You can now listen to Dennis Minsky read Chapter 86: The Tail of Moby Dick. Dennis is a long-time naturalist aboard whale watching boats in the Gulf of Maine, so i can not imagine anyone better to read about the power and glory of whale tails then someone who has witnessed it for decades. Our intern, Evan Henerberry, echoes Melville's ideas about The Tail's strength......and also a little about it's vulnerabilities in the face of modern-day fishing.

The fact that Melville dedicates an entire chapter to the whale's tail is yet another example of Melville's deep understanding of whales. Melville reviews the internal architecture of the massive tail and lays out five different ways in which whales use their tail, including calling one of the behaviors 'lobtailing' - a term we still use today.

The tail is oft-overlooked in comparison to the sheer size and majesty of the rest of the whale but as Ishmael describes, it is a vital body part used for so much more than locomotion. For instance, since Melville's time, scientist have discovered the underside of a humpback whale's tail is as unique as a human fingerprint. Conservation organizations have identified thousands of individual humpbacks around the world based solely on these unique pigmentation patterns.

One of the ways Melville describes whales using their flukes is 'peaking of the flukes' which is what we know call 'fluking up'. Studies show whale species with a thicker blubber layer are more buoyant, require them to ‘fluking out’ for extra propulsion when diving deeper into the water column. Whales clearly also use their muscular tail fluke to propel themselves through the water. The sperm whale can dive up to 3 kilometers or almost two miles beneath the surface when hunting the notorious giant squid, all of it made possible via the power of its flukes.

The tail is also a useful tool for defense. Ishmael describes the terrible force a sperm whale can use to smash whale boats in a single massive stroke of its tail. When threatened by predators sperm whales often use a ‘rosette’ formation. They form a circle with their heads pointed in and their powerful tails facing outward and confronting the enemy. Ishmael playfully notes how sperm whales challenge one another face to face but disdainfully disposes of humanity with their rear end.

There are other uses for the tail that are not nearly so utilitarian. With only one or two strokes of the powerful tail, a whale can propel their entire 30 ton body out of the water in a display called breaching, a behavior science has yet to find a definitive cause for. Humpback whales also use their tales to aid in making their feeding more efficient. They smack the surface with their fluke to concentrate their prey before scooping them up in their massive gullets. This behavior, called kick feeding, is a learned behavior unique to the North Atlantic population of humpback whales.

The importance and vulnerability of the tail was highlighted tragically in the case of an unknown humpback whale seen in 2011 off Cape Cod. The whale had become entangled in fishing gear so severely that he/she lost his/her tail and was unable to dive and feed properly. When it was spotted by WDC scientists the whale was skeletally thin from its inability to feed properly and is feared dead. The tail stock and fluke join up in a t-formation called the peduncle, making it a prime location for entanglement. Lines become caught on the edge of the fluke as the whale moves along and as it rolls to relieve the drag of the trailing line and tension, the whale becomes entangled in wraps of line around the tail stock.

Entanglements on the tail stock are also dangerous to remove, as disentanglement teams must come right alongside the mighty flukes Ishmael and his shipmates once feared. Except in this case, instead of simply trying to kill the whale, the men and women in the tiny boats towed by the huge whale are attempting the much more delicate and dangerous task of trying to save it. Entanglements are one of the most prevalent human-caused dangers to whales now that worldwide commercial whaling is, at least for most, a thing of the past.

It makes one wonder what Ishmael would have thought of his majestic whale brought low by fishing equipment not even intended to capture it, and by the very tail he so admires. If we want to continue admiring whales as Ishmael and by extension Melville once did we need to start taking steps to ensure their survival. Please donate to the Moby Dick Big Read and help support WDC's efforts to help protect whales.

WDC was among the “no-shows” at last week’s Harbor Porpoise Take Reduction Team meeting in Providence, Rhode Island. Some conservationists as well as the entire delegation of experts from the science and academic community chose to “boycott” this meeting.  The issue? A decision made by John Bullard, the Northeast Regional Administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service. Bullard’s fall decision allowed fishing in an area that his Agency’s regulations had mandated for a two month closure despite evidence of the increasing number of harbor porpoises killed as a result of the fishing industry’s low compliance with fishing federal regulations designed to reduce mortality.  Affordable acoustic “pingers” have been shown to reduce mortality of porpoises by up to 90% and they are required for use in New England during much of the time when porpoises are in the area in greatest numbers.  There has been a federal mandate to use these “pingers” since 1998.  But compliance with the mandate has recently slipped badly. 

