Tag: ocean

The End of the Line

  • The documentary, The End Of The Line, takes a look at the status of the world's oceans (Photo courtesy of End Of The Line)

Fish is a big part of our diet. We eat everything from fish sticks and fast food fish sandwiches to sushi and swordfish steaks. But Lester Graham reports a new documentary makes the case we’re overfishing the oceans:

Transcript

Fish is a big part of our diet. We eat everything from fish sticks and fast food fish sandwiches to sushi and swordfish steaks. But Lester Graham reports a new documentary makes the case we’re overfishing the oceans:

This new film is called The End of the Line.

“Everybody recognizes that there’s major problems with the world’s fisheries. And at one level it’s a question of ‘how bad is it?’”

That’s Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington, one of the scientists in the documentary.

The film is a compelling argument that huge fishing trawlers are pushing the fish stocks to the edge.

The first sign of a problem was the cod fishery off the coast of Newfoundland. It collapsed in the 1970s.

But it seemed, despite problems around the world, the total catch around the globe was going up every year. That is, until researchers realized just a few years ago, Communist officials in China were reporting inflated fish numbers to impress their superiors. The world catch was actually getting smaller.

Scientists were stunned, and worried.

“For the first time in human history, the future of the food the world gets from the sea was in doubt.”

“Send a shiver down my spine because that was the one thing a lot of people were holding on to: well, things may be bad, but at least we’re catching lots and we’re catching more every year, so, it can’t be that bad.”

Boris Worm at Dalhousie University is one of the researchers who confirmed the world catch is getting smaller.

He and others have been studying the fact that boats are catching fewer fish, even though the nets are larger and the long lines put out more hooks.

Claire Lewis produced The End of the Line documentary. She admits, this leaves people who see fish as a good source of low-fat protein in a spot.

“It’s very hard. As a parent, you have conflicting evidence. You want to give your children and you want to feed yourself healthy food. You know that’s what fish is. On the other hand, you cannot possible ignore what we’re doing to the oceans, to the ecosystem in the ocean in eating too many fish.”

“Today in every ocean of the world, high-tech industrial vessels are hunting down every known edible species of fish.”

Ray Hilborn: “The basic problem in most fisheries that are in troube is too many boats.”

Charles Clover: “Too much capacity chasing too few fish.”

That last speaker is Charles Clover. The film documentary is based on a book he wrote by the same title. Like the film’s producers, he wants people to be more aware of the plight of the world’s fisheries.

Producer Claire Lewis says there are examples where fishing is being controlled more carefully.

“The most graphic example, I think, in our film, is that fact that in Alaska – which is a very well managed fishery – they take 10% of the stock only. In the North Sea in the E.U., they take 50% of the stock. Now, it seems to me that’s a really, really big difference.”

Lewis says, if left to the big commercial fishing operations, they’ll just keep fishing until fish stocks collapse. And she believes stricter government regulations and better informed consumers are the only things that will stop them.

“I really do believe that it’s the individual consumers who are going to make a difference to this. I think it’s something we can all individually do.”

The film tries to get people to start thinking about what they can do: such as, asking about the fish before you buy it, letting politicians know a sustainable fishery is important, and it encourages people to get involved with groups such as Seafoodwatch.org.

The End of the Line is narrated by actor and environmental activist Ted Danson. It’s appearing in theaters across the nation.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Related Links

Jellyfish Taking Over Oceans?

  • A jellyfish under the Ross Sea ice, on October 14, 2005 (Photo by Henry Kaiser, courtesy of the National Science Foundation)

Some scientists are warning
that as overfishing and climate
change affect the world’s oceans,
jellyfish will take over the
ecosystem. That could mean that
eventually, if you cast a net
into the ocean all you’d haul
in would be jelly blobs. But
as Ann Dornfeld reports, such
warnings may be premature:

Transcript

Some scientists are warning
that as overfishing and climate
change affect the world’s oceans,
jellyfish will take over the
ecosystem. That could mean that
eventually, if you cast a net
into the ocean all you’d haul
in would be jelly blobs. But
as Ann Dornfeld reports, such
warnings may be premature:

The theory goes like this. Overfishing is removing the main jellyfish predators from the oceans. And warming oceans could be more hospitable to jellies.

A new report published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution says jellyfish are already taking over. Its authors point to recent big jellyfish blooms as evidence.

But not everyone’s convinced.

“I think there’s a set of people that are sensationalizing the jellyfish bloom issue.”

