 |
| Photo by Flip Nicklin |
As I wrote a year ago, the value of
this kind of work is immeasurable. “You can count whales from the air, you can
count them from land, you can see what the herd is doing, but you don’t really
get an idea of what an individual does on a daily basis [without tagging
them],” said Jack Orr, the chief scientist in charge of the project and a
biologist with the Canada Department of Fisheries and Oceans. “These tags
provide us information on where they are geographically on the Earth, but we
also get an idea of how they use the water column. Tags will tell us how long a
whale is at a certain depth, and then we can set up dive profiles…Coupling this
with information on water depths and what animals use these depths – we know,
for instance, that turbot (Greenland halibut) and crustaceans live on the
bottom, we know that squid are pelagic so they’re in the water column – and
working with other data on ice and other environmental parameters, we can
determine what these animals are doing over the course of a year. It gives us
insights into not only its movements but also its behavior.”
The knowledge gained from this kind
of research is particularly useful to understanding population dynamics, which
plays an important role in appropriately managing the annual narwhal hunts
conducted by the local Inuit communities.
By tracking the movement of individual narwhals, scientists can learn
how many hunting villages they travel by during their migration, which gives
the researchers an idea of how susceptible the whales are to being killed. And this can affect the quotas the Canadian
government sets for how many narwhals can be hunted by each community.
Narwhal management and hunting
quotas continues to be a sticking point between Inuit hunting communities in the eastern
Canadian Arctic and wildlife managers.
The latest government plan is to drill holes at the base of every
narwhal tusk harvested and attach a permanent metal tag to it so the tusk can be tracked to
ensure the tusk isn’t sold illegally. The Inuit communities disagree with this
strategy, but it is an issue that doesn’t appear to be going away. Just this week, a U.S. appeals court upheld the conviction of an antiques dealer in Massachusetts who illegally sold
narwhal tusks and sperm whale teeth.
Hopefully, as researchers continue
this summer to tag and track narwhals, the scientists will gain enough
information to be able to manage the narwhal population to ensure their
long-term survival.