The Harbor Porpoise Take Reduction Team is a federally appointed group of scientists, conservationists, fishermen, and state and federal agency representatives mandated by the Marine Mammal Protection Act to develop plans to reduce marine mammal bycatch in specific fisheries when the operation of the fishery results in high levels of mortality.  In 2008, the Team, including members of the fisheries, agreed that if compliance with fishing regulations mandating pinger use was not adequate, mandatory “consequence” closures would be put in place for short periods in specific locations to protect the porpoises.  As a result of increasing numbers of harbor porpoises being killed in the past several years, and only 41% of the fishery complying with regulations, fishermen were notified in March of this year that areas off Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine would be closed to fishing in October and November, a time when harbor porpoise deaths were so high that even if no additional mortality occurred, the numbers were still too high to not harm the population.

WDC has always realized and celebrated the importance of responsible whale watching. One of the essential conservation outcomes of whale watching in the Gulf of Maine is the ability for whale watch companies to spot, report and stand by entangled whales until the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies (PCCS) disentanglement team can respond. In fact, we ended our whale watching season with an entangled whale: Tornado’s 2012 calf. One of our fall interns, Evan Henerberry, is going to tell the rest of the story.

Tornado, a well-known mother and grandmother, returned this year with her seventh documented calf. We began seeing this mother/calf pair in late May, but on October 23rd the calf was reported entangled by a whale watch boat off Gloucester. The calf was reportedly towing over 500 feet of line with buoys attached from the left fluke and damage was clearly visible. The rescue team quickly responded to the whale watcher’s call; however, they were unable to relocate Tornado and her calf once they were on the scene, once again highlighting the importance of standing by an entangled whale until the rescue team is on-sight.

Plans were made for an aerial survey of the region and thankfully the pair was found and another rescue attempt was mounted on the 25th. After hours of arduous and dangerous work, Tornado’s calf was freed. We were fortunate enough to be arriving on scene on our last trip of the season as the disentanglement team had just freed the calf. We carefully documented the pair and thankfully the calf was last seen swimming calmly with it’s mother, scarred but alive.

Tornado and her calf’s ordeal and ultimate rescue, both the result of interactions with humans, paint an interesting picture. It was a bittersweet end to the whale watching season, particularly because on this trip we also saw harbor porpoises, which are struggling with their own entanglement issues.

This drawing by Scott Landry of PCCS shows just how dangerous entanglements can be, they are one of the primary dangers impacting whales. It's made even more dangerous because we do not know the extent to which it is injuring and killing whales, and thus is underestimated. There is an abundance of fishing gear in the ocean and plenty of evidence that whales interact with it, including cases like this as well as entanglement scars left on whale from unwitnessed interactions.

Scientific awareness of entanglement can be traced as far back as the late 1950’s when the Journal for Deep-Sea research reported on 14 incidents of large whales becoming entangled in submarine cables while foraging. Since this time, more effort has been put into actively assessing the extent of whale interactions with marine debris, including actively fished gear.

A 30 year study by the New England Aquarium determined that out of 626 individual North Atlantic right whales photographed from 1980-2009, over 80% showed signs of previous entanglement. The plight of the North Atlantic right whale, a critically endangered species, puts a fresh urgency on these efforts, both to prevent entanglements and respond effectively to those that occur. As great as it is that whales can be disentangled, everyone agrees that disentanglement is not the solution. Work is being done to decrease the risk of entanglement in the first place.

Through the years there have been many strategies tested to reduce the threat of entanglement, some of which could be viewed as long shots. For example, studies have tested the effectiveness of glow-in-the dark fishing lines and lines of various colors to make them obvious to whales. Computer models have reconstructed entanglement interactions and mathematical models have estimated where the risk is the highest based upon the overlap of whales and gear - all in hopes of figuring out ways to reduce risk.

There have been gear modifications that help prevent and reduce the severity of entanglements, such as: acoustic alarms to warn harbor porpoises of gill nets, weak links on the vertical lines attaching gear to surface buoys which will break under a certain amount of pressure to prevent a whale becoming anchored to gear, and replacing floating line in-between lobster traps with sinking line to reduce the amount of line in the water column. But clearly more needs to be done. Disentangling whales is like putting a band aid on a cut- it will help to improve the condition but not prevent it from happening. The disentanglement teams all agree that the world would be a better place if there were no need for them to intervene at all and hope for the day when they can hang up their helmets for good.

