Tusk export ban lifted, issues remain

The Canadian government announced last week that it has lifted the ban on the export of narwhal tusks that it enacted in 2010 to protect the population of narwhals living in the eastern Canadian Arctic.  Seventeen narwhal hunting communities had been affected by the ban, and all but one – Grise Fjord, which has no known narwhals living in its vicinity – can resume exporting the tusks.

Photo by Paul Nicklen

            With a population of about 80,000 narwhals in the region and annual hunting quotas of just 700 animals, hunting by the Inuit communities should not be causing a decline in the narwhal populations in the area.  But government biologists were concerned enough about hunting pressures to enact the ban, so there are probably other issues at play.  One issue that should be in play but doesn’t appear to have been included in the negotiations to lift the ban is the issue of those narwhals that are “struck and lost.”  Because narwhals are known to sink when they die, Canadian narwhal hunters using rifles to hunt the whales are known to kill far more narwhals than they recover. And those that are struck and lost are not counted toward the quota.

An article in National Geographic magazine in 2007 by photographer Paul Nicklen, who grew up among the Inuit on Baffin Island, graphically illustrates the problem and suggests that hunting practices may need to be reviewed and recordkeeping expanded.  He wrote that during one 12 hour span, he counted 109 rifle shots but just nine narwhals were recovered.  One hunter reported that he killed seven narwhals, all of which sank.  “This was not the first time I had heard reports of many narwhals being shot but few landed.  Just weeks earlier, a man I know to be a skillful hunter confided that he had killed 14 narwhals the previous year but managed to land only one… So much ivory rests on the seafloor, said one hunter, that a salvager could make a fortune,” wrote Nicklen. 

At the very least, Nicklen’s observation suggests that wildlife managers should be paying much closer attention to narwhal hunting and, rather than banning the export of tusks should perhaps lower the quotas until a better system can be developed for accurately tracking the number of narwhals killed by hunters. 

There are plenty of arguments that have been made to eliminate any harvest of narwhals in Canada – including a lack of confidence in the government’s narwhal population estimates, the unfair advantage that hunters with rifles have over the defenseless animals, Canada’s unwillingness to follow the recommendations of the International Whaling Commission, and the belief, outlined in the recently drafted Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans, that whales have complex minds and societies and should be treated more like people than animals. Having spent time among the Inuit and knowing the importance narwhals play in their culture and health and subsistence, I am not ready to argue that hunting should be banned entirely. But I am convinced that the way it is taking place in Canada today is unsustainable and should be thoroughly reassessed.

Narwhals in temperate latitudes is ancient history

            Speculation that a dead narwhal had washed ashore last month in Ireland, a thousand miles from its normal range, got me thinking about the whale’s evolution and ancient range.  Although it turns out that the Ireland whale was misidentified and was actually a long-finned pilot whale, Ireland had been part of the narwhal’s range many thousands of years ago.

The line of evolutionary development that led to narwhals and the rest of today’s whales – and to humans as well – can be traced back to the Cretaceous and the carnivorous land mammals from which they descended. The branch that became whales follows that of the artiodactyls, hoofed mammals like antelopes and camels, as well as the hippopotamus, the whales’ nearest living relative on land.  The discovery in 1978 of a 52-million year old skull of what became known as Pakicetus was found to have features that showed a transition between terrestrial mammals and aquatic animals, including modifications that allowed for directional hearing under water, one of the first hints that mammals were returning to the sea.  But there were numerous additional steps before the first true whales emerged.

Narwhal fluke, by Paul Nicklen

            An amphibious animal called Ambulocetus, with hind feet clearly adapted for swimming, followed Pakicetus, and later still came Rhodocetus, which had additional adaptations for a marine lifestyle, including legs disengaged from its pelvis.  By the Eocene, about 40 million years ago, Basilosaurus emerged as a fully adapted marine mammal, with a streamlined body, paddle-like flippers, a strong whale-like tail, and the remnants of hind limbs that soon would disappear.  Other physiological changes took place along the way as well, including the relocation of the nostrils from the snout to the top of the head, the addition of an insulating layer of blubber, and changes in the circulatory system for the management of oxygen and for withstanding the pressures encountered at great depths.

