Community Conversations

Beluga Tales

A position paper by Dr. Deland S. Anderson based on a Community Conversation held at the Heritage RV Park on 2 June 2006

Six concerned people met at the Kachemak Heritage RV Park Events Center on the Homer Spit to share information and anecdotes about Cook Inlet’s beluga whales. The discussion cycled from specific stories about whale sightings to overarching questions. One participant told of a friend who used to take his family to the head of the Bay each Spring to watch the beluga feed on hooligan. Another remarked about the one-time Mother’s Day tradition of spotting belugas at Land’s End. Yet another remarked with regret that she had not seen belugas in Mud Bay for ten years. The facilitator encouraged the group to consider the significance of the apparent decline in whales. The most focused answer came from a participant who said this gene pool must be saved. It’s not just that we need more whales to watch, but that these are biologically distinct, and therefore very valuable. They can teach us about adaptation. They can help us refine our theory of evolution. Another voiced the sentiment that the Cook Inlet beluga is the proverbial canary in the coal mine: as it goes with the whole so it shall go for the rest of us. So save the whale to save ourselves. Others indicated that the Cook Inlet beluga was a test case for federal and state laws regarding rights to subsistence harvest and rights to resource extraction, for each of these was putting pressure on the whale. The best hope offered for a solution to the declining whales was to list the Cook Inlet beluga on the Endangered Species Act. With proper enforcement this could help the whale to rebound, but this only if the decline is not due such causes as infectious disease, over-predation by orcas, or climate shift. The endangered listing can only mitigate factors such as human harvest, and pollution or other environmental degradation of their habitat.

The local population of beluga whale is a resident of Kachemak Bay and Cook Inlet, and those places where people and whales meet along the shore are favored spots. Likely places for viewing beluga whales include the Homer Spit, especially the shallows of Mud Bay at the base of the Spit, the tip of the Spit, the Kenai River, and most popular by far—Turnagain Arm. The reason these places have offered the best viewing over the years is not necessarily because they host concentrations of the whales. In the case of the Homer Spit and Turnagain Arm, it’s that there are miles of road that shadow the shoreline, thus granting the diligent watcher a good chance of spotting the white backs of the whales. The lower reach of the Kenai River is itself something of a highway in the summer, if only for boats, and so sightings are frequent. Still, more remote places, like the head of Kachemak Bay, and estuaries on the West side of Cook Inlet, afford good beluga viewing because there are concentrations of the whales in seasonal cycles. In late April and early May they can be seen feeding on the smelt fish eulachon, or hooligan. Through the summer months they can be spotted where salmon gather at stream mouths or shallows. No one seems to see them in the winter. Ice forming in the Inlet surely hides the whales, but also their activity seems to lessen, making them less visible. Overall sightings of belugas are less and less frequent in areas around Cook Inlet and Kachemak Bay. People just aren’t seeing them anymore, not like in the past. Tales are told of the old days when the whales numbered in the thousands, and great shoals of them would be seen swimming by. Clearly things have changed. In the Homer area, belugas haven’t been widely reported for about the past ten years. The burning question is whether these whales are a remnant population facing extinction. If so, and they do become extinct, how long before people will no longer remember them?

Along Turnagain Arm there are three places that speak to the beluga whale. The first is a popular roadside pull out called Beluga Point. Geologically it is remarkable, with huge mounded rocks protruding from the muddy ooze of the estuary. When the tides and wind meet here, dramatic scenes can be witnessed involving snarling whitecaps and ponderous whirlpools and undertows. Occasionally bore tides form with walls of water six feet high and more when the in-rushing tide meets the winds whipping down off the glaciers. But people don’t stop there to see belugas anymore.

The second is farther up the Arm, a similarly powerful place called Bird Point. A visitor park there displays a sculpture group of beluga whales. They are life-size, realistically colored, and are arranged in candid, natural poses, with their unique melon-like heads, fat backs and stubby flippers protruding up out of the concrete plaza just like belugas in the muddy waters of Turnagain Arm, except these art whales are frozen in time. And time seems to be what this piece is about. When will this sculpture no longer serve to interpret the presence of the whales and become a mere memento of a vanished population?

The third place is between Beluga Point and Bird Point is simply called Indian. There are a couple of houses in the small gorge that comes down there to meet Turnagain Arm. Scattered through there are also some roadside tourist businesses. One is a roadhouse that advertises beluga burgers. For the reflective traveler, questions arise. Who can eat a beluga burger? Gastronomically? Morally? Legally? As for the last of these questions, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) only persons who are at least one-quarter Native Alaskan and are members of a tribe or Native group can legally eat Cook Inlet belugas. If you are non-Native, even if you are married to a Native, you may not legally eat Cook Inlet belugas. Other belugas, however, can be eaten by non-natives so long as the whales were harvested by Natives. Indeed you can legally buy beluga in any Native village in Alaska including Juneau, Fairbanks, and Anchorage. And what’s more you don’ t have to eat it there. You can take it where you want. Beluga take out. So legally no one can serve up Cook Inlet beluga burgers to the public at large, at least not since they have been listed as threatened. So maybe the burgers at this roadside restaurant are imported belugas, form the Bristol Bay population, for example. More likely this sign uses the name beluga in an honorific or totemic way. This too speaks of the disappearance of the whale, a bit like a buffalo head nickel speaks of what once graced the great prairie of North America but does so no longer.

