

In New Times' special project "Shades of Gray," reporters from several of our papers have traveled from Siberia to Mexico to tell the complex tale of a creature whose annual migration -- at 12,000 miles round trip -- is the longest by any mammal. The trek joins the competing interests of Indians, scientists, environmentalists and local residents. In this issue, Patti Epler explores the science, the money and the politics behind gray whale research. With hundreds of whales mysteriously washing up dead and a plunging calf count coupled with reports of chemical contamination, scientific research has taken on a new urgency.


The position was certainly not a new one for Gulland, a staff veterinarian at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito. In 1999 and 2000, hundreds of gray whales washed up on Pacific Coast beaches from Bahia de Banderas in Mexico to the mouth of the Yukon River in Alaska. Vets from the Sausalito center alone examined more than two dozen of the emaciated creatures, some still floating in nearshore waters, but many more decomposing on mudflats, beaches and rocky shorelines.







The Eastern Pacific gray whale, on the other hand, had been an environmental success story. Once hunted nearly to extinction, an international ban on commercial hunting sparked a turnaround that led to its removal from the U.S. Endangered Species list. Having rebounded to historic levels -- roughly 26,000 grays by most estimates -- the whales' mortality rate and plunging calf count have scientists groping for answers.

What's going wrong?



But not one of these theories has been investigated.  








But the mystery of the strandings should not be left behind so quickly. Whatever the explanation for the low stranding rate this year, birthrates for the grays continue to drop. So the problem is not merely a piece of theoretical jerky to be chewed upon.

Significant national and international policy decisions are looming that could affect the gray whale population. In six months, the International Whaling Commission will meet again, this time in Japan, to decide how many Eastern Pacific gray whales can be harvested by aboriginal hunters in Washington state and Russia without harming the overall whale population.

The federal Minerals Management Service, which oversees offshore oil and gas projects, will soon be offering up new oil and gas leases in the Alaska region. Eight of the areas up for grabs include main migration routes and primary feeding grounds for gray whales.

And in Canada, the oil industry is pushing to lift the moratorium that has been preventing oil and gas development off the Canadian west coast -- a main migratory path for the grays.

Some scientists and environmentalists worry that this year's lack of strandings is the random event, that the grays are in the eye of some bigger ecological storm that begins in the far northern feeding grounds of the Bering Sea.

Ten years ago, a University of Alaska-Fairbanks researcher counted amphipods in the Bering Sea and predicted that in about the year 2000 gray whales would be in some trouble. He believed the fast-growing whale population was wiping out the amphipods, which take many years to reproduce.

Now, that same scientist, Ray Highsmith, has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to return to the Bering Sea. Next summer's feeding grounds study should -- finally -- answer the fundamental question of whether the gray whales have reached carrying capacity or if there is some larger environmental problem at work.

The questions are vital. If the grays' food supply is threatened, oil drilling in gray whale territory or continued hunting on the open seas could have serious long-term consequences.

Today, there is little hard data upon which to make those decisions.

Right now, daylight in the Bering Sea is down to less than eight hours a day and fading at a fairly rapid meteorological clip. Scientists believe it is this shortening of days that signals the gray whales it's time to head south for warmer habitat, the lagoons of Baja California, 6,000 miles away.  

By January, the bulk of the migration will be passing along the northern California coast, in particular a point called Granite Canyon where trained observers with the National Marine Fisheries Service will count them as they go by.

Scientists have been standing on cliffs counting the whales for more than 100 years. In 1885, the biologist C.H. Townsend watched the whales from the hills at San Simeon, where Hearst Castle now stands, and counted 160 of the leviathans. He had no way of estimating the size of the entire population beyond what he could see.

But Townsend's quasi-official count came a mere three decades after the notorious whaling captain Charles Melville Scammon decimated the gray whale population. Scammon, who is also credited with providing much of the early information on gray whale migration and behavior, discovered the calving lagoons of Baja -- then nearly wiped out the mammals in his zest for whale oil.

Researchers have gotten better since the 19th-century observations of Townsend at extrapolating from a head count to a population size. But this relatively simplistic whale census still remains the basic tool for determining the health of the species.

For more than 30 years, the Granite Canyon station has been the official site for what NMFS calls "abundance estimates." Individual observers watch the whales through binoculars mounted on a stand and focused on a particular spot in the ocean. Same spot, day after day, year after year. Scientific consistency also calls for the observers to record their numbers by hand on a form that also has remained relatively unchanged for years.

"It's a primitive mechanism," concedes Dave Rugh, an NMFS biologist who oversees the counts, "but it's the same one that was used in the '60s."

