NOAA saves rogue monk seal

Another unusual marine mammal story, a rogue male killing other seals. The wildlife biologist at Piedras Blancas thought the rookery might have such a seal killing pups a couple of years ago. A lot of otherwise healthy pups were dead on the beach for no apparent reason. He asked the docents to be alert for a male killing pups, but no one ever observed that.

I hope to visit UC Santa Cruz and see KE18 while he's here in California.

HONOLULU (AP) — The Hawaiian monk seal, the most endangered marine mammal in the United States, has a long list of threats — fishing nets, sharks and, particularly, humans. But for one group of seals, the biggest threat came from one of its own: a 400-pound brute named KE18 who killed two other seals and wounded at least 11, most of them helpless pups.

The Hawaiian monk seal is on course to disappear in 50 to 100 years, scientists say. But KE18 was en route to having his ticket punched much sooner due to his propensity for nudging his own species toward extinction.

"It's really disheartening when the species you're trying to protect is becoming the troublemaker," said Charles Littnan, the lead scientist for the Hawaiian monk seal research program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The female seal KE18 killed would have likely given birth to four or five pups, he said.
Authorities had planned the drastic step of euthanizing KE18. He was spared when the NOAA team that planned to put him down traveled to Kure Atoll, where he attacked most of his victims, but wasn't able to find him.

KE18 turned up at Midway Atoll, a 55-mile journey from Kure, where NOAA officials decided to save him. They captured the 9-year-old seal on a beach, loaded him on a Coast Guard plane, and flew him 1,400 miles south to Honolulu and a temporary home at Waikiki Aquarium.

Jeff Walters, NOAA's monk seal recovery coordinator, said KE18 will be used in research on monk seal eating habits and calorie consumption at the University of California-Santa Cruz, where he'll go later this month.

Monk seals have lived in the waters off the Hawaiian archipelago for millions of years. At one time, their population was estimated at 15,000. It's dropped dramatically in recent years, however, and now totals about 1,100. More than 80 percent live in a nature preserve among dozens of small atolls northwest of the main Hawaiian Islands.

The seal is an important part of Hawaii's history. They're called Ilio holo I ka uaua in the Hawaiian language, which means, "dog that runs in rough water." They are called "monk" seals because they are solitary — like monks — and the soft folds of fur around their necks look similar to the cowls worn by monks.

Stretching 7 feet, the seals are remarkable divers, plunging up to 500 feet to find food and remaining submerged as long as 20 minutes. While they spend most of their time at sea, they come ashore occasionally, notably to give birth. Monk seals don't react well to human contact — some mothers will abandon their offspring, which helps explain why the survival rate for pups has declined sharply as man has encroached on native habitats.

Sharks are another threat — they prey on pups. And commercial fishing has left more danger from old nets that can entangle and suffocate the seals.

KE18 became a concern in 2010, when Hawaiian monk seal research program workers saw him bully other seals at Kure. Last year he escalated his attacks, scratching, biting and holding other seals under water. Most of his victims were pups just weaned from their mothers.

"It was hard to break his attention when he was on top of a seal," Littnan said. Monk seal researchers at Kure tried to distract him by throwing chunks of coral in the water but failed. "They'd be yelling, and he would continue to hold pups under water or wrestle with them," Littnan said.

NOAA staff would scare KE18 away from one victim only to see him move down the beach and begin bullying another.

Ten of the 13 pups born at Kure last year had wounds from KE18. Scientists suspect him in two pup deaths. He also injured three juvenile seals.

NOAA officials aren't sure why KE18 did this. Because the attacks happened during the breeding season, and KE18 didn't have mates, there's a possibility he was acting out of misplaced breeding aggression. Since male monk seals don't generally become dominant until they're 14 or 15, the 9-year-old KE18 may have attacked vulnerable pups for years to come if not removed from the wild.
In extreme cases, NOAA will euthanize an aggressive seal. The last time that happened was 1991.

KE18 would have met the same fate if not for the fortuitous confluence of space opening at the aquarium and him swimming to Midway, a National Wildlife Refuge and former Navy base that's easy to reach because it's equipped with a runway.

