KNBA - Anchorage

Researchers say vessel strikes are a major threat for whales, including in the waters off Alaska. A new technology is aiming to change that by using AI, thermal imagining and marine observers.

Matson’s container ships bring cargo and cars from Tacoma, Washington to Anchorage, Kodiak and Dutch Harbor. The company has partnered with WhaleSpotter, a new system that helps ships detect whales, said Matson’s CEO Matt Cox.

“Every handful of years, we, unfortunately, do have a strike, and of course, we report that up,” Cox said. “But the hope is, this new technology will make that even more rare of an occurrence in the future.”

WhaleSpotter was introduced commercially about a year ago and is now used by a dozen companies, including some in Alaska, said Shawn Henry, the company’s chief executive officer. He said Matson is their latest partner and the first container ship company to use the system.

Danger of ship strikes

Researchers say ship strikes are one of the leading causes of whale deaths worldwide. In the Juneau area alone, at least nine humpback whales were hit by ships in the last five years, according to a local project called Juneau Whale HEALTH.

“Vessel strikes are a major threat to whales,” said Heidi Pearson, a professor of marine biology at the University of Alaska Southeast and a principal investigator for the project. “Most ship strikes go undocumented. Especially if it’s a large vessel, they could hit a whale and not even know it.”

Andy Szabo, the director of conservation and research organization the Alaska Whale Foundation, said ship strikes are especially prominent in the areas frequented by cruise and cargo ships.

“Whenever you’re running high-speed, large boats through whale waters, that increases the likelihood of strikes,” he said.

Humpback whales are the most prone to strikes because they often swim close to the surface and close to shore, Szabo said.

The harm from the vessel strikes is compounding on top of other challenges whales face, he said. Recently, a marine heatwave in the Pacific known as the Blob disrupted ecosystems along the West Coast of the U.S., causing thousands of humpbacks to starve, Szabo said.

He said the population still has not recovered.

“They’re not doing great at all,” Szabo said. “So when you have that, and then you overlay on top of that vessel strikes, even if it’s not a lot of animals, it can have an impact.”

The new whale-detection system

WhaleSpotter technology is designed to alert ship crews when there is a whale nearby and give them an opportunity to change course or stop.

“We are enabling a vessel to detect a whale well ahead of the amount of time it needs to make a turn or slow down,” said Henry with WhaleSpotter.

Thermal cameras track temperature changes in a four-nautical-mile radius around a ship, Henry said. Then, the technology uses artificial intelligence to determine which images likely captured whales. Remote marine mammal observers – real people watching the data feed from elsewhere – do the last checks. Then the system sends an alert to crews about a possible whale nearby.

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts has been developing the technology for the last 15 years, Henry said. The institute granted WhaleSpotter a license to sell the technology, and the company has been working with different clients for about a year.

“We have a number of different other types of vessels that are using the product,” Henry said. “Some of them – vessel strike avoidance, some of them for marine operations like cable laying and pile driving.”

Cox, the CEO of Matson, said the company tested the technology on their ships. He said the trials showed that the system is effective at detecting individual whales and pods, and sometimes even the direction the whale is traveling in.

“We’ve had cases where those whale detections have been spotted, and we’ve been able to navigate around the pod or the individual whale to lessen the chances of a strike,” Cox said. “It’s worked really well.”

Now Cox said Matson plans to have it on all three of its Alaska ships. He said the crews are excited about it.

There’s genuine enthusiasm and excitement on board the vessels,” he said.

Pearson, at the University of Alaska Southeast, said the WhaleSpotter technology can be a game changer for whales, vessels and their crews and passengers.

“Of course, if a whale gets hit, it’s awful for the whale, but it can also damage vessels. Whale strikes have also been known to cause damage to human passengers on the boat,” she said. “So anything we can do to mitigate that protects whales and humans as well.”

Szabo, with the Alaska Whale Foundation, said that outfitting ships with technology to detect whales is a good first step, but he wants to know more about what the crews will do with that information.

He said that if the whale is too close, the ship might not have enough time to turn. And if the whale is too far and is moving, the original location might be irrelevant. Plus, he said, if there are many whales in the area, it can be unclear what the best course of action for the ship might be.

Still, Szabo said he is optimistic about the technology.

“It can’t be a bad thing,” Szabo said. “I just hope that there is sufficient effort put into the whole training and procedures and protocol side of things as well, to make it as useful as it could be.”

The government shutdown is delaying funding for a federal heating assistance program that helps thousands of low-income Alaska families to offset their heating costs and weatherize homes for winter, state health officials said Thursday.

