that sea lions need to live. Without the smaller, less obvious members of the marine community, there can be no sea lions. If people grasp that concept, they may understand why conservation is so important.

And it all starts with a bunch of sea lions sprawling out on the docks. Maybe those “charismatic megafauna” aren’t so bad after all.

________________________________

See a news release from Oregon Sea Grant about Kim Raum-Suryan’s research on Steller sea lions.

Mate has pioneered the tracking of whales through devices that can adhere to whales for hundreds of days, communicate with satellites and relay their locations on a daily basis (see “Tracking the Great Whales,” Terra, summer 2006). “Not a lot is known about western gray whales, so finding out where they migrate to breed and calve, so we can add some measures of protection, will be a tremendous step forward in their recovery,” says Mate.

Mate and his colleagues have created a map of Flex’s progress that is updated every Monday. As of January 31, 2011, he had surprised scientists by traveling to the eastern Pacific where he would be likely to encounter gray whales that migrate along the West Coast of North America.

The international scientific expedition was conducted through the A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences and contracted through the International Whaling Commission with funding from Exxon Neftegas Ltd. and the Sakhalin Energy Investment Company.

Scott Baker’s investigations of whale and dolphin DNA have taken him from Alaska’s humpback feeding grounds to the illegal marine mammal trade in Asia and an Academy Award-winning documentary. (Photo: David Baker)

For most Americans, eating a relative of Flipper or Keiko would be as unthinkable as dining on Lassie or Smokey Bear. But in some seafaring cultures, dolphins and whales are traditional foods, sold in supermarkets right alongside the fish fillets and beef cutlets.

The sale of meat from whales and dolphins accidentally drowned in fishing nets or left over from “scientific” whaling operations is allowed in some countries as “exceptions” to the international moratorium on commercial whaling. Trouble is, neither customers nor enforcers eyeing the packages of fresh or frozen steaks or stew meat can distinguish a minke whale taken in the scientific whaling program from, say, an illegally killed gray or humpback whale.

That’s where Scott Baker comes in.

The OSU conservation geneticist is one of the world’s foremost experts in using DNA to identify specific populations of cetaceans — whales, dolphins and porpoises — and thereby detect the unlawful sale of protected species. Baker travels frequently to Japan and South Korea, where he holes up in cramped hotel rooms in Tokyo or Seoul with his portable genetics lab, listening for a knock at the door. When the secret code is tapped out, he cracks open the door and a local collaborator, who has been covertly trolling grocery stores and sushi bars, furtively passes him a bagful of bloody meat for analysis.

This cloak-and-dagger science was documented in the Academy Award winning eco-thriller The Cove, in which Baker was cast (see sidebar).

“No scientist has contributed more to our understanding of cetacean genetics than Scott,” says Phillip Clapham, a cetacean scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “In particular, his innovative use of genetic analysis to detect and track illegal or unreported trade in whales and other wildlife has given scientists and managers a powerful tool to assess the extent of this traffic and its impact on populations. He’s been one of the major players in the field of whale biology worldwide.”

Catcher in the Bay

Height, as everyone knows, is an advantage in basketball games and presidential elections. But in marine science? Surprisingly, it can be — at least at New College of Sarasota, Florida. For a pioneering dolphin study launched while he was a student there, Baker’s 6-foot-4-inch stature gave him an edge over his shorter classmates. That’s because he could stand in the shallow waters of Sarasota Bay, his head well above the surface, while helping to use a seine net for the capture and release of wild dolphins.

“The researchers tended to enlist tall undergraduates for the hard work,” Baker says, laughing.

As a kid in Alabama, Baker vacationed on the Gulf Coast every summer with his dad (an electrical engineer and decorated veteran of Omaha Beach and the Battle of the Bulge) and his mom (an activist and humanitarian in the nuclear freeze movement and many other causes). “When you live in a place like Birmingham, the Gulf of Mexico is sort of like paradise — except for the mosquitoes and sand flies and jellyfish,” he says, grinning. The Gulf was where he first became intrigued by dolphins. But it was in that shallow Florida bay as he wrapped his arms around individual bottlenoses to process them for the study — weighing, measuring, tagging, drawing blood, taking tissue samples — where the animals etched a deeper impression on his psyche.

