Rescuers Try to Lure Lost Whales With Whale Call Sounds

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This effort reminds me of the saga of Humphrey The Whale, who was successfully guided back to the Pacific in 1985. ---BBBhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphrey_the_whale

Rescuers Try to Lure Lost Whales With Sound
By CAROLYN MARSHALL
Published: May 18, 2007
WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif.

Anxious to save two injured wayward whales, a team of marine rescuers on Thursday played recorded humpback songs, hoping to lure the stranded mammals from the Sacramento River back to the sea.

The humpbacks, believed to be an adult female and her calf, were first spotted in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta on Sunday and have since meandered almost 90 miles upriver from their natural habitat in the Pacific Ocean along Northern California.

Marine biologists managed to examine the whales late Wednesday as they circled a shipping channel near the Port of Sacramento, about 84 miles northeast of San Francisco. They said both animals had suffered what appeared to be boat-propeller lacerations, lending urgency to a rescue effort. On Thursday, rescuers played whale sounds amplified by underwater audio devices and intended to coax the two seaward.

"Several segments of sound have been introduced," said Bernie Krauze, a researcher who spoke by cellphone from the Coast Guard cutter Pike, a vessel involved in the rescue.

"We call ourselves the whale whisperers," said Mr. Krauze, president of Wildlife Sanctuary, a nonprofit group. "But we are not whispering loud enough. These guys are not responding."

Mr. Krauze, who captured the sounds used Thursday on a 1991 whale research trip in Glacial Bay in Alaska, said the 10-second vocals from whales feeding were being played in intermittent 10-second intervals. In theory, he said, the recordings are turned off when the animal moves toward the song, and on when it veers away.

"Sometimes these animals respond to the process in 15 seconds," Mr. Krauze said. "Today the animals are not responding. They are just swimming in circles in this large, industrial basin."

The technique worked in 1985 when a whale named Humphrey wandered the delta for nearly a month. Humphrey returned to the sea after hearing recorded whale calls.

Marine experts said the wounds did not appear to be life threatening. Mr. Krauze said the adult, which appeared to be about 55 feet long, had a 2-foot-long, 6-inch-deep gash between the blowhole and the dorsal fin. Injuries to the calf, believed to be a juvenile about 30 feet long, were undetermined.

A spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that if the recordings failed to do the job, researchers could try a herding technique, using boats to gently corral the humpbacks toward the ocean.

"Whales can survive in fresh water for extended periods of time," said the spokesman, Brian Gorman. "But the concern is that something is wrong with the mother that caused her to appear where whales do not belong."

Curious onlookers flooded the Port of Sacramento docks on Wednesday evening, hoping to see the humpbacks, said Teresa Bledsoe, a clerk with the City of West Sacramento port division.

The crowd prompted officials to clear and shut the port on Thursday, though hundreds of spectators continued to line the nearby riverbanks.

Ms. Bledsoe said she caught a glimpse of the humpbacks, an experience she described as "exciting and sad."

"People are drawn, I think, because it's like a fish out of water," she said. "You could go to Marine World, but to see whales in your own neighborhood doesn't happen every day."

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They got lucky with Humphrey. I hope their luck holds out this time. That mom whale and her pup must be very confused right now.

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Thnx for the updates, BBB.

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BBB
Latest news: The two whales were given antibiotics by dart to help heal the gashes in their bodies.

Last report is they are about 45 miles from the Bay and exit to the Pacific and are still swimming strong in the right direction. The closer they get to the bay's salt water, the better for their health and the food they need.

BBB

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Wayward Whales Now Just 10 Miles From Ocean
Wayward Whales Now Just Miles From Ocean
MARCUS WOHLSEN
May 29, 2007
VALLEJO, Calif.

Two lost whales closed in on their ocean home Tuesday evening, passing under a busy bridge and entering San Francisco Bay after being lost in inland waterways.

The mother humpback and her calf, who have sojourned for more than two weeks in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, passed under the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge on Tuesday afternoon, the next-to-last bridge along the pair's route.

"They're heading very much in the right direction," said Rod McInnis, a spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

If the humpbacks can navigate south around a peninsula and an island, few obstacles would remain on their route past Alcatraz to the Golden Gate, the strait that connects San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean.

Still, the fear remained that the whales might head south instead of west, passing under the Bay Bridge and into the long southern half of the bay.

"There are lots of places they could get themselves into trouble before they go out of the Golden Gate," McInnis said.

But, he said, the whales could be back out in the Pacific in a few hours from their current location "if they put their minds to it."

On Tuesday evening the whales were spotted swimming about 10 miles from the Golden Gate.

Observers saw the whales leap above the water Tuesday in a behavior known as breaching, which some biologists view as a form of communication and others as play.

A convoy of boats escorted the pair to protect them from heavy ship traffic in the bay. Bay Area ferry commuters could expect delays Wednesday morning depending on the whales' location, Coast Guard officials said.

The whale and her calf had been spotted in the river May 13 and got as far as 90 miles inland to the Port of Sacramento before turning around.

Lesions that had formed on the humpbacks' skin over the weekend appeared to be sloughing off, apparently due to the saltier water the pair have been swimming in since leaving Rio Vista, biologists said. Scientists also reported that a coating of algae that was clinging to the mother farther upriver had fallen away.

