Fatal trap in the Arctic ice

[Animal 0]

Fatal trap in the Arctic ice

In November, 600 narwhal whales died stranded in shallow water when they waited too long to return to open ocean and were stranded by the winter freeze-up. It was the biggest such entrapment ever in Canada and the third in three years, leading some scientists to wonder if global warming could be to blame

By Ed Struzik, Canwest News ServiceJanuary 24, 2009

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A narwhal pokes its head out of the sea ice. The whale's spiralled tusk can grow up to three metres long and fetch $3,000 or more.Photograph by: Reuters, Canwest News ServiceIt was late November when Inuit hunters from Pond Inlet were crossing the sea ice on their snowmobiles to take advantage of good weather and the three hours of sunlight available at this time of year.

About 17 kilometres north of their hometown, one of them spotted a group of polar bears huddled up in the distance. Curious to see what had attracted the animals, the hunters drove up and found the bears covered in blood and feeding on several narwhal, which had evidently been dragged out of small holes in the ice nearby.

The tusked whales had been trapped by a sudden shift in weather that caused the ice to form almost overnight.

Bobbing up and down in a hole that was no larger than a child's rubber swimming pool and getting smaller by the hour, dozens of narwhal were desperately jockeying for position, trying to get a gulp of air.

A couple of young calves were accidentally tossed out onto the ice by the sheer force of so many animals pushing up at once. Many of the live whales bore wounds inflicted when the polar bears swatted at them as they surfaced.

Initially, it was estimated that as many as 200 narwhals might be trapped in this hole and several others that Inuit hunters found in the area the next day.

After concluding that nothing could be done to save the whales, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans decided to let the Inuit hunters and trappers harvest the animals.

The numbers, however, were far greater than anyone could have imagined.

By the time Inuit hunters finished harvesting all of the trapped whales, more than 600 narwhal had been killed, carved up and distributed to people in the community. Dozens, possibly hundreds more, likely drowned and sank to the ocean bottom.

It was the biggest whale entrapment ever recorded in the Canadian Arctic. So much maqtaaq (whale blubber) was left over that managers of the Co-Op store in town were boxing it up and selling it to other communities in the Arctic.

Jayko Allooloo, the president of the Pond Inlet Hunters and Trappers Association, said he's never seen anything like it.

"No one in Pond Inlet remembers anything like this happening around here in at least 75 years," he said in the midst of the harvest. "No one has seen so many whales trapped. This is very new to us."

"Normally, we hunt narwhal from boats," said Joseph Maktar, another Inuit hunter.

"The narwhal are usually gone by the end of September. But the ice was late coming this year and I guess the narwhal got tricked into staying. Blame it on global warming."

Narwhal are one of three types of whale that live in the Arctic year-round. No one knows how many there are, but estimates range between 50,000 and 80,000. Unlike beluga and giant bowhead whales, which are found across the Arctic world, narwhal are found mainly along the coasts of Greenland and Canada's eastern Arctic.

There, they are hunted by the Inuit who covet the maqtaaq and the long, spiralled tusk that can grow up to three metres in length and sell for $3,000 or more.

Greenland Inuit call these entrapments "sassats," which means "something that is being served."

Entrapments like the one outside of Pond Inlet are rare, but likely happen more often than can be confirmed.

"It's impossible to say how often they occur because entrapments tend to happen at a time of year or place when it is either too dark, too cold or dangerous for anyone to be on the ice," says Pierre Richard, a Winnipeg-based Fisheries and Oceans scientist who has spent his entire career studying beluga and narwhal.

"With so few people living in the Arctic, there are not many eyes to see what is going on. Narwhals also spend the late fall and winter and early spring far offshore in Baffin Bay and Davis Strait. I had a chance to fly over that area, and it was amazing to see so many narwhal bunched up in small cracks in all that ice."

The only thing really unusual about this entrapment, says Richard, was the number of animals stranded. Usually, it's just several dozen whales, he says.

Richard recently co-authored a scientific paper that looked at several Arctic entrapments.

The biggest entrapment of narwhal ever recorded occurred in Disko Bay, Greenland, in January 1915, when at least 1,000 got stranded. This is an area where prevailing northwest winds, an influx of warm water from the south and a jagged coastline combine to create very volatile ice conditions.