“Those kinds of things change your life,” says Baker, who left New Zealand’s University of Auckland in 2006 to become associate director of OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute. “How many people get to have an experience like that — capturing and releasing wild dolphins for a groundbreaking scientific study?” He adds, “We caught a lot of dolphins.”

Describing himself as “not terribly sentimental,” Baker nevertheless admits to being charmed by the joie de vivre of dolphins. Whales, on the other hand, are hard to relate to. He calls them “extremophiles,” a term borrowed from deep-ocean biologists who apply it to such exotic creatures as cold-seep tubeworms and giant hydrothermal vent clams — organisms that live in Earth’s most extreme environments. Not only have whales shed such basic mammalian characteristics as hind limbs during their evolutionary history, they can dive as deep as 5,000 feet, live as long as 200 years and travel as far as 6,000 miles during annual migrations.

“Whales are so alien,” Baker says. “They’re fascinating and magnificent animals, but it’s hard for us to imagine their world. Dolphins are much more like humans.”

Brain Train

During discussions of cetacean genetics, Scott Baker’s train of thought passes through a hundred switches, side rails and branch lines, diverging down one surprising aside after another. For him, everything in biology is connected to cetacean genetics.

Ask him about genetic diversity among whales, for instance, and he’ll tell you a story about cheetahs — a story with an Oregon angle, no less — from a Scientific American article that strongly influenced his early career. At Southern Oregon’s zoological park, Wildlife Safari, cheetahs were mysteriously dying of a common feline virus that causes only sniffles in housecats, suggesting a weakness in the big cats’ immune systems. The resulting gene-pool study by U.S. National Cancer Institute scientist Stephen O’Brien piqued Baker’s curiosity about the impact of genetic “bottlenecks” (large die-offs in a population caused by natural or human forces, such as the intensive whaling during the 19th and 20th centuries) on long-term species survival among the great whales.

Ask Baker about the human bond with wild animals, and he’ll engage you in an exploration ranging from the philosophy of Descartes to the methods of Jane Goodall to the quantifiable self-awareness of pigs, chimps, crows and (of course) dolphins. If you venture into the topic of evolution, you’ll dive with him into the Eve Hypothesis (the theory that all humans share DNA traceable to the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens in Africa about 200,000 years ago), take a detour into Mendel’s peas, then veer from Darwin’s (mistaken) hunch that whales evolved from bears to the current scientific thinking: Today’s oceanic behemoths had a hoofed, hippo-like ancestor. If you’re still with him, you’ll careen around a hairpin turn, returning to the origins of modern humans to look in on the late pioneer of molecular evolution Allan Wilson of UC Berkeley, who discovered the “molecular clock” (using genetic mutations to date evolutionary changes).

Genes on Screen

By this point in the conversation, your brain will probably verge on overload. But Baker is just getting warmed up. As he talks, he frequently jumps up from his seat to scan his bookcase for a relevant article, or swivels to his computer screen to pull up a DNA barcode or digital map showing worldwide distribution of humpbacks, which he has studied since his years as a Ph.D. student at the University of Hawaii.

He’s at his most animated when talking about those early discoveries — such as one stunning, predawn revelation in a darkroom where he was developing “autoradiographic” images of humpback whale DNA. These were some of the first “DNA fingerprints” derived from small skin samples, which Baker had collected with a biopsy dart fired from an inflatable research boat in Southeast Alaska’s Inside Passage and Central California’s coastal waters, as well as in Hawaii and the Gulf of Maine. (Previously, whales and dolphins had been ID’d photographically by natural markings on their fins, flukes and flippers.) The finding he made that night in 1988 was a breakthrough in the just-emerging field of molecular ecology — using molecular markers for clues to relationships among individual whales and the ancestry of populations.

“I remember pulling out the first autorad that showed samples from feeding grounds in Southeast Alaska side-by-side with samples from California, and there was no overlap between the two populations,” he says. “All individuals from Southeast Alaska had one pattern, and not one individual from California had that pattern. It was like, wow!”

These population-level variations in DNA, which geneticists call “fixed differences,” pointed to ancient migration pathways swum again and again and again over tens of thousands of years. The black-and-white barcode he stared at that night supported his hypothesis that migratory routes from winter calving to summer feeding grounds had persisted for hundreds of generations — in other words, across evolutionary time. Biologists call this enduring continuity “maternally directed fidelity,” that is, patterns taught from mother to calf and reflected over eons in mitochondrial (maternally inherited) DNA, which scientists denote as mtDNA.

