Conservation
Conservation of whales through research and education is the key objective of Ocean Alliance. Whales are compelling representatives of the natural world. The threats to their existence - the resumption of commercial whaling, the entrapment of cetaceans in drift-nets, and the pollution of ecosystems by poisonous chemicals - attract the concern of people interested in conserving whales and the environment as a whole.
The struggle to conserve a species is never won permanently; and the species will be lost forever. Conservationists, however, must win every battle. They can never afford to lose even a single battle, or what they are trying to protect will be lost forever. This means that as new threats evolve, so must the thinking of conservationists.
A brief glance back
Right whales once filled many of the bays and inlets on earth. They were in Delaware Bay, the Chesapeake and many bays on the European coastline. Diarists from the Mayflower marveled at the whales they saw as they entered Massachusetts Bay. The surfaces of these bays were alive with the slow restful breathing of whales. Their sounds filled the bays and inlets of five continents for all but the last two hundred years of the tens of millions of years they have existed. Now children, whose great-grandparents would have delighted in hearing these whale sounds, cannot even imagine what it was like to hear them such a short time ago.
Peninsula Valdes, Argentina
We are currently working to make Ocean Alliance's 39-year database of the right whales of Peninsula Valdes a resource for right whale protection and management in Argentina. We are running a program that brings Argentine researchers to our laboratory in the US, so they can learn how to access and maintain our database and use it to answer management questions about the whales both now and in the future.
Ocean Alliance is also working with our Argentine representatives: the Instituto de Conservaciòn de Ballenas (www.icb.org.ar) to document conservation issues, prepare and distribute educational materials in Spanish, develop educational programs that inform people about right whales, so as to develop broad support for right whale protection within the country. We continue to raise funds to support a curriculum in the schools surrounding Peninsula Valdes that focuses on the wildlife of the region and encourages student involvement in preserving it.
We will continue to find a way to reduce the problem of gull harassment of the Peninsula Valdes right whales. Refuse from fish processing plants near Peninsula Valdes has created a problem by subsidizing gull populations. Young kelp gulls have difficulty competing for the limited natural food sources and, in the 1970s they began feeding on skin and blubber bitten from the whales' backs. Other gulls copied the behavior and now mothers and calves spend a quarter of their day fleeing gull attacks. The mothers' flight uses up blubber reserves that were destined for their calves. Most calves older than two weeks have a chain of lesions on their backs where they have been repeatedly attacked by gulls. Such harassment can lead to a slow and painful death.
