Tourism Aids Science : Whale Watching Isn’t Just for Fun

“I can’t find a darned thing out here,” a disconsolate voice squawks over the radio of a whale-watching boat.

Others in the little flotilla of nautical sightseers pipe up with a contemporary version of “Thar she blows!” They have spotted fin whales, dolphins, and share their findings. They exchange longitudes of their sightings.

Soon the complainer’s voice returns, sounding happier. “We’re rotten with whales now.”

At sea, there’s cooperation. On shore, the boats seem fiercely competitive, offering various lures. One serves Portuguese food. Kids up to age 8 ride free on another. Prices range from $22 for a ride from Boston Harbor to $10 for a sunset cruise from Provincetown.

Whale watching, a tourist attraction from Hawaii to New England, is big business in the Gulf of Maine, where whales feed near the Stellwagen Bank and Jeffrey’s Ledge. It is a business often run by people whose forebears slaughtered the very whales the modern-day captains show off to their customers.

It’s also a business that has contributed enormously to the scientific knowledge of whales.

Return to Same Spots

“Now it’s old hat that humpbacks return to the same spots in the summers in the northern longitudes, but we learned that through the early whale-watching boats,” said Charles (Stormy) Mayo of the Center for Coastal Research. “We also learned the frequency of calving from the whale-watching boats and now we’re finding the exceptions to that rule.”

Mayo says humpback whales normally calve every two to three years, but this year a humpback produced a calf two years in a row, only the second time that has been observed.

“Scientists forget that we didn’t know that before the whale-watching boats provided us with such a density of information on individual whales,” Mayo said.

The peak year for the whale-watching entrepreneurs in the Cape Cod area was 1985, largely due to ideal weather, when business hit the $4-million mark. In California, where whale watching has been going on for about 30 years, business is even better.

The current whalers move their boats slowly into the midst of feeding whales as passengers snap away with cameras. A naturalist or a researcher explains what kind of whales they are seeing and some of that information is shared with serious research efforts.

Until about 1972, “The Joy of Cooking” included a recipe for whale meat, as the final entree--”vast but last”--of the seafood section.

Today, “Save the Whales” is a national cry, and almost an international one, although some nations still engage in limited whaling, which they say is for scientific research and conservationists say is an excuse for commercial whaling.

Americans are fascinated by the behemoths. Back in 1985, the plight of a 45-ton humpback whale named Humphrey became Page 1 news for nearly a month as he wandered up and down the Sacramento River. Eventually, volunteers and researchers steered Humphrey back into San Francisco Bay and on into the Pacific. His sighting nearly a year later, happily traveling with other humpbacks in the Pacific, was also happily noted.

Reports of whale strandings, a phenomenon that aroused the curiosity of Aristotle a millennium ago, usually bring hundreds of would-be rescuers to the scene, risking limb and hypothermia to shove the huge mammals back into the water.

The whales, now fully protected for 200 miles off the U.S. shores, were important to America’s economy from the beginning. Greg Early, an expert on strandings of whales for the New England Aquarium in Boston, said that some of the first settlers stopped where they did because they espied beached whales, which translated into easy pickings.

The rarest whale spotted by today’s Cape Cod tourist boats is the right whale, so named because it was the easiest, or right one, to catch. They are slow, they float when killed and so they were the most heavily slaughtered. An estimated 200 to 300 right whales swim in the North Atlantic waters, part of a world population of only 1,800.

Whale watchers have only about a 5% chance to see a right whale, Mayo said, though last year sightings were more numerous.

When Al Avellar, captain of the first of the Cape Cod whale-watching boats, went out with a boatload of schoolchildren from Truro, he had a rare day, spotting between 30 and 50 right whales. Mayo, who was aboard, isn’t quite convinced of the numbers.

“To tell you the truth, I wasn’t very good at identifying whales back then,” he said. “Some of the whales we thought were right whales may not have been.”

This year the Cape Cod boats have reported two sightings of great blue whales, the largest animals known. There’s uncertainty whether two individuals were involved or just one sighted twice. Both reports estimated the whale’s length at 75 feet. The great blue whale, rare and endangered, can reach 95 feet.