“This was one of the first discoveries we made using molecular methods,” he says. “What we were seeing in whales was a very distinct population substructure. The markers showed that despite their mobility, despite their ability to travel 12,000 miles roundtrip on each migration, these animals keep returning to the same place year after year, generation after generation. They don’t wander around. It was puzzling, because these aren’t terrestrial animals isolated by canyons and rivers and mountains — they’re out there in the ocean with no obvious barriers. Who would have thought the ocean would be so subdivided? Who would have thought whales would treat the ocean the same way bears treat their habitat, inheriting their mothers’ home range and returning there each year?”

Scott Baker was featured in "The Cove"

In the seaside village of Taiji, Japan, there’s a jarring juxtaposition: Jolly-looking tour buses shaped like happy dolphins putter up and down the streets by day, while by night fishermen secretly slaughter hundreds of panic-stricken dolphins in a nearby inlet and sell them as meat.

This sinister irony permeates the Academy Award-winning movie, The Cove, produced by the Ocean Preservation Society. Scientific adviser and cast member Scott Baker is delighted by the accolades, not because they widen his fame outside science circles but because recognition from the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards and the Sundance Film Festival means broader exposure for the movie, which critics have characterized as an “eco-thriller.” That, in turn, means more international pressure to end the carnage.

“There has been tremendous resistance to the movie in Japan,” says Baker, a leader in international efforts to uncover black-market trade in products from protected species of whales and dolphins. “The Tokyo International Film Festival initially turned down the film, but under pressure from American actors like Ben Stiller, they agreed to allow one showing outside the formal festival. The international press was relegated to the back of the auditorium.”

Baker, associate director of OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute, acts as the film’s scientific voice on dolphin biology and the health risks to humans who eat dolphin meat, which is high in mercury (mercury levels are concentrated in organisms that are, like dolphins, high up in the food chain). As the world’s first scientist to use DNA to identify whale species being butchered for human consumption, Baker appears in the movie both as an expert “talking head” and as a DNA detective, hunkered over a portable genetics lab in a Tokyo hotel testing samples purchased, covertly, in Japanese fish markets.

“We spent days filming in that hotel room — a room not much bigger than my office,” recalls Baker. He describes director Louie Psihoyos as “visionary but meticulous,” shooting “tons of film” to tell the story of the annual killing of more than 1,200 dolphins in Taiji.

Baker’s science-based scenes of DNA identification and his comments on the threat of mercury contamination in dolphin meat are a counterpoint to the movie’s main storyline: An intrepid team of cinematographers and activists (including the dolphin trainer of the 1960s TV series Flipper), wearing camouflage and night-vision goggles, risk arrest and even death to capture video and underwater acoustics during the slaughter.

Besides being a gripping piece of filmmaking, the movie highlights a heartbreaking issue of massive proportions: the international black market in wildlife. From elephant tusks and rhino horns to bighorn sheep antlers and panther pelts, the illegal trade in endangered animals is worth an estimated $5 billion to $8 billion a year worldwide. Cetaceans are lucrative commodities in that grisly enterprise. In Japan or Korea, for instance, a whale killed in coastal fishing nets can sell for more than $100,000 wholesale. Dolphins, too, bring in fat cash: Aquariums pay $150,000 for a live animal.

But it’s the dead ones that most worry Baker, a longtime delegate to the International Whaling Commission (IWC). Despite the IWC’s 1986 moratorium on whaling, Japan, Korea, Iceland and Norway continue the hunt, either under the guise of science or under an “objection” (basically, a rejection of the commission’s authority to regulate whaling). Loopholes in the commission’s 1986 moratorium, it turns out, are big enough for a whale to swim through — and die in. A “scientific whaling” loophole allows a limited number of whales to be killed for research and the remains to be sold. A “bycatch whaling” loophole allows fishermen to sell whales and dolphins that become entangled in fishing nets. Hundreds of protected animals die unreported each year because of the laxity of IWC rules and regs, Baker says. “The continued sale of ‘legal’ whale products acts as a cover for other illegal, unreported and undocumented hunting,” he argues.

Still, whales are afforded at least some measure of protection by the IWC. Dolphins, on the other hand, have none at all from the IWC or other international conventions (although many individual nations have outlawed dolphin killing).