Presumably, this is why entrapments occur here more often than anywhere else. More than 3,000 belugas were trapped at Disko Bay in 1955 and another 1,000 in 1970. Six hundred belugas and narwhals were trapped there in 1968. Each time, the Inuit of Greenland harvested what they could.

Comparatively few entrapments have been recorded in Arctic Canada. Richard suspects that the deep freeze of winter and the fact that there is much less warm water flowing this far north makes ice conditions much more predictable.

Nevertheless, those that have been recorded in Arctic Canada were memorable.

When 40 belugas and one bowhead were trapped off the north coast of Baffin Island in 1999, the stranded whales attracted as many 40 polar bears to the area. By the time polar bear scientist Malcolm Ramsay arrived on the scene by chance, at least a dozen belugas had already been hauled out. Some of the bears were so fat from eating so much whale blubber that they could barely move without dragging their bellies on the ice.

Further north, near Grise Fiord, hunters from Canada's most northerly Inuit community broke holes in the ice the same month in a failed effort to save belugas that got stranded in a similar way.

This year's entrapment is the third in as many years in Canadian waters.

About 20 belugas got trapped in the ice near Grise Fiord last May.

In 2006 and again in 2007, dozens of beluga whales were found stranded in the Husky Lakes, a saltwater inlet that juts inland from Liverpool Bay in the western Arctic.

The first time it happened, Fisheries and Oceans scientists, working with Inuvialuit hunters in Tuktoyaktuk, considered the possibility of trying to drive the belugas out with boats. But the Husky Lakes are dotted with hundreds of small islands and countless shallow, narrow channels.

Finding a way to drive the whales out would have been a nightmare, if not impossible.

In the end, the Inuvialuit were allowed to kill what they could. Fisheries and Oceans scientists then went home with samples they needed to find out whether the whales were diseased and what it was they were eating that may have kept them there.

The second time it happened at Husky Lakes, the fate of the belugas was left to nature to decide, mainly because the animals harvested the year before were too emaciated to be worth eating.

The fact that something like this has happened three years in a row -- years when low-ice-cover records in the Arctic were smashed in 2005 and 2007 -- has some scientists wondering whether climate change and volatile ice conditions are making Arctic whales more vulnerable.

"I don't know that anyone can make a clear connection between climate change and what happened near Pond Inlet," says Kristin Laidre, a University of Washington scientist who has been involved in narwhal research in Canada and Greenland for the past decade.

"But when I first heard about it, that was the first thing that came to mind."

In a way, Laidre saw this coming after she and Ian Stirling of the Canadian Wildlife Service in Edmonton collaborated with other scientists from around the world to evaluate the sensitivity of Arctic marine mammals to climate change and melting sea ice.

They considered everything, including population distribution, feeding patterns, seasonal dependence on ice and reliance on ice for food and predator avoidance.

Just months before the latest stranding, their findings appeared in Ecological Applications, a scientific journal published by the Ecological Society of America.

In that paper, they concluded that narwhal, the polar bear and the hooded seal were among the most vulnerable marine mammals in the Arctic because of their close ties to ice, which is rapidly melting and becoming unpredictable.

Animal-rights activists were highly critical of the Canadian government for not sending an icebreaker up to the Arctic to carve a path through the ice to save the whales.

The Russians did this back in 1984-85, when more than 1,000 whales got trapped in the ice inside the former Soviet Union. The dramatic rescue made headlines around the world.

Not only was this a good-news nature story, it was also seen as a sign that the evil empire of the Cold War had a heart.

So it was inevitable that people would ask why Canada didn't do something similar.

There are, however, differences between what happened then and what occurred outside of Pond Inlet last fall.

No icebreaker was anywhere near Pond Inlet at the time. And even if one were sent north, says Keith Pelley, the regional director for Fisheries and Oceans, there was no certainty it would be able to get through the ice that was building up with winter's deep freeze.

Nor could anyone be assured the narwhal would have followed the lead out.

The Russians spent days waiting for the belugas to follow the lead the icebreaker made for them. In the end, or so the Russians say, it was music played through loudspeakers on the deck of the icebreaker that finally coaxed those whales to move.

