ASP #10: Alaska's Humpback Whales with Dr. Fred Sharpe
Dr. Fred Sharpe
Listen to Dan and Dr. Sharp with your favorite podcast player, or via Apple Podcasts
Alaska Whale Foundation founding member and researcher
Formative years as a whale biologist
The remarkable characteristics of Humpback Whales
Songs of the Humpback Whale
Whale brains, four times as large as a human brain
Spindle neurons and social behavior
Whale communication, ocean acoustics
"Whale internet"
Concerns: Ocean noise, ships, military, seismic testing, entanglements
Warm water anomaly: "the Blob"
Whales and humans: similarities in social behaviors, cooperation, altruism
Whale health vigilance: promising research tools and practices
Whale vocalizations, structure & implications for what constitutes intelligence
Sounds collected under NMFS Research Permit #19703
ASP Episode #10
Transcription: ASP#10 with Dr. Fred Sharpe
Hello listeners. This is Dan Kowalski host of the Alaska Story Project.
DK: The motivation and inspiration for this project is to talk with authors, scientists, artists, historians, fisher-poets, and a colorful cast of characters who are both knowledgeable and passionate about Alaska. Storytelling has always been key to how we connect as humans, piquing our curiosity and deepening our understanding. Our podcasts are unhurried, so I invite you to settle in and explore with us some of the richness that makes Alaska such a special place. Without further ado, let's begin.
DK: My guest today has been studying Humpback Whales in Southeast Alaska for some 33 years. His early work on the social behavior of the region’s humpbacks was instrumental in the formation of the Alaska Whale Foundation, where he continues as an AWS board member researcher, and speaker. He is author of two respected books on the birds and wild plants of Washington’s San Juan Islands. As a gifted and passionate bio-regional scientist, it’s my pleasure to introduce Dr. Fred Sharp.
FS: Hey Dan. Thank you, righteous.
DK: Welcome Fred. It is interesting to hear of the early years of a life's career and journey. Fred, how did you find your way into the fascinating world of whales?
FS: Yeah, Dan. I had the good fortune of growing up in a family where my parents were outdoor educators working with the National Parks and so always attentive for wild places and new projects. I had opportunity to sail up to Alaska, after I finished up my work in the San Juan's in the late 80s, and I came up with Cynthia Devincent, on the vessel Acania. They were running an Earthwatch type program, and they introduced me to these marvelous Humpback whales, and once you see your first bubble net and get into that Alaska wilderness, you're hooked. And, yeah, I’ve been coming back every summer.
DK: Wow… since late 80s and, indeed, 33 years is wonderful span of time—wonderful career. Well, for those that might only be familiar with the intrigue and the size and imagery of Whales, Fred, what would you pass on about some of their characteristics that might be on the surface to help us get into a little more interesting things about your work and understanding these remarkable creatures.
FS: Yeah, Humpback Whales, they are remarkable beings, they're very distinctive, they're a middle heavyweight Whale grow to about 30 tonnes dogs get up to about 50, 60 feet. They are about the size of a good school bus there. They weigh more than one and a half space shuttles, so they're, they're big critters. Right. And they have very enormously long pectoral flippers, they have huge beautiful tails and they arch up when they dive. They almost look like large gherkin pickles. They have these distinctive sensory nodules over the leading parts of their face and flippers that allow them to sense their environment. And they are a pretty well known animal because they are one of the most wide ranging predators on the planet. They're found in all major ocean basins, they tend to inhabit near shore waters both in their breeding and feeding. These animals move to cooler temperate waters during the summer months to take advantage of the higher productivity and longer light in these poleward movements. During the wintertime, these animals get a right idea, right, they they turn around—they’re basically snowbirds they turn around and head south towards tropical waters in near equatorial regions for breeding. So they get around, and they're one of the longest mammalian migrators on the planet, some populations migrating over 10,000 miles each year. And if you look at that across there maybe up to 60, 70 perhaps 100 year lifespan that would be a trip to the moon and back again, right, so they know their place. They're fabulous; I guess for a lot of us our first interactions and awareness of humpbacks came in the late 60s and early 70s, when we were finally making the connection that these great Whales are much more valuable as living breathing commodities than being harvested and boiled down for transmission fluid and dog food. And so, yeah, it was their song really, which was first recorded by Frank Watlington, Roger Payne and Scott McVay, and it was those sounds you know that first album that they came out with, Sounds of the Humpback Whale… You remember growing up to these amazing sounds of these brilliant animals.
