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

Research vessels in the northern Gulf of Mexico are never out of sight of the more than 4,000 active oil and gas platforms in the area. (Photo: Stephen Brandt)

Bruce Mate didn’t wait long. Within days of the April 20 Deepwater Horizon oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, he was on the phone with officials from the U.S. Minerals Management Service. From 2001-2004, the agency had funded him to study the Gulf’s endangered sperm whales. Now, the director of Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute had an idea: By tracking the sperm whales again, he could provide useful data to federal agencies and the well’s owner, British Petroleum, on the impact of spilled oil on the marine ecosystem.

Working through an emergency-response process known as Natural Resource Damage Assessment, Mate negotiated a contract with BP in which OSU would own the data. BP and the National Marine Fisheries Service would have access to determine damages for future settlements. By the end of May, Mate and institute staff members Craig Hayslip and Ladd Irvine were on the research ship Gordon Gunter (owned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), which had been quickly re-tasked from the North Atlantic to support five spill-related science missions.

Mate wasn’t the only OSU researcher to respond as the world watched crude spew into what the Census of Marine Life has ranked as one of the globe’s most diverse marine systems. Professor Kim Anderson in the university’s Superfund Research Program marshaled a crew to track chemical contamination along the shore. At four sites from Pensacola, Florida, to Grand Isle, Louisiana, they deployed devices that essentially sniff the air and water for an oil component known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs. And in September, a team led by Stephen Brandt, director of Oregon Sea Grant, conducted an acoustic survey of fish in an area northwest of the spill site.

Researchers are still analyzing data, and while images of oil-soaked pelicans, turtles and other animals are seared in the public mind, it will be a while before the broader biological significance of the spill is known.

Following the Whales

In late December, Mate was following six of the dozen whales that he had tagged in June near the damaged well. One of them was among 58 that he had tagged in the previous project. Data from that effort, he says, form a baseline, which can be used to compare whale behavior after the 2010 spill.

“I don’t expect to see sperm whales directly affected by oil,” Mate says, “but if oil or dispersants have dramatically affected the squid they eat, the secondary effect will likely influence the movements of the whales. They sort of vote with their flukes.”

A pioneer in satellite-based whale tracking, Mate says the whales that had initially traveled northeast from the well (in the direction of oil visible at the surface) had changed course and were in the western Gulf, some close to the Mexican coast. As his lab continues to monitor whale movements, researchers will use the data to analyze the size of the whales’ home ranges. They’ll also consider whether significant differences between 2010 and previous years suggest that whales avoided heavily oiled waters.

Pollutants on the Increase

While Mate was making his plans, Kim Anderson in OSU’s Department of Environmental and Molecular Toxicology was assembling sampling devices and personnel to track PAHs, a group of more than 100 compounds that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classifies as “highly potent carcinogens.”

Supported by OSU’s Environmental Health Sciences Center, Anderson and her team, including Ph.D. student Sarah Allan (see “After the Spill”), started deploying their equipment on May 9, before oil began washing ashore. As the oil slicks and tarballs hit beaches and wetlands through the summer, PAH concentrations rose to about 40 times over baseline levels, according to preliminary data.

“There are a range of health effects associated with PAHs,” says Anderson. “They are toxic by several different modes of action. We’re now using a technique that looks at the fraction of PAHs that are bioavailable — that have the potential to move into the food chain.”

Over the next two years, with support from a National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences grant, the lab will continue sampling in each location for more than 1,200 different compounds: PAHs, pesticides, PCBs and other industrial chemicals, many of which are known to disrupt hormone signaling.

Fish-Eye View

For Stephen Brandt, oil is only one of the threats to fish habitat in the Gulf of Mexico. At least as significant is the persistent presence of a low-oxygen region west of the Mississippi River outlet, a.k.a., the “dead zone.” As part of a multi-institution project that began in 2003, Brandt has collected data on water quality and fish behavior in order to assess the dead zone’s impact on fisheries.

A pioneer in the use of acoustics to study fish, Brandt has led five sampling expeditions to the Gulf. His September cruise, with OSU faculty research assistants Sarah Kolesar and Cynthia Sellinger, was the first after a major oil spill, but it was not the first to reflect the presence of crude. Natural oil seeps pour an estimated 41 million gallons into the Gulf every year, he points out.

During eight days of sampling, Brandt and his team saw no oil, but they did see evidence for the first time of “a very intense double-layered dead zone” with low-oxygen patches near the bottom as well as higher in the water column. The location and severity of low-oxygen zones can shift from day to day. It will take additional data analysis to identify the factors behind the 2010 pattern.

