Right Whales found in the Bering Sea:

Related Media Coverage

Content:
Telephone interviews
New Group of Endangered Whales Found - The Associated Press.
Rare right whales adopt new feeding site - The Seattle Times
Bering whales offer hope: ENDANGERED: Researchers try to protect habitat of right whales. - The Anchorage Daily News
Rare whales seen feeding in new spot - The Boston Globe

Telephone interviews with various media at NOAA's Fisheries headquarters/NW Fisheries Science Center on November 29, 2001

Brief description: Northwest Fisheries Science Center scientist, Cynthia Tynan, responded to various media calls today about her upcoming article relating to a new population of Right Whales in the Bering Sea. National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" interviewed Tynan, and plans to air the story tonight or tomorrow morning. In addition, she spoke with the Associated Press, National Geographic News, the Anchorage Daily News and the Daily Telegraph in London. Tynan's article comes out tomorrow in Science Magazine. Basically the article says, the most endangered whale population, the eastern North Pacific right whale has been discovered on the middle shelf of the southeastern Bering Sea. Compared with the 1940s to 1960s, this remnant population now occupies a different habitat and forages on different prey. We expect more media interest tomorrow when the magazine hits the news stands. For more information, contact Connie Barclay, NOAA Fisheries Public Affairs, Silver Spring (301)713-2370.

The National Geographic Channel will be airing the story on their channel either Dec. 3rd or 4th, as well.

New Group of Endangered Whales Found

WASHINGTON (AP) -- North Pacific right whales, the most endangered of the whale family, have been found feeding in a new area of the Bering Sea, giving scientists hope of finding ways to help the whales survive. "This is a very exciting discovery. ... These animals are on the brink of extinction," said Cynthia T. Tynan, an ocean biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In a study appearing Friday in the journal Science, Tynan and other researchers report that at least five North Pacific right whales are now regularly feeding in relatively shallow waters of the southeastern Bering Sea, far from their traditional feeding grounds. The animals also feeding on a species of crustacean that was previously not their prey, an additional encouraging sign, Tynan said. The whales feed by straining small animals, call zoo plankton, out of the sea. Tynan said the new group is feeding on a crustacean that is less than a one-tenth of an inch long and must be consumed in huge concentrations to nourish the whales.

Tynan, a researcher at NOAA's Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, said their population was decimated before commercial whaling was stopped in the 1960s. Some estimates suggest there are only 100 to 200 of the animals left. They have not been seen in their traditional feeding grounds for years, and Tynan said it has been more than a decade since a documented sighting of a North Pacific right whale calf. "This new site is the only place where we know we can go and find the North Pacific right whale," Tynan said.

She said the animals spend only their summers in the 150- to 240-foot deep shelf of the Bering Sea. The water surface freezes in the winter, forcing the whales to leave.

"We don't know where they go in the winter," she said. Tynan said it is not known if the remaining North Pacific right whales are able to reproduce enough to keep the species alive. "We would like there to be both healthy males and females in the population, but that has not been established," she said. When whaling was permitted, the right whale was considered a choice target because it was easier to take. The animal is slower than some other whales, has a good quality of oil and frequents coastal waters. Also, after the whale is harpooned, it tends to float, making it easier for the whalers to handle.

The right whale is 45 to 55 feet long and can weight up to 70 tons. Tynan said there are three types of related animals -- the North Atlantic, North Pacific and Southern Oceans right whales. The North Pacific is most endangered, but the North Atlantic is also in trouble, with only about 300 animals known to exist. The South Oceans right whale is recovering. Observers have reported sighting about 100 newborn calves among the southern right whale herds, said Tynan.

Rare right whales adopt new feeding site

On the Net: Science: Seattle Times/AP

Friday, November 30, 2001, 12:00 a.m. Pacific

By Paul Recer The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — North Pacific right whales, the most endangered of the whale family, have been found feeding in a new area of the Bering Sea, giving scientists hope of finding ways to help the whales survive.

"This is a very exciting discovery. ... These animals are on the brink of extinction," said Cynthia Tynan, a Seattle-based ocean biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

In a study appearing today in the journal Science, Tynan and other researchers report that at least five North Pacific right whales are feeding regularly in relatively shallow waters of the southeastern Bering Sea, far from traditional feeding grounds that stretch to the Sea of Okhotsk off eastern Russia.

The animals also are feeding on a species of crustacean that previously was not their prey, another encouraging sign, Tynan said.

The whales feed by straining small animals, call zooplankton, out of the sea. Tynan said the new group is feeding on a crustacean that is less than a one-tenth of an inch long and must be consumed in huge concentrations to nourish the whales.