DK: Yeah, well, I think most of us listening remember the song of the Humpback Whale, and it was remarkably popular back quite early 70s. I think Judy Collins got in on on a recording of it or incorporated some of the Whales into one of her pieces and it was huge again bringing awareness of these remarkable creatures to a much wider population.
FS: Yeah, and in some ways they're beautiful song sort of heralded in the modern marine conservation movement in that it was a bigger revelation as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, that we do share the ocean with this incredible sentience yeah they were the Humpback Whales, they were one of the original species that was put on the endangered Species Act. And what's really cool was that, you know, within the last few years they've actually have recovered so well globally that they've been delisted pretty much in all of the 14 major subpopulations—10 of those have been delisted now and so that in this stage in the game you can have a large predator like that, recover and thrive, it shows you that our sweet Gaia is still has a lot of ecological resiliency and health. And it's also a testimony to the Humpback Whales incredible survival intelligence.
DK: Right. Fred, I'd love to spend more time on the Whale song but maybe now is a time to play an example. Do you have something like that?
FS: You bet. Got some beautiful sounds here from some of those first original recordings.
DK: Yeah, I'd love to hear—love to share.
Humpback Whale song recording
DK: Fred, that was so rich and I look forward to going back into talking more about the Whale vocalizations and even bio-acoustics out in the ocean, but—here’s a curiosity that I've got is that these huge creatures also have really large complicated brains. And I think in a conversation that you and I had, you mentioned that they're actually four times as large as human brains and so
FS: Yeah five times larger than mine.
DK: Laughter— which is amazing you know and and so four or five times larger than human brains and if one was to think that well neurons they don't have jumbo neurons and neurons are probably about the same, Fred, what goes on with these big brains of Whales?
FS: Well, we've had fortunately had some amazing studies that had been conducted on the psycho architecture of the humpback brain, and from occasional specimen that washes ashore and if you can get in a necropsy team out there early enough before there's any decomposition you can look at the really fine structure of their brains and what Patrick Vandergulch and their colleagues found was that their brain, not only is it, so tremendously large but it is laced with these neurons called spindle neurons, or von [Economo] cells. These spindle neurons are incredible because in humans they're associated with facial recognition, social intelligence language acquisition and compassion. And studies have shown that they have these spindle neurons in certain parts of their cortical areas at equal or higher densities than humans, and that suggests that these animals are capable of equal or even greater sense of self awareness and sentience and cognition, as Humpback Whales. And there was a paper that was recently published that examined over 100 interactions that were documented by investigators in the field where Humpback Whales came to the aid of other animals that were in distress. It's really remarkable because it's like, mostly dolphins and sea lions, even a human swimmer, or two that's been assisted by these Whales when they're in trouble or, or being menaced by sharks. And so it just shows you that the the depth of their compassion, not only extends to their own species but to interspecies as well. And this whole idea about you know when we're on the airplane and they say, please put your own oxygen mask on first before helping others. That's not how Humpback Whales do it, they just come stampeding over. Oftentimes when they detect an animal's in duress. They've even assisted ocean sunfish, so it extends across phyla. So, yeah, we see they're tremendously large brains and big hearts and spindle neurons in action.
DK: Wow. Well, that's something that I don't think is well known when we see the whales breaching or just diving with their elegant graceful way of moving in water, might be a good segue into talking about how much of their brain might be devoted to hearing and communicating with the acoustics in the ocean, the acoustics of water. How on that? and maybe a sub question there, Fred, would be rolling that into their Whale song too— so communication amongst the animals in water, say more.
FS: Yeah, the water is a really fascinating place for an animal to make its life, because the sound channels are highly conductive sound travels extremely far underwater essentially sound moving underwater behaves as if it's a solid, so speed is actually almost five times faster than in air. And so, marine mammals and fish really use the acoustic corridor. Light in comparison gets absorbed very quickly and so it's only we're really only talking, a few meters or 10s of meters in clear tropical waters where a sound can travel, you know, up to miles maybe maybe even hundreds of miles or for some of these species of large Whales, that vocalize in the subsonic range like the fin Whales below 20 hertz it's thought that they can perhaps even travel thousands of miles and be picked up by other individuals. So, hearing is extremely important in the ocean. It's how animals get through their day it's how they find mates and search for food and socially interact and avoid predators and humans also, right. We, with our ship strikes and nets and our acoustic pollution that can be very problematic for these animals and, tell you what though, they're probably really loving it out there right now, though! In some ways, this is truly Rachel Carson's Silent Spring right with so many of our human edifices that are spun down, so I'll bet you the Whales are loving it.