University of Washington researcher Claudia Mills has been studying jellies for 30 years.

“I do think that probably jellyfish blooms are on the increase. But the problem is, we have so little baseline data that it’s almost impossible to really, honestly know that.”

Mills says there’s hardly any historical data on jellyfish populations, and not even much recent data.

She says it could be that the future of the world’s oceans is gelatinous and tentacled… or the blooms could just be cyclical.

For The Environment Report, I’m Ann Dornfeld.

Related Links

Saving Underwater Forests From a Prickly Pest

  • A few years ago, urchins had mowed this huge kelp forest down to just a few square feet (Photo by Ann Dornfeld)

Most of the world’s forests are on dry land. But in a few special places on earth, forests grow underwater. They’re kelp forests. And they’re home to an astounding array of marine life. Trouble is, these underwater forests are vanishing. Ann Dornfeld reports on efforts to turn the tide:

Transcript

Most of the world’s forests are on dry land. But in a few special places on earth, forests grow underwater. They’re kelp forests. And they’re home to an astounding array of marine life. Trouble is, these underwater forests are vanishing. Ann Dornfeld reports on efforts to turn the tide:

A healthy kelp forest is so thick with fish and invertebrates that you’d swear you were looking at an aquarium exhibit.

They’re biodiversity hotspots – places that feed and protect an extraordinary number of species.

Brian Meux of Santa Monica Baykeeper standing on the deck of a boat in his wetsuit. He’s looking proudly at a thriving kelp forest along a rocky coastline near Los Angeles.

“This is our little jewel on this coast. Not only does the kelp forest have over 800 species dependent on it, but more than a quarter of all California marine species are dependent upon the kelp forest during some part of their life cycle.”

Since the 1960s, Southern California has lost 90% of its kelp forests. The culprit looks like a small purple pin cushion.

It’s a sea urchin!

Urchins love to eat kelp, and their populations have gone out of control. That’s because overfishing has removed most of the large fish and lobsters that eat urchins.

A few years ago, urchins had mowed this kelp forest down to just a few square feet. So Meux and a team of Baykeeper volunteers are trying to restore the balance.

They’re licensed by the state to do “urchin relocation.”

“what we do is go down, collect urchins by hand, get them on the boat and relocate them to areas where they will no longer harm the kelp forest.”

Sounds easy enough.

“Some of them you’ll want to just pull off the reef – they’ll look like they just can come off – I recommend using the tool. Urchin spines in your fingers… just not fun. ”

Or maybe not.

Either way, it’s time for the us to gear up and jump in.

(sound of diving in and scuba breathing)

Twenty-five feet underwater, the ocean surges so violently that the divers cling to rocks so they won’t be swept away.

It’s tricky to find a safe rock to grab because most of them are covered in urchins that have moved in on this young kelp forest.

But urchins aren’t the only migrants.

Huge purple sheephead and fire-orange Garibaldi fish swim by. A small octopus sits curled in a crevice. Pastel sea stars are everywhere.

Four years ago, this site was pretty much just rocks and urchins.

Two dives later, the divers are back on the boat.

Diver 1: “That was a workout!”

Diver 2: “That was a workout. I’m tired.”

After the team hauls up bag after bags of purple and red urchins, we try unsuccessfully to extract a spine from one volunteer’s finger.

Next, we move to deeper water a mile away. This will be the urchins’ new home.

The divers count the prickly balls as they throw them overboard.

Diver: “Purple!”

Each time a diver counts ten urchins of a particular color, they call it out.

Divers: “Purple! Purple.”

Similar kelp restoration efforts have revived kelp forests along other stretches of the California coast. But while those projects involved reseeding of the kelp forest, Meux says Baykeeper focuses on urchin relocation.

“We’ve found that mostly just get rid of the urchins and natural kelp spores will seed the reef and the return of kelp will ensue.”

Diver: “Purple!”

In all today, the team has relocated about 1500 urchins.

Between weekly trips like these and giant kelp’s ability to grow as fast as two feet a day, kelp restoration is a
heartening environmental success story.

In order for Southern California’s kelp forests to make a widespread comeback, Brian Meux says the state will need to limit the fishing that caused this problem in the first place.

And that issue’s as prickly as an urchin.

For The Environment Report, I’m Ann Dornfeld.

