Story and photos by Christopher Boffoli
Reporting for West Seattle Blog

We’re riding on the back of a 200-ton blue whale, skimming the surface of the Pacific Ocean somewhere off the coast of California. There is a faint collective gasp as the whale dives below the surface of the water and everyone reflexively holds their breath.

Facing forward from around the dorsal area, we can see the mottled skin of the whale as it undulates below us, gaining speed as its negative buoyancy takes over below 20 feet, pulling the huge mammal into deep, cold water. It is suddenly too dark to see, but gradually it grows lighter as the whale swims straight up into a cloud of krill. The crowd emits a delighted “ahhh” as the whale opens its mouth incredibly wide, seeming to disarticulate its jaw to engulf a huge amount of prey before coming to a stop near the surface to force out the water and strain the krill with its baleen. Everyone in the room is rapt.

“We’ve got hours of this footage,” said John Calambokidis, chuckling at the reaction of the dazzled audience. Few in the room seem as though they’d mind if he showed every minute of it.

The stunning clip — video footage from a remote camera mounted to the back of a whale — was just one of the fascinating bits of research shared last night with a packed house at the Duwamish Longhouse by Calambokidis, a research biologist with the Cascadia Research Collective.

Hosted by West Seattleite Donna Sandstrom of The Whale Trail, with opening remarks by Kathy Fletcher of People for Puget Sound, the lecture by Calambokidis touched on his ongoing research of blue, humpback and gray whales in Puget Sound and in the broader waters of the Pacific Coast.

In her brief welcoming remarks, Sandstrom reiterated the goal of The Whale Trail — to someday see orcas come off the endangered list, and for the Sound to be restored. She said she also thought that seeing orcas in the wild is a life-changing experience that provides an understanding that something else lives here that has been here a lot longer than we have.

Fletcher complimented those sentiments, reiterating how marine animals need a healthy marine environment in which to thrive. But she said that the current state of Puget Sound does not provide that environment. “We have our work cut out for us,” she said, “with the physical destruction of habitats, legacy contamination of the Duwamish estuary, and all of the fresh water habitats for the chinook salmon that orcas depend on.” Fletcher said that the current disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has implications for Puget Sound as, even though we don’t have oil drilling, we do routinely have tankers in the Sound with enough oil to cause a significant disaster. “We need to address the major shortcomings of our [disaster] plans here,” she added before introducing the evening’s keynote speaker.

John Calambokidis co-founded Olympia-based non-profit Cascadia Research in 1979. Since then he has participated in more than 100 studies, principally on large whales and the impact of humans on marine mammals. He has authored 2 books and more than 150 journal articles and technical reports and his work has been covered by the Discovery Channel and National Geographic television. Some of his footage was included in this year’s feature documentary “Oceans.”

Closer to home, Calambokidis led the internationally publiclized necropsy on the gray whale that stranded and died on the beach at the Arroyos back in April (as extensively covered here, starting with this report). But to hear him tell it, he still knows little about whales.

“Considering the amount of things you see on TV, and huge public interest, there is comparatively little research that has been done on whales,” said Calambokidis, “There is just so much we don’t know.” Calambokidis explained that there was actually a fair bit of research done decades ago, when commercial whaling was still going on, as there was a greater economic interest in the information. But only relatively recently have advanced techniques and modern science been applied to studies aimed at addressing basic questions about whale populations, migration patterns and the effects of human activities marine habitats.

Calambokidis’ research has taken him far from the Washington coast, as he has studied blue whales, the largest mammal on earth, off the coast of California and as far south as their feeding grounds known as the “Costa Rica Zone” west of Central America. He said that blue whales were once desirable to commercial whaling operations because their size guaranteed the greatest return for the effort in capturing and killing them. Prior to Pacific whaling operations, there were an estimated 300,000 blue whales worldwide. But whaling operations from 1924-1965 were devastating for them. Calambokidis said that scientists were surprised to find blues feeding off the coast of California in recent decades and their total population is now estimated to be around 10,000.

Calambokidis showed footage of suction tags being attached to the backs of blue whales. Scientists have used these tags to track the behavior and travel patterns of whales. They are designed to detach from the whale’s back after a few days at which point they are collected and their data analyzed. Some of the tags also provide fascinating video footage like the clip he showed of a whale feeding. Through an analysis of the sound recorded by the tags, researchers developed a method for recording the speed of the whales as they swim through the water.

Even more intriguing was the data recorded of the whale’s depth over time, indicating that the animals enter a non-feeding resting stage at night that is at or near the surface. This is most important as the greatest threat to blue whales is no longer from harpoons but from ship strikes. Calambokidis explained that, due to their negative natural buoyancy, most whales that are struck and killed by ships will sink to the bottom of the ocean and are never found. “When four blue whales washed up on California beaches in the fall of 2007, killed by ship strikes, we knew there must be many more dying,” he said.