            The two groups of modern cetaceans, the toothed whales and baleen whales, descended from a third group, the Archaeocetes, which disappeared about 30 million years ago.  It was just 500,000 years ago that narwhals evolved as a species, sometime in the late Pleistocene, about the same time that polar bears diverged from brown bears and the period when many large mammals and birds evolved and went extinct.  It was also a time when great changes in climate occurred.  While always believed to be an Arctic species, the range of the narwhal expanded and contracted over the millennia as variations in climate dictated.  During the last glaciations about 50,000 years ago, when ice extended as far south as England, narwhals were forced southward.  Fossils of the whales have been found there, along the coast of Norfolk.  When the glaciers began their retreat, narwhals followed them north again, with some traveling to the east of Greenland and others to the west.  That was the last time that narwhals from West Greenland and Canada came into contact with narwhals from East Greenland.  The 10,000 year separation of the two populations has led to genetic differences between them, a signal that evolutionary changes are still taking place, changes that one day far in the future could result in two distinct species of narwhals.  If they last that long.

Ancient and Exaggerated: Narwhals through History

          A while back I spent several days at the New Bedford Whaling Museum research library, where I uncovered some of the earliest known writings about narwhals. And last week I finally received some scanned images from the librarian of what early explorers believed narwhals looked like. The oldest volumes, like those by Swedish writer Olaus Magnus in 1555 and naturalist Konrad Gesner in 1558, written entirely in Latin, included woodcut prints illustrating what they identified as Monocerote or Monocerotis, an early variation on today’s taxonomical identifier, Monodon monoceros.  Next to an illustration of a sawfish – which several authors apparently believed were closely related to narwhals – Magnus showed a fish-like creature with a short, thick horn emerging from its forehead. He described it as “a sea-monster that has in its brow a very large horn wherewith it can pierce and wreck vessels and destroy many men.” Gesner’s narwhal, depicted with just its head emerging from the water, looked more like an alligator, with a long snout and abundant teeth, large dog-like eyes and, like Magnus, a horn sticking straight up from the top of its head. 

Surgeon Ambrose Paré, in 1582, writing in French about unicorns, described a sea unicorn “with a horn on his forehead like a saw, three feet long and a half, and four inches wide, with its two peaks very acute.”  The accompanying lithographic illustration featured a monstrous creature labeled Vletif with a long, scaly body, a mermaid tail, two pairs of pectoral fins that looked to me like dragon wings, a wolf-like face and teeth, and a horn like the rostrum of a sawfish rising from the top of its head. It exhibited an angry look as hunters poked at it from land while whaling ships sailed by in the distance. Theologian Isaac de La Peyrère in Relation du Groenland (1663) includes three excellent views of a narwhal skull alongside an illustration of a narwhal looking more like a fish than a whale but with a bear-like snout and its tusk growing from its nose. It is clear that he had access to narwhal skulls and tusks from which to create accurate illustrations, but he had not been able to study complete narwhal specimens and were instead left to interpret brief sightings of the animals in the water.

In 1700, ship’s surgeon Pierre Martin de la Martiniére published observations from an Arctic expedition in A New Voyage to the North, which includes an extraordinarily unique depiction of a narwhal hunt that the Whaling Museum’s librarian said “has no precedent.”  Yet it is the image of the narwhal that was most disturbing to me: a scaly body, a hawk-like beak and eyes, and a spiral tusk emerging from its forehead, with its head the size of a rowboat

Not long afterward, descriptions and illustrations of narwhals finally became more and more true to life. Explorer Henry Ellis’s A Voyage to Hudson’s-Bay (1748) was the first I found to correctly illustrate the tail of a narwhal as a horizontal fluke as opposed to the vertical caudal fin of a fish tail that most earlier illustrations feature. Bernard O’Reilly’s written description of narwhals in Greenland, the Adjacent Seas, and the Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean (1818) is much more accurate in its physical descriptions and behaviors than most earlier works, though critics claim most of his book is fiction. He must have had a specimen available to him, as he included such details as its tongue length and placement in the mouth (“very short, immoveable, and placed very far behind”), the size of the throat passage to its stomach (“very small, not three inches over”), and its mouth size (“very small; its greatest expansion being not more than six inches”).

         While descriptions of what narwhals look like were getting more accurate, descriptions of narwhal behavior remained just exaggerated guesses. For instance, William Henry Dewhurst, a surgeon on an English whaling ship, wrote in The Natural History of the Order of Cetacea and the Oceanic Inhabitants of the Arctic Region (1834) that the narwhal “is an animal possessing almost colossal strength, inasmuch as it precipitates itself upon every thing giving it the least offense, and furiously rushes against the most trifling obstacle.  Its habitual sojourn is among the ice and icebergs of the Arctic Seas.  Here, in the vast empire of eternal frost, where darkness reigns for so great a portion of the year, this giant of the frozen ocean dares every power, braves every danger; and bent upon carnage, he attacks without provocation, combats without rivalry, destroying without necessity; and the only enemy to whom he is occasionally compelled to yield to, is man.”