Miyoko Sakashita, a lawyer for the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group that petitioned the government to expand critical habitat for monk seals, said these types of management actions may be necessary when one seal poses a risk to a population that can't afford to lose any individuals.

"I think this is really just a symptom of the overall problem with the monk seals edging their way toward extinction," Sakashita said.

Michael Hutchins, the executive director of the Wildlife Society, said wildlife managers are increasingly being forced to make difficult ethical decisions to protect species as humans encroach on wildlife habitat.

"Because of our own activities, we've driven many species to the brink of extinction," Hutchins said. "Emergency room ethics are what we are talking about here."

After he's finished in California, KE18 is expected to return to Hawaii and spend his days at Sea Life Park outside Honolulu, one of just four institutions authorized to house Hawaiian monk seals.
Meanwhile, he is eating 10 pounds of fish a day at Waikiki Aquarium and swimming around in his own pool. He's in quarantine, but for KE18, it was almost much worse.

Western gray whale moves to Mexico

Welcome Varvara!

 

By TIM JOHNSON of McClatchy Newspapers reports on an interesting marine mammal event. Perhaps she will pass Piedras Blancas on her migration north!

 

When scientists fired a cigar-sized satellite tag into the blubber of a western gray whale off Russia's Sakhalin Island in September, they expected to track her along Asia's Pacific shoreline down to the South China Sea.

The sudden travel bug that infected Varvara, the 9-year-old female now meandering in waters near Baja's Magdalena Bay, has deepened a mystery that has scientists the world over pondering what is happening to a tiny population of critically endangered western gray whales. Only 130 of the whales remain, feeding off of Sakhalin Island, not far from two offshore oil platforms.

In recent years, however, gray whales have been spotted far from their known migratory routes. One turned up in the Mediterranean off Israel, and a pair was seen in the Arctic's Laptev Sea.

Varvara's movements are sending a frisson through whaling circles.

"It's a scientific event - a big one," said Randall Reeves, a marine mammal expert who is a member of the global Western Gray Whale Advisory Panel, which met in Geneva earlier this week.

Varvara's movements have "demolished conventional wisdom," he said. "It's always been believed that gray whales are coastal migrating mammals."

To get to Mexico, Reeves said, Varvara had to cross the Okhotsk Sea off the Siberian coast, navigate up Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, strike out across the huge and deep Bering Sea far from any coast, and into Alaskan waters. Once there, the whale would have migrated to Baja along the North American shoreline.

"For all scientists interested in animal migration, we are following this pretty closely," Reeves said.
Gray whales once swam in both the North Pacific and North Atlantic oceans. Under intense whaling pressure - whale oil was then what petroleum is to the world today - they had disappeared from the North Atlantic by the early 1700s. Two centuries later, the Pacific population also grew endangered.

Good environmental practices helped rescue California gray whales, also called eastern Pacific gray whales, and they've returned to a healthy population of 18,000 to 20,000. They spend summers suctioning for small crustaceans in a shallow area of the Bering Sea and winters breeding near Baja.

But the western gray whale - which varies genetically from the California whale - remains besieged, migrating each year from Sakhalin Island south along coasts to unknown Asian breeding grounds.
A joint team of U.S. and Russian scientists began researching the Sakhalin population in 1995 and started to tag them in 2010 to learn their migration routes.

"Because their numbers are so low - 130 individuals is the estimate - it would be really important to find out where they are breeding to offer protection," said Bruce Mate, director of Oregon State University's Marine Mammal Institute and a member of the bi-national team.


The pressures on the western gray whales are great. Five have died in Japanese fishing nets in recent years. A 45-foot gray whale was found dead off China's Fujian province Nov. 5. The tiny population may have only 26 breeding age females. Varvara, born in 2003, is maturing into one of them.

"If we lose just one or two females every year, the population could become extinct. So just a small loss could have devastating effect," said Heather Sohl, a whale expert with WWF, the conservation group once known as the World Wildlife Fund.


The shallow feeding grounds off Sakhalin Island are threatened by gas and oil exploration. A third offshore platform is planned and will entail seismic testing.