Related Links

The Case of the Disappearing Dolphin

  • A false killer whale, which is actually a type of tropical dolphin, with calf (Photo by Deron Verbeck, courtesy of iamaquatic.com)

Commercial fishing in the oceans of the US has done a lot to reduce
accidentally catching marine mammals such as dolphins. But there are
still problems. Ari Daniel Shapiro reports on concerns about one kind
of tropical dolphin called the false killer whale:

Transcript

Commercial fishing in the oceans of the US has done a lot to reduce
accidentally catching marine mammals such as dolphins. But there are
still problems. Ari Daniel Shapiro reports on concerns about one kind
of tropical dolphin called the false killer whale:

Jim Cook has been a fisherman in Hawaii for 18 years.

“You know, it used to be real simple: catch a fish, sell it, and go
back out and try and catch another one.”

Now he owns a company that operates six fishing vessels. Cook’s
ships catch deep swimming sashimi-grade tuna that ends up in sushi
restaurants across the US. They use a technique called longline fishing.

“We have around 45 miles of mainline to which we attach floaters
and 2200 to 2500 baited hooks.”

“The regulations imposed on the Hawaii longline fishery are
probably the most restrictive regulations on any longline fishery in the
world.”

That’s Bill Robinson. He’s an administrator with the National
Marine Fisheries Service. And these regulations he’s talking about are
meant to reduce bycatch. That means catching marine animals other than
the tuna. As a result of these policies, sea turtle bycatch has dropped
by more than 90-percent and seabird bycatch by 95-percent.

Things are looking up, but now there’s another problem. The numbers of
another kind of animal – the false killer whale – are declining. No one
knows why they’re disappearing. It might be related to longline
fishing, but it’s just not clear.

Robin Baird’s a biologist with Cascadia Research.

“There’s a whole variety of lines of evidence that imply the false
killer whale population around the main Hawaiian islands has declined
dramatically over the last 20 years. And I think it’s clearly the most
serious conservation or management issue for whales and dolphins in
Hawaiian waters today.”

Baird thinks the decline is partly related to fewer numbers of tuna
and other species false killer whales eat. He also suspects that the
false killer whales might be moving farther offshore, where they could
get hooked when trying to eat the tuna caught by the longline fishery.

So the question is: should the National Marine Fisheries Service come up
with even more regulations for the longline fishery in case more false
killer whales move offshore looking for tuna.

Bill Robinson with the Fisheries Service isn’t so sure that they
actually go that far offshore.

“That’s speculation, and it may or may not be true. What we
don’t really know is what the range of each population is.”

So, really, at this point, it’s anyone’s guess why the false killer whale numbers are declining.

The biologist, Robin Baird, is concerned that nothing’s being done.

“Unless something is done to change the factors that are
influencing the population, it probably will continue to decline.”

The environmental group Earthjustice and a coalition of
conservation groups have sued the National Marine Fisheries Service over
failing to develop a plan to protect the false killer whales.

The agency has not responded officially to the lawsuit yet. But Bill
Robinson says an action plan is in the works.

“Hopefully by the fall, we’ll be able to not only appoint the
team, but have the team begin work on a take recovery plan that will
make recommendations to the agency to reduce the incidental take of
false killer whales in the fishery.”

Such a plan might end up costing the commercial fishers money. But
Jim Cook says he’s willing to pay. That’s because false killer whales
pick fish off his lines. They eat the caught tuna before the fishers
can haul them in. That can mean a lot of lost income.

“We would very much welcome any methodology almost
irrespective of cost because we’re suffering quite a bit economically as
it is.”

But the National Marine Fisheries Service first has to find that
methodology.

For The Environment Report, I’m Ari Daniel Shapiro.

Related Links

Tuna Farming in the Ocean

  • They call the cages Oceanspheres. They’d have the diameter of half a football field. (Photo courtesy of Hawaii Oceanic Technology)

A company in Hawaii wants to build the world’s first commercial bigeye tuna farm. Bigeye tuna is also known as ahi and it’s a popular fish for sushi. Rebecca Williams has more:

Transcript

A company in Hawaii wants to build the world’s first commercial bigeye tuna farm. Bigeye tuna is also known as ahi and it’s a popular fish for sushi. Rebecca Williams has more:

Bigeye tuna are getting overfished in the wild.

So a company called Hawaii Oceanic Technology wants to raise tuna in giant underwater cages off the coast of Hawaii.

They call the cages Oceanspheres. They’d have the diameter of half a football field.

Bill Spencer is president and CEO of the company. He says they’ll raise 20,000 fish in each cage. The tuna will get up to 100 pounds each.

