Wildlife

A cruise line is apologizing to passengers who witnessed the killing of dozens of pilot whales near their docked ship this week in the Faroe Islands.

Passengers aboard the cruise ship Ambition, owned by the U.K.-based Ambassador Cruise Line, had just arrived Sunday in the port of Tórshavn in the Danish territory when they caught the spectacle, part of a long-standing and highly scrutinized local tradition.

Among those passengers were conservationists with ORCA, a marine life advocacy group that seeks to protect whales and dolphins in European waters. Since 2021, Ambassador has paid for ORCA staff to join their cruises in order to educate tourists on marine wildlife and collect data on the animals.

In an account shared by ORCA and confirmed by Ambassador, the conservationists said over 40 small boats and jet skis herded the whales to a beach where 150 people worked to haul the animals ashore with hooks and slaughter them with lances.

In total, the hunt lasted about 20 minutes, ORCA said. Some of the animals, which included nine calves, took over 30 seconds to die.

Ambassador Cruise Line said it was “incredibly disappointed” that the hunt unfolded near the ship and that it continues to “strongly object to this practice.” The company asks their guests not to support the hunters by purchasing local whale and dolphin meat.

“We fully appreciate that witnessing this local event would have been distressing for the majority of guests onboard,” Ambassador said in a statement to NPR. “Accordingly, we would like to sincerely apologise to them for any undue upset.”

A representative for the Faroe Islands government did not immediately respond to NPR’s request for comment on Sunday’s hunt.

Long-finned pilot whales, which are technically a species of dolphin, are a medium-sized marine mammal that dwells in the North Atlantic, known for their bulbous head and sickle-shaped flippers. They’re protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, but not currently listed as an endangered species.

The mammals live in social pods of up to 20 individuals, organized into a larger school of hundreds of animals — a social structure that makes them easy targets for whalers, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In the Faroe Islands, the hunting of pilot whales is known as the “grindadrap” or “grind.” The Faroese view the tradition as central to their cultural identity and a sustainable way to gather food, according to a local government website.

The government says the killing is not highly commercialized. Each catch is “distributed for free in the local community” but “in some supermarkets and on the dockside, whale meat and blubber is occasionally available for sale.”

Multiple hunts can occur throughout the year, and each is carried out by people with a required license and supervised by elected officials. Local legislation stipulates the killing must be carried out as “quickly and efficiently as possible.”

The government says the average catch is around 800 animals, an insignificant impact on the overall pilot whale population, which it says is around 778,000 animals.

But a record single-day killing of more than 1,400 white-sided dolphins in 2021 brought the practice into intensified scrutiny. The chairman of the Faroese Whalers Association told the BBC that the size of that killing was purely accidental.

That Sunday’s slaughter unfolded near the cruise ship made it seem as if the whalers were “flaunting the hunt and taunting the tourists,” many of whom were hoping to catch a glimpse of marine life in the wild, ORCA CEO Sally Hamilton said.

“It defies belief that the Faroese authorities allowed this activity to take place in clear sight of a cruise ship packed with passengers,” she wrote in a statement shared with NPR. “At some point, the Faroese authorities will have to decide if its marine life is a more attractive tourist proposition when it is alive than when it is being killed.”

The cruise ship was docked for a stop in Tórshavn, the main harbor of the 18-island territory between Iceland and the Shetland Islands. While the local government has invested more into its tourism sector, fishing and marine-related industries still remain the region’s top economic driver.

NOAA biologists are asking people to watch for two humpback whales that were seen entangled in fishing gear in the Juneau area on Monday. 

One of the whales, named Manunauna or Manu for short, was reported tangled in a crab pot line in Fritz Cove on Monday morning. NOAA biologist Sadie Wright said the agency is tracking that whale. 

“From the Coast Guard vessel, we were able to attach a satellite tag buoy,” she said. “If he slows down or appears to be showing any signs of distress, we can launch another response.”

Wright said the entanglement is life-threatening.

“It passes through the mouth and inhibits its ability to forage,” she said. 

Manu the whale was trailing two yellow buoys with a green buoy behind him. He was last tracked near Warm Springs Bay on Baranof Island, but Wright expects he will come back to the Juneau area. She said NOAA would like any photos or information people may have on Manu. 

The second unidentified whale was reported entangled in gillnet gear in Taku Inlet just before noon on Monday. Wright said NOAA is seeking any information on this whale if people see it. 

“Stay at least 100 yards away from the whale for the whale’s safety and for their own,” she said. “Boat propellers can get snagged up in the entangling materials that whales are dragging behind them. And that just makes a bad situation worse.”

To reduce the chance of entanglements, Wright recommends that people avoid using floating line.

NOAA Fisheries asks that people report sightings to the marine mammal hotline at (877) 925-7773, or to the U.S. Coast Guard on VHF Channel 16. NOAA asks that anyone who spots one of the whales not take any hands-on response actions.

A white raven has been turning heads around Kenai for the last month. Gregory Messimer, a local photographer, has been documenting the bird, and he says the white raven is both visually striking and culturally symbolic.