Legendary author Jules Verne continued these exaggerations in his 1870 classic Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.  His main character, Captain Nemo, a marine biologist, said:  “The ordinary narwhal, or unicorn fish, is a kind of whale which grows to a length of sixty feet… [It] is armed with a kind of ivory sword, or halberd, as some naturalists put it.  It is a tusk as hard as steel. Occasionally these tusks are found embedded in the bodies of other kinds of whales, against which the narwhal always wins.  Others have been removed, not without difficulty, from the hulls of ships which they had pierced clean through as easily as a drill pierces a barrel.”

The truth about the narwhal’s abilities, from its flexible tusk to its extraordinary diving abilities, is far more extraordinary than Verne’s fiction.

More concerns about Arctic ship traffic

“A rapid increase in shipping in the formerly ice-choked waterways of the Arctic poses a significant increase in risk to the region’s marine mammals and the local communities that rely on them for food security and cultural identity.”  That’s the conclusion drawn by a group of Alaska native groups and the Wildlife Conservation Society following a workshop last week.

            Before the climate started warming, sea ice had been a major obstacle to large ships traveling in the high Arctic, but that is less and less of an issue for the ships, and more and more of an issue for marine life.

“The disappearance of summer sea ice from the region’s coastal areas is leading to major changes in this part of the world,” said Martin Robards, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Beringia Program. “The presence of large ocean-going vessels is expected to increase as the region becomes more attractive to both international shipping and extractive industries seeking minerals, oil, and gas. The northern sea route is 30 percent shorter than the comparable route linking northern Europe to Asia via the Suez Canal, which only supports the conclusion that the Bering Strait is likely to get busier.”

While this workshop and its conclusions focus on the marine mammals in the Bering Sea and the waters around Alaska – a region that is far from the range of the narwhal – it is just as true for the eastern Canadian Arctic and the waters around Greenland where narwhals will be similarly affected.

One strategy suggested by the workshops participants for combatting the effects of increased shipping was to enforce a reduced speed for shipping through the Arctic region. The strategy has been successful in reducing ship collisions with the imperiled North Atlantic right whale along the U.S. East Coast, and it is worth trying in the North as well.  

But ship strikes are primarily an issue for larger whales like bowheads.  Narwhals are more likely to be affected by the low-frequency noises that the ships emit. The sea unicorn is skittish and the noise from increased shipping is certain to be a significant disturbance to their feeding, migration and communication.

“There is mounting evidence that human-generated sounds in the marine environment have negative effects on marine life,” said Howard Rosenbaum, director of The Wildlife Conservation Society’s Ocean Giants Program. “An increase in background noise from increased shipping, coupled with increases in underwater noise from industrial activities and other potential stressors, is of great concern for the Arctic’s marine species and their important habitats.”

An even greater threat comes from increased oil exploration and the likelihood of an oil spill in a region with little or no capacity to contain it.  As I wrote here last year, the U.S. Geological Survey believes that there may be as many as 50 billion barrels of oil off the coast of Greenland, a quantity similar to that of Libya, which could provide an economic boost that would transform the island and sever its financial dependence on Denmark.  The expense of drilling in the region, along with the short drilling season and the risks that oil rigs would get rammed by icebergs, had made oil drilling in the region unattractive.  But increasing oil prices, satellite tracking of icebergs, and warming temperatures have created a huge opportunity and growing interest among oil companies around the world.

“The lack of international response capability to a spill in these waters is a serious concern in light of the increased interest in oil and gas exploration, or the rise in transportation of petroleum products by tankers through the Arctic,” added Robards. “A comprehensive approach is clearly needed to prepare for a potential environmental disaster in a region where marine mammals transit both national and international waters.”

Hopefully the concerns raised at the Alaska workshop will be heard by U.S. policymakers and the Coast Guard and shared with their counterparts in Canada and Greenland.  Arctic marine life will have plenty to deal with from the warming climate without having to also defend themselves from a flotilla of noisy ships.

Retreating ice means orcas are increasing threat to narwhals

            The effect of the declining extent of sea ice in the Arctic continues to raise new questions among scientists and generate attention in the media.  The latest stories reveal concerns about killer whales and what impact they will have on prey species like narwhals as disappearing ice provides the orcas with greater access to the region.

