Bad News from BC #1 - Missing Gray Whales

The ecology of my home province is sure taking a beating, and being the upbeat guy I am, I thought I would share it with you.

Missing Gray Whales

My home town of Ucluelet has a Pacific Gray Whale festival every year because the whales travel close to the shores as they migrate from Baja to Alaska. If you stand out by the lighthouse during the height of the migration in early spring, you can see hundreds of whales. The whales numbers had dropped due to hunting, but had rebounded back to the pre-whaling population of just over 20 thousand.

Turns out the pre-whaling Gray Whale population was actually near 100 thousand! Researchers from Stanford University and the University of Washington have found this number by comparing the genetic variability between whales.

From Science Daily:

Gray whales were hunted extensively in the late 19th century. "The lagoons of Baja California were the primary killing fields for gray whales," recounted lead author S. Elizabeth Alter, a Stanford researcher. "But we don't know exactly how many there were before whaling took its toll." The new research measures the amount of genetic variation in current gray whales across ten different sections of their genome, and back calculates the long-term population size based on new measurement of the mutation rate of these gene segments.

What does this mean? The population seems to have slowed down in population growth, meaning the ocean can't sustain that near 100 thousand strong ancestor population. Meaning the ecology of the Pacific is not as robust as it once was, and isn't getting better.

And to make it worse, there is a growing number of Gray whales found starving.

The research also raises questions about how many whales the current oceans can now support-- and whether the future of whales, even if whaling is limited, may be reduced by new problems in the guise of oceanic overfishing and global climate change. "Despite our best efforts," Palumbi said, "these genetic results suggest gray whales have not fully recovered from whaling. They might be telling us that whales now face a new threat - from changes to the oceans that are limiting their recovery."

"Decades ago, whales were the first creatures to tell us that we were overfishing the oceans," Palumbi concluded. "Maybe now they trying to tell us the oceans are in deeper trouble."

Hopefully, this ancestor whale species that was hunted by Megalodons and has swum in the oceans for the last 30 million years can make it through the wrecking times to come.