That way, changes in technology do not skew the methodology or, hopefully, the results. In recent years, NMFS has added aerial surveys and underwater sensors to the mix as a way to confirm what the onshore watchers are seeing.

The count usually begins in mid-December. By the time it ends in mid- to late February, observers will have spotted more than 3,000 individual whales. Those numbers are run through a computer model that factors in density and other variables, then gives the estimated size of the population.




Earlier this year, volunteers who staff a whale-watching station in Southern California reported that the 2001 migration has been a healthy one.

"I saw some of the biggest, fattest whales I'd seen in quite a while this year," says Alisa Schulman-Janiger, a high school marine biology teacher from San Pedro, California, who oversees the volunteer count as head of the Los Angeles chapter of the American Cetacean Society.


The whales head north in two pulses, according to Schulman-Janiger. The first includes animals without calves and, about six weeks later, the watchers begin to document mothers with calves.


Instead, Schulman-Janiger's final report calls the spring 2001 migration an "exotic season." Volunteers documented a large number of marine mammal species, including humpback, blue, minke and killer whales, two very rare sei whales, sea lions, seals, sea otters and numerous species of dolphins. One "megapod" contained more than 10,000 dolphins, she reported.

Schulman-Janiger doesn't think there will be a lot of strandings during the coming migration. She expects to see more calves and an overall healthy look to the whales that would suggest they're feeding well and perhaps expending their feeding ranges to other areas. "I would predict the whales will continue to look fat and sassy," she says.  

"Next year is going to be extremely telling."











That's made for a much shorter feeding time for gray whales. Pregnant whales "have to get fat in a short period of time," Perryman says. "Then they have to support the fetus, give birth and then lactate and feed a calf. It's really a very big deal."

He thinks the whales haven't been able to eat enough to sustain that incredible biological process. So when a pregnant whale realizes she's not getting fat, "she buys out of the pregnancy early on rather than when she has a big investment in it," he says, in essence miscarrying the fetus.

One reason Perryman is convinced the calf problem is centered on the female simply not carrying the fetus to term is because scientists have not seen a large number of dead calves in the lagoons or along the beaches, as they would if the babies were being born and then died for some other reason.

In recent years, Perryman has focused his research on female gray whales, believing that the condition of the females may tip scientists to future problems with the entire population.

So on the last couple of days in December and for a few days in January, Perryman will load high-tech camera gear on a twin-engine plane -- both of which he often borrows from pals in the military -- and fly over southbound gray whales as they pass the coast of northern California, near San Simeon. At an altitude of about 600 feet, the "photogrammetry" technique is capable of capturing snapshots of migrating whales as if they were lying still.

Length, width and shape of the whales is telling, and Perryman makes careful measurements from his photos. "As gray whales lose weight, the relationship between their length and width changes," he says. "They're shaped differently if they're pregnant, and near-term females are much wider."

Perryman says he has seen a change in the condition of the whales in the last three years -- a change for the worse because the whales are substantially skinnier. He is at work on a new scientific paper that moves beyond the increasing distinctions between fat and skinny whales, and looks at how skinny whales may be linked to calf production and ice conditions from 1997 to 2002. He concedes his ice-cover theory is just that -- a theory -- and hopes that someday various pieces of the puzzle will finally be thoroughly studied and the puzzle solved.  

Perryman's work is a good example of the larger quandary facing scientists. The existing data suggests a serious problem, but the field research that would nail down the answer is still beyond their financial grasp.

"There is a very complex answer," he says. "I think we'll have enough information next year [before the IWC meeting] to have a good idea what's going on in the population. As far as having the entire picture wrapped up by next April, it's not going to happen."

Wayne Perryman's photogrammetry work has become one of the main components of NMFS' gray whale monitoring program. But the government pays nothing for the studies and Perryman has had to beg and borrow gear and aircraft in recent years to carry out the important research.

He's a personable guy, and the fact that he's a former naval officer helps when he needs to borrow a plane and the special camera gear from associates in the military.

"It's a real struggle," Perryman says. "I haven't been getting any money so I've been stealing a bit from other people."

Lack of cash for work considered as significant as Perryman's demonstrates a fundamental truth of how science gets done in the 21st century. There's simply no money for a species that is not on the edge of extinction or showing signs of slipping that way.

"The most critically endangered species where we could mitigate the cause of the decline is our highest priority," says Doug DeMaster, head of NMFS' National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle who oversees much of the funding.




















Instead, money from the endowment went to humpback, right and blue whales this year, populations that are endangered and only small fractions of what they used to be.