Pelley says the decision to let the Inuit harvest the narwhal was made after it was concluded nothing could be done to save them.

Like others, Ian Stirling doubts that anything could have been done to save those whales.

However, because this was the third reported entrapment in three years, and because it came after he and Laidre published their paper, he sees it as a cautionary tale, one that should have Fisheries and Oceans thinking about how it responds to entrapments in the future.

More than a week passed before anyone in the department was sent up to Pond Inlet.

And while there may have been a good reason for the delay, that left the door wide open for critics to pounce on both the government for not responding soon enough.

This wasn't the first time Stirling had raised such concerns about Arctic whales. In a scientific paper published in 1980, a year after 100 whales were stranded at Agu Bay in Igloolik, he was similarly critical when Fisheries and Oceans failed to send someone there to gather data that might have shed light on why it happened.

That paper raised concerns that the whales' penchant for leaving open water might tempt them to follow the leads made by icebreakers and other ships and become entrapped.

Now that the Northwest Passage is becoming more attractive for commercial shipping, Stirling feels more strongly about this than ever.

He also wonders if increased weather variations year-round, due to climate change, might make the whales more vulnerable to entrapment by an unseasonal cold snap while they're feeding away from open water.

Like Stirling and Laidre, Richard would have liked to know what caused so many whales to stick around for so long.

"Climate change may be a factor," he said. "But these entrapments have happened before, so I'm not sure that is the case here.

"Was it the open water that tricked them into staying longer than they should have? Maybe, but from our experience, narwhal in the eastern Arctic of Canada are usually long gone before the ice moves in.

"The fact is, we know very little about these whales and the habitat they live in. For now and some time to come, this will remain a mystery."

EXPLORER BELIEVED NARWHAL WAS THE UNICORN OF THE SEA

Inuit legend suggests that the narwhal was created in ancient times when a long-haired woman refused to let go of a harpoon she had pierced into the side of a beluga whale.

When the two got tangled up underwater, she continued to get wrapped up with the animal as it was trying to spin away. In death, the two then became one narwhal.

The outside world's take on the narwhal has been just as fantastical.

In medieval times, many of the narwhal tusks that Viking hunting parties brought home from their travels to Arctic waters ended up in southern Europe and East Asia.

Those who weren't aware of their origin speculated that they were the horns of the mythical unicorn.

This belief was shared by Martin Frobisher when he set off for the Arctic in 1576 in search of a Northwest Passage to the Orient.

Like others at the time, Frobisher believed that for every species of animal on land, there was a twin that lived in the sea. The narwhal was the sea's unicorn.

Frobisher returned from his first trip to the Arctic with a tusk that he gave to Elizabeth I, Queen of England in the 16th century. It was reportedly worth £10,000, the value of a castle at the time.

The narwhal tusk came to have such universal appeal that it was used as a royal sceptre in England.

In spite of all this interest in and infatuation with the narwhal, the whale remains something of a mystery.

Unlike the beluga, which does reasonably well in captivity, every narwhal that has been placed in a zoo has died. No one has been able to explain why.

Nor is it known why narwhal almost never venture into western Arctic waters, where belugas are plentiful.

Scientists are almost certain that the narwhal tusk is not used as a weapon because specimens rarely show any nicks or breaks that might have occurred while fighting.

Yet in October 1991, two Inuvialuit hunters from Tuktoyaktuk in the western Arctic found part of narwhal tusk embedded in a beluga whale.

What we do know about the narwhal is that it is found mainly in the waters of Hudson Bay, the Eastern Arctic oceans and the Arctic waters of Greenland.

Growing up to six metres, it is slightly smaller than the white beluga, the whale it most resembles. Like the beluga, it dives to great depths, up to 1,500 metres or more in the narwhal's case. It can stay underwater for at least 15 minutes.

Narwhal migrate into Arctic waters in early summer when they follow the melting ice packs to feed on the Arctic cod that abound along these edges. When the ice reforms in late fall, they retreat once again to the North Atlantic.

Males are born with an incisor tooth that can grow to lengths of nearly three metres in rare cases.


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