Forensic genetics is a potent weapon in the fight to save wildlife. Baker’s technique — a method of quickly amplifying segments of DNA called a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) — is the same one used by crime-scene investigators to match “perps” to body fluids, hair and other tissue they leave behind. PCR is used for all sorts of investigations, from nabbing moose poachers to detecting cystic fibrosis in eight-celled human embryos. Indeed, Baker and his Ph.D. student Merel Dalebout were using PCR in 2002 when they discovered a new species of beaked whale, the first new whale species in 15 years and the first to be described primarily by DNA.

Anatomy of a Career

He was a Midwest kid, a self-described “technical nerd” who hung out with ham-radio buffs and fell in love with a girl who played flute to his percussion in the school band. Before he headed to Oregon with his bride, Mary Lou, to become a marine biologist, Bruce Mate had never laid eyes on an ocean.

Read more…

Bruce Mate has scudded most of the world’s oceans at the prow of Avon and Zodiac Hurricane inflatables. Using a crossbow or an air gun, the OSU marine biologist has spent several decades attaching radio transmitters to animals that, despite their enormous size, live largely out of sight beneath the opaque surface of the sea. Following a distant spout, a momentary fluke, a sudden breach, Mate has tagged fin whales in the Mediterranean off the coast of France and sperm whales in the Gulf of Mexico. He’s tagged right whales off Nova Scotia and grays off Baja. Bowheads in the Canadian Arctic. Humpbacks off the coast of Africa and in the Hawaiian archipelago. Blues off Chile or traveling the Pacific from California to Costa Rica.

But it’s at his office on the Oregon Coast where his research pays off in data. Every morning when he sits down at his desk at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Oregon, and logs onto his PC, Mate has a window into the feeding habits and migratory travels of each tagged animal. That’s because the electronic signals emitted by the tiny transmitter lodged in its skin are picked up by instruments on weather satellites, whose relayed data translate into longitude and latitude on the researcher’s computer. “Next to the whales and God, I’m the first to know where they are,” Mate likes to say.

Aside from its value as basic science — fact-finding about whales’ hidden lives — Mate’s work holds real, and urgent, import for the fate of endangered and threatened species. The cutting-edge research that has propelled him into the elite of marine mammal scientists has, for example, helped to preserve critical habitat for grays in the breeding lagoons of Baja and to prevent fatal ship strikes of North Atlantic right whales, which teeter on the edge of extinction. “I don’t want whales to become the next spotted owl,” says Mate, who holds the Marine Mammal Research Professorship. Using science to prevent problems before they occur is one of his most important aims.

Monitoring Whales with a Mouse

One drizzly day last November Mate, still tanned from a fin whale expedition to the south of France, ignores the hundreds of e-mails that have piled up in his absence, instead clicking on the folder labeled “Grays.” He’s stunned by what he finds. Four of the mother whales he tagged off Baja in March have traveled hundreds of miles north of their expected summer feeding grounds in the Bering Sea. Having weaned their calves by now, three of them are still in the high Arctic, lingering in the Russian waters of the Chukchi Sea even as winter nears. A fourth tagged mother has been killed by Russian whalers who, under International Whaling Commission rules, are allowed to harvest 145 grays annually.

The other surprise is the duration of the data stream: Eight months after tagging, the transmitters are still working. It’s a testament to how far the technology has come. When Mate tagged his first whale back in 1979, the signals from the crude, radio-monitored device reached a mere five miles. He had colleagues listen to receivers from their offices at irregular intervals along the coastline. “I spent a lot of time waiting for phone reports to come in,” he recalls, ruefully.
In 1983, he became the world’s first researcher to track a whale by satellite — a humpback off Newfoundland. Since then, he and the staff at the Marine Mammal Program have pushed the technology relentlessly. With funding from the Office of Naval Research, the Minerals Management Service and the Marine Mammal Commission, he has overseen several generations of tag designs. Today’s model is compact and lightweight, made of surgical-grade stainless steel and infused with long-lasting antibiotics to prevent infection. Super-streamlined, it’s also designed to resist drag and the pressures of deep-water dives.
The goal of the tagging, ultimately, is to protect whales from the myriad human activities that might harass, harm or kill them — seismic exploration and drilling for oil and gas, sonar, ship collisions, fishing-gear entanglements, pollution and industrial development near sensitive marine habitats.

