Smattering of Ink: Bowhead whales in Arctic, East meets West again.
Sometimes one gets behind on genuinely fascinating news with marginal for now, but potentially sizeable, importance. A week or so ago came a small splash about Atlantic and Pacific bowhead whales that traverse the Arctic coast of North America and Greenland. Researchers from Greenland, the University of Washington, and Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game tracked a few and found something surprising. In Biology Letters, pub. by the UK’s Royal Society, they reported that in the summer of 2010 two male bowheads that had been affixed with radio tracking devices, and were from Atlantic and Pacific populations presumably isolated from one another in recent millenniums by unbroken Arctic Sea Ice, managed to follow the Northwest Passages from opposite ends and for awhile swim around in the same general area.
Upon happening on one of the news stories, it appeared to The Tracker a big mistake is visible right in the lede. It still seems off, but for reasons I did not first recognize in their confoundingly full ambiguity. Maybe you’ll see it too before I explain below. At least, it spurred me to a roundup on this rather diverting, perhaps epochal, event.
Stories (with hed and lede sentence);
- Edmonton Journal/PostMedia News – Randy Boswell: Bowhead whales in Far North sign of melting ice ; “In what may be an ecological first since the end of the last Ice Age some 10,000 years ago, bowhead whales from the separate Pacific and Atlantic populations have crossed paths in the Canadian Arctic…”
- IrishTimes – John Von Radowitz: Whales find Arctic path from Atlantic to Pacific ; “Whales are blazing a trail ahead of humans thrugh the melting ice floes of the Northwest Passage. Satellite tracking has confirmed that loss of Arctic sea is is opening up the waterway connecting the Pacific and Atlantic oceans to marine mammals.”
- Live Science – Wynne Perry: Northwest Passage ice melts ; “For the first time, scientists have documented bowhead whales traveling form opposite side of the the Canadian High Arctic and mingling in the Northwest Passage, a usually ice-clogged route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.” ;
See it? It’s in the first one. Reporter Boswell of PostMedia* News – who wrote a decent story and is not being picked on here for any reason but a broader point - tells us this is perhaps a first since the end of the last Ice Age. That got my head spinning. You mean it was common during the last ice age? Surely an ice age is no time to find a lot of open water up there – implying at first naive thought that not since before the last ice has this happened. That’d be a long long time ago. But wait a minute – we’re still, some say, IN the last ice age that started maybe 100,000 years ago during the Pleistocene. So I looked at the paper – where it says (and a few news accounts related) that fossil and near-fossilized bones in the Canadian archipelago suggest bowheads were found along the entire stretch of the NW Passage during a warming spell 11,000 to 8500 years ago. Aha. But is that since the last ice age? Or was that during the last ice age? Are we still in it? What IS an ice age? And if it happened until 8,500 years ago and it says here in the story the ice age was done by 10,000, how can this be the first time since? I looked around this morning to pin down the Ice Age. It’s vague is what it is. It is whatever you want it to mean. Some say whether we’re in an Ice Age (Greenland’s ice cap says yes, geologically speaking) or not, one thing is clear. We’re far from the last glaciation high.
See where I’m going? The use of the term ‘ice age’ gives readers nothin’ substantial. It just means since the world was different, but that’s not very useful. If we pin things on the last glaciation that ended its dominance (thank you Wikipedia, and its footnotes back it up) about 12,500 years ago. the best phrasing that matches the intended meaning is that this may be the second (not first) time in the present interglacial.
Why not just say it could be for the first time in 8,500 years or so? Then explain how that connects to how popular conception would interpret the term ‘ice age.’
Whew.
*PostMedia News is not an outfit, incidentally, whose name is akin to such terms as post-Renaissance. The news agency is associated with the National Post newspaper, and includes much of the old CanWest confederation.
I have other questions, such as why or whether bowheads don’t also connect their Pacific and Atlantic populations via the Northeast Passage, along Siberia’s coast. And, whether the two groups seem particularly genetically or behaviorally distinct. A longer reporting visit to the topic could be revealing.
Other, including very local, Bowhead Whaling News:
- Alaska Dispatch (Sep 26) Eric Christopher Adams: Alaska Eskimo bowhead whale harvest quotas up for review ;
- Alaska Disptach / Arctic Sounder (Sep 29) Alaska whaling boats prepare for new season ; Including a rather amazing, poignant, distressing, reaffirming (you make the choice or add one of your own) video of scenes from the beach, after the hunt.
Grist for the Mill: Royal Society Press Release ; Biology Letters The Northwest Passage opens for bowhead whales, full text.
- Charlie Petit
September 30th, 2011 at 2:46 pm
Why not “since the hypsithermal” or “since the Holocene Climate Optimum?” Okay, I’m kidding. Maybe.
The fact that global climate was generally warmer immediately after the last glacial maximum than it is today is a fairly interesting point that merits broader recognition.
Quite a lot of work has been done on the genetic structure of Bowhead populations, including some studies that recovered evidence of ancient and recent gene exchange across the NW passage. The Spitsbergen population is declining rapidly and is geographically more separated from the Pacific populations than the Baffin Bay population so crossing the NE passage would involve a much longer journey. There are apparent differences in song patterns among the different populations. So, yes the information is out there it would be interesting to see a story that went into greater depth.
I was sorry to see that nobody quoted Melville, who mentioned in Moby Dick that Greenland-style harpoons were reportedly found in Bering Sea whales in the 19th century. The paper mentions these reports in passing but writes them off as apocryphal. Given the astonishingly long lifespans of these whales, however it makes for an interesting plot point. There may well be whales swimming in the Arctic today that were calves when Moby Dick was published!