Brandt knows it will take time for the Gulf’s rich marine life to respond. In 1979, the region received a large gush of crude from Mexico’s Ixtoc 1 well, which fouled beaches and estuaries from Texas to the Yucatán Peninsula. After that event, it took three to five years for fisheries to come back, he says. Some species, he adds, may never recover.

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See the locations of Kim Anderson’s PAH sampling stations and a video of Stephen Brandt’s Nov. 8, 2010 Corvallis Science Pub presentation, Troubled Waters.

For information about supporting research and teaching through faculty endowments, contact the Oregon State University Foundation, 1-800-354-7281 or visit CampaignforOSU.org.

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.

Gray whales have roamed

2006 was a banner year for the whales and whale watching on the central Oregon coast. In kelp beds a mere quarter-mile out from Depoe Bay, 45-foot-long gray whales frolicked away the summer, feeding head-down, their tail flukes extended high above water. It was in stark contrast to the previous year, when the tell-tale spouts were rarely seen from lookouts along Oregon’s Highway 101.

OSU graduate student Carrie Newell has discovered that the difference may stem from the relative abundance of tiny shrimp-like zooplankton called mysids, a gray whale delicacy. In 2006, the mysids took advantage of the super-charged upwelling to feast on phytoplankton blooms. These half-inch, opaque crustaceans, which look like small shrimp, form clusters or “swarms” up to 20 feet thick in shallow waters.

Find a handful of gray whales in the neighborhood, and chances are that a mysid swarm is down below.

A biological oceanographer, Newell began investigating the connection between whale abundance and the mysids in 1999. The scientific literature suggests that whales in the Northwest feed on mud-dwelling amphipods, yet the kelp beds that attracted the whales were anchored in rock.

So Newell donned her scuba gear and dropped into the chilly waters of the Pacific Ocean to take a look.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “There were mysids everywhere. It seemed obvious the whales were feeding on them, but I had to be sure.”

Her solution? Take samples of whale excrement and search for remnants of mysids, a process nearly as disgusting, though not as simple, as it sounds.

“Well, you don’t want to get too close,” she says with a laugh, “and it dissipates quickly. But I did get a number of samples that proved my hypothesis, that whales were eating mysids, and lots of them. It’s probably their favorite food.”

So during the delayed upwelling season of 2005, mysid swarms were scarce. She could tell something was amiss by the behavior of some of her well-known whale friends.

“Rambo came into the area three different times in 2005 to check things out,” Newell says, “but there wasn’t any food and he cruised on out. Cutter stayed five days; Stretch hung around for a couple of days, then left. And that was about it. There just weren’t many whales that year.”

But in 2006, when the biological productivity off Oregon exploded, the gray whales returned for the mysid buffet and brought new whales with them. Most stayed for several weeks, and one named Eagle Eye spent more than 120 days in the same vicinity.

Newell is expanding her research to look at mysid densities and whether their movements are related to tidal changes. She is continuing to determine the relationship between physical factors, mysid biomass and gray whale residency.

To help pay for her studies, Newell began her own whale-watching business in Depoe Bay, Whale Research Excursions. She has spent the last several years studying Oregon’s summer resident gray whales, which she can identify individually by their unique markings.

She passes along her findings to the classes she teaches at Lane Community College, and to clients aboard her whale-watching cruises, who sometimes help her with the research.

“I love sharing what I do with others,” Newell says. “It makes people happy to see whales in their natural environment and, for some people, it is a life-changing experience. I’m translating what I’ve learned at OSU directly to the general public, and they turn around and spread that to others.”

Julie Brinck, a retired registered nurse from Florence, Oregon, said: “Entering the lagoon gave me sort of a ‘lost world’ sensation. I felt like a traveler who had gotten through the travails of an impossible journey to finally enter this eternally tranquil place. The sight of whale spouts on a still sea was magical — giant creatures doing exactly what nature intended them to do. I came away with a sense of peace.”

Jean Amundson, a retired administrative officer from Newport, Oregon, said: “The sheer numbers of whales in the lagoon amazed me. So did the many, many frolicking baby sea lions investigating the ship and the skiffs at Cedros Island.”

Amundson’s husband, a retired physicist, observed: “For humans, ‘home’ can be a moveable place. But for other species, there’s no suitcase, no moving van. It’s up to us to preserve the lagoons of Baja, those immovable homes of the great gray whales. Our planet’s life zone is unbelievably complex and interconnected. What we do to protect the environment for one species has a direct effect on all species, our fellow travelers on spaceship Earth.”

I’ve been fortunate to work with a group of cetacean scientists for five years and have seen quite a few mysteries explained, but each explanation gives instant rise to at least one new question, and usually more. That’s one of the greatest frustrations, and the greatest pleasures, of working in a scientific field.

And there’s another great pleasure as well: sharing knowledge with others. This one, I believe, is the true end goal of science. It’s not just about discovery; it’s about dissemination. Knowledge is nothing if it’s not communicated.

