Oregon biologist plays tag with the world's whales
By EDWARD STRATTON
The Daily Astorian | Posted: Friday, February 3, 2012 11:16 am
Bruce Mate flashed a photo of his daughter holding his granddaughter on the projector screen in front of the crowd gathered for the Columbia Forum Thursday night.
The Oregon State University researcher talked about his hopes for her future, that she should expect to live a decent and fulfilling life. For Mate, that idea is no different for one of nature's largest mammal groups, traveling between homes a world apart to feed and to breed.
"When I first got into biology, my sense was I wanted things to be sustainable," said Mate, now pointing to a picture of an elder female blue whale on the projector screen. "That whale probably expects the same environment, the same feeding grounds.
"We conserve what we love, and we love what we understand."
And Mate, who has studied whales since 1979, understands them quite well. The director of the Marine Mammal Institute and Program, based in Newport's Hatfield Marine Science Center, stopped by Astoria to talk about his growing and cutting-edge understanding of whales.
Tagging of whales
Mate's most well-known endeavor is the tagging of more than 650 whales using laser pointer-sized satellite radio transmitters attached to their backs.
He started by tagging sea lions and seals, his earlier area of research, until colleagues told him they wanted to have the same data on whales. Thus started his foray into a new understanding of the largest of marine mammals.
His tags, which he shoots into whales off a bridge on a small boat, transmit the whales' location - usually multiple whales traveling in groups - to the Argos satellite system, which collects, processes and disseminates environmental data from fixed and mobile platforms worldwide. The tags track the whales' migratory pattern all the way down to their individual dives to herd food.
"We can go back and visually construct the worm" of their path, he said. By worm, he means the path whales take around certain fishing grounds searching for food. When the pickings get slim, they move to other grounds, and the tags keep spitting out data.
"There aren't a lot of `private moments' for this whale," said Mate. "We're really on it."
About a quarter of those tagged have been blue whales, the biggest and most endangered of the large marine mammals.
"What we do is identify critical habitat and the route a whale takes from one place to another," said Mate.
This data collection can help make conservation efforts more efficient. One of his biggest accomplishments to date was in Canada's Bay of Fundy, where he tracked the migratory patterns of the North Atlantic Right Whale and how it collided with shipping traffic, a common death sentence for whales. With data in hand, Mate helped convince shippers to voluntarily alter their paths by as little as four miles, reducing the number of collisions by 80 percent.
"We have to consciously make space for the other creatures we share the planet with," he said.
In another key discovery, he found a calving grounds for blue whales - the first time a biologist has done so - 500 miles off the coast of Costa Rica, after tracking them with his GPS tagging technology.
Mate's tagging also dissects the whales feeding and surfacing patterns at a more micro level.
Effects of Deepwater
Horizon
When the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in April 2010, resulting in three months of unabated flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, Mate and fellow researchers started tagging whales and testing the effects of dispersals used to break up oil slicks and keep them from clogging the coastline.
"Dispersals breaks up the oil into small droplets," he said. Mate added that whales are more resilient to oil than the food they eat, including squid that only live a year or two and can be easily affected by changing water.
"If there's an effect, it's probably on the lower part of the food chain. One question is: If you whack the squids, what's going to happen with sperm whales?"
Mate is still gathering data to see if whales avoid oil-slicked areas, but added that it's too early to tell anything. The work is legally sensitive, and he even receives part of his financial backing for research from British Petroleum and Exxon.
He said it's inspiring for companies that face exposure from his research to help fund it.
"We are almost solely supported by grants and contracts brought into the state of Oregon," he said about the Marine Mammal Institute. "Out of 33 people, we have only four-tenths of a person funded" by OSU.
Tracking whales
in Russia
For the last two years, Mate has travelled to the eastern coast of Russia, around Sakhalin Island and the Kamchatka Peninsula, trying to either confirm a small, local population of gray whales or further track far flung groups moving across the pacific to feed.
Gray whales generally aren't tagged much because their global populations are one of the healthiest among large marine mammals. Where they're not healthy, or at least not thought to be, is in the western Pacific.
One gray whale Mate tracked, 9-year-old female "Varvara," started near Sakhalin, crossed the Bering Sea, moved down the side of Alaska and worked its way along the North American coastline to the tip of the Baja Peninsula. Another, "Flex," started near Sakhalin and ended up near Depoe Bay.
Navy affects whales
Ed Johnson broached the question of how much of an impact the U.S. Navy's sonar tests, a recently growing news concern, would have on whale populations.
"I would say we don't know much about what they're going to do," Mate said, adding that scientists haven't been given enough information by a military branch concerned with the privacy and security of its operations.
Shelby Lofton of Warrenton wondered how to tell a whale's age. Mate explained that the makeup of proteins in the lenses of their eyes provides insight into their age. Gray whales average about 40 years, while a bowhead whale can reach 200 years.
Avarie Fitzgerald of Knappa wondered how much they could reproduce in that time frame. Mate said that if the environmental conditions stay proper, a whale can produce offspring once every other year. "If things go badly, they can't reproduce."
He added, in an answer to Brenda Penner's question, that a gray whale, for example, can be pregnant for a year and lactate for about six months, feeding its calf 4 to 10 gallons of whip cream- and butter-thick milk per day.
Next up, a world audience
Mate gathers hard data on whales, at the same time transparent and open for use by conservationists, fisher, shippers and anyone else who needs it. His main point is helping people understand where whales move, eat and breed.
"I want them to take away the concept of critical habitat, and apply it to everything they see in wildlife," he said.
"Scientists are some of the only people that can help us understand that. I want people to support science."
Next Mate heads to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, based in Geneva, Switzerland, which publishes the Red List of threatened species, to talk about his work tagging whales.
Of the various main species of whales he studies - blue, gray, right, humpback, bowhead and sperm - blue whales are the most in danger, at about 8 percent of their population prior to commercial whaling. They've been on the list as "endangered" since 1960.
"Gray whales are probably as abundant now as they ever were prior to whaling," said Mate.
Sperm whales are also up to between 60 and 70 percent of their earlier levels. Humpbacks aren't recovered, but are coming back at about 6 percent a year.
For more information on Mate's work, visit www.marinemammalprogram.org
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