Antibiotics had been injected into the whales on Saturday to try to slow the damage from wounds likely caused earlier by a boat's keel.

The two whales spent Monday near the Benicia-Martinez Bridge, about 45 miles from the Pacific before finally swimming past it. Boats blocked the entrance to the Napa River and were to be positioned at the mouth of the Petaluma River near San Francisco Bay to keep them on track, Fees said.

With the whales on the move, officials did not plan to take any more action to prod them toward the Golden Gate Bridge.

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Tokyo vows to continue cull of humpback whales
While we are trying to save these two whales, the Japanese government continues to kill them. Shame on them! ---BBB

Tokyo vows to continue cull of humpback whales
By David McNeill in Alaska
Published: 30 May 2007

Japan has vowed to press on and kill 50 humpback whales later this year in defiance of conservationists and anti-whaling nations.

Britain joined New Zealand, Australia and other "like-minded" nations to condemn the plan in Anchorage, Alaska, where the annual conference of the International Whaling Commission opened on Monday.

"This will really adversely affect the image of Japan in our countries, " said New Zealand's Environment minister, Chris Carter.

Japanese whaling ships intend to kill the humpbacks in the Southern Ocean whale sanctuary as part of its "scientific whaling" programme. The ships will also hunt hundreds of minke, sei, sperm and fin whales.

The humpback is classed by most environmentalists as one of the planet's more imperiled species, but not by Japan's Fisheries Agency. "We don't see it as endangered," said Joji Morishita, Tokyo's alternate IWC commissioner. "Our surveys suggest that in some areas humpback stocks are increasing."

Tokyo has hinted at a possible deal to limit the size of the humpback hunt in return for concessions on commercial whaling. Conservationists suspect that Japan might use the plan to kill one of the planet's more beloved mammals as a bargaining chip in its efforts to secure a return to small-scale commercial whaling by its coastal communities.

But the overture was rejected by Britain's Biodiversity minister, Barry Gardiner, who said that the humpack issue was not "a matter of horse trading and negotiations".

Conservationists say that scientific whaling is illegal and that the IWC should stop it, despite threats from the pro-whaling nations that blocking compromise will push them into a corner.

Officially, 29,000 whales have been slaughtered since a worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986, most by Japan, Norway and Iceland. Many more are snagged in fishing nets, something conservationists say causes 300,000 deaths a year. Others die from ingesting oil, chemicals and plastic in congested sea lanes.

The meat harvested is increasingly too polluted to eat. Iceland's commercial whaling campaign has been stalled after mercury was found in whale carcasses.

"With so many other factors impacting whale populations, it is incredible that the IWC is still entertaining the idea of commercial whaling, " said Junichi Sato of Greenpeace Japan. He wants a commitment this year to switch the IWC into a "body that works for the whales and not the whalers".

Pro-whaling nations see the IWC in opposite terms, clinging to what they say is its original mission, the managed, sustainable use of whale resources. Japan has never accepted the conservationist takeover of the IWC and has waged a $750m (£380m) campaign to swing the organisation back to support commercial whaling. Last year, it won a narrow vote for the first time in 25 years, a symbolic victory that stunned environmentalists.

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whales in bay
The whales are in San Francisco Bay. Now the task is to get them safely out through the Golden Gate without getting hit by lots of ship traffic.
If Humphrey could do it, I'm susre a mom and her babe can do it, too.

BBB

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When whales get this screwed up, they should be harvested for use and science. Idiots poking them with antiobiotics and playing whale calls with no idea what they might mean.... unreal.

Emotion triumphs logic again and again. We are all doomed.

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2 lost whales apparently find way back to ocean
2 lost whales apparently find way back to ocean
By MARCUS WOHLSEN
The Associated Press
5/31/07

SAN FRANCISCO -- More than two weeks after they were first spotted far up the Sacramento River, two lost humpback whales appeared to have finally found their way back to the ocean Wednesday.

The whales, believed to be a mother and calf, were last seen at sunset Tuesday less than 10 miles from the Golden Gate Bridge, after they traveled 25 miles southwest from another bridge. Officials said they assumed the pair returned to the open sea, undoing a wrong turn that had drawn thousands of onlookers and a flurry of rescue efforts.

To make sure the whales had not taken another wrong turn, two government boats were launched Wednesday morning to look for them in the Pacific Ocean, said Bernadette Fees, deputy director of the California Department of Fish and Game.

Rescuers planned to rely on reports from commercial vessels and Coast Guard patrols to determine if the humpbacks still were in the bay.

But as the afternoon wore on, officials grew increasingly confident that the humpbacks, which were injured by a boat's propeller during their two-week sojourn inland, had reached the ocean.

Marine scientists said Wednesday that although they will never know why the pair swam 90 miles inland, the massive operation to rescue them yielded valuable information about the endangered species.

It was the first time the same humpbacks were studied in the wild for so long, Fees said.

The information scientists gathered includes sound recordings, logs of the whales' behavior and tissue samples.

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I wonder how they know the strategy worked with Humphrey? Did they ask him?

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Rescuers Try to Lure Lost Whales With Whale Call Sounds

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