DK: Well, out of curiosity, here we are, this is being recorded in early May, are the humpbacks in Southeast Alaska right now, or are they still kind of showing up?
FS: They have already arrived, many of them have already arrived on the feeding areas probably a lot of them are still in migration. Most of the Humpback Whales that traveled between Southeast Alaska, they go to Hawaii, and then turn around head straight back up. It's probably a population of about, 10 to 12,000 individuals. And a lot of these animals, they get they start heading out you know that the peak party down in the Maui nightclubs for these animals are the crooning Whales and mothers going down and giving birth usually mid February. And then the animals are hanging out there through March and then they start to populate starts to drop off and then takes about a month, based on Reese sightings of the flutes, a fluke identification sort of like a mug shot so we can figure out that something can get about a month they probably traveled about three knots, all the way across, day and night, just kind of drop it into cruise control. So a lot of the animals are showing up now on the feeding grounds and across the summer months, the animals, when they first arrived in, say, May they often times run the outer banks are off the shelf break out Queen Charlotte's or out on the Fairweathers feeding and they gradually seem to press in as the productivity increases throughout the inland waters, and usually peaking in July and August in Southeast Alaska.
DK: So, that raises lots of curiosities in my mind. During their migration, what’s your sense of how important their creature to creature communication is or their, I don't know if they are only singing in the breeding grounds or, you know, talk about their vocalizations, and both the migration and then once they get to the feeding grounds. How does that work? What's your understanding with that?
FS: Well they sure pack a lot of different ways they can acoustically communicate. They have a huge diversity of sounds that they can vocally produce, depending on what classification scheme that you use, anywhere from 60 to 200 different discrete signals have been identified. Not only can they vocalize using their laryngeal sack and their voicebox kind of like we are remember these are mammals right, just like us and they retain a lot of the similar morphological features to their sound production apparatus. What's really cool is that when they vocalize though they don't release any air. They're essentially like a bagpiper they have they have their lungs and their laryngeal sack which they cycle air back and forth across a vibrating vocal folds or voice box—our voice box is perpendicular to air flow where theirs is parallel to airflow. But they can produce this incredible, why don’t we just play a little sample of some of the incredible diversity of social sounds that these animals can make.
DK: Oh please, that's great.
Whale vocalizations
FS: Yes. So, some of the sounds that we look at are these this incredible social jabber, these whistles these shrieks and these moans these ratchet like sounds, these drops and we're not entirely sure what those are for they appear in some ways very language like. They overlap with the song but they're also very discrete from the song, these social sounds are produced in all major ocean basins of the world, both on the breeding and feeding grounds as well as the migratory corridors so we think they're pretty important. We've been doing research with collaborative efforts with research teams around the planet to see how similar these, quote unquote, languages are or local dialects are between populations. It turns out there is a lot of similarity, even though it's thought that the major ocean populations may have been separated by hundreds of thousands of years, they have retained these basic vocal features of their social sounds, suggesting that they're deeply rooted and probably very important to these animals. So we have these wonderful chitter chatter language like social sounds. They also have those amazing songs that we listen to a little bit earlier. And in addition, they also can communicate by, you know their, their percussive activity, you see these magnificent animals rocketing up out of the water and falling back over with a tremendous splash and a thundering sound that echoes off the canyons and rolls away, under the underwater sound corridors and those are probably really important for the animal to to signal if their position and just depending on how they impact the water, you can kind of tell whether the animal is aroused or excited or pissed off or relaxed. It's called like me holding an infant you know how they squirming around so they get that kind of arched back and when the way they impact the surface of the water can make very different sounds, depending on their emotive state. They also have those enormous flippers that they can beat the surface of the water like their large kettle drums, those huge tails we can do the slaps with and so these animals are well armed acoustically. There's also a couple other interesting sounds that they make. One of them is called megapclicks, they almost sound like echolocation clicks when they're hunting schools of sand lance out on the still wagon bank on the Atlantic coast. So, yeah, there's a whole diversity of cool sounds, picking up some really low frequency sounds now from these animals so they are well endowed to take it to the street.