Some of his most recent research has studied the behavior of blue whales around large ships. The results seem to indicate that whales are not detecting and reacting to the ships, meaning that spotting whales from ships and/or employing a system of noisemakers would be ineffective. The outcome of the research may make it necessary to alter shipping lanes in order to minimize collisions.

Between 2004 and 2007, Calambokidis participated in a broad study of humpback whales in the Northern Pacific. Using photo identification and genetic sampling techniques, the study sought to offer a more complete picture of how humpbacks were distributed and where they were moving. The study had some fascinating conclusions: that whales of various genetic groups had migration patterns that were much more complicated than researchers initially suspected. They found that certain families of these animals remained loyal to certain geographic areas and that their offspring would return to the same areas from generation to generation.

(April 15, Arroyo Beach)
Calambokidis said that the results of this study may be relevant to the migration patterns of gray whales, like the one that washed up in West Seattle last April (above).

According to Calambokidis, gray whales have the longest migrations of any mammals, from their breeding grounds off the coast of Baja, Mexico, to their summer feeding areas in the Bering Sea. He began studying gray whales in Puget Sound in 1984. Through photo identification, researchers were able to determine that many of the gray whales sighted around Puget Sound were local whales that were here year-round and not part of the populations migrating between Alaska and Mexico. Calambokidis said that researchers from the University of Washington found some areas of Puget Sound to have densities of ghost shrimp (a favorite food of the baleen-equipped gray whales) that are higher than that found in the Bering Sea. “So the local gray whales have discovered great feeding resources in northern Puget Sound and are taking advantage of it,” he said.

(April 14, Arroyo Beach)
Most of the whales that die and wash up, which Calambokidis calls “strandeds,” typically die at sea and wash up on the beach, like the April Arroyos whale. And while the number of gray whales that have stranded this year is statistically unremarkable, he said that more than usual have washed up within Puget Sound. Calambokidis showed charts which detailed estimated gray whale populations over the past few decades. The data demonstrated some very dramatic spikes in deaths every ten years or so. “There was a major mortality event around 1999-2000 in which about 6,000 gray whales disappeared,” said Calambokidis. He said that gray whales go through very dramatic seasonal feeding patterns, bingeing throughout the summer in Alaskan waters and fasting for the rest of the year. The best consensus for the spikes in whale deaths, he said, were the coincidence of a huge rebound in the gray whale population and not enough prey.

“None of the whales affected by the large mortality events are from the local population of gray whales in Puget Sound”, said Calambokidis, “Ours are doing very well.” Though gray whales are not as at risk of ship strikes, he said that they do sometimes get tangled up in nets and crab gear. Most necropsies (examinations of whales after death) indicate scars from orca attacks which usually occur when the gray whales are caves.

Calambokidis said that, as gray whales often feed in shallow coastal waters, it is not uncommon to find non-food items in the stomach. A gray whale which stranded on Fidalgo Island this spring had a large amount of wood in its stomach. However, he said the whale at the Arroyos had the largest amount of trash ever recorded in a whale in Puget Sound.

Though the shocking amount of plastic in the local whale was widely reported, a breakdown of the stomach contents provided last night suggested that only about one to two percent of the debris were manmade. Calambokidis said that, of the 50 total gallons of undigested material found in the whale’s stomach, most of it was plant matter. “There were 3.2 pounds of garbage: plastic bags, a pair of sweatpants, fishing line, a golf ball, duct tape and a juice pouch,” he said. “There were 15 ounces of the debris that was actually plastic bags.”

Some test results from the necropsy can take six months or more and the definitive cause of the whale’s death has yet to be determined, he said. Though the human debris was probably not the cause, Calambokidis said the source of the contaminants was probably the area of water just off West Seattle. So he said it provides an important lesson in what we’re putting in the bottom of the Sound. “This reflects the human legacy of not only the contaminants we can see, but also the huge amount of chemicals and compounds that cannot be seen,” he said.

Calambokidis explained that the US Navy funds a majority of the research he and his peers are undertaking these days, much to the envy of most others nations who have a fraction of the funding. But as he fielded questions from the audience at the end of the evening, he reiterated that there is much that scientists still do not know. “We don’t know how the whales locate the krill. Toothed whales don’t even use echolocation to find prey. We don’t even know how they avoid hitting the bottom in the dark,” he said. “They clearly have a way of sensing things that we do not understand.”

There is perhaps an even greater mystery in some unusual species that have been showing up in Puget Sound this year. Calambokidis showed slides of a Bryde’s whale that stranded in Puget Sound this spring. It is a tropical species generally not seen any farther north than Southern California. More recently, there have been scattered reports of what are probably bottlenose dolphins (also a warm-water species) swimming around the south Sound. Whether this is a result of global climate change, Calambokidis could not say.

Last night’s discussion offered some hope and even more reason for concern. But it was clear that, even for an expert who has dedicated more than 30 years to research on the topic, our oceans and their enigmatic species conjure more questions than answers.