The Alaska Department of Health said in a statement that the government shutdown has delayed the release of money for the federal Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program for the year of 2026. The program subsidizes energy bills for about 50,000 Alaskans, many of whom live in rural and tribal communities.

“It definitely benefits a lot of rural and tribal communities,” said Jennifer Hyde, a federal infrastructure coordinator at the Alaska Center, a nonprofit that advocates for the continuation of the program. “Disproportionately, those communities are often low income or have different economic struggles.”

The shutdown began on Oct. 1. Funding for the heating assistance program usually comes in on Nov. 1.

State health officials said they expect that money to run out by mid-November. For now, they are operating the program using the remaining money from the previous year.

The department said it usually takes four-to-six weeks for the heating assistance funds to be released to states. So if Congress acts in late November, Alaska would receive funding after mid-December, according to the state health department.

Alaska tribal organizations are looking closely at the issue.

The Tanana Chiefs Conference administers heating assistance for over 1,200 households. Amber Vaska, the executive director of tribal government and client services at the organization, said by email that the federal program is “a lifeline across the Interior.”

“In our remote Interior villages, this support means the difference between families keeping their homes heated and pipes from freezing—or being forced to go without heat entirely, ” Vaska said.

Vaska added that Tanana Chiefs Conference can use carryover funds from prior years, which allows the organization to continue serving residents even during funding interruptions or government shutdowns.

The government shutdown is also affecting other programs crucial for Alaska Native communities, like food assistance and tribal Head Start.

Hyde, with the Alaska Center, said families who rely on heating assistance are the same vulnerable residents who will be affected by the loss of food benefits.

“It’s going to just be a really tough winter, unless something can give,” she said.

In the meantime, the state Department of Health said its staff is prioritizing applications by focusing on households in a heating emergency or at immediate risk of losing heat. It’s also processing regular applications in the order they were received.

If the federal money runs out, the department said it plans to continue processing new applications, though payments will be delayed until the new funds arrive.

The Alaska Federation of Natives convention, which is scheduled for this week, always focuses on issues most pertinent to local Indigenous communities. This year, a catastrophic storm that battered predominantly Alaska Native villages in Western Alaska is already the center of the conversations.

The remnants of Typhoon Halong over the weekend left at least one woman dead in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. Two people are still missing.

“As we gather for this sharing and this collective convening, let us keep in mind those that are in harm’s way and those who are out there to be with them and to help them,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski said at the beginning of the Elders & Youth conference, the traditional prologue to the main AFN event.

The storm has displaced more than a thousand people, who are sheltering at their local schools. Meanwhile, AFN and other local Indigenous organizations were looking for ways to help.

AFN was one of twelve mostly Indigenous organizations that formed the Western Alaska Disaster Relief Fund to provide assistance to villages. On Thursday, AFN planned to hold a blanket dance fundraiser for the disaster. And on Friday, the group said they will host a donation drive to accept water, food, hygiene products and other necessities.

Roy Agloinga is president of the First Alaskans Institute, which hosts the Elders & Youth conference. He opened the conference with a speech about the destruction from the storm. He told the gathering that the whole state must come together to help.

“It’s easy to feel distant, but I ask you to lean in, because while the storm may be hundreds of miles away, the people affected are our neighbors, our friends and our family.”

Marilyn Attla, a healer from the Interior who participated in the Elders & Youth conference, encouraged people to pray and acknowledge the stress of the situation. She also invited attendees – especially young people– to talk about what they feel and consider visiting a healing station.

“The youth could learn a lot and get a lot of healing from these people here,” she said. “You have to make up your own mind to be resilient. Any type of loss that you’re going to go through in your life, any type of happening problem, you have to make up your own mind to overcome it.”

The Elders & Youth conference is running at the Dena’ina Center in Anchorage through Wednesday. AFN is scheduled there from Thursday to Saturday.

Rhonda McBride contributed to this report.

In April, Julie and Dug Watkins were walking their dogs on Sandsend Beach, near their home in northern Scotland. As Julie was taking a short swim in the cold water, her husband found something unusual lying on the pebbles: an amber-colored wine bottle.

The bottle was sandy and partly covered with seaweed. Inside, they found a note saying it had been released on sea ice near Utqiagvik, on Alaska’s North Slope, six years earlier. The author had drawn a picture of a whale on the back and signed it: Craig George.

“When we read the message in the bottle and realized how significant a thing it was, we were really very excited,” Julie Watkins said.

John Craighead George was a prominent whale expert who lived in Utqiagvik for decades. He died in 2023 — three years after setting the bottle adrift — leaving behind an extensive body of research. He published studies on things like how long bowheads can live and how they can survive in cold waters.

