Right whale death signals emergency response
By Lori Valigra
WHEN THE PHONE RANG at College of the Atlantic's Allied Whale research and rescue operation in late July, senior researcher Sean Todd sprang into action. An endangered right whale had been found dead in the Bay of Fundy. The young female had died a week earlier, and time was of the essence for scientists to dissect the body and collect samples for further study before the scorching heat hastened decomposition. Todd, a COA professor who also heads Allied Whale, mobilized his team of students and volunteers, packed up an emergency response vehicle and drove two-and-one-half hours north from Bar Harbor, Maine, to Campobello Island in New Brunswick, where the whale had been brought ashore. There, they assisted Canadian authorities as they attempted to discern the animal's cause of death.
In a Gulf of Maine Times interview conducted just after he returned from the right whale necropsy, Todd talked about what it's like to conduct the grueling work that will hopefully lead to information about the whale's death and aid in the recovery of this endangered animal.
Q: Why was it important to study this particular whale?
A: Right whales are serious business. There are only about 300 left in the North Atlantic population. When you have a population that small, you have to be concerned about the rate of potential mortality per year versus the rate of growth that can be measured by the number of calves per year. The dead animal was a calf.
Q: How does the emergency response network work?
A: We typically receive a call from the public, often from whale watch boats. Because this whale was in Canada, we were further down the list and got called by someone else in our network. The whale was found floating in the Bay of Fundy by a whale watch boat captain who happened be a member of a whale rescue team. He took it to a beach in Campobello for the necropsy. This was the fourth baleen whale we've had reported in the Gulf of Maine this year.
Q: What did you do after you received the call?
A: We got the call the afternoon of July 24, organized a response and drove up early the next morning. Whenever you work on a large whale there are several things that must come together. First you need a fairly large team of people because the process is grueling, typically taking at least one long day of work. This time we got together seven people from COA who joined three others on the scene from other institutions. We drove up together in a convoy of cars and our emergency response vehicle.
That vehicle is a truck that's completely outfitted to go at a moment's notice. We have very sharp knives and various hooks that we can use to connect to the animal, lots of line, block and tackle to haul heavy things around, and a winch and a crane. There's also a whole suite of medical supplies to deal with live strandings, including a clinical device that reads the blood chemistry of an animal so we can see if it is dehydrated or whether it has low sugar levels. The truck also carries gloves, overalls, kennels, and large boards to defend us from animals that are a bit more aggressive.
Q: What did you do when you arrived?
A: The first thing we had to work around was the tide. When you've got a whale that weighs 30 tons your options to move the animal around are limited when you don't have any heavy equipment on the beach, which we didn't in this case because the beach was fairly isolated. So the animal was tied as high as possible at high tide. We then waited for the tide to recede in order to study it. That took a couple of hours. We started the "cut" (necropsy) around noon. The whale was about 30 feet long and we think she was probably "young of the year," which means she was born in November of last year.
Q: How do you feel when you first see the animal on the beach?
A: I guess there's a little part of me that's always sad to see a dead animal, no matter what. When I see a dead right whale it's even sadder because this is one we could not afford to lose, especially a female because she could have great reproductive potential on the population. But I also have to think dispassionately about how we are going to get the best information we can. We're often working against the clock, the tide, the decomposition or the availability of resources such as heavy equipment, so we have to be efficient. Even a dead animal has all kinds of data to help further our understanding of the species and ultimately bring that back down to a point of view of conservation. For example, we can look at humpback ears to see if they've been damaged by some kind of acoustic device. We can get an idea of what a healthy animal looks like versus a sick animal, and get other baseline data such as blubber thicknesses or body shapes.
Q: There seemed to be several marine mammal experts working or vacationing in the area when the whale was discovered. How did this help?
A: We had some fantastic expertise. The fellow who led the cut, Bill McClellan out of University of North Carolina-Wilmington and a COA alumnus, has literally written the book on how to cut up a right whale. And Amy Knowlton of the New England Aquarium was there. She probably knows more about the causes of right whale mortality than anyone else on this coast.
Q: There has been speculation that the whale may have been struck by a ship. What was the condition of the whale when you first saw her?
A: She had a clear, substantial lesion on the left flank that was suspicious and that deserved further analysis. She was decomposed, so we knew we would have to work hard to get any substantial evidence for the cause of death right away. Animals can often strand with what appears to be very clear evidence of the cause. However, such evidence can be misleading, depending on the chronology of the stranding. It's our job to try to determine whether or not various wounds and other pathologies occurred pre mortem, peri mortem (around the time of death) or post mortem.
Q: How is the necropsy or "cut" performed?
A: Before we start cutting up the animal we take a suite of measurements that allow us to know more about the shape of the animal and its length. That information can help us when we next see a female whale of about that size. Then we cut into the whale and take tissue samples, typically going through the belly of the animal and paying close attention to any abnormalities. Although this animal was about a week gone, there's always a possibility that a finer detailed analysis of the tissues at the histopathological level using microscopes to look at tissue structure might yield more information about the cause of death, whether it was acute or chronic.
We cut the animal to take a sample of all the major organs, the skin, the blubber and the bones. We were limited by the whale's decomposition and lack of access to machinery that could have helped us move the animal or pull back the skin and blubber. But we did have a Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada officer there who had brought down his four wheeler and that proved to be extremely useful. The samples will be processed in Canada.
Q: What is the most difficult part of the necropsy?
A: Whale muscle has all kinds of tendons and ligaments inside it. They store a lot of their swimming energy in those ligaments, so there's an elastic potential to them. Every time your knife hits one of those tendons or ligaments it is harder to cut through. With the fat, skin, muscles and the blubber, the knife blade dulls quickly. When we cut up a whale we divide ourselves into teams of four or five. One person does the cutting, two to three people pull the flesh away and provide tension to make the cutting easier, and the last person sharpens knives. We typically swap out knives every two minutes or so. The knives we have are industrial quality, so they are designed to hold their edges a long time. They're 12-14 inches long. We sharpen them with stone and steel.
We worked through till nightfall on this animal, cleaned up and then got back home around midnight, so it was an 18-hour day. At the end of the day we were extraordinarily tired. Whichever arm you cut with is extremely sore. You smell horrible, and your hands and arms and overalls are covered in whale grease and gore. And then we still had to drive home. If you didn't have a sense of humor I don't think you could get through it.
Q: What is the current focus of your investigations?
A: I'm looking at how to solve the ways humans and whales interact and to make those interactions more positive and less destructive. Over the past 15 to 20 years my research has been on fishery disentanglement, ship strikes, and trying to quantify what animals feed upon and how that changes with time and its potential impact of fisheries. Those kinds of questions are geared toward conservation ultimately, and of course as an educator I try to bring along as many students as I can on that mission. There's a much larger question behind the whole business of whale conservation, which is the business of ocean conservation. That's a far more important question. How do we preserve the ocean and how do we keep it as pristine a place as possible? If we can do that than hopefully the species in the ocean will save themselves.
For more information see: www.coa.edu/html/alliedwhale.htm.
Q&A: Sean Todd, College of the Atlantic
© 2006 The Gulf of Maine Times