            On my first visit to Arctic Canada in 2008, I watched as a pod of about 12 killer whales chased a group of perhaps 200 narwhals through Eclipse Sound in northern Baffin Island.  That’s when I first began to wonder how much of a threat the orcas are to the ice whale.  My guide that week, who has lived his whole life in the region, had never seen a killer whale, so I suspected that they must not be common in the area.  But like most questions about wildlife in the Arctic, answers aren’t easy to come by.

While killer whales are considered resident in the Canadian Archipelago when the water is ice free, their numbers are small and they are seldom observed because they are spread out over a wide area. Despite their small numbers, however, killer whales may be the top predator on narwhals – next to humans – according to many Arctic marine mammalogists, including one who referred to narwhals as “orca candy.”   

“My general feeling,” said University of Washington biologist Kristin Laidre, “is that the densities of killer whales in the Arctic are low.  Sightings of killer whales are, in general, pretty rare. We do know that they feed on narwhals and belugas, and some killer whale pods, it seems, have evolved to know precisely where narwhals are located in summer, especially in the southern part of their range like in Foxe Basin or Hudson Bay.  There they show up pretty regularly, as narwhals are a predictable prey resource that occur in high densities in ice-free shallow waters.” Killer whales are sighted only rarely along the coast of West Greenland, she added.

Laidre is one of very few biologists to have observed orcas feasting on narwhals.  In August 2005, while satellite tagging narwhals in Admiralty Inlet in northwestern Baffin Island, she and two colleagues watched as a pod of 12 to 15 killer whales attacked and killed at least four narwhals among a group of several hundred over a six-hour period.  From their observation point at Kakiak Point, they saw what they described as “vigorous surface and diving activity” by the orcas which resulted in a large oiled area on the water, presumably from whale oils released from the dead narwhals, and congregations of seabirds. It appeared that the orcas consumed the narwhals below the surface.  The biologists had tagged several narwhals a few days before the attack, so they were able to monitor the movements of the animals in response to the killer whale aggression.  According to Laidre, the narwhals in the area suddenly moved into shallow water as the killer whales approached, some forming tight groups and others lying still at the surface or moving slowly and quietly.  One narwhal even stranded itself on a beach and thrashed its tail violently for 30 seconds as if to warn its pod mates.  During the attack, most of the narwhals in the area moved as much as 50 miles south and spread out much more than usual.  The animals resumed their normal behaviors within an hour after the killer whales departed the area.
            In a surprising coincidence, given how seldom killer whale attacks on narwhals are observed, another biologist watched killer whales prey on narwhals on the exact same day in Repulse Bay, about 400 miles south of where Laidre made her observation.  Laidre surmised that if the predation level from these two attacks were representative of the daily activity of killer whales in the region, then 200 to 300 narwhals are likely killed on their summering grounds by orcas during the two months of open water in the area.  Coupled with the annual harvest by Inuit hunters and predicted reductions in sea ice, enabling killer whales to hunt narwhals over a longer period each year, this mortality rate raises questions about how these elements will affect the sustainability of narwhal populations.

Ice entrapments an increasing concern for Arctic whales

            The recent news about the beluga whales caught in an ice entrapment north of Russia reminded me of the last such event that made the news, one that entrapped 600 narwhals just off Baffin Island in northern Canada.  Given the changing ice conditions caused by global warming, our Arctic whales are likely to experience increasing numbers of ice entrapments in coming years.

Entrapped belugas await icebreaker in Russian Arctic

On that November day back in 2008, the ice near the village of Pond Inlet apparently closed suddenly, leaving the whales just a few small holes from which to breathe.  Those holes were closing, too, while the next nearest place to surface and breathe was believed to be about 30 miles away.  The animals were certain to die, so the Pond Inlet Hunters and Trappers Organization advised its members, with approval by federal officials from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, to kill the narwhals rather than let them suffer and die.  As heartbreaking as the situation was, it was probably the right decision – the entrapment was a natural event, the whales were certain to die after what would surely have been a long and stressful experience, and their harvest by the hunters not only reduced the animals’ suffering but provided an unexpected bounty to the local Inuit communities.

Entrapments such as this are extremely rare.  David Angnetsiak, a 50-ish hunter in Pond Inlet, told me it was the only time in his life that he had seen narwhals inescapably trapped. He said that most of the entrapped narwhals were females and young, reflecting the Inuit belief that bull narwhals can hold their breath longer and were probably better able to reach open ocean. The last such entrapment that local hunters remember occurred in 1943.