“Most stocks of large whales are so depleted, they’re under full international protection; everybody’s keen to see them recover,” Mate notes. “But we’re powerless to know what to do unless we know where they go throughout the year and what puts them at risk there. So in my research program, we concentrate on answering the questions, Where? When? and Why? by tracking the animals, month-to-month, season-to-season, across the planet.”

The answers do more than make protection possible. They change our understanding of how the ocean works. For example, Mate and other researchers have shown that whales and other marine migrants are sensitive to small differences in water temperature. These differences are often associated with “fronts” between water masses, boundaries that affect the ocean just as atmospheric cold and warm fronts affect the weather. By tracking where whales go, analyzing what they eat and monitoring such water fronts, scientists have discovered new patterns in ocean productivity. They have found hot spots, areas where migratory species congregate. They’ve learned how food availability changes from one place to another, knowledge that can be used to predict available habitat and how human activities affect the health of marine mammal populations.

Looking into Inquisitive Eyes

When a calf is born in the warm waters of San Ignacio Lagoon — one of only four gray whale calving areas in the world — it unfolds its one-ton body as it surfaces for its first breath. Here on the Pacific coast of Baja, it will gain as much as 20 pounds a day on its mother’s fat-rich milk, as it grows strong enough to make the 10,000-mile roundtrip migration to its summer feeding grounds in the Arctic.

Each year after the calves are born, Mate leads an ecology tour for 30 adventurous neophytes eager for a close-up look at wild whales. It’s a 30-hour trip from San Diego aboard the chartered, sport-fishing vessel Royal Polaris. After their second night at sea, the eco-tourists awake in the 50-square-mile lagoon, anchored inside a 360-degree panorama alive with rainbowed spouts, glistening black flukes, bobbing heads (grays “spy hop,” thrusting their noses above the water’s surface to look around), thunderous breaches, and even the occasional “Pink Floyd” — a whale-watchers’ euphemism for the five-foot penis that a male sometimes displays when pursuing a female.

Seeing this teeming congregation of whales, visitors can barely imagine that in this tranquil spot, 19th-century whalers slaughtered grays by the hundreds, and that by the early 20th century the species had been nearly wiped out. A worldwide ban on hunting gray whales, established by the League of Nations in 1937 and continued in 1946 by the International Whaling Commission, has allowed the grays to rebound to their pre-whaling population of about 18,000. The species has been so successful, in fact, that the IWC has established a sustained quota of gray whales for the indigenous people of Chukotka, Russia, who use them to feed mink and fox bred for furs.

For Mate’s intrepid band of eco-tourists, the view from the deck of the Royal Polaris is just the teaser. Climbing into small fiberglass motorboats called pangas, the visitors head out among the grays led by experienced local guides, who, along with the Mexican government, tightly regulate the eco-tourism trade here. Out in the lagoon, the guides slow the motors to a quiet idle. Then, everyone waits.

When a longtime guide named Alvaro points and whispers, “¡ballena!” (“whale,” in Spanish), a sudden sense of vulnerability descends on the group of six afloat in their 20-foot craft. As the 45-foot creature with flippers five feet long approaches — pushing its 35-ton form through the saltwater with a 1,000-pound tail that could snuff a human life like a swatter flattens a fly — they hold their collective breath. The great mottled body passes silently through the dappled sea beneath them. The little boat rocks softly, undisturbed.

A few minutes later, another whale emerges from the depths. At her side swims a calf. The humans, having by now exhaled, reach into the water and splash. And something remarkable happens. The mother whale rises to the surface with her month-old calf balanced on her back, its pale gray skin lustrous in the sunlight. After getting a good look at the boaters, the calf slips back into the water and swims toward the splashing hands. Just inches from the boat, it lifts its head. The humans find themselves face-to-face with the spiky hairs that sprout forward of the whale’s dual blowholes. The primeval-looking “knuckles” on the last third of its back, hinting of mythical beasts and ancient origins. The black eyes that seem to gaze back at the people with frank curiosity. And when their fingers stroke its rounded nose, its skin feels like a neoprene wetsuit, only smoother.

These whales are among the “inquisitives” — an estimated 10 percent of the stock of San Ignacio — who seek inter-action with humans. Mate, in fact, was one of the original researchers to document this “friendly” behavior on an expedition early in his career. So in the mid-1990s, when the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission heard about the $120 million salt-extraction project that Mitsubishi Corp. and the Mexican government were planning to build in the Vizcaino Desert Biosphere Reserve bordering the lagoon, it sent Mate to meet with concerned Mexican activists and ecologists. For even though grays have rebounded, Mate considers them — and indeed many marine mammal species — still in jeopardy because of the many ways their habitats can be compromised by humans. The saltworks, slated for this pristine birthplace of whales (and countless other species of flora and fauna), might have put this population of grays at risk.