“They’re typically a schooling type fish so they’d be able to swim around in the Oceansphere so we think that would give them the ability to get the kind of muscle tone that would be appreciated by the consumers.”

There are real concerns about pollution and that fish will escape and spread disease to wild fish.

Spencer says ocean currents will sweep away fish feces so they won’t concentrate, and he says the cages are built so tuna can’t escape.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Sea Levels Threaten Coastal Towns (Part One)

  • The boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland. Before beach replenishment, you could get your feet wet standing underneath the boardwalk. Now, as you can see, the water is 200 feet away. (Photo by Tamara Keith)

It’s beach weather – and along the mid-Atlantic one of the most popular beaches is Ocean
City, Maryland. For years, engineers have been battling back the ocean to save the beach
and the town. And as Tamara Keith reports, that fight is only going to get tougher and
more expensive if predictions of sea level rise from climate change become a reality:

Transcript

It’s beach weather – and along the mid-Atlantic one of the most popular beaches is Ocean
City, Maryland. For years, engineers have been battling back the ocean to save the beach
and the town. And as Tamara Keith reports, that fight is only going to get tougher and
more expensive if predictions of sea level rise from climate change become a reality:

When the sea level rises, Ocean City feels it. It’s on the front lines – a barrier island on
the edge of the Atlantic.

(sounds of water)

Terry McGean is the city engineer for a town he describes as a working class resort.

“Our industry is tourism, and the real reason people come here is the beach.”

But in the 1980s, that beach was reduced to a narrow strip. Not so today, all thanks to a
massive, and expensive, beach replenishment project. In 1991 countless tons of sand
were brought in, dunes were built. But that wasn’t the end of it.

To keep up with erosion, McGean says the beach here at Ocean City has already been re-
nourished 4 times.

“Approximately every 4 years we’re doing a re-nourishment project. To give you an idea
of the scale, that’s 100,000 truck loads of material that we’ll put on here. Though it
doesn’t actually come on a truck? No. It’s pumped in a dredge from out in the ocean.”

It is a constant fight, because the waves keep coming, keep pulling the sand back out to
sea. Scientists say this is partially just normal erosion. But some of it at least can be
blamed on global climate change and sea level rise. Over time, they say, the share of the
problem caused by climate change will grow.

“If you hadn’t done the beach replenishment do you have any sense of what this would
look like right now. There probably would have been no public beach left in many of
these areas.”

So far fending off the sea has cost $90-million, split amongst local, state and federal tax
dollars. But engineers estimate some $240-million in storm damage has been prevented.

“Holding back the sea is an economic proposition. If you’re willing to spend the money,
the sand exists to elevate any given barrier island.”

Jim Titus is the project manager for sea level rise at the Environmental Protection
Agency. And he’s been sounding the alarm about climate change for years. And he says
policy makers and the public will eventually have to decide which beaches, which
communities are worth saving.

“The challenge for communities like Ocean City is to persuade everyone else that they
are one of those cities that are too important to give up. And then to get their residents to
cooperate in doing what it takes to do to gradually elevate the entire community with a
rising sea.”

But if you think in geologic time, like University of Maryland professor Michael Kearney
does, there isn’t a whole lot of hope for barrier islands like Ocean City.

“It’s essentially a pile of sand. There’s really nothing permanent about it.”

Kearney studies coastal processes.

“The long term prospect of any barrier surviving the projected rates of sea level rise, even
at the moderate rates – the so-called moderate rates, that the IPCC predicted is pretty
slim.”

Ocean City engineer Terry McGean just isn’t buying it. He thinks Ocean City can survive
sea level rise.

“I think that we can design towards it and we can probably build towards it and with
responsible actions we can live with it.”

As long as there’s enough sand and money to keep it going.

For The Environment Report, I’m Tamara Keith.

Related Links

Sea Levels Threaten Coastal Towns (Part Two)

  • A living shoreline near the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. The native grasses and sandy shore provide habitat for terrapins, the University of Maryland mascot. (Photo by Tamara Keith)

Scientists are pretty certain climate change is going to cause the sea level to rise. It’s
happening already, actually. In communities around the Chesapeake Bay, people are
getting a sneak preview. Tamara Keith reports some people there are trying to work with
nature rather than resist it:

Transcript

Scientists are pretty certain climate change is going to cause the sea level to rise. It’s
happening already, actually. In communities around the Chesapeake Bay, people are
getting a sneak preview. Tamara Keith reports some people there are trying to work with
nature rather than resist it:

(sound of kids planting)

It’s been raining in Woodland Beach. The community is just off of the Chesapeake Bay
in Maryland. The ground here is so soft you sink into it. Mud is everywhere. And that’s
just fine with the volunteers planting native grasses on a sloping hillside.