Tynan, a researcher at NOAA's Northwest Fisheries Science Center, said their population was decimated before commercial whaling was stopped in the 1960s. Some estimates suggest there are 100 to 200 animals left. They have not been seen in traditional feeding grounds for years, and Tynan said it has been more than a decade since a documented sighting of a North Pacific right-whale calf.

"This new site is the only place where we know we can go and find the North Pacific right whale," Tynan said.

She said the animals spend only summers in the 150- to 240-foot-deep shelf of the Bering Sea. The water surface freezes in the winter, forcing the whales to leave.

"We don't know where they go in the winter," she said.

Tynan said it is not known whether the remaining North Pacific right whales are able to reproduce enough to keep the species alive.

"We would like there to be both healthy males and females in the population, but that has not been established," she said.

When whaling was permitted, the right whale was considered a choice target because it was easier to take. The animal is slower than other whales, has a good quality of oil and frequents coastal waters.

Also, after the whale is harpooned, it tends to float, making it easier for whalers to handle.

The right whale is 45 to 55 feet long and can weigh up to 70 tons. Tynan said there are three related species: the North Atlantic, North Pacific and Southern Oceans right whales.

The North Pacific right whale is most endangered, but the North Atlantic is also in trouble, with only about 300 animals known to exist.

The South Oceans right whale is recovering. Observers have reported sighting about 100 newborn calves among the southern-right-whale herds, Tynan said.

Bering whales offer hope:
ENDANGERED: Researchers try to protect habitat of right whales.

Email: Doug O'Harra
Phone: 907-257-4334.

ANCHORAGE DAILY NEWS

By Doug O'harra Anchorage Daily News

(Published: December 2, 2001)

They were thought the rarest whales in the world, virtually extinct across their former range in the North Pacific Ocean.

Yet as oceanographer Cynthia Tynan and others motored in a skiff across a glassy Bering Sea on a summer evening four years ago, they were amazed to find five and possibly seven northern right whales swimming near one another.

It was the largest group seen in half a century, and they had a lesson to teach.

"It's a day that stood out strong and clear in my mind and always will," Tynan said last week. "It was a wonderful experience."

The uncharacteristically calm sea allowed the scientists to take tissue samples with a crossbow and confirm that the whales were foraging about 300 miles from former summering grounds farther out on the Aleutian Chain. Attracted by a teeming bloom of tiny, fat-laden crustaceans, the animals had surfaced in shallower and warmer water east of the Pribilof Islands, in pursuit of an unexpected prey.

But right whales have an uncanny knack for finding rich concentrations of copepods across vast stretches of ocean, Tynan said, making them a sort of "bellwether" for changes in the marine ecosystem.

"They do it much better than we're able to as oceanographers," she said. "It's possible that they are able to target oceanographic features and processes that enhance their own forage. They can tell us a lot when we can find them."

Over the past five years, small groups of the planet's most endangered cetaceans have returned each July to the same southeastern Bering Sea waters just outside Bristol Bay, raising the possibility that researchers will now find ways to keep the stock from dying out.

Once thought to number 11,000 in the North Pacific, the slow-swimming right whales were decimated by whalers because they were easy to harpoon and floated after death. Though a few hundred may still summer in the Sea of Okhotsk in eastern Russia, the whales returning to Alaska waters probably number only in the tens.

"These animals are critically endangered," said Sue Moore, a whale specialist with the Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle, who coordinated research into the whales over the past few seasons.

The discovery of this remnant population -- first reported in 1996 and described in the current issue of Science by Tynan and two other authors -- has triggered a surge in research and a legal push to designate a broad stretch of the Bering Sea as habitat essential to their survival.

"There are just so few of them," Tynan said. "We have some hope and some chance that by learning why they are there in the summer, we may help protect them."

Using aircraft and research ships, biologists have annually plotted sightings, gathered photographs, taken tissue samples and made recordings of eerie calls with acoustic phones planted on the sea floor. At least 14 individual whales have been identified, several seen in more than one year, according to federal biologists. One device retrieved recently contained right whale calls recorded in October, suggesting that the animals stay even longer.

Next summer, federal biologists plan to conduct the broadest survey yet and want to begin tracking the whales by satellite to find where they go in winter, said Michael Payne, director of the protected resources division for the National Marine Fisheries Service in Alaska.

In another development that gives even more urgency to their plight, northern right whales in the North Pacific appear to be a separate species from right whales in the North Atlantic or the Southern Hemisphere. The findings, reported last year in the journal Molecular Biology, came after researchers analyzed DNA from 380 right whales, some of it extracted from century-old baleen recovered from whalers.

With all this new information, the Center for Biological Diversity last year petitioned the fisheries service to designate a swath of middle shelf waters in the Bering Sea as critical habitat, entitled to special scrutiny under the federal Endangered Species Act.

