A10
THE ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2021
Team encounters whales
off the Oregon Coast
Simon Ager/Sea Shepherd Conservation Society
A beaked whale is seen near Baja California, Mexico.
By JES BURNS
Oregon Public Broadcasting
Engine trouble can be a real
drag.
Especially when you’re just a
few days into a weeklong journey
to the Great Pacifi c Garbage Patch
in search of elusive beaked whales.
So when the Oregon State Uni-
versity research mission aboard
the R/V Pacifi c Storm had to turn
around in the middle of the ocean
and head back to Newport, there
was a fair amount of disappoint-
ment on board.
“It was very clear that we were
not going to be able to keep the
expedition as planned. We needed
to change things up,” research
leader Lisa Ballance said.
Beaked whales are some of the
shyest marine mammals around.
They often spend their time far
away from land, hunting in the deep
open ocean. They look like longer,
chubbier dolphins. Six known spe-
cies have never been seen alive.
Scientists only know about their
existence because they’ve been
found dead.
Ballance and her team were on
the trail of what they thought could
be a totally new species that had
been sighted, but not identifi ed,
near the garbage patch. But with
more than half their time being
eaten up by engine repairs and
other delays, the team made the
call to look for whales a bit closer
to home.
“We know in the seas … right
off of Oregon, there are beaked
whale mysteries,” said Ballance,
director of Oregon State’s Marine
Mammal Institute. “And I’ll be
darned if we didn’t have an abso-
lutely remarkable encounter …. I
still cannot believe it.”
The Pacifi c Storm was about
200 miles off the northern Ore-
gon Coast when audio special-
ist Annamaria DeAngelis picked
something up while listening
through a hydrophone towed
behind the ship. It was the sounds
of beaked whale echolocation.
There’s no light in the deep water
where the whales hunt, so they
use sound to locate squid, which is
thought to be their main prey. It’s
similar to the method used by bats.
The sound is so high-pitched
that humans can’t hear it, but the
instruments can. And DeAnge-
lis didn’t recognize what whale
that particular acoustic signature
belonged to.
And then the signal stopped.
The team knew that meant the
whales were on their way to the
surface to breathe.
The research crew all rushed to
the deck. The seas were rough and
the wind high, diffi cult conditions
to spot any whale. An hour passed.
Then, they got lucky.
Two whales appeared.
“Amazingly, they were what I
would call curious. They stayed
with the ship. We pointed the ship
and went down-swell. And so did
they …. And we got great looks at
them,” Ballance said.
The whales swam so close to
the Pacifi c Storm that the crew
was able to collect a small sam-
ple of skin with a crossbow-fi red
biopsy dart. That skin sample was
key to positively identifying them
as Hubbs’ beaked whales.
The Hubbs’ beaked whale was
fi rst discovered dead and washed
up on shore in the 1940s in South-
ern California. Ballance says a
National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration science team
observed the species alive off the
coast of Oregon in the mid-1990s,
but as far as she knows, none had
been sighted alive since.
But more important scientifi -
cally than the sighting of Hubbs’
beaked whales was the audio
recording they captured. For the
fi rst time, researchers were able to
positively match the Hubbs’ to its
song.
“Linking the acoustic call with
a visual description of a poorly
known whale — and confi rming
the species identifi cation through
genetics — is an extremely power-
ful tool. Because instantly we know
the animal occurs everywhere that
call has been recorded,” she said.
Now the task for the team is
to fi nd where that call has been
recorded before so they can start to
get a sense of their range. The team
hopes to publish a paper with their
results next year.
“It was such an unlikely event
to happen, especially on the heels
of what we were sort of thinking
was a largely failed expedition …
It was an absolutely extraordinary
win.”
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