Stephen Hult is trying to keep things in order.

“And when we plant them we want them all the way down. I’m telling everyone twice.”

Hult heads up shoreline restoration projects for the local property owners association.
And there’s a lot of shoreline to restore.

“The shoreline, in parts of the community since the 1930s, have eroded 20 feet. Year to
year, one barely notices, but if you look at aerial maps of what it used to be like
compared to what it is, it really is quite dramatic.”

There’s been tons of erosion here. The land all along the mid-Atlantic coast is also
slowly sinking. Combine that with global sea level rise and you get erosion in overdrive.

Hult says the community is trying to restore the beach with rock and dirt and sand and
grasses to hold it all together. This is what’s called a living shoreline.

“We have now, with this project it will be well over half a mile of living shorelines that
we’ve installed.”

It’s a relatively new concept, a more natural approach to the gnawing problem of
shoreline erosion. Living shorelines create buffer between the water and homes. They are
kinda like the tidal wetlands that used to be here – before property owners started building
sea walls, also called bulkheads.

Jana Davis is associate director of the Chesapeake Bay Trust. It’s one of the organizations
funding this shoreline restoration. And Davis also happens to live here.

“It’s a wonderful alternative that provides just as good shoreline protection while also
providing a lot of really important habitat benefits that a bulkhead or rock sea wall does
not provide.”

Good for wildlife, and she says, it’s adaptive in the face of sea level rise.

“If sea level were to rise another foot, for example. The marsh could kind of migrate
inland, whereas if you had a bulkhead obviously there’s no migration because it can’t
move.”

But most of the people with bulkheads are NOT buying it. They want to protect their
property from the sinking land and rising water, and a lot of them don’t think a bunch of
rocks and grass are going to cut it.

Kevin Smith is chief of restoration services for the Maryland Department of Natural
Resources.

“There’s many places you can go and look at miles of shoreline and not see any natural
shoreline at all. It’s all armored off.”

Smith met me at a nature center along the bay. A few years ago, a stretch of bulkhead
here was replaced with a living shoreline. The natural ebb and flow of these shorelines
has made some property owners skeptical. They want the shoreline to stay put.

“If these types of projects don’t protect that shoreline from erosion, then homeowners are
not going to want to do it.”

But Smith insists these projects do work, and long term they’re going to be more
sustainable and more flexible than bulkheads – which over time will lose the battle
against the constant pounding of the rising sea.

For The Environment Report, I’m Tamara Keith.

Related Links

Coral Conservation in the Caribbean

  • The island of Bonaire is somewhat of an anomaly in the Caribbean due to its remarkably preserved coral reefs (Photo by Ann Dornfeld)

Scientists say nearly half of the coral reefs in the US are in bad shape.
Many are dead. The situation is similar in much of the world. But not
everywhere, as Ann Dornfeld found on the Caribbean island of Bonaire:

Transcript

Scientists say nearly half of the coral reefs in the US are in bad shape.
Many are dead. The situation is similar in much of the world. But not
everywhere, as Ann Dornfeld found on the Caribbean island of Bonaire:

(sound of waves on shore)

Jerry Ligon was working as the on-board naturalist on a small Caribbean
cruise ship when he first saw Bonaire.

“And I saw how clear the water was. And I’d been able to compare, during
my stint on the cruise ship, other islands in the Caribbean, and I realized
how special Bonaire was. So that was at the end of my contract, so I
decided to stay here. And I’ve been here for 15 years!”

It’s wasn’t just the clarity of Bonaire’s water that made Ligon stick around. It
was the remarkably healthy coral reefs that lay beneath the waves.

“I can even talk to divers who come to Bonaire and they say, ‘What
fantastic diving!’ and they remember, ‘This is how the way it was in Cayman
Islands 25 years ago!'”

Ligon says the Cayman Islands might have even had more impressive
reefs than Bonaire’s back in the day. But coral throughout the US and
Caribbean has been in sharp decline for decades.

So how do Bonaire’s reefs remain intact?

Ramón de León is the manager of the Bonaire National Marine Park. He
says the island has an advantage in that it has no industries to pollute the
water.