“I suppose Craig lives on in that message,” Watkins said. “He probably lives on in so many ways, but that was just one more thing.”

Release

Originally from New York, George was instrumental in starting a bowhead whale census back in the 1970s that incorporated knowledge of Iñupiaq hunters and supported their subsistence.

Kate Stafford, a researcher at the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, counted whales with George in the spring of 2019. For several months, they took hour-long snowmachine rides to an observation perch built on the ice north of Utqiagvik. At the end of the census, she said they followed George’s tradition and released several bottles with messages.

“Most of the time, we put them in the lead, and they probably got crushed when the ice moved around,” she said. “We thought this time, we would put them on the sea ice.”

Over the years, George collected sturdy wine bottles and emptied them with friends during music nights – which, to Stafford, is a lovely memory in itself. She said he would write his messages on waterproof paper, seal the bottles with wax and tape, and release them after the whale census.

The only known retrieval happened when one of those bottles washed up in Point Lay, about 180 miles to the southwest. That is, until now.

“Craig was the most curious person you’d ever meet,” Stafford said. “I think it just tickled him to think about putting a message – often with a little drawing that he’d done, and the weather, and the date – putting it in a bottle and seeing where it ended up, or if it ever got recovered. He would have been so thrilled that that bottle was recovered in such an interesting spot, like the Atlantic.”

The journey

When George released the bottle near Point Barrow, the northernmost tip of the United States, he was facing a strong northeastward stream. Seth Danielson, a physical oceanographer at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who was also George’s colleague and friend, said the bottle most likely got caught in the Beaufort Gyre, a clockwise ocean circulation that sent it toward the East Siberian Sea.

Then, the Transpolar Current likely picked it up. That’s the same stream that helped the explorer Fridtjof Nansen’s Fram drift from the Russian coast to Norway in the late 1800s. In the 1990s, it contributed to the global spread of rubber duckies after a spill in the North Pacific.

“There’s sort of this large ocean superhighway of ice that moves from the East Siberian Sea towards Fram Strait on the east side of Greenland,” Danielson said.

Danielson said that somewhere south of Iceland, the bottle probably drifted east and was caught by the North Atlantic Current, which carried it to its final destination: Shapinsay, one of the Orkney Islands, off the north coast of Scotland.

Discovery

There are no bowheads in Orkney, but the area is a popular whale watching spot for orcas. Julie and Dug Watkins – the couple who found George’s bottle – shared their discovery in a local Facebook group for whale enthusiasts. They learned that another Orkney resident knew George from helping with the whale census in Alaska, back in the 1980s.

“It’s just absolutely incredible that it should travel that far and not get broken or nothing else happened to it, but also end up on this beach, on this island, where people knew about him and respected his work and things,” Julie Watkins said. “It’s unbelievable almost, but it happened.”

The note in the bottle included George’s email address. The couple reached out, to no avail. Then they contacted the City of Utqagvik, which connected them with George’s widow, Cyd Hanns.

Hanns said she was glad the couple kept trying to reach out. She wrote to them about George’s life and research, as well as Alaska whaling traditions.

“I was happy-sad because he wasn’t here,” Hanns said. “He has so many friends around the world, and still making them.”

Julie Watkins’s husband Dug died unexpectedly a month after finding the bottle. The family sent his ashes out in a small burning boat from the same beach where the bottle washed up. Losing a loved one was a point of connection between Hanns and Watkins, who have stayed in touch over email.

And Hanns said the discovery brought her family closer together, three years after her husband’s death.

“It’s a story on the ocean currents and the way loved ones can surprise us even after they’re gone,” she said.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced in July a plan to reorganize the Department of Agriculture, citing the need to decrease spending and bureaucracy. That plan is not final, but the current proposal includes consolidating tribal relations programs and personnel, according to the memorandum of the decision.

Leaders of the First Alaskans Institute, one of the state’s largest Native advocacy organizations, said the reorganization could diminish tribal voices and harm regional agriculture and food security.

Last month, the statewide nonprofit submitted a comment to USDA about the plan asking the agency to consult with tribes.

“We’re calling on the USDA to honor its trust responsibility by engaging in formal government-to-government consultation with Alaska’s 229 federally recognized tribes, before finalizing its organizational plan,” the president of the First Alaskans Institute, Apagruk Roy Agloinga, said in an interview.

“Food security for Native communities, it’s not just a policy issue,” Agloinga added. “It’s really a matter of survival, cultural continuity and self-determination.”

