rescuing the RIGHT

10.17.2000 00:05
'Whale at 3 o'clock!': By air, crews guard the giants of the sea

By PETER LORD
Journal staff writer

ABOVE THE ATLANTIC

"Holy cow! Another humpback!"

The shout blasts through the headsets, overcoming the engines' roar. The airplane flips on its side and spirals toward the water. Two pilots up front, four spotters in back, and a couple of journalists -- all slam onto their sides and peer out windows for the whale.

Until this moment, it's been a peaceful ride. The twin-engine plane sweeps back and forth over the seas southeast of Cape Cod. It's a mild day in May and the seas are calm, so a good time for spotting whales. This team of federal observers is looking for North Atlantic right whales -- a highly endangered species -- so that it can warn ships to steer clear.

The team members take a close look at every mammal they spot, then -- because of the engines' noise -- report to each other over the microphones and headsets. They see a lot.

The action comes in spurts.

"I've got a bunch of animals at ten o'clock, and a bunch at eleven, and a blow at one o'clock," comes a shout late in the morning.

The engines roar even louder as the plane twists down toward the water.

"Forty-five lags [white-sided dolphins] on the left. Twenty-five more lags."

"Whale at three o'clock!"

"Sixty more lags."

"Five humpbacks over here -- they're bubble-feeding!"

Huge turquoise circles erupt in the sea: it's the humpbacks blowing bubbles in order to herd fish. Then the whales' great brown bodies lunge through the bubble circles as they gobble their prey.

Each new whale sighting prompts the pilots to swing the plane down toward the animals. During an aerial dive, all you can see out the side windows is ocean -- furiously rushing up at you. The engines bellow, the stall-warning horn bleats, and voices shout over the headsets. The passengers grip their seats to keep from being flung to the floor.

It's like a dogfight. For 15 minutes, the crew shouts out sightings and the plane spins and dives and climbs. But the only shooting is through the long camera lens wielded by a spotter.

"Talk to me!" yells the co-pilot after losing the whales.

"A humpy! Down here."

Another dive.

SCIENTISTS have been observing, listening to, and counting North Atlantic right whales for years. But now, at a mere 300-some animals, these whales face probable extinction.

Recently, the number of births has plummeted; the number of accidental deaths -- from entangling fishing gear and strikes by ships -- has increased; and environmental activists have filed law suits for expanded conservation measures. So programs to study and protect the last remaining North Atlantic rights have proliferated.

Two years ago, Congress sharply increased the National Marine Fisheries Service's budget for right-whale work to $1 million. Last fall, the figure went up to $4.1 million, and for next year Congress is talking about $5.1 million.

This year, the Fisheries Service plans to spend $750,000 researching ways to modify fishing gear so that entangled whales will be able to break away from it. A total of $1.1 million is earmarked for early-warning systems to reduce the number of whales hit by ships; $600,000 to monitor the whales' habitat and population; and another $1.1 million for tagging and following individual whales, and for research into their reproduction.

Last month in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the Canadian government announced grants of $371,000 for projects to develop sonar-warning devices for ships, breakaway fishing gear, and studies of possible rerouting of the shipping lanes in the Bay of Fundy -- where the right whales spend much of their time. This work will largely occur in partnership with East Coast Ecosystems, the Nova Scotia - based organization run by whale activist Deborah Tobin.

Much of the U.S. work is done by scientists at the New England Aquarium who have been studying right whales for 18 years.

The Aquarium maintains more than 100,000 photographs of right whales in a catalogue that, through the white growths on the whales' faces (callosities), allows precise identification.

The Aquarium's staff also conducts aerial surveys over the whales' calving grounds, off the coasts of Florida and Georgia, each winter -- generating information that allows ships in the South to steer clear of the whales. And researchers spend much of the summer in the Bay of Fundy, monitoring the whales' seasonal stay.

One of their less glamorous research tasks involves following the whales with nets to collect their feces.