“Next to the whales and God, I’m the first to know where they are.”
Bruce Mate
Director, Marine Mammal Program

In his 2001 book Eye of the Whale: Epic Passage from Baja to Siberia, author Dick Russell reports that Mate was “the first biologist to take a stand on citing concerns about the saltworks.” In a letter to colleagues in 1995, Mate expressed one of his top concerns — a planned pier for loading salt onto ships for export. The mile-long dock would have been exposed to winter storms and waves from summer hurricanes. If it failed, operations would have shifted to a tug and barge operation inside the mouth of the lagoon, creating an impediment to the whales.

Mate was appointed to a seven-member advisory panel of international marine experts to guide and review an environmental impact assessment process for the Mexican minister of natural resources. The panel provided “14 pages of concerns — things we felt needed to be addressed,” Mate later told Russell. “This was not limited to whales; we discussed fish and shellfish and larval forms, freshwater utilization for a community that would have to grow, even coyotes in the desert and garbage disposal.”

After years of public and behind-the-scenes efforts among corporate, government, scientific and environmental interests, the “saltworks war” ended happily for the grays when Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo canceled the project in 2000. “It would,” Zedillo said, “irreversibly alter the area’s aesthetics.”

Those aesthetics — the contradictory images of a desert landscape that is both tough and vulnerable — remind Mate’s eco-tourists that the treasures of Baja are not limited to whales. They include the flowers, soft-hued, blooming on barbed cactuses. The pelicans, wheeling above beaches strewn with pink shells and bleached bones. The elephant seal “weaners,” lolling in the sun like overstuffed duffle bags. The gangs of juvenile sea lions, who followed the pangas in clamorous undulations. The bottlenose dolphins, who escorted the Royal Polaris out of the lagoon — a swirling, leaping, bow-surfing honor guard.

Saving the Last Survivors

The gray whales are thriving now. But other species that were also decimated by whalers’ harpoons have not returned to healthy numbers. One of the most critically endangered is the North Atlantic right whale, which got its name from whalers who considered it the “right” one to kill because it swims slowly, floats when dead and is loaded with blubber, prized for lamp oil in the days before electric lights. (Many other products were produced from whale carcasses, including corset stays, buggy whips and brushes.) From its estimated pre-whaling population of 12,000 to 15,000, the North Atlantic right whale today clings tenuously to existence. Only 300 to 350 individuals now summer in the nutrient-rich waters off Maine, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland — what author Tora Johnson (Entanglements: The Intertwined Fates of Whales and Fishermen) calls the “ragged remnants of a vast tribe.” Scientists like Mate speculate that the species’ naturally low birthrate (mature females have only one calf every three to five years, in contrast to the grays’ rate of one every two years) makes any death outside normal attrition devastating to the overall population.

Collisions with seafaring vessels are the major anthropogenic (human-related) cause of right whales’ demise. Of the right whales found dead, in fact, fully half have been hit by ships. In part, that’s because their feeding grounds overlap some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes — waters where freighters, tankers, ferries, cruise ships and fishing boats make thousands of trips. Between 1986 and 2005, ship strikes took the lives of at least 19 right whales — and those were only the documented fatalities. The injuries observed by researchers include severed tails, shattered skulls, internal hemorrhages, deep cuts and gashes. Mate is still haunted by the sight of one whale that had been eviscerated by a propeller.

When Canadian marine biologist Moira Brown of the Center for Coastal Studies in Massachusetts launched a campaign to limit whales’ vulnerability to ship collisions, Mate’s research played a significant role. The travels of nine right whales he tagged in the late 1990s showed they were in constant danger. “Right whale distribution,” Mate and colleagues concluded in 1997 “coincided with areas extensively used by humans for fishing, shipping and recreation.”

In 2000 Mate and then graduate student Mark Baumgartner (now a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) investigated the movements of right whales feeding in the Bay of Fundy. Data from them and other scientists convinced a collaborative group of shippers, fishermen and Canadian officials in 2003 to adopt scientists’ recommendation to move shipping lanes four miles to the east — an unprecedented action that reduced the risk of ship strikes in the bay by at least 80 percent.