Whale vocalizations
FS: Yeah so that's that's one of the big concerns about— given that these animals so heavily rely on sound. That's one of the primary concerns of human activities is that we during the industrial era, the Anthropocene humans have been injecting large amounts of acoustic sounds into the water, primarily from large ships that ply the ocean—at any one time there can be up to 30 or 40,000 large ships, transporting goods and services, and people and militaries across the oceans. So the background noise has gradually ramped up. Some of this background noise overlaps with some of these signals that they give that are very frequently used. So we think potentially that could be interfering with their acoustic theater, the distance over which they can communicate with each other, find food, mates and avoid predators.
DK: Yes so ocean noise, increasing as humans move about doing what the humans do. And just a little bit more. Those of us that have spent time on our boats know that if we're down below the waterline, we can hear what's going on in the water so much better.
FS: Yes. Yeah, yeah, that's right.
DK: When a ferry comes by, or a cruise ship comes by, its dramatic.
FS: It can be deafening.
DK: It can be and is that the conclusion of what happens with these whales? Or scenario: a cruise ship passes by the Brothers and the whales are feeding off by Five Finger. What's it like for them when a cruise ship goes by?
FS: Yeah, there's been a number of studies with a variety of species, and it's what it’s shown is that once you start to get elevated backgrounds of noise from a ship like you day one plying through Frederick Sound, what typically happens is the animals, they start to increase their calling rate, and also increase their sound pressure levels or their decibels, to make themselves heard. It's also been shown that animals in noisy environments, as sound increases, they have to simplify their signal right because— if you walk into a quiet nightclub and you're the first one there and the music's down low, you can tell the waiter you know that I'd like one of those 32 ounce chilled glass effervescent please. But as it gets louder and more and more people show up pretty soon all you can do is just scream BEER, more beer! And so, the same thing happens to these animals is that, as it gets noisier they increased transmission rate they get louder, but there's a point where it's kind of just like, it's just like they sort of fall out right there's just like there's just no point in communicating more and they fall silent, right, and so it's kind of what you expect. And it's not that they don't. I mean, they certainly do encounter ambient noise in their natural environment, the calving of glaciers and the glacier sliding across their basements. The wind and wave action, breakers crashing on the beaches, pounding rain on the surface, and so they, they do have had, you know, they had lived with these natural sounds and natural sources of noise. So they are well equipped to deal with the noise but it's just that they want the periods to when there's quiescence, right, and they can seek areas of lower ambient noise to carry out you know important things like the bonding and communication between mothers and calves and listening for their prey and avoiding predators but just that we're so incredibly incessant when it comes to our ocean noise, and you take all the ship noise and this near shore industrial development, then you add on militaries that produce various forms of war games and tests. They have incredibly powerful sonars, that can interfere with these animals and elicit behavioral reactions that can cause them to strand or surface very rapidly or dive very deep, that can also even exceed their dive limits and cause barrel trauma or the bends. And there's been shown that there's been a number of military exercises that have increased the number of stranding of individuals and so I might add though that the Navy, now the Office of Naval Research, they're one of the biggest funders of marine mammal research now, and they have funded, you know, dozens if not hundreds of my colleagues for various acoustic studies and they hire very good people to work with them and so they are concerned about and working on this problem.
DK: Well that's, that's very encouraging and good to hear.
FS: Yeah, and we can move right all up and down the coast here, at Bangor and the Navy has been very good neighbors. They discourage nearshore development. They want to keep these areas quiet, also up in Ketchikan and Behm Canal area. They have an interest in a quiet ocean too, so they can be very helpful in these endeavors of understanding these lives. Another huge source of acoustic disturbance comes from seismic exploration for petroleum products. Very loud sounds are produced either through explosions or air guns that send down loud concussions in through the water and into the surface layers of the earth, and looking listening for the echoes to form it really is a form of sonar, and to look for various deposits and that can also interfere with these animals.
Whale vocalizations
FS: Yeah, boy incredible sounds huh?
DK: Ohh… Otherworldly and yet in an intriguing way, slightly compelling and familiar so I find that interesting.