"We look for hormone levels," says Amy Knowlton, an Aquarium scientist. "It tells us if they are pregnant. Reproduction is such an issue now -- we see a lot of animals who have had calves but aren't pregnant now. Why?"

In a similar effort, scientists take skin samples by firing tethered darts into the whales with crossbows. The dart excises a slug of skin the size of a pencil eraser; the sample allows DNA analysis that determines the whale's sex. "Sometimes they flinch," says Knowlton of the sampling. "Often they just keep going."

A scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, on Cape Cod, goes up to whales with a sonagraphic device on the end of a pole to measure the animals' blubber -- to find out if the whales are getting enough to eat.

The University of Rhode Island's Prof. Robert Kenney maintains the data collected by the various right-whale researchers, and serves as a key member of the consortium of institutions that conduct the leading studies of the right whale.

Another URI professor, James Miller, is developing a sonar device to alert ships when large objects such as whales lie ahead of them.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare is teaching harbor pilots how to steer entering and departing ships away from whales, and is testing devices that detect whale sounds, which may in future serve to warn skippers of the animals' presence.

Scientists at the Center for Coastal Studies, in Provincetown, are concentrating on habitat studies. Has something happened to the populations of the tiny copepods that are the whale's primary food?

Of all these efforts in behalf of the whales, the researchers agree that top priority goes to somehow preventing their entanglement in fishing gear and their being hit by ships.

ON MAY 4, just before the government survey plane departs from the Coast Guard Air Station on Cape Cod (near Otis Air Force Base), six F-15 fighter planes blast off -- generating so much thrust that they soar nearly vertically, and so much noise that no one even tries to speak.

The survey plane, a De Havilland Twin Otter, will fly at a more sedate pace, keeping to about 100 knots and about 750 feet over the ocean -- perfect for whale watching.

The pilots, Mark Moran and John Longenecker, are lieutenants in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration -- NOAA. This arm of the Commerce Department is one of the government's key science agencies. It forecasts the weather, monitors the climate, regulates offshore fishing, creates nautical charts, and works to protect whales and other marine mammals.

Based in Tampa, Fla., the two pilots do research flights all over the country. When not looking for whales, they've been known to collect air samples at 100 feet over Iowa farm fields.

Sitting just behind them on the plane today are whale "spotters" Shannon Rankin and Heather Chichester. They look for whales through windows that "bubble" out from the plane's skin: with their heads protruding beyond the plane, the spotters can see ahead, behind, and straight down.

In back of Rankin and Chichester, Michael Levine writes on a notebook computer propped on a 150-gallon auxiliary fuel tank -- installed in the cabin to allow the plane increased range. In the rear there's a curtain and a tube leading outside: the plane's urinal.

The three spotters wear jeans and T-shirts and talk about music and eating -- much like any other college students. But these students share a particular passion.

As Chichester puts it, she knew she was "in trouble" when she recently dreamed about a whale with fishing gear wrapped around its head.

The student spotters' boss, Patricia Gerrior, watches out a back window of the plane. Before her federal assignment to whale surveys, she served as coordinator of the Northeast stranding network for marine mammals and sea turtles. Before that, she spent years as an observer on commercial fishing boats working from Maine to Virginia.

During today's flight, the crew will check on two dead whales (a sperm and a fin), hundreds of healthy dolphins, and dozens of energetic fins and humpbacks. The plane cover so much distance that the pilots will debate whether to veer over to Nova Scotia or Maine to get enough fuel to return to Cape Cod. (They end up getting gas at Bar Harbor.)

Three times during this survey, the plane will pass over hot spots of whales -- sparking explosions of activity by the crew.

DEPARTING from Cape Cod, the survey plane passes over sandbars near Muskeget Island and Nantucket so thick with seals they look like teenage sunbathers on Rhode Island's Scarborough Beach.

The morning gets off to a worrisome start when a Coast Guard jet pilot calls in a dead whale.

Soon the spotters see a mile-long disturbance in the flat waters off Nantucket.