Humpback whales, also endangered, reach 50 feet and put on the best show for watchers because they like to “breach,” or jump. They are best known perhaps for their thrilling song. About 10,000 are left worldwide with about 5,700 in the North Atlantic.

Mayo said the whale-watching boats have contributed about 80% of the data base the center has on humpbacks.

“Arguably, we have the largest database on humpbacks, with a long history on individuals, and maybe 30,000 to 40,000 photographs from the whale-watch boats,” Mayo said.

The whale-watching boats provided the first clues that complete “songs” were sung in the north, not just in the whales’ breeding grounds in the Caribbean.

“They set us on the trail to investigate the singing in the north,” Mayo said.

The center works closely with Avellar’s fleet of whale-watching boats operating out of Cape Cod. The fleet donates about $10,000 a year from ticket sales to the center and a scientist goes out on each trip.

“More importantly, they allow us access to the public, to let people know what we are doing here,” Mayo said.

Irene Seipt, 35, is one such whale watcher. She is the principal investigator in the finback whale project, in which the center is trying to identify individuals, as it has done with humpbacks. The center has a catalogue of 400 identified humpbacks and photographs of their tails, or flukes, which are quite distinctive to the trained eye of a whale watcher. To a whale expert, they are as individual as a human fingerprint.

Head Bumps

The right whales are also unequivocally identifiable by the callosities, or bumps, on their heads.

The finbacks are tougher to differentiate, but the center now has identified about 100 individual ones.

The fin whales are the largest whales tourists are likely to encounter. They go up to 50 tons and 70 feet in length.

Seipt, the center’s fin expert and scientist aboard a recent cruise, notes the location and water temperature every 20 minutes to track the species. She photographs every whale she sees, noting how it fits into the location and water temperature.

The whale researchers gather enough data over the tourist season to keep busy cataloguing it all winter. Boats begin going out in April and continue through the end of October.

The center has untangled five humpback whales from fishing nets and in one case watched a disentangled whale, named Ibis, come swimming back the following summer with a calf.

“We have three generations of whales named now,” Mayo said.

Mayo and Dave Mattila went out on rubber rafts and essentially used the same whale-untangling techniques that Mayo’s father used when he hunted whales. They attached flotation gear to the netting and wore the whale down enough so that she surfaced and they could cut the netting that bound her.

“Neither of us are very macho, “ said Mayo, who cut Ibis free on Thanksgiving Day of 1984. “It was scary before and after, but there wasn’t time to be frightened while we did it.”

One whale-watch boat, the Voyager, is owned by the Boston Aquarium and sails from Boston Harbor. The whale specialist aboard is Elliott Edwards, and he and captain Doug Hall not only can find the tell-tale spouts but can usually tell the species of the spouter from the spurt of water.

On one particular day, 15 finbacks were spotted, but no humpback. “We had a great show last Saturday,” said Hall. “We had a humpback cow and her calf doing excessive breaching.”

Failure to sight a whale from a tourist boat is rare, and most boats issue a raincheck of sorts. Whale watcher David Wiley thinks that’s terrible.

“If people aren’t willing to risk $15 to see some of the largest animals that ever lived, they don’t deserve to see a whale,” he said.

Mayo has a doctorate in marine sciences, but many whale experts have become experts by being there--at mass strandings, aboard whale-watching boats for prolonged, repetitive observations.

Wiley, who works for the aquarium, has a degree in wildlife biology “but the rest of the school is the ocean,” he said.

“The difference between being a researcher and a naturalist is how much you’re willing to suffer for an end,” he said. “My job is 16 hours a day with no retirement, no insurance. I watched whales for years before I could make unemotional comments as I recorded the data.”

Greg Early, the aquarium’s expert on strandings, agrees with Wiley about the aura of whale watching.

“I’m strung on the same line as everyone else,” he said. “ ‘Moby Dick’ is the archetypal whale book. It’s a real animal, a mythical animal, a projection of our imagination.