Another major statewide organization, the Alaska Federation of Natives, also urged the USDA to hold a tribal consultation on its plans, stating that the public comment period does not meet the requirements for consultation with tribal governments.

The USDA Office of Tribal Relations was created in 2010, after tribal farmers argued in court that the department discriminated against them.

Tikaan Silas Galbreath, the chief operating officer of First Alaskans Institute, said that the USDA’s reorganization plan might move the Office of Tribal Relations down from the higher-up secretarial level of the department. He said the change could diminish tribal access to USDA programs.

“It needs to be at that secretarial level to really have the influence that is required to really provide the services to the tribes,” Galbreath said.

Another USDA change that the First Alaskans Institute is concerned about is the consolidation of the Natural Resource Conservation Service program, which includes relocating its offices out of Alaska. Galbreath said the program has been helping Alaska tribes manage land and water resources and access traditional foods.

Galbreath said that access to USDA programs, whether to advance tribal agriculture or reindeer herding, is especially important in light of the changing environment.

“The change in the migratory patterns and the decline for many of the species has raised the question for a lot of our communities of, ‘How do we continue to provide protein security for our tribal members?'” he said. “The USDA and the programs available through the USDA are some of the solutions that are being looked at by the tribes.”

USDA did not respond to the comment the First Alaskans Institute submitted last month. However, the department did respond to a request for comment from KNBA, calling the proposed plan a first step to “right-size USDA’s footprint.” It added that the agency’s critical functions would not be affected.

The department has extended the public comment period on reorganization to the end of September and encouraged sharing feedback by emailing reorganization@usda.gov.

A haunting crime story and an Alaska Native legend are at the center of a new documentary that will premiere on Hulu on Sept. 4.

“Blood & Myth” looks into a real-life crime case that happened in Kiana, in Northwest Alaska, over a decade ago.

“It’s all very much rooted in reality,” said James Dommek Jr., the executive producer of the new documentary. “Incredible story of survival and legends and violence and culture.”

Teddy Kyle Smith is an Iñupiaq actor from Kiana who starred in “On the Ice,” a 2011 drama about two Utqiagvik teenagers. In 2012, Alaska State Troopers were investigating the suspicious death of Smith’s mother when he fled to a cabin and had a violent encounter with two hunters. He was later convicted of attempted murder.

In court, Smith said that Iñukuns, or Little People, guided his actions.

Dommek has been intrigued by this incident for years. When he worked at KNBA in 2016, that case came to mind when a coworker asked him if he knew any Alaska stories that would make for a good podcast.

Dommek described Smith’s story in his 2019 bestselling audiobook, “Midnight Son.” The new Hulu documentary is a movie adaptation of the audiobook, where he is also a part of the narrative, trying to uncover what happened in Kiana.

Dommek grew up in Kotzebue hearing about Iñukuns, evil creatures in the high Arctic. They came up in local stories and in conversations with Dommek’s great grandfather, Paul Monroe, who was an Inupiaq storyteller known as Palangun. Dommek said that Iñukuns exist in various legends from Inuit groups across the globe – in Siberia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland.

“If all of us had the same story, and we’re also spread out, it might have an air of truth to it, and my great grandfather’s stories were no different,” he said. “That was one of the big draws to the story for me.”

In the film, Dommek said he also wanted to highlight the issue of justice in rural Alaska, where the state struggles to provide a consistent law enforcement presence.

“Blood & Myth” is a true crime documentary told through an Indigenous perspective, which is rare in today’s entertainment industry, Dommek said.

“There’s the type of story I wanted to see, and no one was making it,” he said. “Everyone else is invited to listen and watch, but at the end of the day, it’s something I made for me.”

With a few exceptions, most of the filming took place in Alaska, including Kotzebue and Kiana. Dommek said it was important for him to make the story look and feel authentic.

“I took my crew up to Kiana, skeleton crew – four wheelers, and boats and village dogs and all that,” he said. “I was like, ‘We’re going to do this, and I’m an Alaskan making an Alaskan story, we can’t fake this.'”

Dommek is also a musician who has played in such Alaska bands as Pamyua

and Medium Build. He has worked in film production, but being an executive producer in his own film is a first. He said he wondered if it was his story to tell but decided to do it after talking to his family and elders in his community. He said he wanted it to be a story about staying true to your culture.

“You pull back all the layers in this story, and at the real heart of the documentary, the main message is, don’t forget who you are,” he said. “Remembering your roots, where you come from, and what makes our people strong, and what has made us survive in a place as harsh as Alaska for this long.”

The film will be streamed on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ internationally.