Climate Change

Federal scientists have launched a coordinated investigation to find the cause of this summer’s mysterious die-off of whales in the Gulf of Alaska, and they want the public’s help spotting and reporting stranded whales.

Thirty large dead whales have been observed floating or washed ashore in coastal Alaska since May. That’s over three times the average for Alaska waters.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s declaration Thursday of the whale die-offs as an unusual mortality event allows federal, state and tribal biologists to develop a coordinated response and investigation plan, and allows more access to financial, technical and logistical resources. There have been three such events declared for unusual marine mammal or whale deaths in Alaska in the last 15 years. Over 60 have been declared nationwide.

Eleven fin whales, 14 humpbacks, one gray whale and four unidentified whales have been observed stranded along the Gulf of Alaska coastline from Seward down to just past Cold Bay. Nearly half of the stranded whales were spotted just in the Kodiak Island area. It’s unknown if the increased mortality is caused by disease or a biotoxin from recent algae blooms.

Aleria Jensen with the NOAA Fisheries Stranding Network says it’s important that fishermen, boaters and beachcombers report a dead or live distressed whale as soon as possible. Contact a local stranding coordinator, the Marine Mammal Stranding Network Hotline at 877-925-7773 or the U.S. Coast Guard through VHF channel 16.

“We caution the public not to approach any animals that are sighted, or touch or handle in any way, or intervene,” Jensen says. “Most important thing is to report. Also, keep pets away from any animals that are sighted to avoid the risk of any transmission of harmful agents.”

Biologists have only been able to do a limited necropsy on one of the 30 whales so far. It may be a challenge, if not impossible, for biologists to access some of the stranding sites because of rugged geography. Bears or other predators feasting on a carcass may also make it unsafe, and high tides may carry beached carcasses away.

“One of the issues here is that a lot of these carcasses are seen floating and it might be someone who’s not very versed to determine whether a carcass is fresh or not,” says Kate Savage of NOAA Fisheries in Juneau. Savage says it’s important to sample the whale tissue, fat, eye liquid, bile, feces and urine as soon as possible.

“The condition of the carcass is paramount in taking samples,” Savage says. “And the fresher, the better. Once the tissue starts to degrade, the quality of the samples we can take and also the realm of samples we can take starts to decrease. From what I understand, the level of toxin that you would expect to find would also decrease as the carcass degrades.”

Savage and Jensen were part of a panel of American and Canadian scientists which fielded questions from the media Thursday about the investigation.

Paul Cottrell, Pacific marine mammal coordinator with the Canada Department of Fisheries and Oceans, says they’ve observed four humpbacks, a fin whale and a sperm whale that were stranded on the central and northern British Columbia coast. With the exception of the fin whale in May, all of the other strandings happened earlier this month.

“Most recently, we had a sperm whale off the west coast of Haida Gwaii, Graham Island, which is again like we see in Southeast Alaska. It’s a fairly isolated area,” Cottrell says. “It’s a carcass that was observed quite a while after it hit land because it was so isolated. So, it’s fairly decomposed.”

Results from two British Columbia whale necropsies are due back in a few weeks.

Teri Rowles, NOAA Fisheries lead marine mammal scientist and National Marine Mammal Stranding Network coordinator in Maryland, says the higher whale deaths appear limited to the far northeastern Pacific Ocean.

“In comparison to what is happening on west coast of the U.S., large whale strandings are not increased in the same time frame as they are increased locally in the western Gulf of Alaska,” Rowles says. “So, this is not a coast-wide event at this point.”

One leading theory is the whale deaths are due to biotoxins from algae blooms caused by this summer’s abnormally warm sea surface temperatures, but there’s no conclusive evidence yet. Some form of an infectious disease or a virus is also a possibility. But the panel said flatly that there is no evidence the whale mortality is due to recent military exercises in the Gulf of Alaska, and they referred reporters to contact a military spokesman on that issue.

Coming up with any answer as to the potential cause of death of the 30 whales may take months, if not years.

At a site near the Southwest Alaska village of Quinhagak archaeologists are racing against time to uncover Yup’ik artifacts before the effects of climate change cause them to erode into the sea. The old village continues to reveal artifacts that give a glimpse into the daily lives of Yup’ik people hundreds of years ago.

The crowning artifact found this season, says Rick Knecht, the lead archaeologist and a professor from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, is a mask half human, half walrus, in nearly perfect condition. It’s wrapped in several layers of plastic as Knecht keeps the mask damp and cool in a refrigerator at base camp.

“It’s got amazingly lifelike contours with the cheek bones, and the nose, and the forehead and so-on. Beautifully carved out of wood, and as you can see it’s got two little conical tusks that represent that transformation into a walrus. And these are in fact made out of walrus ivory. It’s got a little beard here, and half of it are human hairs and then on the other half are sea mammal hairs, maybe walrus whiskers,” said Knecht.

Knecht says the mask could have been a used by a Shaman. He unearthed it, about five miles outside Quinhagak, on the edge of the Bering Sea, where archaeologists have spent the six field seasons scraping dirt from the remains of a 500-year-old Alaska Native sod house. Today’s discovery of a wooden bowl gives another clue about how Yup’ik people lived.