In the North Atlantic, where northern right whales number fewer than 300, critical habitat has already been identified to reduce the number of whales killed after getting struck by ships or tangled in fishing gear.

"We think the right whale is in a precarious situation in the Pacific," attorney Brent Plater said. "We're going to have to make changes in our day-to-day life in the Bering Sea. . . . In times of the year when we know right whales are present, extra precautions are going to have to be made."

In October, the center filed notice that it will sue in federal court if the agency doesn't make a final ruling within 60 days.

"We're still in the process of responding," said Payne, of the fisheries service. "We have to do it by mid-December, and we're going to make that deadline."

Growing to 56 feet long and weighing up to 60 tons, the docile right whales were almost wiped out by centuries of hunting that began in the 1100s in the Atlantic and the late 1500s in the Pacific. Yankee whalers named them the right whale because they could be killed and processed so efficiently.

The world harvest climaxed during the 19th century. In the North Pacific, whalers from Japan and New England slaughtered thousands from the Sea of Japan to the Gulf of Alaska. International protection came in 1935, though another 77 right whales may have been killed illegally by Soviet whalers in the western North Pacific through the early 1980s, according to a status report by the fisheries service.

After 1900, people rarely reported seeing the whales at all. Over 94 years, there were fewer than 60 sightings in the central and eastern North Pacific and the Bering Sea, according to the 2001 stock assessment. Then everything changed.

In 1996, a right whale was sighted off Maui in the Hawaiian Islands and another off the Baja Peninsula. That July, fisheries biologist Pam Goddard on a survey in the southeastern Bering Sea snapped a photo of four to five baleen whales, including a small animal that may have been a juvenile. Dave Rugh, of the marine mammal lab in Seattle, confirmed that they were the right whales, stunning cetacean biologists along the Pacific Rim.

Tynan, a biological oceanographer at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, then plotted Goddard's sighting with three others since 1985 in the Bering Sea and found a startling consistency.

They were all in water between 150 to 260 feet deep a few hundred miles southwest of Dillingham. Previously, right whales had summered in much deeper water north of Unalaska Island.

Along with biologists Robert Pitman and Richard Rowlett, Tynan joined a pollock survey cruise aboard the 215-foot NOAA ship Miller Freeman. They spent 15-hour days on the flying bridge, scanning the ocean for blows from whales rising to breathe. They found five to seven whales on July 20 and another couple of whales on July 21.

The water was especially warm that summer, Tynan said, and the whales had found a remarkably dense bloom of a certain species of copepods. Other species of whales were present in the general area, suggesting that they were all clued in to changing conditions.

"Right whales, like other rare species, are not necessarily to be found in the center of their historical distribution, but rather at the edge of their once broad range," Tynan wrote in the Nov. 30 issue of Science. "Endangered right whales may be among the best bellwethers of large ecosystem shifts."

Rare whales seen feeding in new spot

BOSTON GLOBE/ NEWSDAY/ O.C. REGISTER/ WASHINGTON POST/ AP

By Associated Press, 11/30/2001 WASHINGTON - North Pacific right whales, the most endangered of the whale family, have been found feeding in a new area of the Bering Sea, giving scientists hope of finding ways to help the whales survive.

''This is a very exciting discovery. ... These animals are on the brink of extinction,'' said Cynthia T. Tynan, an ocean biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In a study appearing today in the journal Science, Tynan and other researchers report that at least five North Pacific right whales are now regularly feeding in relatively shallow waters of the southeastern Bering Sea, far from their traditional feeding grounds.

The animals also are feeding on a species of crustacean that was previously not their prey, an additional encouraging sign, Tynan said.

The whales feed by straining small animals, called zooplankton, out of the sea. Tynan said the new group is feeding on a crustacean that is less than one-tenth of an inch long and must be consumed in huge concentrations to nourish the whales.

Tynan, a researcher at the administration's Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, said their population was decimated before commercial whaling was stopped in the 1960s. Some estimates suggest there are only 100 to 200 of the animals left. They have not been seen in their traditional feeding grounds for years, and Tynan said it has been more than a decade since a documented sighting of a North Pacific right whale calf.

''This new site is the only place where we know we can go and find the North Pacific right whale,'' Tynan said.

She said the animals spend only their summers in the 150- to 240-foot deep shelf of the Bering Sea. The water surface freezes in the winter, forcing the whales to leave.

''We don't know where they go in the winter,'' she said.

Tynan said it is not known if the remaining North Pacific right whales are able to reproduce enough to keep the species alive.

''We would like there to be both healthy males and females in the population, but that has not been established,'' she said.

When whaling was permitted, the right whale was considered a choice target because it was easier to take.

The right whale is 45 to 55 feet long and can weight up to 70 tons. Tynan said there are three types of related animals - the North Atlantic, North Pacific, and Southern Oceans right whale.