FS: Yes, yes. Yeah, I agree there's just there's this uncanny familiarity with these with these sounds and we are such incredibly linguistic beings and so we really resonate with the acoustic behavior of these animals, and you know this chatter it's like, it's almost word like right there's these individual individual sounds, they're almost like words you know separated by spaces and it's been shown that the humpback song is similar to like language it's evolving and it has rhymes it's phonemic and there's even some syntactical structure to it and so we haven't yet deciphered it yet but that's just one of the many uncanny similarities between humpbacks and humans.
DK: Yeah, no kidding. Well I remember a comment that you had one time Fred that I'd love to hear more about and you said something along the lines that whales had the original internet.
FS: Yeah, totally, totally. Yeah there with the with the sound speed underwater and these open environments that they live in and the sound pressure level. These animals have, you know, one darn tootin’ set of pipes, right. They're like the original strata liners and they can belt it out at over 160 decibels, and those sounds can travel for hundreds if not thousands of miles and then, you know, with these populations recovering, and you look at the density of animals out there, they could be in contact you know one whale can be in contact with dozens if not hundreds and on the breeding areas, maybe even thousands of other individuals in these big song cacophonies, and so you know just the information carrying potential of these humpback civilizations, it really kind of boggles the mind and what's really awesome is that, you know, these whales, humpbacks vocalize, pretty much, well within our own hearing range, unlike the blue and fin whales which are subsonic, these humpbacks broadcast— we can process there between 20 hertz to 20 kilohertz right where we are and so very convivial very, very commodious in that way for our acoustic studies.
Yeah, so it's like we previously reflected on the similarity of their brain architecture to ours and how large they are and how it makes them, in many ways, very pro social beings with a lot of compassion, and we see a lot of similarities with their bubble netting teams up in South Alaska, you know these teams are based around enduring bonds between non kin which is very human like in terms of our, our working in our societies and all of our information networks. These individuals they form these bonds which can last across summers and across years and perhaps even lifetimes, which is also a really cool human feature and there appears to be quite a bit of division of labor—certain individuals acting as the as the callers which using sounds which appear to herd and chase prey up towards the surface, other individuals appear to be primarily engaged in a tool using behaviors, deploying the bubble nets and clouds. And there's also windows that appear to be the primary herders so we get a lot of this task specialization and with roles that they endure to continue to use over time. You know, they're just like almost like a football team really and that you've got specialists wide receivers and quarterbacks and linemen and you've got bubble blowers and vocalizers and herders and so apparently even leaders too, right. It's remarkably human in that way and if you look at the social structure of these pods, they really remind me a lot of our of our modern food cooperatives, in that even though we get certain combinations of whales, that inhabit a specific area. Other whales are free to come and go, we get no sense that whales aren't ever allowed to join. So you have this core community of hunters— where we work in Chatham Strait or in Frederick Sound, probably about 50 whales that are pretty much around all summer, every summer, chasing the herring schools, but there's this huge society of other whales that drift through, and will come and feed with them for just one lunch or a day or for a week. And so if this was a cool concept of open membership that anybody can join, there's an open border and a degree of owner operated right—unlike a lot of other hunting societies have like a predatory prides of lions like, if they bring down a large prey, there’s a whole issues about divisibility and who gets to feed and what part of the carcass and you get these despotic male lions that show up and it's really cool because there's this certain divisibility of the herring schools that make it that you got to be there to win. There's nothing around you. There's no hanging back and waiting for the others to do the work isn't showing up when it's facing time everybody's got to work together as cooperative and it's a highly divisible prey these fish schools and it's forged on instantaneously. So these are all kind of really factors that tend to make it a very egalitarian society of these whales.
DK: Fascinating. Fascinating and this is something that I'm excited about for the research that you and your team are engaged with, because this is completely unknown to most people unless you've got a deep curiosity about whales and are able to pick it up somewhere in the literature. So, thank you, Fred, and thank you Alaska Whale Foundation for just revealing some of these remarkable qualities and social structures that the whales engage in all the time, it sounds like.