The gray whale studies "would be extremely interesting and I would love to be doing it," Mate says. "But could I do it at the sacrifice of those other projects? The answer is no."

While the hundreds of dead whales stranded along the migration route and the continued low calf count are alarming, the grays are also a victim of their own biological success. Keepers of the purse strings believe that with a population of some 26,000, the grays do not merit further expenditures in a scientific world that treats problems on a triage basis. Researchers determined to get to the root of the dilemma are largely on their own.

NMFS has, for example, been trying to pull together a group of like-minded researchers up and down the West Coast into a sort of emergency stranding network that would respond to beached whales in a more systematic and scientifically consistent fashion.

Teri Rowles, who coordinates marine mammal response and strandings for NMFS out of Silver Spring, Maryland, says since 1999 the agency has collected tissue samples from about 110 dead or dying gray whales -- but that's out of more than 600 that have stranded. And fewer than 10 full necropsies have been done, she says.

Three or four years ago, the agency simply collected numbers -- how many whales died in a given year. When more and more whales started dying, federal scientists knew they needed more and better information.

But it was slow going. Initially, the researchers who ventured out to look at dead whales weren't even distinguishing between whales that died of obvious trauma -- a ship strike -- and those for which no cause of death was readily apparent.

The agency began holding workshops that included Mexican and U.S. scientists, stepping up what Rowles calls "more focused training" as more whales continued to die in 2000.

One problem, notes Rowles, is that many of the people who respond to strandings are simply interested citizens who have agreed to jot down some very basic information about dead whales -- length, general body condition and whether there is any obvious trauma, for instance. Professional researchers, veterinarians and scientists often are not available in isolated or rural areas.  

The workshops have been aimed at the professionals who can do more sophisticated biological and chemical testing. At a minimum, the standard protocol calls for samples of skin, blubber, milk and liver specimens to be tested for chemical contaminants. NMFS also wants samples of blood, urine, feces and stomach contents, as well as parts of the liver, kidney, lungs and gonads so the agency can test for diseases and toxins.

That effort is being applauded by scientists in the field, who have been frustrated with the lack of data that has hurt the scientific community's ability to figure out if there is a serious problem looming for the gray whales.

For instance, Russian scientists have recently found the industrial solvent phenol in gray whales harvested in the Chukotka area. They have shared their concerns with colleagues in the U.S. Yet NMFS officials have not tested gray whale carcasses along the West Coast for phenol. Rowles says the solvent rapidly metabolizes so it might only show up in whales close to the area of exposure, in this case off the Russian coast.

Is phenol, which is known to interfere with the reproductive cycle, part of the problem with the low calf count? No one knows, in part because no one has tested the carcasses of the stranded whales for industrial solvents.

"I'm not condemning [NMFS], I'm just disappointed that they couldn't respond more quickly," says Todd O'Hara, a biologist with the North Slope Borough in Barrow, Alaska. "Now we feel like we're ready if this happens again."

One of the country's leading specialists in chemical contaminants, O'Hara stands in the hallway outside the International Whaling Commission meeting in London in July, his black jeans and soft plaid shirt an oddity in a crowd where not only the international commission members and their staffs but the numerous environmental activists dress smartly in business suits.

O'Hara has been working with aboriginal whalers for years and, most recently, has been helping Siberian whalers examine problems with "stinky" whales -- grays that smell of a medicinal or chemical smell that some worry might be poisoned with industrial solvents.

Barrow whalers, who hunt primarily bowheads, and the Siberians sit together at the IWC, listening somberly, some through translator headphones. Unlike other more conventional spectators, they don't chitchat among themselves or wander in and out of the room as the proceedings drag on over five days. Instead, they seem intent on this discussion of every conceivable aspect of whaling, from computerized management and population modeling to whale-killing methods to whale-watching projects and marine sanctuaries.

For most of the countries gathered at the long tables in this brightly lighted room, the debate over whaling is largely political. But for these residents of the Far North, particularly the Siberians from Chukotka, what the IWC does could very well mean life, provided by the sustenance of whales, or death -- through starvation.

















"I think with the government what happens is they respond to crisis," he says. "They don't get much money unless there's a crisis and the politicians lean on them and they produce a product."

So Le Boeuf, Bruce Mate from Oregon State University and several noted Mexican whale scientists decided to sidestep government red tape and collaborate on a paper. They had no intention of actually studying the feeding grounds or even applying for any grants.

"I think what you hope is that your paper presents an idea which stimulates further research," Le Boeuf says. "You don't necessarily have to do it yourself. You're moving things forward. I would hope that it would serve as a boot in the butt to the government."