"It's a very dangerous place to be a whale," said Stephen R. Palumbi, a marine ecologist at Stanford University. "If a whale population is stuck there, it's like being stuck in a very bad inner-city neighborhood."

That's why the discovery of Varvara off the coast of Baja has given whale experts new hope. Instead of facing doom in a poor habitat, the whales may be seeking ways to survive.


It's just the latest such indication.

In what Palumbi called a "totally wacky" sighting, experts spotted a gray whale off Israel's Herzliya Marina on May 8, 2010. They followed the whale for an hour and 10 minutes, documenting its condition. Twenty-two days later, the same whale was seen off Barcelona, Spain. Photographs of the whale's tail flukes showed identical pigmentation patterns in both cases, confirming it was the same mammal.

"We all got the email that this gray whale was spotted near Israel. The reaction was: 'You've got to be kidding!' What a bizarre place for it to be," Palumbi said.

Israeli scientists studied whether the whale was an errant California gray whale, a vagrant from the Sakhalin Island group or a miracle survivor of the once-extant north Atlantic population, none of which had been seen for 300 years.

The most likely explanation, they found, was that it was a California gray whale that had traveled for 100 days along the Eurasian coast in Arctic waters that have been increasingly ice-free in summer months because of global warming.

Then came further sightings, including one along that same Eurasian route in the Laptev Sea north of Russia. Mariners also believe they spotted a gray whale in the far north Atlantic.

"It would've gone through probably the Northwest Passage over the top of North America," Mate said. "So as there is less and less ice, there'll be more and more opportunities for that kind of exchange between ocean basins."

Whales undertake the longest migrations in the mammal kingdom, during which they barely eat, surviving on stored blubber for up to five months.

"You can't average four miles an hour with a body size like that and spend any time feeding," Mate said.

Mate and his colleagues at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Oregon are pioneers in satellite tracking of whales, moving beyond early experiments with glue and suction-cup devices to satellite-monitored radio tags fired from air guns.

The tags that scientists now inject into the backs of western gray whales send pulses for an average 123 days before they fail, Mate said.


The first evidence that western gray whales were migrating from Sakhalin to North America came in 2010, when scientists tagged a 13-year-old male they dubbed Flex. He was off the coast of Oregon when his tag's transmitter failed.

Varvara's journey of more than 7,000 miles this year suggests that Flex's migration was not an anomaly, and that western gray whales have far better navigation skills than previously understood.


By late January, Varvara had moved past this 27-mile long saltwater lagoon, which hosts the world's highest density of breeding whales. By early February, Mexican biologists determined that 1,620 whales had concentrated here.

While the lagoon is now a sanctuary for gray whales, it was once a place of slaughter. It is sometimes known in English as Scammon's Lagoon, named after whaling ship captain Charles Scammon, who harvested whales here in the 19th century.

The translation of the lagoon's Spanish name - Hare's Eye - gives a better indication of what a bloody and violent business whaling once was.

"It's called Hare's Eye Lagoon because a lot of whales were killed here," explained a tour boat captain, Leopoldo Lopez, noting that the water filled with blood. "That's how it got its name, you know, because when you see a hare's eye at night, it is red."

On a recent morning, the lagoon's still surface mirrored a leaden sky, and scores of gray whales with calves could be seen rising to the surface to breathe. The resonant bellow, varying in timbre, offered a maritime symphony. Whales approached a boat, swimming underneath, then popping their heads above water. Somewhere off the Baja coast, Varvara appeared to be mingling.

Whether Varvara traveled to Baja with a potential mate is not known.

"At (age) 9, we wouldn't expect her to have a calf this year, and I'm not even sure she'll be mating this year," Mate said.

Read more here: http://www.sanluisobispo.com/2012/02/16/1950633/scientists-see-big-scientific.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy

Photo is Exhibit A

By VIRGINIA HENNESSEY
Herald Salinas Bureau

Posted:   02/04/2012 03:04:24 PM PST

The Monterey Herald continues its coverage of the Nancy Black story:

Updated:   02/06/2012 07:45:17 AM PST

There it is, in sunbathed living color. Exhibit A.