Messimer is an amateur photographer in Kenai, who has been photographing and keeping tabs on the bird for weeks.

He first saw it on June 16 in North Kenai, among a family of mostly black ravens.

“The parents in this group had seven chicks that made it, and one of its siblings has some white feathers on its chest, and one had reddish feathers on its neck and face,” Messimer said.

According to the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, the raven probably isn’t albino, a condition involving an absence of certain enzymes that create melanin, and results in a complete lack of that pigment. Instead, it’s what’s called leucistic, which means there’s a lack of pigment in some feathers due to an absence of cells that produce melanin.

Messimer said he took note, not just because of the bird’s aesthetic differences, but because the white raven has symbolic relevance in many religious traditions and mythologies.

“It’s an omen, or it’s a curse, or it’s a blessing, but mainly it’s ‘some sort of change is about in the world,’” he said. “Whether it’s good or bad depends on the tradition.”

In Greek mythology, the white raven is associated with the god Apollo. In Haida tradition in northwest Canada, a white raven helped bring the sun, moon and stars to earth, but turned black when it brought fire to humans.

Messimer said “white raven” is also an idiom.

“In Europe, it turns out, a ‘white raven’ is a saying for something that has a very low chance or an impossibility,” he said.

The Kenai National Wildlife Refuge posted about the bird on Facebook as sightings trickled in, and called it, “truly a once in a lifetime occurrence.” The refuge confirmed that the bird is leucistic, not albino. It has blue eyes instead of red, which would indicate albinism.

Messimer is worried about the prospects for the bird. He said the white coat makes the raven vulnerable because melanin provides structure to the feathers and skin. They’re also more susceptible to bacterial infections and to sunburns and cancers. He suspects the bird is unlikely to survive the winter.

“The white feathers don’t allow it to hold in heat, or absorb heat, so they’re reflective in the winter,” he said.

His hope, he said, is that the bird may be taken in by the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center near Girdwood, or the Alaska Raptor Center in Sitka. In the meantime, he’s keeping an eye out for the raven to snap more photos, and hoping this one is a good omen.

Scientists working off the coast of Costa Rica say they’ve discovered the world’s third known octopus nursery.

The international 18-person research team found the site nearly 2 miles below sea level and believe that in the process they may have also discovered a new species of Muusoctopus, a genus of small to medium sized octopus lacking an ink sack.

 

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“The discovery of a new active octopus nursery over 2,800 meters beneath the sea surface in Costa Rican waters proves there is still so much to learn about our Ocean,” Dr. Jyotika Virmani, executive director of the Schmidt Ocean Institute, said in a statement.

According to a press release, researchers witnessed Muusoctopus eggs hatch. They said it demonstrated that the area, known as the Dorado Outcrop, was hospitable to young octopuses.

When the Dorado Outcrop — an area roughly the size of a football field — was first discovered in 2013, researchers believed octopuses couldn’t grow there because they didn’t observe any developing embryos at the site.

Scientists said the discovery also indicated that some deep-sea octopus species brood their eggs in low-temperature hydrothermal vents, such as the one where the nursery was discovered, where fluid heated in the Earth’s crust is released on the seafloor — like hot springs.

The research vessel for the trip was provided by the Schmidt Ocean Institute, a nonprofit research organization founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy.

The trip was led by Beth Orcutt of the Maine-based Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences as well as Jorge Cortes of the University of Costa Rica.

According to the researchers, areas like the Dorado Outcrop are still vulnerable to human activities such as fishing, and some Costa Rican scientists on the trip were trying to discern if the underwater seamounts should be legally protected.

“The information, samples, and images are important to Costa Rica to show its richness and will be used for scientific studies, and outreach to raise awareness of what we have and why we should protect it,” Cortes said.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

A federal appeals panel issued a last-second ruling Wednesday that will allow this summer’s Southeast Alaska troll chinook salmon fishery to open as scheduled July 1 — reversing a lower court ruling that would have kept the $85 million industry off the water.

“It’s a major victory,” Alaska Fish and Game Commissioner Doug Vincent-Lang said in a brief phone interview Wednesday. “We can go fishing.”

The panel, in a five-page ruling, said that the entities defending the fishery — the Alaska Trollers Association, the state of Alaska and the National Marine Fisheries Service — met the legal standard required to grant what’s known as a “stay” of the lower court ruling.

The decision, the panel said, was based on the likelihood that those entities could show that “the certain and substantial impacts” of closing the harvest on the Alaska salmon fishing industry outweigh the “speculative environmental threats” posed by allowing the fishery to take place.

The Washington-based environmental group that sued in an effort to shut down the harvest, the Wild Fish Conservancy, argued that allowing the fishery to continue would harm a population of 73 endangered orca whales that live off the coast of Oregon, Washington and British Columbia.

The Southern Resident orcas depend on chinook salmon for most of their diet.

This article was originally published in Northern Journal, a newsletter from journalist Nathaniel Herz. Subscribe at this link.

