The Mystery of Alaska’s Disappearing Whales

This story initially appeared in Undark and is a part of the Local weather Desk collaboration.

When Roswell Schaeffer Sr. was 8 years previous, his father determined it was about time he began studying to hunt beluga whales. Schaeffer was an Iñupiaq child rising up in Kotzebue, a small metropolis in northwest Alaska, the place a wholesome retailer of beluga meat was a part of making it by way of the winter. Every summer season, 1000’s of those small white whales migrated to Kotzebue Sound, and hunts have been an annual custom. Whale pores and skin and blubber, or muktuk, was prized, not solely as a type of sustenance and a buying and selling commodity, but in addition due to the non secular worth of sharing the catch with the group.

Now, practically seven a long time later, Schaeffer is one among only some hunters who nonetheless spend the late weeks of spring, simply after the ice has melted, on Kotzebue Sound, ready for belugas to reach. Many individuals have switched to searching bearded seals, partly out of necessity: There merely aren’t sufficient belugas to maintain the group anymore.

Within the Eighties, Kotzebue Sound’s beluga inhabitants started to dwindle, from 1000’s to a whole bunch, after which to the handfuls or fewer that go to the area now. Kotzebue just isn’t alone. Though some shares are wholesome, beluga numbers have fallen off in round a half-dozen areas over the past 50 years. A long time in the past, searching, business whaling, and different influences pushed the whales towards the brink. Now, even after searching has ceased in some locations, stresses equivalent to local weather change, elevated ship site visitors, and chemical pollution are a gathering storm that threatens to complete the job.

However some scientists assume that understanding how the whales reply to those stresses may find yourself being as vital as understanding the stresses themselves. Belugas, like chimpanzees, birds, people, and lots of different animals, create cultures by passing data and customs from one technology to the following. With local weather change and different human actions reshaping the world at an alarming fee, belugas will doubtless need to depend on progressive cultural practices to adapt—genetic adaptation is just too gradual to maintain up.

Cultural practices can turn into rote, nonetheless, and identical to people, different animals can maintain onto traditions lengthy after they’ve stopped making sense. One key query, in line with Greg O’Corry-Crowe, a behavioral ecologist at Florida Atlantic College, is: Will tradition carry the whales by way of?

“When the change is so seismic, perhaps, and so fast, you’re attempting to search for the innovators and the pioneers among the many social conservatives,” O’Corry-Crowe stated. On the similar time, Indigenous individuals like Schaeffer are going through their very own quandary. Persevering with to hunt belugas might damage the whales’ probability of rebounding, but when Indigenous teams quit the apply, they may lose data that’s helped maintain them within the Arctic for 1000’s of years.

Philosophers and scientists have lengthy recommended that animals can study. However even within the early 2000s, scientists debated the concept that animals accumulate data over generations. One animal that helped popularize that notion is the killer whale.