In fact, just this week a fisherman reported an entangled whale outside of Cape Cod Bay. Again, the disentanglement team sprang into action and discovered a dangerously imperiled young humpback, which has yet to be identified. According to Scott Landry of PCCS,  “The whale was so injured and unhealthy that it couldn’t raise its flukes." Heavy and durable synthetic fishing line was wound tightly around the whale’s tail and the team believed it had been towing the line for some time. Thankfully they were able to cut the gear off this humpback.

We are very thankful to the PCCS rescue team for their efforts and the fisherman who reported the entangled whale. This latest incident demonstrates the need for everyone to take part in conservation. There are simple choices you can make to help whales in your everyday life. For example, choose seafood that is sustainably caught and reduce the use of plastics, another threat to whales. Also, be sure to report any entanglements you may observe to the Coast Guard or your local disentanglement hotline (1-800-900-3622).

On Friday, August 24^th, most of the WDCS-NA office headed out on the vessel Easterly to document small vessel traffic in the vicinity of whales as part of our propeller scar project.  As always, we document, and when possible, retrieve any marine debris we locate.  Early in the trip, at approximately 11:15AM, we stopped to retrieve a balloon when Sue Rocca located a whale about a mile from our position.  Upon approaching the location of the whale, we noted that the behavior was odd (consistently rolling onto its left side and forcefully submerging, creating white water as it did so). Surface times were less than 30 seconds while dive times exceeded 8 minutes.  Humpback whales typically fluke, or lift their tails above the surface when diving and rarely create white water in doing so, unless they are feeding.  After watching the whale behave like this for a number of surfacings, we notified the Atlantic Large Whale Disentanglement Team at the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies (where Marta Hevia from the WDCS-LA office is currently training for disentanglement work).  They requested further documentation and by this point we were able to approach and verify that the whale was entangled in black polypropylene line.  We again notified the Disentanglement Team and committed to remaining with the whale until they arrived. The whale was identified as a five year old named Forceps, Ganesh’s 2007 calf (grandcalf of Loon). Our database indicates we had sightings of Forceps this year on 7/11, 7/13,  and 8/17 with no entangled gear. The Dolphin Fleet reported a more recent gear free sighting on August 20^th indicating the whale had been entangled for less than four days, and the entanglement likely occurred in gear that was local to the area. When the Disentanglement Team arrived, we offered to remain with them to assist in locating Forceps as its direction of travel was not consistent and surfacings were extremely brief (sometimes only seconds at the surface).  For the next four and a half hours, we remained on site with the whale, though we traveled less than two miles in that time.  During our time on site, we were also ensuring that vessels transiting the area remained a distance from the whale. And there was no shortage of them; here are a few photos of vessels transiting our area while disentanglement attempts were underway.

 

The entangling line appeared to enter the left side of the mouth, exit the right side and wrap over the blowholes.  The wrap appeared tight and there was some mass of gear, or line, that was weighing down the left side of the whale, hence the rolling to dive.  No trailing line was noticed.  As a result, even though the Disentanglement team attempted to grapple onto to a line many, many times - every attempt proved futile. Further attempts to cut the line with a “fly cutter” (remotely deployed with a cross bow) were also unsuccessful.  We left only when the Disentanglement Team ceased efforts.  We have alerted whale watching vessels in the area of Forceps, but, as of now, there have been no further sightings. After leaving the area, we found two humpback whales (Putter and Wave) northeast of our location. After a few minutes of observing these two whales they became very surface active, which was a nice end to a rather stressful day. But as we stayed and watched, these two whales moved into a high concentration of actively fished lobster gear. We are happy to report that these whales were able to navigate the gear while we were with them. I would like to personally thank the efforts of our crew, and particularly one of our interns, Michelle Collins, who never left her position of behaviorally sequencing every breath and behavior of Forceps for more than six hours.  We are also greatly appreciative of the effort put forward by the Disentanglement Team and share their frustration in not freeing this whale.  However, this incident is a reminder that disentanglement is not a solution to the larger threat of incidental fishing gear entanglements.  WDCS-NA has federally appointed seats on the Atlantic Large Whale, Atlantic Trawl Gear, Harbor Porpoise, and Bottlenose Dolphin Take Reduction Teams.  We are in a position to develop management plans for fisheries that will substantially reduce this threat along the entire east coast.  I know this experience has further motivated me to argue even more for humpback protection under the large whale plan, which is currently focused on NA right whales.