In fact, their paper has gotten wide circulation in the small world of whale research. The 12-page paper has been the catalyst for a growing debate on whether there are just too many gray whales for the environment to support.  

The scientists relied on existing data of various kinds surrounding the 1999 strandings: the locations of the strandings, how often they occurred, the sex and age of the dead whales, their physical condition, reports of whales feeding in new spots, especially along the migration route.

They found that most of the dead whales were female adults, not the usual calves and yearlings. Tests of dead whale tissue samples, although limited, showed thin blubber and low levels of oil and fat, which suggested low energy reserves.

"If gray whales have become food-limited, a high stranding rate and lowered reproduction would be expected to continue until an equilibrium is reached," the scientists predicted.

Le Boeuf and his colleagues' "starvation hypothesis" held that whales were going hungry for two related reasons. One, changes in the northern ecosystem were reducing the whales' principal prey, the amphipods. Moreover, they theorized, there are simply too many whales competing for the same meal.

This "carrying capacity hypothesis" has floated to the top of scientific debate over the future of the gray whales. Some researchers think the population has grown so large that the ocean environment simply cannot sustain 26,000 or more grays. The large number of strandings was simply nature's way of cutting the herd down to a sustainable size, they believe.

Other scientists don't buy the carrying capacity theory. They think the strandings were a random event, a spike -- albeit a sharp one -- on the whales' biological timeline that shows an upturn in strandings every seven or eight years. The more likely culprit for the 1999 and 2000 strandings, they say, was a short-term warm water event, an El Niño effect that reduced the amphipods for a couple of years.

But some scientists like Le Boeuf and Mate, as well as many environmentalists, worry that the low birthrate on top of the high number of strandings means something more long-term is afoot.

"If the whales have come on hard times and their food supply is threatened, the first thing you would have is some starving in the first couple years," explains Le Boeuf. "So maybe that was kind of like the first cut and the weak ones have succumbed. So that perhaps explains why we have not had the same strandings rate."

Or perhaps not.

In July, two other leading gray whale scientists, Robert Brownell and David Weller, both on the staff of NMFS' Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, California, submitted a paper to the IWC that argued against the carrying capacity theory. Both men have worked extensively with the Western Pacific gray whale population that is found mainly off Sakhalin Island in the Okhotsk Sea near Russia. That population has been deemed "critically endangered" and is down to fewer than 100 whales.

Brownell and Weller contend that by no stretch of the imagination could the Western gray whales be overgrazing their feeding grounds; there are simply too few of them. Yet they are dropping in numbers, too, almost to the point of extinction.

Instead, "more global or oceanwide changes may be influencing the availability of, or access to, primary prey for numerous large whale populations," Brownell and Weller say.

Again, Brownell and Weller don't have any recent data on the actual food supply. That's the work that won't be done until the coming year, perhaps by both NMFS and the National Science Foundation.

But the two scientists got together with 10 other whale experts at a meeting of the Society of Marine Mammalogy in Hawaii in December 1999. The group scrutinized photographs of skinny whales from both the Eastern and Western populations. Many of the features were the same: protruding shoulder blades, depressions behind the head and a pronounced ridge or visible "bulge" along the lateral flank.

The scientists concluded that the "starvation hypothesis" proposed by Le Boeuf earlier in the year was indeed plausible. "However, we do not think that starvation is necessarily related to exceeding carrying capacity."

Evidence from throughout the world points to something much bigger at work, they say. Skinny blue whales have been observed in the Gulf of California and skinny right whales have been spotted in the North Atlantic. Changing global weather patterns may be affecting sea ice, which means the feeding grounds are not as accessible to the whales. Plankton production may be off in the North Atlantic because of long-term weather changes.


















A widespread environmental change would make sense, given that scientists have been seeing a continuing crash in the Bering Sea's ecosystem for the past several decades. From the smallest organisms to the largest mammals to the physical environment of the region, scientists have noticed changes, some profound. Fisheries have declined, there are fewer and fewer sea birds and other shore creatures, even the permanent ice pack is thinner than it was 30 years ago.

The loss of the whales' primary food supply would have tremendous implications for management of the species. IWC officials, already under attack by some major environmental groups for allowing any killing of grays even for aboriginal purposes, would be hard-pressed to defend the harvest. Oil companies would face a much tougher permitting process if the gray whale population is again considered threatened.

"I think one has to be cautious," says Highsmith. "There's a signal occurring, but whether it's a blip or a trend, no one knows. We need to get out and find out."

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