Scientists and environmentalists have now turned their attention to U.S. waters. The National Marine Fisheries Service has, for example, recommended lowering speed limits for vessels off the eastern seaboard, where right whales travel annually to their breeding grounds off Georgia and Florida. A 2004 NMFS report cites data (right whale migration patterns and routes, speed and distance traveled, residency periods and dive durations) from studies by Mate and other scientists in support of the proposal.

The other big threat facing North Atlantic right whales is fishing gear. New England Aquarium scientists have documented dozens of entanglements with nets and lines in recent decades. They have reported whales with lines through their mouths and wrapped around flippers, head and back. One whale with “three tight wraps from gillnet” over its back was later found dead with line cut into the dorsal body cavity and “wrapped around both flippers and underside.”

The detritus of human enterprise and entertainment — helium balloons, aluminum pull-tabs, plastics by the ton, nylon netting that even a whale can’t break — too often winds up in the world’s oceans, and takes the lives of countless sea creatures. That fact is brought home forcefully for visitors in a graphic photo display at the Hatfield Marine Science Center. The recent travelers to Baja witnessed it firsthand: a sea lion wearing a piece of fishing line cinched around her neck. It had cut its way into her skin, forming an ever-tightening noose. Watching her scratch at it with her flipper, Mate shook his head. “Eventually,” he said, “it’ll kill her.”

For the precarious North Atlantic right whale, these kinds of entanglements are tragic not just for the individuals, they’re ominous for the species as a whole. “Almost 60 percent of North Atlantic right whales are scarred by gear entanglements,” Mate says. “Some years, all of the calves are scarred before they’re a year old. That’s not tolerable!”

Creating a Corps of Advocacy

Mate’s findings are not limited to academic journals and scientific papers. He’s been quoted widely in the popular press, including National Geographic, and he makes the evening news whenever whales beach themselves on the Oregon Coast. He’s been featured on the Discovery Channel, the PBS science programs “Nova” and “Nature,” and several BBC specials with world-renowned director and producer Richard Attenborough, including a recent episode of “Blue Planet.”

Reaching ordinary people about the plight of whales and their cousins gives Mate deep professional satisfaction. For more than 20 years, he reached that broader constituency as a member of the Oregon Sea Grant Extension faculty. Mate believes that when marine mammals are under siege, their strongest shield is public outrage girded by scientific evidence — the kind of evidence that, as Mate likes to say, “will hold up in court.”

That kind of evidence is critical to resolving such issues as the ongoing conflict between salmon fishermen and sea lions in the river systems of the Northwest. The competition for coho and chinook makes headlines across the region year after year. Yet studies by OSU and others suggest that there is more to it than a simple predator-prey relationship between marine mammals and fish. That’s because sea lions have historically had a voracious appetite for a salmon nemesis: the lamprey, a parasitic fish that attaches itself to juvenile and adult salmon. In the 1980s, an Oregon Sea Grant-funded study by Mate and his colleagues found that lamprey topped the sea lions’ diet in the Rogue River. “Lamprey are anadromous (they spawn in fresh water and migrate to sea), like salmon,” Mate says, “and each female that makes it upstream lays 100,000 eggs. Seals and sea lions are thought to be the reason lamprey populations in Oregon rivers have declined.”

Since that study, the picture has changed. Salmon numbers have plummeted while more sea lions, which are protected by federal law, have been making their way upstream. More research is needed to end the bitter debate.

To settle this and other human-animal conflicts, Mate is spearheading the creation of an international Marine Mammal Institute at OSU. In June, Markus Horning, director of the Laboratory for Applied Biotelemetry and Biotechnology at Texas A&M University at Galveston, became the latest scientist to join the multidisciplinary team that will study marine mammal ecology from many different angles — behavior, acoustics, physiology, genetics and seasonal distribution. Horning specializes in pinnipeds and other diving animals. With scientists at the Alaska Sea Life Center in Seward, Alaska, he leads a study of Steller sea lions, using a new implanted tag technology that reveals details about foraging patterns and other aspects of an animal’s life history.

Mate continues to develop his program at the Hatfield Marine Science Center as the foundation of a worldwide effort to understand and manage marine mammals. Because in the end, extending the scope and reach of science, Mate says, is the best hope for the future of the world’s ocean dwellers.