FS: Well thanks, Dan. Yeah it's such a privilege to be out there with these beings, year after year and to almost become like family after a while and it's so funny in that it's just like with the humans, we tend to come like their pets and pets their their human companion, it's the same way with these whales. I feel like I start to become like them, you know, taking off on tropical sojourns. Yeah, a little bit of cage fighting down in Maui, crooning under street lamps, so yeah love these great beings and that's why it's so wonderful to be able to, like you say, conduct our research and make our findings known to the world, so we can be better stewards of these animals, right, and one of the big concerns that's been happening up in Alaskan waters has been the warm water anomaly that kicked in now four or five years ago now and lasted for a couple years. It was this big body of—big lens of warm water that just was basically from heating in place, right, just the high pressure systems—a lot of sun reaching the surface of the ocean. The following winter, there wasn't a lot of storm activity to break up that lens of warm water sitting on top and the problem with these warm water blobs just like when we have our El Nino events is that it's like, it's like a cap— it's like a cover that suppresses the upwelling of the deep nutrient rich waters that provide, you know, stimulate the base of the food chain for the phytoplankton up so the zooplankton. Without this upwelling, you know, the entire foot web can suffer— fish stocks, seabirds, marine mammals and during the height of the blob Glacier Bay, you know, lost almost half of their Humpback Whales that have been coming back, you know, decade after decade right and we had nearly two summers in Southeast Alaska when there was virtually no productivities from the mom and wintering areas down in Maui we could also see the whales were—it took them longer to get there they were skinnier when they showed up, they live sooner than they should, there's fewer individuals, there's just a lot less cage fighting and hardly saw any calves and so this this is a big concern because no longer was the ink dry on the signing of the delisting Endangered Species Act was that we have this problematic climatic event. And so that was why I was privileged to be out there with our research teams and continue monitoring these animals and engaging and incorporating new technologies for house vigilance studies and drones have been fantastic for coming online and going through the permitting agencies and getting them checked out that they are highly effective and much safer for these animals to utilize this tool and one of the big questions is basic house vigilance and you're just using from an aerial perspective we get about these animals on a calm day and you can just see down through, through the water and the beautiful inspections of their bodies and you know look at, have they been subjected to ship strikes or entanglements so we can get much better rates of human interaction and help specify maybe what fisheries are occurring or what types of gear so we can go back and make voluntary suggestions to the fishing industry about how we can all work together to… It doesn't do the fishermen any good, right, as you would know. You can get entanglement it's downtime, it can damage your gear. And nobody wants to hurt good animals, right? So yeah by figuring out you know what type of lines, they can see or what kind of netting or if pingers are effective or some of our research interests.
DK: What's the initial take on net pingers. They seem to work?
FS: Net pingers— you know, they send out a sound just couple different types of pingers, some of them are dissuasive that they make sounds that keep the animals away because it's annoying. Other pingers just send out a subtle acoustic signal within the primary hearing range of the animal, just to let them know that something's there and that they should, you know, be vigilant and for certain fisheries certain like the swordfish fishery and some other more tropical fisheries where they're having problems with dolphin entanglement there they can get really large sample size and they've been able to show that, yeah, these fingers have been effective at ordering off for certain species of dolphins, keeping them out of nets, they appear to be effective. We're less sure about their efficacy here, up in Southeast Alaska, you know some of the some of the gill netters and seiners swear by them— yeah and so you know some of our work is is just getting started to just use pingers in environments where just have them out there just floating, just on a buoy and just see, do they just tend to avoid that buoy? With some of our broadcast work we can see if we can elicit any change in behavior by with these pingers and so yeah we're quite excited to see if they can be an effective tool.
DK: UmmHmm. Well, another promising avenue for what you guys are doing. We appreciate it.