The Marine Mammal Program’s annual Baja Expedition is about all these things: discovery, understanding, sharing. It’s a rare opportunity for people of all backgrounds to learn, answer questions and ask new ones. Our passengers can see elephant seal pups roll over each other and teach themselves to swim, watch juvenile California sea lions make a beeline toward a boat because they’re curious about us and touch a whale because that whale chooses to be touched. As a staff member of these expeditions, I find it just as much fun to watch others make these discoveries as it was to make them myself.

One of the questions I’m often asked on this trip is, do I ever get jaded? Am I tired of it yet, seeing the same things each year? The quick answer is, no way. The longer answer takes the form of a short story.

Our time in San Ignacio Lagoon includes a trip to a particular beach that I adore. It’s located at the north entrance to the lagoon and is literally covered in places with shells and bones. Most of our passengers take great delight in beachcombing this area and quickly spread out as they wander in pursuit of that next interesting or beautiful thing. But I usually sit. Because if we can get to this beach at the right time of day, an amazing thing happens: the wind dies down, the lagoon calms and sound carries. So if I can find a quiet spot to just sit and listen, I can hear whales breathing. I hear them all over the lagoon. Some are close to me; others can be over a mile away — far enough that I see the blow a half second before I hear it.

There’s only one word to describe what it’s like to sit in the sun, on a spectacular beach in a pristine environment, and listen to whales breathe. Magic.

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.

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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.

Bruce Mate, OSU Professor of Fisheries and Wildlife, Oceanography
Hatfield Marine Science Center

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. He had, however, seen a pickled sea urchin. That’s because a gifted biology teacher named Mr. Barker, hell-bent on hooking his skeptical sophomores, would order exotic marine specimens from Carolina Biological Supply. Another of Mate’s role models was ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau.

Mate’s interest in intertidal invertebrates quickly got eclipsed, however, during his first graduate seminar when UCLA marine mammal expert George Bartholomew revealed that the migratory habits of sea lions were a mystery. Mate headed straight to the library to find out for himself. After scouring the literature, he was astonished to learn it was true. The indefatigable graduate student took this knowledge gap as a personal challenge. Armed with a pre-doctoral fellowship from the National Science Foundation, he made marine mammal history by figuring out the sea lions’ migration patterns.

After finishing his Ph.D. in biology at the University of Oregon, he secured funds from the newly formed U.S. Marine Mammal Commission to do the first range-wide survey of pinnipeds on the West Coast. Every month for a year, Mate would fly a single-engine Cessna with his left hand, while holding a camera out the window with his right. (The single-lens-reflex Canon F-1, with its telephoto lens, bulk film pack and motor drive, weighed 12 pounds.) Back in Newport, he processed the film and “counted the nose of every seal and sea lion” from British Columbia to Mazatlan, Mexico.

That was 30 years ago. He’s been tracking the movements of pinnipeds and cetaceans (with Mary Lou at his side) ever since joining the OSU faculty in 1973. Today, he holds the directorship and endowed chair of the Marine Mammal Program. Here are a few highlights of a career that has earned him international acclaim:

General Research Interests

Marine mammals:

• Critical habitat identification for endangered whales, population assessment, behavior (mating, feeding), seasonal migration
• Marine mammal competition with fisheries and aquaculture
• Development of high-tech research tools including satellite-monitored radio tags

Selected Scientific Committees and Professional Services

• Scientific adviser to U.S. Marine Mammal Commission (10 years, most recently 1995-2000)
• International Whaling Commission, (invited expert five years, most recently 2006) Union for the Conservation of Nature, Species Survival Commission
• Member of International Scientific Advisory Committee to Mexican Minister for the Environment on Industrial Development Proposals for Gray Whale winter reproductive habitat (1996-2000)
• Society for Marine Mammalogy, founding Secretary (1982-1988) and founding Treasurer (1982-1992)

Recent Research

Identification of migratory routes and habitats of large whales:

• Right whales in the North Atlantic(2000) and South Atlantic (2001)
• Sperm whales in the Gulf of Mexico (2001-present)
• Blue whales off southern California (1998-01, 2004-5), Mexico (2001-2), and Chile (2004)
• Humpback whales off Hawaii (1995-2000), Southeast Alaska (1997), Gabon, Africa (2002), Mexico (2003) and California (2004-5)
• Fin whales in the Sea of Cortez (2001), Mediterranean Sea (2003, 2005) and California (2004)
• Gray whales off Mexico, tracked to Russian high Arctic (2005)

Awards

• Marine Mammal Investigator of the Year, Office of Naval Research, 2001
• Marine Conservationist of the Year, Long Beach Aquarium, 2000