Monterey Bay marine biologist Nancy Black hangs over the side of her inflatable research dinghy with one hand gripping a rope strung precariously through a piece of gray whale blubber.

It is a photograph that has Black, owner of Monterey Bay Whale Watch, in a lot of hot water. Black, a prominent yet controversial figure, contends she was securing a piece of a whale that had been killed by orcas so she could film them for research purposes.

Federal prosecutors say she was chumming for killer whales and a great piece of video, or "money shot."

The Monterey resident made her first appearance in U.S. District Court in San Jose on Thursday, pleading not guilty to two counts of violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act by feeding or attempting to feed the killer whales. She was also arraigned on two counts alleging she altered a video of a 2005 encounter with a humpback whale and lied about it to an investigator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

While the feeding charges have received more attention, the latter two are much more serious felonies that carry combined maximum sentences of 25 years in prison and $500,000 in fines. Federal prosecutors are also seeking the forfeiture of her rigid-hulled inflatable research vessel.

The charges date back to 2004 and 2005. The U.S. Attorney General's Office and NOAA declined comment on the indictment and the reasons for its delay.


Cousteau connection

The government's six-year investigation also targeted the Jean-Michel Cousteau Ocean Futures organization, which filmed the blubber exchange between Black and the killer whales for its PBS series, "Ocean Adventures." Cousteau is the son of famed oceanographer Jacques Cousteau.
An Internet search for Black and Cousteau reveals the incriminating photo and the connection between the marine biologists. The PBS website credits the photo to Matt Ferraro, a member of Cousteau's "X-Team." Black is also listed as a team member.

Additionally, renowned Monterey Bay marine photographer Chuck Davis, who served as director of photography on the 2006 episode "The Gray Whale Obstacle Course," confirmed, "We were filming that day." Davis said federal authorities have told him and others involved in the shoot not to talk about it.

In an email to The Herald, Ferraro said the rights for the photograph are not available and therefore he could not offer it to the newspaper.

It is unknown whether authorities are still considering charging anyone in the organization, but Rep. Sam Farr, D-Carmel, said the younger Cousteau asked him to intervene in the investigation. The congressman said last week the investigation involved the Cousteau team's conduct during filming of the orca attack, but he had no other details.

Cousteau did not respond to requests for comment. Black's attorney, Larry Biegel, said Cousteau has retained Phoenix attorney Lee Stein.
Stein's only response to an interview request was to say Cousteau is not Black's co-defendant.


Getting footage

The case spotlights troublesome gray areas that have developed in the symbiotic relationship between marine scientists who want the public educated and film crews who are making millions for television channels like National Geographic and Discovery. As one insider said, the public used to be thrilled with film of a killer whale breaching. Now it wants a front-row seat to thrashing, blood and the fear in a gray whale's eyes.

Getting that "money shot" sometimes crosses the line. In 2009, marine scientist Michael Domeier came under fire for hooking great white sharks off the Farallon Islands and bringing them on board for tagging. The research technique, which had been approved by the National Marine Fisheries Service, made for great TV footage until a shark swallowed the whale bait and Domeier's crew had to reach through its gills to cut the hook, leaving part of it in the injured shark.

In Black's case, she was trying to film the aftermath of an orca attack on a baby gray whale. According to the Justice Department, she enabled the feeding, potentially changing the orca's natural behavior.
Sitting in her rigid-hulled inflatable research vessel in choppy water, she poked a line through the thin, torn edge of a piece of blubber to keep it floating nearby. With a video camera on the end of a pole, she captured the underwater feeding when an orca snatched the food and shared it with others in the pod.

Black, who earned her master's degree at Moss Landing Marine Laboratory, told The Herald it was the first time she used the pole camera and the technique. It was also the first time any scientist captured orcas cooperating in their underwater feeding. The footage was a hit when she showed it later at a marine conference in Norway. But she says she never profited from it.

Black also denied that she had anything to do with the Cousteau mission that day. She remembered his team was on the water and that she went on board for an interview. She was not under contract as a team member, she said, was not paid and did not know anyone had taken a damning photo of her that was posted on the PBS website.