FS: Yeah, it's it's great with these with these drones because you know in addition to seeing if they've had you know ship strikes or entanglements, we can just to see— because they these baleen whales, they keep their gas tank on the outside of their body in the form of their blubber layers. And so we can get a really good idea of how healthy they are, again with the drones looking down onto the animals, to see if they're fat, if they're fat and happy. And you can get, you know, by holding the drone at as precise elevation you can get very precision measurements of the rostrum— the tip of their snout to the apical notch in their tail. And then you can look at the girth of these animals and just see if they're fat and happy. And so that tells us a lot about if they're finding enough to eat or, you know, where in the summertime might they be querying for food stress and the increasing number of animals that overwinter in Southeast Alaska, are, how are they doing? Did they not make the migration because they were weren't getting enough to eat are they skinny or are they super fat and maybe it's a female that's sitting out a year or two on their three year reproductive cycle, or you know youngsters hanging around. And so that's really exciting with these drones. Also look for you know skin discolorations and do they look skinny? Can we see you know the dorsal vertebrae protruding out a little bit more out of there tailstock, or can we see the scapula is there's another condition in these whales called peanut head where there's a collapse of the right behind the blow holes kind of a real fatty color and if they're not healthy. That tends to become depressed and so all really good indices that we can detect with the drone. We can also look for the burden of lice on their body. If naturally occurring little crustacea that typically occur at very low levels but when the animals become stressed, those lice burdens increase significantly so we can see those with drone. We can look for skin discoloration. And so, the drones are fantastic tools for health vigilance in combination with other tools like looking at their stress and reproductive hormones, and that can be done by taking a blubber sample with a small dart that's fired from the biopsy rifle or crossbow. It just takes about a pencil eraser sized chunk of skin and blubber out of the out of the back of the animal. And by that we can we can look for cortisols— stress hormones to see if there's some long term stressing agent to these animals and we can also, and it's the project that we're doing with University of Alaska, with Shannon Atkinson and Kelly Cates, and we can also look for reproductive hormones to see if the females are pregnant. And that can be very useful because when they're transiting, they may be getting inseminated in Maui and then coming north and with a year long gestation period, we can then determine which individuals in the population are which females are pregnant, right, and so those they become critical animals for sustaining populations of whales and see how they're doing and maybe they're getting pregnant and they're holding them all summer but maybe losing before they get back down for birthing in Maui, right? So again, these research tools are really fabulous and it's also important too in that even though all of the central North Pacific had was delisted that big population that goes between Hawaii. And, you know, the Hawaiian population that not only they come to Southeast Alaska, but they'll go on a huge arc essentially from Russia, all the way through the Bering Sea and the Aleutian Islands and South Central Alaska, Kodiak, Prince William Sound. And then down through Yakutat in Southeast Alaska all the way down through British Columbia, essentially. What’s really interesting, the Straits of Juan de Fuca appear to be an important boundary between the California Mexican race, and the Polynesian you know the Hawaiian Alaskan race to the north, and so that that population is doing very well it's up around 10,000 individuals.
FS: But there still is a couple of beleaguered subpopulations in the North Pacific, there's the Japanese stock. And then there's also a Panamanian or Central American stock that was really cool that Central American stocks probably about 400 whales, and some of those animals they certainly come all the way up the coast through Washington, Oregon and California, a little bit in central BC and they may be coming up to Alaska and so through our photo ID program and collaborating with other researchers, there's a great website now called Happy Whale, run by Ted Cheeseman— you can upload your photographs of any tail flukes that you make. And now that's got 10s of thousands of whales— lots of citizen science and lots of researchers contributing to that and so it's fantastic. We’re starting to get some really interesting and enduring histories on these animals, and that can help us learn if these by looking at the flutes from the Central American population, we can see if they're making their way up to Southeast Alaska, and by knowing who these individuals are and where they're moving around maybe we can cut them a little space. That's super exciting and what's cool about this Panamanian population is that, that same wintering area is also used by Antarctic whales, that come up and use it during the austral summer, so it's it's really cool. In the austral summer of the feeding in Antarctica, then in the austral winter they swim up to Panama, when our whales are further north northern hemisphere so they're six months out of phase, but really starting to see how these 400 whales in Panama that use the North Pacific, they're not increasing— evidence suggests they're not doing well, whereas the other population, the Antarctic whales that use the same breeding area they've been going gangbusters. And so, that suggests that the problem is on the foraging grounds, right?
DK: Mm hmm. Well, fascinating— ocean basin wide… These creatures that can communicate over amazing distances, many similarities with human society, brain structure, behavior. Fred, if you were to kind of put a wrap on the conversation and maybe even philosophize a little bit, what might we humans have to learn from these ocean creatures that we know and love called whales?