While news reports indicated that federal officials said the harvest was the most humane way to deal with the entrapment, there was considerable public outcry that the government didn’t send in an icebreaker to open a passage for the trapped whales.  The Humane Society International/Canada called the government decision “unconscionable” and noted that the narwhal harvest was “inherently inhumane.”  Others from the South agreed, though Mike Richards, a special administrative officer for Pond Inlet, told the Globe and Mail of Toronto that “It’s just a misfortune of nature.”

Ice entrapments, called savssats by the Inuit, are an increasing concern and they probably happen much more often than records suggest, since the Arctic is so thinly populated and no one is around to observe or document entrapments in the vast majority of the region.  Nonetheless, narwhal biologist Kristin Laidre told me that four ice entrapments that resulted in the deaths of more than 700 narwhals occurred in 2008 and 2009 – the first one ever documented in East Greenland, as well as two in northwest Greenland and the very large one near Pond inlet.

Laidre is beginning to examine the distribution and timing of known ice entrapments and look at the trends in the breakup of sea ice on the narwhal’s summering grounds. She has found what she calls “strongly significant trends” that suggest that the ice is forming later and later.  “Over a 30 year period there is a three to four week difference in when the ice forms,” she said.  “If ice formation is a clue to the narwhals that it’s time to get out of their summering grounds, then the trigger is changing, the pattern is changing.”  Is that change in the formation of ice making narwhals more vulnerable to ice entrapments?  Laidre hypothesizes that it may be the case, though there is precious little data from which to draw conclusions just yet.  But the hints she has found so far are another indication of the dangerous implications of global warming.

Tracking migrating narwhals

Many news outlets have reported this month about a study in northern Canada aimed at tracking narwhal migrations by attaching satellite tracking devices to the whales and monitoring their movements.  It’s a great project that will hopefully shed new light on population dynamics, migratory corridors, and how declining sea ice is affecting the species.

Some news reports suggested that this project is new, but that’s not true.  The effort has been underway for about a decade, and I spent two weeks with the researchers in the summer of 2010 in the same location they worked this year in a challenging effort to capture narwhals for study.

Narwhal research camp in Tremblay Sound

Based in Tremblay Sound, a fjord in northern Baffin Island in the province of Nunavut, the 13-man research team started out by spending more than a day just setting up camp – which included 1,800 pounds of food, three gas grills, two zodiacs and outboard motors and drums of fuel, giants nets, high-tech scientific equipment, and a 25-foot tall radio antenna.  As we finished preparing camp, we all glanced up in unison as our first massive movement of narwhals swam by. 

Like a child’s bath, at first we just heard gentle splashing noises in the distance from the narwhals’ repeated surfacing for air and an occasional whooshing sound as they exhaled.  Then the whales came into view, swimming in groups of threes and fours and sixes, most appearing quite dark like they were not yet very old, some with pinkish gray calves that looked like tiny swimming sausages, and all porpoising at the same speed in the same direction with little concern for the crowd of onlookers standing on the shore less than 50 yards away.  As we watched, our mouths hung open and I could barely catch my breath, so pleased were we with their seeming tameness and abundance.  There must have been 200 of them, and they took more than 10 minutes to pass our camp.  If the scientists had worried about whether narwhals were going to be in the area, those worries quickly disappeared.  Little did we know then that what we believed were the same animals would swim by us repeatedly two or three times a day for the next several weeks.  Watch my video of the narwhals parading by.

Researchers capture a narwhal for tagging.

Unfortunately, we didn’t catch any narwhals while I was in camp.  Day after day, the whales approached the nets numerous times, and every time they must have detected the nets and swam under or around them.  After I left, however, the researchers acquired a different net that apparently was more difficult for the whales to detect, and just 30 minutes after the new net was deployed, they captured their first narwhal.  In the next four days they caught five more.

“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.”

By late November, all of the narwhals the team tagged the previous August were in the middle of Baffin Bay at the edge of the pack ice, exactly where it is known that most narwhals spend the winter.  But the scientists were intrigued to see that some of the tagged whales traveled together the entire route while others took widely varying routes to the same destination, including one who went all the way to West Greenland before returning to Baffin Bay.

It will be exciting to see what route this year’s tagged narwhals take to their wintering location, and if they return to Tremblay Sound next summer.