Officials Can’t Agree on How to Save Whale Lost in River

The health of a humpback whale swimming in the Sacramento River delta appeared to deteriorate Monday, a marine biologist said, but federal officials continued to rule out any attempt to drive the animal back toward the ocean.

“The days are ticking by for this animal,” Mark Ferrari, a California Marine Mammal Center biologist who has followed the whale’s odyssey for more than a week, said Monday night. “If we don’t do something he’s going to die. There may be nothing we can do. But we’ve got to at least try.”

Earlier Monday, officials from the National Marine Fisheries Service, which has jurisdiction over the whale, said the 40-ton mammal might live for months in the Sacramento River, and suggested that leaving it alone is the best policy.

Wants It Left Alone

“I think the animal’s best chance is to survive on its own,” said Jim Lecky, a biologist with the Marine Fisheries Service. “We ought to let the whale have its own shot at it before we go back in and start harassing it some more.” Lecky, who has not seen the whale himself, was interviewed by telephone from Los Angeles.

The differing views highlight a growing disagreement among scientists over what role humans should play in helping the whale, which has strayed far from its natural habitat.

The Marine Fisheries Service, which has two enforcement agents but no biologist on the scene, has adopted a “hands off” approach.

But the Marin County-based Marine Mammal Center, set up primarily to rescue seals and sea lions along the coast, has made several proposals to coax the whale out of narrow Shag Slough, where it has spent the last three days swimming in circles.

One method, Ferrari said, would involve creating a loud noise using pipes in the water to drive the animal under a small bridge that seems to have blocked its progress back down the river. The tactic has been used in Japan with some success on smaller marine mammals, he said.

Doubts on Survival

Ferrari said the whale’s skin appeared to be deteriorating Monday and that the animal seemed to be running out of energy, leading him to believe it would not survive much longer.

“He’s coming up to the surface and not blowing,” he said. “It’s taking a tremendous amount of energy for him to do the things that sustain his life.”

The whale, which would normally be headed for Hawaii at this time of year, took a wrong turn at the Golden Gate Bridge 12 days ago, swam through San Francisco Bay and then worked its way up the river to the slough some 60 miles from the ocean.

Ferrari and fellow biologists from the Marine Mammal Center initially suggested that the whale was lost and might not survive more than two weeks in fresh water. They led efforts to herd the whale downriver by boat, attempted to coax it along with music and tape recordings of killer whales and worked with psychics who tried to send the whale home by mental telepathy. None of that worked.

The National Marine Fisheries Service officials and some other scientists think the whale could survive for months in the narrow channel.

“He could go for a couple months without feeding,” Lecky said. “Unless some other problem arises, he could stay there for quite a while.

Take a Step Back

“What we’ve learned from the attempts to rescue him so far is that we just keep adding to the confusion. We’re just going to take a step back and hope the whale finds its own way out.”

The Marine Fisheries Service is flying a biologist to the river today to observe the whale.

Attempts to coax the humpback out of the delta have captured the imagination of dozens of people who have flooded the Marine Mammal Center and the Rio Vista Coast Guard Station with ideas on how to help the animal, variously named “E.T.” and “Humphrey” by its followers.

One popular suggestion is to tow the whale out to sea. But that would be likely to drown the mammal, which must surface regularly to breathe.

Other equally impractical proposals have included scaring the animal by showing it a harpoon, hoisting the 80,000-pound creature by helicopter, baiting the river with a trail of fish, importing dolphins to lead the whale home, or placing reflectors on bridges so the giant mammal won’t see them.