Scientists setting sail on whale odyssey

September 29, 1998
Webposted at 11:45 AM EDT

By Environmental News Network staff

Eye to eye with the most endangered great whale in the world -- the right whale.

(ENN) -- Iain Kerr is a modern day ocean adventurer -- a Captain Ahab roaming the seas, but passionate about the fate of the world's oceans and the many whales rather than just one. Now he's getting ready to embark on a project that will use whales as a barometer of global ocean pollution.

Captain Kerr, born in Scotland, began his career with dolphins in 1983 at the Dolphin Research Center in Florida. In 1987, he hooked up with Dr. Roger Payne, a scientist renowned for decades of work studying the songs and behavior of whales, at the Wildlife Conservation Society whale camp in Argentina. Since then, the two have been to all parts of the globe, including Australia, the Amazon Basin, Argentina, Alaska, the Caribbean, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Hawaii and Mexico.

As a team, they have contributed to the development of research protocols and innovative technologies in whale research. Payne is the founder of the 26-year-old nonprofit Whale Conservation Institute and a pioneer in the field of whale studies.

The pair's latest scientific adventure is a five-year WCI project called the Global Ecotox Program. The goal of the project is to gather the first-ever baseline data on synthetic contaminants throughout the world's oceans.

The R.V. Odyssey is a 93-foot steel-hulled ketch capable of spending extended periods of time offshore with little or no shore support.

Almost nothing is known about how concentrations of these contaminants vary on a global scale, or whether, for instance, the Atlantic is more polluted than the Pacific.

What scientists do know is this: manmade pollutants travel up the food chain, becoming more concentrated and posing more of a problem for whales and humans than say, amoebas. The second clearly known fact is that there have been whales found with such high concentrations of these pollutants, that if they were land-based they'd have to be regulated as toxic waste dumps.

The big problem with these synthetic compounds are the three "Bs": biopersistent, bioamplification and biogenerational. First, some of them don't break down for hundreds of years -- that makes them biopersistent toxins. Bioamplification means that the higher up the food chain, the more vulnerable we are to them, and they're known to cause weakened immune systems, learning defects and other problems in humans. Perhaps the most frightening aspect is biogenerational -- mammals can pass up to 30 percent of the compounds they're storing on to the next generation through the placental barrier and mother's milk.

"We're walking a biological tightrope," says Kerr. "The key element is that the oceans are one of the largest mediating forces on the planet and without knowing the distribution and concentration of compounds in the ocean, we can't even know for sure whether there's a problem, and whether it's getting better or worse."

Set to begin in October, Global Ecotox will use whales and Albatrosses as indicator species for surveying the distribution of 32 organohalogens. The size, longevity, and wide-ranging migrations of whales make them unique targets for toxic chemicals. They carry dramatically more fat than any other animal, and organohalogens are irresistibly drawn to fat; a double whammy allowing whales to store more toxins in their bodies than any other animals.

When they metabolize the fat in which these toxins are stored, the toxins enter the blood stream where they may affect vital organs, the immune system and reproduction. This makes the pollutant loads in whales a good gauge of the pollutant concentrations in the oceans through which those whales swim.

"Whales are humanity's canary in the coal mine," says Payne. "As ocean pollution levels increase, marine mammals like whales will be among the first to go."

Captain Kerr catches a right whale Lob Tailing at sunset.

To help answer the question of whether contamination is widespread or isolated, biopsies of blubber the size of pencil erasers will be taken from male and female whales from 15 to 20 locations worldwide. Scientists will also test eggs from the albatross, which flies great distances to feed and nests on remote islands.

The vehicle for the expedition is a high tech floating laboratory named the R.V. Odyssey, a 93-foot steel-hulled ketch capable of spending extended periods of time offshore with little or no shore support. The Odyssey utilizes high tech sonar tracking and hydrophonic devices, environmental probes and a fully integrated computer system to record data 24 hours a day. The remote probe WHALECAM was developed on an earlier expedition in the Galapagos. This expedition will take the scientists to the Galapagos Islands, Rykyu Island (East China Sea), Madagasgar, Sri Lanka, Cape Verde Islands and the Amazon basin.

As with many scientific enterprises, collaboration among scientists is vital and Global Ecotox has an impressive roster of participants: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Sere Group, Cambridge University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, The Smithsonian Institution and Magian Design studios. The project is expected to cost $1.5 million a year, and is not yet fully funded.

Getting ready to leave on the first leg of the expedition, Kerr says "the first mistake we made was by calling this planet Earth when 71 percent is covered with water. We need to remember that 80 percent of oxygen production and CO2 absorption happens in the oceans not in the rain forest. It's frustrating that we know more about the surface of the moon than most of our oceans."

That won't be true for long if Kerr, Payne and their ocean-loving cohorts have anything to say about it.

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