Charges harsh, some say

Talk of Black's indictment is swirling through the scientific community. Most refuse to speak openly because they are affiliated with NOAA and the National Marine Fisheries Service, which investigated Black. Privately, they say the charges are overkill and will blow a dedicated conservationist out of the water. They question the exorbitant expenditure of resources on a six-year investigation over what seems a technical violation during a noble exercise.

Black was a co-investigator for NOAA's National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle, studying the feeding habits of killer whales. It was her discovery in 2000 that orcas from the Pacific Northwest were migrating to Monterey Bay, likely because of declines in northern Chinook salmon, that led the government to declare them protected and begin the studies.

That research has stopped since armed agents came into her house with a search warrant in 2006, seizing computers and video footage. Black said it would be futile to try to renew her permit.
Government ties did not inhibit Ken Balcomb, executive director of the independent Center for Whale Research in Friday Harbor, Wash. Balcomb said he has seen government scientists use the same technique Black is accused of and "would probably do it myself."

"I think it's a gross miscarriage of justice," he said. "It's a little Gestapo for me."

Phil Clapham, leader of the cetacean program at the National Marine Mammal Laboratory, said Black is a dedicated, curious scientist.

"Nancy Black has been a valued researcher who has contributed valuable data and samples to our research program," he said.


Conduct on the bay

But Black is not admired or defended by all on Monterey Bay. Some say her aggressive practices during commercial whale-watching trips are what attracted law enforcement to begin with. They complain of Black cutting off other captains and speeding up on whales to give her passengers an up-close-and-personal experience.

Though Black is allowed to closely approach whales while doing research, she is prohibited to do so while on a commercial cruise.

It was an investigation into reports of that conduct that led to the more serious charges against her. NOAA investigator Roy Torres received reports that Black was harassing a humpback by approaching too closely.

Torres asked for video of that day's cruise. Federal prosecutors allege Black said the video was the original when in fact it had been edited. Black said the video was edited to remove "dead water shots" for her passengers, who can buy the video. She notes that she was never charged with harassing the whale, nor with making money from research.

Two former competitors, Heidi Tiura and Steph Dutton, former owners of Sanctuary Cruises, have been outspoken critics of Black.

Dutton recently said Black's unethical ocean conduct lured passengers, and financially lucrative film crews, away from his business because they felt Black would take them closer to the whales.
When passengers did opt for Sanctuary Cruises, Dutton said, they "would watch Nancy's boats crowd the whales, violating our right-of-way and that of the whales to get better looks. ... Many would ask us why we were holding back. In their eyes, it lessened our credibility."

In 2004, a month after the alleged blubber incident, Tiura wrote a letter to Julie Packard at the Monterey Bay Aquarium that indicated Black was already under investigation by the National Marine Fisheries Service for conduct by her and her operators.
"She admits one operator is a problem and yet he is still there and doing the same boneheaded stuff such as racing through a pod of orcas at the surface at high speed," Tiura wrote.


Chilling effect

Dorris Welch, a UC Santa Cruz marine biologist who now co-owns Sanctuary Cruises, said she has never witnessed Black act unethically but questioned the need to "chum" for killer whales.
Her partner, Mike Sack, said whale watch operators on the bay, always careful, are being particularly cautious around marine mammals since Black's indictment.

Some hoped the indictment would have a chilling effect on nature TV production crews as well.
"It's not so much what the public wants, it's what they're being spoon-fed," said one insider who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "It's what the production companies, National Geographic and the Discovery Channel are demanding so they can sell products to their advertisers.

"It's time for everybody to have the stones to say, 'No. I will not be a part of this.'"


Virginia Hennessey can be reached at 753-6751 or vhennessey@montereyherald.com.

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The charges
· Two counts of violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act by feeding or attempting to feed killer whales.
· Two counts alleging she altered a video of a 2005 encounter with a humpback whale and lied about it to an investigator for the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration.

Marine biologist charged with interfering with whale feeding

The Monterey Herald reports on charges against a marine biologist:

In her first interview since being indicted on federal charges, prominent Monterey Bay marine biologist Nancy Black adamantly denied feeding killer whales she was studying. Black said she was conducting important research for the same governmental agency that sought her prosecution. That research is now being hampered, she said, causing real damage to the orcas.