It is shaped like a Y. At the Y 's tail shimmers a large slab of something white.

The plane banks sharply.

Rankin unscrews a back window and aims her telephoto lens.

Voices get increasingly tense as the plane closes in and some kind of large whale is discerned floating below.

The spotters quickly agree it is a sperm whale -- at about 60 feet, the species is slightly larger than the right whale. Sea gulls cover the body, pecking away. The mammal's lower jaw hangs open. It is just bone -- the flesh has been ripped away.

A slick of whale oil curls from the body.

It's an ugly sight. The one consolation is that it's not a right whale, a species in far greater danger of extinction. You can feel the crew's relief.

THE PLANE TURNS and begins flying a grid pattern across the shipping lane that goes around Cape Cod to Boston. The pattern is designed to spot any whale in the path of a ship.

The plane runs precise lines, 30 miles long and 1 mile apart. NOAA started flying these whale surveys in 1997 -- it had to pull a program together quickly in response to a lawsuit from an environmental activist.

Soon the plane passes over a fin whale cruising just beneath the water's surface. It is so narrow and long -- as much as 79 feet -- the animal looks like a giant torpedo.

Then the spotters see a humpback and her baby. They swim side by side. Their white flippers make them easy to identify.

Another fin whale passes below, and an enormous mustard-colored cloud stains the water behind it.

"We've got a fin pooping here," someone shouts.

Then, for a while, all is quiet.

EARLY IN THE afternoon, someone sights something up ahead.

"Yeah, I got a blow! Come on, baby -- come on!"

"There he is," says Pat Gerrior, the chief spotter. "See that blow? He's a big ol' boy."

You can identify a whale by its "blow," the blast of vapor that leaves the animal as it exhales. Humpbacks create a bushy blow, about 30 feet high. Right whales create a V -shaped blow, about 16 feet high; that of the fin whales is higher and narrower.

This whale is big, but it turns out to be just another fin whale.

Although listed as endangered, there are some 35,000 fin whales in the North Atlantic. Humpbacks are also endangered, with 8,000 to 10,000 in this ocean. In stark contrast, the 300-some remaining North Atlantic rights hang truly on the edge.

Suddenly, 21 right whales are reported swimming 30 miles to the north. Lieutenant Moran changes course to look for them.

Soon, he sees something:

"There it is! Two o'clock -- about a mile out. I got a blow!"

"Did you see that breach?" yells a spotter. "He was way out of the water."

"Two fins -- one blow," yells another.

"I got a humpback on the right," yells someone else.

The plane dives right, then swerves left. The stall-warning horn blares.

"Another fin whale."

"More blows on the nose."

"I have a fin at ten and a breach at eight."

"Twenty-two lags on this side."

A turquoise circle of bubbles appears -- another of the humpbacks' fish herdings. Above the circle flaps a canopy of hungry birds.

"Owaa. . . !" exclaims a spotter.

Bubble circles and humpbacks appear everywhere. The sea seems to be boiling.

"Four on the left."

"Five on the right."

A big humpback emerges -- "Oh, yeah, he's munching down big-time!"

"Six more humpbacks on the right!"

Then it's quiet again.

NOW THE PILOT sees something else.

"Oh yeah, we got a whale. "

Moran slows the plane and circles.

"That's a full body breach!" he shouts.

"Man, that was full air -- he was completely out of the water!"

As the plane draws closer, Moran changes his opinion. He says it's one enormous tail rising from and slapping down on the water.

"That's a right whale!" says someone. "He's waving to us!"

Then the whale sinks into the deep.

But the spotters have been able to make out its telltale callosities: a long narrow patch of white down the middle of its black head, with symmetrical white circles on either side.

"Not too many people have seen those things," someone says.

INDEED.

During the nine-hour survey flight, the spotters record 626 dolphins, 504 seals, 50 humpbacks, 27 fin whales, 10 pilot whales, and 5 minkes.

But only this one North Atlantic right whale.