The island is mostly undeveloped, which means relatively little farm and
lawn fertilizer run-off that can create marine algae blooms. And cool
upwellings in the region help balance the rising ocean temperatures. Warm
oceans can cause coral bleaching, which often kills the coral animal.

But de León says Bonaire really owes its healthy reefs to its history of
conservation laws. They date back to an era when such policies were rare.

“Bonaire start to protect sea turtles and turtle nests in 1961, back when
everybody was promoting sea turtle soups and nailing shells in the walls.”

By the end of the 1970s, Bonaire had banned spear fishing and made it
illegal to damage coral. For years, divers have been required to pay a
sizeable fee and take an orientation course before they’re allowed to dive
on the island. That helps them avoid touching the coral, which can kill it.

De León says the island still allows too much fishing. So several years ago,
he told the island’s fishermen they needed to choose a no-take zone to let
the reefs recover.

“I refuse to decide myself. I give the fishermen some prerequisites that they
have to have to close, and they chose which area. Is not my number-one
option, but is their number-one option. So I have to respect that.”

De León says because the fishermen chose the no-take zone, something
important happened. Compliance is high.

For all of Bonaire’s success in coral conservation, there are still some
problems. De León says its reefs suffer from leaky septic tanks and boat
pollution. And there are few of the large predator fish that used to maintain
population balance on the reefs.

But the island is a haven for researchers like Mark Patterson. He designs
underwater robots at Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences.

Last year he led a NOAA expedition to use robots to map Bonaire’s reefs.
He says the island’s reefs are valuable as a baseline by which other reefs
can be judged.

“If you’re an up-and-coming marine scientist and you go to a lot of the coral
reefs on the planet now, you might think that all coral reefs have always
look like this. And they haven’t! So the fact that we’ve got some pristine
reefs left is very important, and we’ve got to work very hard to protect them
because it shows us how the ecosystem should look and used to look
around the planet before things started to go downhill.”

For The Environment Report, I’m Ann Dornfeld.

Related Links

Hurricane Season Is Here

  • Monday, June 1 is the official start day of hurricane season (Photo courtesy of NASA)

Today is the first day of the Hurricane season,

but we’ve already seen a tropical depression off

the Atlantic coast. Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

Today is the first day of the Hurricane season, but we’ve already seen a tropical depression off the Atlantic coast. Lester Graham reports:

The Weather Channel noted that tropical depression was farther North earlier than any potential hurricane in the 159 years of storm records.

You can’t help but wonder whether climate change is having an effect here.

Jeff Masters is a former hurricane hunter, now with Weather Underground.

He says that’s not what’s happening. He says this storm was getting stronger by following the the gulf stream.

“There just happened to be a little blip of warm water associated with the gulf stream that this storm took advantage of. It was a very small storm so it was very lucky. It was able to stay over the warmest part of the gulf stream.”

Masters says it’ll be decades before we’ll be able to tell if climate change is actually affecting hurricanes.

Forecasts this year call for a pretty average hurricane season.

Masters says an El Niño event could occur later. That’s important, since the number and intensity of Atlantic storms are usually reduced during an El Niño year.

For The Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.

Related Links

Rare Right Whale Recorded

  • Only two Right Whales have been spotted in the last 50 years off the southern tip of Greenland (Photo courtesy of NOAA)

Scientist think they’ve found
a rare whale in a place where
they thought they were wiped
out. Sadie Babits reports,
they haven’t seen the whale
but they’ve heard it:

Transcript

Scientist think they’ve found
a rare whale in a place where
they thought they were wiped
out. Sadie Babits reports,
they haven’t seen the whale
but they’ve heard it:

Scientists thought the North Atlantic Right Whale
was gone. Only two of them have been spotted in
the last 50 years off the southern tip of Greenland.

But some underwater microphones picked up right
whale calls.

“They sound like mmmmmmick… kind of like that.”

That’s David Mellinger. He teaches at Oregon State
University.

He says they recorded more than two
thousand right whale calls in a year. That doesn’t
mean there are a lot of the whales, but Mellinger
says hearing any in the North Atlantic is significant.

“Because the population is so endangered. There
are only 300-350 maybe right whales in the world.
So finding any new whales is important.”

But there is a concern. As the Arctic Ice Cap
melts because of global warming, more ships are
expected to pass through the area. That could
mean ships could strike and kill the few right
whales that are left.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sadie Babits.

Related Links