• Acid Oceans: The other climate change problem
• Saving Sharks: Connecting the Asian fin trade to Canadian waters
• Branding Nature: Selling and saving the seas

Basking sharks have huge mouths, the better to filter plankton with. (Chris Gotschalk/DFO)

But I didn’t have a context for why overfishing sharks would be any different than other types of overfishing. I also wasn’t sure whether this was something that affected sharks off Canada’s Pacific coast, or if it was only a problem other places.

It turns out, yes, overfishing sharks is different, and yes, the fin trade around the world affects endangered sharks here. I connect the dots with the help of patient scientists, to tell a tale about endangered basking sharks. That piece also aired across Canada on CBC Radio.

The second International Marine Conservation Congress starts in Victoria today. Scientists, policy makers, resource managers, and NGOs are here to share science on our changing oceans, and ideas on how to save them. It’s only been held once before, 2 years ago in Washington, D.C. What I find so interesting is the goal is not just moving the conversation forward by publishing papers in the scientific literature — but also by crafting recommendations that let science inform public policy.

I’m here to report for CBC Radio — you’ll hear me talking to Stephen Quinn, host of On the Coast, and Grant Lawrence, guest-hosting All Points West. I’ll be on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday at about 5:40 or so in the Vancouver area and 4:50-ish in the rest of B.C.

Changing oceans

It’s not easy to decide what to cover. The program is huge, covering invasive species, overfishing, aquaculture, planning, and many more issues. I’ll be looking for stories that mean something to a B.C. audience.

One piece will be on climate change and ocean acidification — there is a lot on it at this conference, and a topic I find really interesting. We know the pH of the ocean is changing as it absorbs excess CO2 we’re dumping into the atmosphere. It seems to already be causing problems for the shellfish industry in some coastal areas. But it’s not clear just how the complex systems of the sea will respond to these changes — or how this threat stacks up against others.

Still deciding on other topics. I’m excited—and a little bit daunted—to dive in.

* update: This may or may not be an internet myth based on a band name. I was just chatting with a journalist publishing a book on sharks, and she’d never heard it. Nevertheless, a lovely word.

A researcher implants an acoustic tag into a migrating Fraser River sockeye (Jennifer M. Burt/Science)

Q: When is the lead author of a paper published in Science not allowed to comment on the subject?

A: When she works for Canada’s federal government. In this case, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO).

It is not a new phenomenon that Canada’s federal scientists are prevented from talking about their taxpayer-funded work. Margaret Munro, the science reporter for Postmedia News, wrote a news story last year that pushed this practice into the public eye, prompting coverage by other media outlets (including the CBC), and an opinion piece in the journal Nature calling for change. From Munro’s story:

The documents say the “new” rules went into force in March and reveal how they apply to not only to contentious issues including the oilsands, but benign subjects such as floods that occurred 13,000 years ago.

But, even if it’s not new, I still think its worth noting when it happens.

In this case, the scientist was the first author of study on Fraser River sockeye that provides a new piece to the puzzle of their declining numbers. (CBC story.) Researchers took tissue samples from migrating sockeye salmon, and tagged the fish to see which ones survived to spawn. They found a pattern.

The ones with a certain set of active genes were more likely to die before the spawning grounds. The researchers said it looked like the genes were responding to a viral infection — as in the fish that were dying had caught a virus out at sea.

The journal’s embargoed release sent to media around the world told reporters to contact DFO communications to reach the lead and corresponding author, Kristina Miller. But after days of trying, my colleague on the story was told yesterday that Miller “still [had] not received permission from Ottawa to speak to the press.”

Two of her co-authors from UBC, Scott Hinch and Tony Farrell, conducted interviews instead.

This study does touch on a few issues the federal government would flag as controversial. For example, if the fish did catch a virus, where did it come from? Biologist and activist Alexandra Morton suggests it might be from fish farms. Also, the study invites questions about climate change, pointing out that “seven of the last 10 summers have been the warmest on record for the Fraser River” and explaining that warmer water can make sick fish sicker.

What do you think? Would you like to hear from federal scientists about their work?

A young killer whale found dead at Point No Point, near Victoria. (Stefan Beckmann/DFO)

Answer 1: Life’s tough, and more to the point, finite. So, animals die, even the charismatic ones that humans like. That’s Nature.

Answer 2: Some thing, or things, are happening in the ocean, and these are signs of that.

I don’t know what the answer is, but there have been a lot of stories lately about marine mammals washing up dead on B.C. beaches.

I’ve certainly reported on a few for CBC News. For example:

• The Department of Fisheries and Oceans told me yesterday they’re “concerned, but not panicking” about at least eight harbour porpoises that have washed up dead in recent days on southern Vancouver Island. Maybe they were hunted to exhaustion by transient killer whales, or the weaker ones died during breeding season, or something else. The provincial government’s Animal Health Centre in Abbotsford is conducting necropsies starting today. [Update: now, at least nine porpoises have washed up in five days.]
• A brand new killer whale calf just washed up near Victoria. Again, the cause of death is not known, and the Animal Health Centre is investigating. Here’s my story interviewing the veterinary pathologist on the case. Survival is low among newborn killer whales, so the death itself isn’t surprising, but some populations of them are so endangered this death was treated (a) as an urgent case and (b) as an opportunity to learn more about what’s going on.
• There have also been at least five grey whales washing up north and south of the border (CBC) (The Province). This is apparently not unusual; it happened at the time when grey whales pass here on the way from their breeding grounds in Baja to their feeding grounds in B.C./Alaska.