More than 2,000 ticks collected over a decade in Alaska revealed a pattern: New tick species are being introduced to the state, often through dogs traveling from the south. They’re joining the handful of tick species endemic to the state, which are usually found on small mammals like rabbits.

The results are detailed in a new bulletin released by the Alaska Division of Public Health’s epidemiology section. While several non-native tick species that can spread disease have been imported to Alaska, none have yet established permanent populations in the state, the bulletin said. But the numbers show that “ongoing tick surveillance is critical for monitoring this dynamic situation,” said the bulletin, authored by Micah Hahn, an associate professor of environmental health at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

Most of the study’s data comes from a program called Submit-A-Tick, a joint project of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation’s Office of the State Veterinarian, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the University of Alaska. Through it, members of the public send ticks they find to the state veterinarian’s office.

Hahn, who works at UAA’s Institute for Circumpolar Health Studies and has become one of Alaska’s top tick experts, lead a project in Anchorage-area and Kenai Peninsula parks that used drag cloths and, at some sites, live-trapping of small mammals to find ticks in the wild. That data supplemented the records of ticks submitted from 2010 to 2022 by the public and veterinarians.

Pets have been the most common place for the discovery of ticks in Alaska, followed by wild animals, the bulletin said.

The imported ticks were largely the brown dog tick, with the scientific name Rhipicephalus sanguineus, which is the most widespread tick in the world, and the American dog tick, with the scientific name Dermacentor variabilis, that is also widespread. About half of the non-native ticks tracked through the Submit-A-Tick program were found on hosts — domestic animals or even people — who had traveled outside of Alaska in the prior two weeks. Some sources of introduction were unknown, however.

Of growing concern is the western black-legged tick, with the scientific name Ixodes pacificus, which is known to spread Lyme disease. A few specimens have been found through the Submit-A-Tick program, and the Alaska climate is becoming more hospitable to it. A recent UAA study coauthored by Hahn found that Southeast Alaska and parts of Southcentral Alaska already have conditions that would support the establishment of this tick species, and more areas of the state are expected to become suitable in the future.

The biggest year for tick reporting was four years ago, when there was a lot of publicity about the Submit-A-Tick program, Hahn said. The record-hot summer that year might have also played a role in the reporting, she said.

“I think that the bump in tick submissions in 2019 was related to outreach about the program that kicked off that year. But definitely weather plays a role because when it’s nice outside, people and pets are more likely to get outside and go hiking and encounter ticks,” she said by email.

Of the six species of ticks considered native to Alaska, five of those were found through the Submit-A-Tick program. Those ticks are known to infest small mammals like rabbits, squirrels and voles and are considered a low risk to humans. They can spread diseases in the wild population; one is tularemia, sometimes called “rabbit fever,” which can be acquired by pet dogs and cats – and, occasionally, people — that have contact with infested rabbits or other mammals. In recent years, signs of tularemia exposure have shown up among polar bears and other Arctic animals.

Additionally, Hahn and her colleagues conducted surveys in 2021 of veterinary clinics to see what staff members and pet owners knew about ticks. Participants knew about the Submit-A-Tick program, but there were otherwise some lapses in awareness or tick-safety practices, the survey found.

“Ticks are a dynamic situation in Alaska so for people who grew up here or for vets who have practiced in Alaska for a long time, it’s probably not something that they’ve ever thought about or had to deal with. As things are changing in Alaska, it is important for vets and pet owners to keep up to date with the latest information,” Hahn said by email.

Over the longer term, reports of ticks in Alaska have increased dramatically, according to Hahn’s research. From 1909 to 2019, there were 1,190 tick records in Alaska representing 4,588 individual ticks across 15 species, according to a previous study authored by Hahn, published in 2020. Most of those ticks were of the six species historically found in Alaska: Haemaphysalis leporispalustris, Ixodes angustus, Ixodes auritulus, Ixodes howelli, Ixodes signatus, and Ixodes uriae. However, over half of the tick records were collected in the last 10 years of that study period, she and her colleagues found.

Yet to be spotted in Alaska is one type of tick that is of most concern to some people: the moose-attacking winter tick. That tick, with the species name Dermacentor albipictus, has become notorious in New England and parts of Canada for impacts to moose.

They have been established for years just over Alaska’s eastern border. Climate change has contributed to the spread of winter ticks west and north.

For infested moose that scratch off their hair and appear white, there’s a commonly used term: ghost moose. The blood-sucking winter ticks degrade the health of moose, increasing physical stress and hampering their ability to forage for food. For moose calves, infestations can be fatal.

In Maine, for example, winter-tick infestations – which are increasing as the climate warms – are now the leading cause of moose calf deaths, according to that state’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. A department study of collared animals found that nearly 90% of the moose calves had died by the spring of 2022 after being infested with ticks. And a 2019 study cited tick-caused calf deaths as the reason for the overall moose population decline in northern New Hampshire and western Maine.

The winter tick was first discovered in Canada’s Yukon Territory in the 1990s. They have been found on animals within two Yukon elk herds, on moose and deer. Winter ticks have also been found on moose and caribou in Canada’s Northwest Territories.

This story originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.