FS: Yeah, great question. Mmmm. I certainly marvel at their grace and their size, their beauty and certainly admire their survival intelligence. During the tragic excesses of the 20th century industrial whaling, we probably killed over 4 million great whales and drove many of them to the brink, and it's great to see many of these populations are now recovering. Yeah, so I guess the wheels teach us just humility in that we're not alone in this universe. Up until, gawd, the mid 1950s we thought that these great whales were mute, you know, we had no idea until some of these Navy acousticians, Frank Watlington and submariners they were starting to like, “what is going on out there?”—and the diligent work of Dr. Roger Payne and Scott McVay they are able to make the jump and realize, these are, these are Humpback Whales, making this crazy, crazy beauty, beautiful cacophony— really it's a form of sexting actually, it's that internet thing… Yeah with sound speed you know they've had this internet, long, long before us and, you know, the ability to communicate information and reach civilization you read, you know, Jared Diamond and what qualifies as a civilization and just the just the sheer number of individuals that are interacting and potentially communicating complex information and their social structure and especially with these beautiful egalitarian manifestations of the humpback and, in referenced your question, one of the most important things we could potentially learn from these whales is what is another definition of intelligence and how do we study intelligence and these animals, they're displaying in an incredibly complex communication system that we have not yet deciphered and so there's very likely an incredible sentience and intelligence that's equal to greater than ours— is really kind of cool because it was, you know, their potential communicative prowess has attracted those searching for signs of life in the universe. It’s kind of crazy— it's like it's like after half a century of diligent searches in the cosmos for other signs of life it's like we're not having not come up with anything. And our tools are constantly getting better and deeper with Hubble and Kepler and all the ground based telescopes and huge amount of habitat that we realize exists out there. The universe is laced with prebiotic chemicals and there's energy sources and mediums for chemical synthesis to form life forms, lots of energy sources of all of all kinds, and the question is, so why why you know this is Fermi's paradox— Why are we gazing out on a silent universe? And we know that the number of exoplanets out there now, where there can be habitable habitable zones. So, that attracted the interest of these astrobiologists these signal detection specialists, these astrophysicist that gaze out into the cosmos and they just realized, you know, what are we missing? There’s got to be lots of lessons about what an intelligence signal is here on planet Earth, right? So, it was like, I think almost 17 years ago now, Dr. Lawrence Doyle came and just said, “hey, what do you got for us?” What are the craziest wackiest undeciphered signals that we can pour down to the maw of our telescopes and our intelligence filters to see if there's some lessons to be learned out there and the humpback whale, and you know, mysticeti whales in general because these are important animals for the search and understanding of what life is because a lot of the exoplanets now that are being discovered out there appear to be watering worlds. And so, understanding what you know the types of communication systems and their coding and how they package intelligence into a detectable signal— there is a lot to be learned from looking at these bailing whales. They're really interesting because bailing Whales appear to be predisposed to some of the problems that you would get from Interstellar communication, like let's say we were you know trying to send a signal to Proxima Centauri, one of our near stellar neighbors proximately four light years away—you send that signal, it will be a while before you hear back, right? And it's the same thing with these whales, and even though that sound speed is Mach five underneath the water, it’s still a long ways out there, and it can take hours for the signals to move across some of their communication theaters, and by then, it might be stale information, right? You know it's a foraging opportunity, it's a school of hearing it lasts just an instant. If it's a reproductive opportunity you know during an estrus window and if there's other males around, that could be that can be pretty fleeting too, right? So, great whales, they're probably subject to this problem of information quantization or information becoming stale. If it's, you know, if it's too far traveled. And so, also these whales are great to look at because we have to deal with sounds that are get degraded in in space, there's Interstellar electrons that scatter signals and so how do whales package signals to be adapted for such long distance underwater and then the same some rules may be applying for how you design optimal signals for interstellar space.
DK: Fascinating, just utterly fascinating. Well, Fred, that’s a very cosmic note, upon which to wrap this session up with you on whales. And if somebody listening to this is interested in the work that you're doing and the Alaska Whale Foundation, what's the best way to make contact?
FS: Yeah, sounds like an interstellar question. Good one!
FS: Yeah, they can find us on our website, Alaska Whale Foundation. They can also find me at fsharpe@alaskawhalefoundation.org.
And, yeah, I can't wait to reflect again with you, Dan, be it in cyberspace, in the studio or around a campfire on a beach up in Southeast Alaska.
DK: Oh, they all sound inviting, but the latter sounds particularly inviting—at this stage of the game. Well, Fred I, I want to thank you and a big thanks to all of the lucky folks that are listening in on this and if you find the Alaska Story Project compelling, we'd invite you to go to Apple Podcasts, where you can share, rate, review and subscribe to the Alaska Story Project. And it's helpful in getting us out into the world. So, Fred, really appreciate the time and,
FS: As you were Dan. Nothing further. Cancel pan pan. Going back 16.
Laughter. OK Fred. On we go…
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