“On the bottom of the bentwood bowl is an ownership mark left by the person who carved that and these ownership marks were inherited between families. We have about six or seven ownership marks we see consistently throughout this site, which we believe was a very large sod house divided up into compartments which were domestic spaces for women and children,” said Knecht.

His team has found tens of thousands of household items, jewelry and weapons, among other things. The dig is composed of what’s left of an entire village at the site of the ancient community of Arolik.

The objects look much younger than the centuries they’ve endured. That’s because they’ve been encased in permafrost. Wood and leather items can survive for hundreds of years. The oldest objects date as far back as seven hundred years.

Unseasonably warm temperatures at the dig site– nearly 80 degrees- create another set of variables for the crew to deal with. Conditions that Knecht say are driving the crew to work as fast as possible before more washes away.

In the early 1600s, right around the time that Shakespeare was publishing plays and poems in England, Knecht says, these people were crafting art too: carving intricate ivory jewelry and weaving baskets. Then, in the middle of the 17^th Century, says Knecht, their communal, sod house was attacked and burned.

Carlotta Hillerdal is a co-investigator with Knecht on the project. Back at the dig, she points to a burnt orange streak running along the dark soil of the dig’s dirt wall.

“This site was abandoned around 1640. So that’s where we have the kind of orange and black soil that you see in the wall over there that we dug. That’s the roof of the last phase of the structure that stood here that was burnt down and abandoned,” said Hillerdal.

The evidence at the site corresponds with local Yup’ik lore about the ‘bow and arrow wars,’ a time of fighting between tribes during an earlier climate change that strained resources.

Those are stories that Yup’ik elder Annie Cleveland knows. She says, when she was a girl, she remembers walking on the beach just outside of her village and finding old spears and human remains along the shore.

“When my grandmother and I used to walk down the beach to get some driftwood or pick berries we used to find spear-anek (spears) and maybe a human bone and skull and we used to put the bones back up there and dig a little bit and cover them,” said Cleveland.

That spot where she and her grandmother kept reburying things has turned into the dig called Nunalleq, meaning ‘old village.’ Cleveland says the project is bringing to life history for Yup’ik people in her village and giving them a sense of pride. The Native corporation in Quinhagak eventually wants to develop ecotourism around the site, but rapid erosion has made getting artifacts out the priority.

As they dig, researchers are finding that the village is larger than expected. With the new discoveries they’ve tacked on another season of fieldwork to unearth more history before it’s too late.

The archaeologists will ship the artifacts to Scotland for study and preservation before they return them to the region. Tribal leaders say they will eventually display them either in Bethel or Quinhagak.

Hundreds of dead herring washed up on Front Beach in downtown Unalaska on Tuesday.

“Hundreds of herring floating in the water,” Caleb Livingston, who lives nearby, said as he was walking his dog Hazel on the beach. “But what really got my attention was the few that drifted on the beach were not being eaten by the eagles, or seagulls or terns.”

Scientists have been receiving reports of dead and dying whales, birds and the small fish known as sand lance in the Aleutian Islands.

A dead Steller’s sea lion washed ashore in Unalaska in July with no wounds or other obvious causes of death.

Researchers think the killer might be toxic algae proliferating in unusually warm ocean waters.

Mussels taken from two different bays in Unalaska this spring have had levels of the toxin that causes paralytic shellfish poisoning two to four times higher than the level considered safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Livingston said he doesn’t think toxic algae killed the herring he saw on Front Beach.

“I’m guessing that somebody shoveled them off a boat,” he said.

Herring are used as bait by crabbers and longliners.

“Boats shouldn’t do that in close. If they’re going to get rid of this stuff, they should do it further out,” Livingston said. “It’s probably not that harmful, other than critters like Hazel gobbling on it, but it is a form of pollution.”

Scientist Melissa Good with University of Alaska Fairbanks agreed, after a quick bit of beach forensics, that these dead fish were probably dumped in the water.

She said the herring had lost their scales, suggesting the fish had been poured through a chute en masse.

“Their fins are deteriorated while their eyes are intact,” Good said. “I think it’s probably bait fish that got dumped.”

Even so, Good said she would send herring that she and Livingston collected on the beach to an Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation lab for analysis.

This spring, Good collected mussels from Captains Bay and Summer Bay in Unalaska to see if they had the toxin that causes paralytic shellfish poisoning.

She just got the results back: Mussels had up to 3.3 parts per million of the potent PSP toxin. That’s four times higher than the FDA’s 0.8 parts-per-million limit.

“Anything above that is unsafe to eat,” Good said.

“I would suggest people take caution and probably not harvest mussels or any other clams or bivalves within the Unalaska area because we are seeing high toxin levels for the previous spring months,” she said. “It’s likely these levels are higher now, after the summer algal blooms.”

In an email, Bruce Wright with the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association said butter clams tested in June at Sand Point, in the Shumagin Islands, just east of the Aleutians, showed even higher levels of the toxin.

One of the largest algal blooms ever recorded has been spreading throughout the Northeast Pacific Ocean, from California to Alaska. Scientists believe a giant blob of warm water is fueling the harmful algal bloom.