Does this all add up to anything? I don’t know. Just because they’re all marine mammals doesn’t mean it’s wise to list these cases together. Plus, the media has a habit of paying extra attention to something its already paid attention to (meaning the later strandings would get more coverage).

The good thing is: it appears that someone’s watching. When I interviewed Dr. Stephen Raverty, the veterinary pathologist on these cases, he noted that prior to 2000 most marine mammal strandings were not investigated. Now, he says 70-80% are, thanks to the efforts of DFO and NOAA. His lab now examines hundreds of marine mammal carcasses each year.

The hope is, if something is going on, these individual cases will yield some clues to protect the rest of the population.

Do you have any questions or thoughts about what’s going on?

Scientists are tagging humboldt squid to figure out what they're doing in the North Pacific. (Submitted by Nikki Lane to CBC)

Even more interesting, or perhaps alarming, is what’s happening with the Humboldt squid in B.C. waters.

First, why are they here? They’re native to northern Mexico, but in the past ten years have spread northward, first to California, and now all the way to southeast Alaska. That is a big change in such a short time.

Secondly, they’re washing up dead on beaches in large numbers.

Given this, I was pretty curious when I learned about a new study tagging two dozen Humboldt squid and trying to trace their movements around the North Pacific, as part of the Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking project. The goal is to figure out what the jumbo squid are doing up here. That’s important to know for fisheries because these squid prey on commercially valuable species like hake. It also matters because their rapid change of range could tell us something about our changing oceans.

You can watch my CBC TV story (vid link) from last week to see the squid, and hear from the scientist leading the research. There’s an online text version here.

eyes on the ground

If you look at the TV story, or even the photo above, you’ll see that CBC didn’t capture the images of the squid. The video came from a Tofino-based group called the Raincoast Education Society.

I found some of it on YouTube, then called up Josie Osborne and asked if we could use it. She said yes, and ended up being part of the story, talking about the wonder and concern people felt as squid washed on shore — squid that aren’t supposed to be up here.

What I said to her then (besides “thank you”) was how important it is for groups like hers to capture video like this, and post it online. They can be the eyes and ears of a changing coastline that many of us don’t get to visit. (Pacific Wild on the central coast is another great example.) And while, as a reporter, I have to be cautious of second-hand video, it can also help me tell a story that otherwise wouldn’t get told.

Killer whales on the B.C. coast. (CBC)

Researching another story this week on humpbacks, I called up Dr. Lance Barrett-Lennard at the Vancouver Aquarium. He’s a scientist with a gift for speaking clearly, and he studies marine mammals on our coast. He’s also the co-chair of the Killer Whale Recovery Team organized by Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

I asked him about the killer whales he studies — the Northern Resident population, which can be seen in the Johnstone Strait area and further north during the summer. Last year, he had spoken out about that population starving, and described whales swimming for hours before finding fish to eat. (Their preferred food: chinook salmon).

This year, what a difference.

The central coast runs for chinook were abundant, he told me. So the whales seemed to have enough to eat, and it could be seen in how they act.

“That basically means the whales don’t have to be making a living every minute of the day they have time to socialize,” said Barrett-Lennard in an interview on the Aquarium’s research boat, Skana.

“When whales are ‘happy,’ we see a lot of social behaviour, they’re a lot like us in that respect,” he said. “We see larger groups, lots of playing, lots of pushing and shoving and jumping and rolling over on their backs.”

Take a look at my CBC TV story (vid link) to see killer whales, and learn what other threats they face.

A humpback whale breaches off the B.C. coast. Photo by SparkyLeigh on flickr.

The good news is: seeing a humpback whale in the North Pacific isn’t as rare anymore.

They’re considered threatened in Canada, and for as long as the U.S. has had an endangered species list (since 1973) the humpback has been on it.

But that could soon change, in the U.S. at least.

This week, NOAA announced it’s reviewing the humpback’s status. A recent international study puts the North Pacific population estimate at almost 20,000, up from a low of less than 2,000 animals.

While humpback numbers are now growing steadily, the population is still just one-fifth of the pre-whaling size, according to Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

good, but good enough?

“It’s been such a gift to watch them come back,” Jackie Hildering told me this week. She’s a naturalist with Stubbs Island Whale Watching in Telegraph Cove, and remembers in 2002 when humpback sightings were uncommon in the Broughton Archipelago.

This year, she identified 47 individuals. She laughs in wonder as she recalled to me juvenile humpbacks energetically slapping their tails on the water.

But Hildering worries what a loss of protection could mean for the whales, given that status can help drive research funding. “There’s just so much we don’t understand about these animals,” she said.

Dr. Jay Barlow, one of NOAA’s own lead scientists studying humpbacks, told me he agrees are still many unknowns — especially when it comes to climate change.

For example, will the whales be able to change their migration routes to find food? “The same places where whales have been going to in the past that have been good for feeding in the past may not be good places for the future,” he told me in a phone interview from La Jolla, CA.

“If their habitat changes, will they be flexible enough to deal with that? We don’t really know at this point,” said Barlow.

When do you think it’s time to take a species off the endangered list? Is it time for Canada to review the humpback’s status too?