"I was right at the level of getting very important data about toxic chemicals in killer whales," she said. "They have hindered research on killer whales because of this."

The irony is further driven home, Black said, by the fact that it was her discovery that killer whales were migrating from the Pacific Northwest to Monterey Bay, likely because of a decline in northern chinook salmon, that led the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to begin its study of the animal.

Black, co-owner of Monterey Bay Whale Watch, said her separate research work has all but stopped since 2006, when 15 armed agents and police stormed into her house with a search warrant. The impact then and now has been devastating, she said.

"This is my whole life. This is not just some side thing that I do," an emotional Black said late Tuesday at her attorney's office in Monterey. "The stress has been tremendous for me. I've been to the doctor several times and the money is (costly). But I just can't plead to something I didn't do."

Black is charged with violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act by feeding

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killer whales on two occasions, in 2004 and 2005. Black said she merely positioned a piece of blubber from a dead gray whale calf closer to her research boat so she could film the orcas that killed it and were feeding.


"I am steadfast that I wasn't feeding the whales," she said.

The grand jury, impaneled by the U.S. Attorney General's Office, indicted her on two counts alleging she doctored a video of an encounter with a humpback whale during a commercial cruise in 2004, then lied about it.



Black notes that she is not charged with harassing any of the whales, something her permit allowed her to do. She said the video she provided to a NOAA investigator was edited for her passengers, who can buy it for subsequent viewing, and she denies she represented it as anything else.

Federal investigators and prosecutors have declined comment outside of the four-page indictment.
Black will be arraigned on the charges Thursday in U.S. District Court in San Jose. Her attorney, Larry Biegel, said he will plead not guilty and ask for her release without bail, noting she has remained available to the government since it began its investigation six years ago.

At the time, Black was allowed as a "co-investigator" to conduct biopsies of killer whales and observe their feeding patterns under the umbrella permit of the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle, a branch of NOAA, whose investigator later led the inquiry into Black. Biegel, who is representing Black with San Francisco attorney Mark Vermeulen, said they have no idea what prompted the investigation. Black said she thinks the agency believed she was selling video or photographs taken from her rigid-hulled inflatable research vessel.



It is illegal to profit from government-funded research. Black, whose work has been featured on National Geographic Channel and helped win an Emmy for BBC's "Blue Planet," said she has only been paid once for her ocean footage, and that was taken from her commercial whale-watching boat.

The only thing she did with footage of the conduct she is charged with was show it to a marine conference in Norway, she said. It was the first time orca feeding, most of which happens under water, had been captured on video.

"It's not like she was hiding it," Biegel said.

It was 2004, during a record-setting spring season of orca attacks on gray whales in Monterey Bay. The region is one of the best for orca research because the shore-hugging grays have to cross the deep Monterey Canyon, exposing them to their predators.

Black said she was trying out a pole camera for the first time. The tool allowed her to plunge a small camera into the murky water and display the video on a monitor on board.

A mother gray whale had lost her battle to protect her calf and orcas were shredding its blubber in the water. A piece floated near her boat in choppy waters. To keep it nearby, she said, she threaded a line through the thin blubber on the torn edge and left it floating. One end of the line remained in the boat.




A killer whale lunged up from beneath, took the blubber and disappeared below, where the camera captured it and other whales "sharing" their meal. Black said she tried the technique again in 2005, though no whale took the blubber.

Among its provisions, the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act prohibits interfering with feeding in a way that would alter an animal's normal behavior.

"I've seen this hundreds of times over 20 years," said Black. "I know what I did didn't alter their behavior at all. Feeding whales, to me, is that I went to Safeway and bought a whole bunch of blubber and started throwing it out there."

She bitterly recalled attending a November marine conference in Florida where a NOAA investigator displayed a poster of images captured from YouTube of people feeding dolphins. The investigator said she contacted the creators and told them to take down their posts.

"They got warnings," she said. "I feel I've done something horrible to the whales the way I've been treated. I'm not a criminal."


Virginia Hennessey can be reached at 753-6751 or vhennessey@montereyherald.com.