Native Alaskans can legally go out and get their own beluga burgers because the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 has a provision for the permissible subsistence harvest of seals, polar bears, sea lions, walruses, sea otters, and various whales and porpoises, including the beluga whale. The Alaska National Interest Land Claim Act of 1980 bolsters that right to subsistence resources. In Alaska the beluga whale can be found in the Bering, Chuchki, and Beaufort Seas, as well as Cook Inlet. Native hunters have harvested these whales from these waters since the beginning. Only in Cook Inlet has concern been raised over the harvest, indeed possible over harvest, of belugas. The populations in the Bering Sea and Arctic Ocean appear to be robust, ranging in ample numbers from Hudson’s Bay to Siberia. Migratory patterns establish that these whales can range for thousands of miles along the north coast of North America. But the Cook Inlet beluga is different. It is trapped, or apparently so. It seems that this population has been separated from the rest of the world’s belugas for approximately 10,000 years. Genetic variations indicate that they are in fact a subspecies of the other belugas. Interestingly, glaciology indicates that these whales were separated from their cousins when the ice sheet covering southcentral and southwestern Alaska receded. This effectively cut the ice pack in half roughly along the line of the Aleutians, which of course form the pass between the North Pacific (including Cook Inlet) and the Bering Sea and Arctic Ocean. Traditional knowledge of the whale-hunting Inuit of northern Canada indicates that belugas shadow the edge of the ice pack, moving farther from shore in the winter as the ice advances toward open water, and coming back to inshore waters as the pack recedes during the summer. In Cook Inlet, however, there is no longer an ice pack. Cake ice forms in the upper Inlet, sometimes as far south as Kalgin Island, and it forms in Mud Bay and at the head of Kachemak Bay. But this loose collection of floating ice hunks is quite different from the solid and relatively stationary ice of the pack. Satellite telemetry has permitted researchers to follow the movements of a few Cook Inlet belugas in recent years. Though the data are very limited, it seems to indicate that the whales remain year round in the upper reaches of Cook Inlet, near the mouth of the Susitna River and in Knik Arm. Coincidentally, that is where there is the most ice most of the time. The beluga whale is unique among whales in that it has no dorsal fin. This enables it to swim under the pack ice, to breath from pockets of air trapped beneath the ice, and possibly to feed on prey that is also trapped near the surface. The beluga has three major predators: orcas, polar bears, and people. The orca has a large dorsal fin that does not permit it to cruise under the ice. The beluga is safe from the orca, if it can take cover under the pack. Polar bears, on the other hand, though fine swimmers, can only take belugas in the shallows when they beach themselves (this is frequent in summer months in the high arctic), and from the ice. But not if they are under the ice rather than at a breathing hole or an open lead. People seem to have no luck capturing belugas from the ice. Nets, harpoons, high-powered rifles—these are the preferred techniques for taking belugas, and all require open, if shallow, ice-free waters.

There is a popular perception that the problem with Cook Inlet belugas lies with the right to subsistence. A picture is painted of Natives participating in a beluga black market, selling muktuk to the highest bidder. Given the principles that drive Western-style capitalism, it is only a matter of time, the argument goes, that the stock of belugas is depleted through over-harvest. And that, according to the uncritical view, is exactly what happened to the Cook Inlet beluga. Rubbed out like the buffalo, and the sea otter. For money. Thankfully the majority of people don’t buy this argument. But Alaska being what it is, it is a very seductive rhetoric that drives this line of reasoning. Imported Alaskans came here to enjoy the bounty. They depleted much of it. They are prevented by subsistence laws from gaining access to and depleting the rest of it. Some is reserved for indigenous people. That leads to resentment by the immigrants. Typically Americans just won’t take no for an answer when it comes to resource extraction or exploitation. So they point to the Natives and cry foul. Abuses of subsistence rights gain far more attention than does the good of the subsistence style of life itself. That seems to be what’s going on today with concern over Cook Inlet belugas. The most common cause identified for the apparent decline in whales is over-harvest. Here are some other apparent causes:

Over-heating of the water. This is more complex than it seems. First, warmer water leads to warmer weather. This leads to less ice. This could lead to fewer belugas. Certainly it has led to a genetically limited population being trapped in upper Cook Inlet. Second, warmer water leads to regime shifts in the marine biology. Eulachon, salmon, trout, and other staples of the beluga diet are very dependent on cool water temperatures. Their comfort zone is being exceeded in recent years. Long story short—no food, no whales. Third, the warming of the weather has led to increased melting of glaciers in the Cook Inlet watershed. These incredible masses of ice are formed from fresh water. When they melt rapidly, as they are doing now, they change the salinity of the water. This affects all anadromous creatures, but it also affects everything that lives in salt water. The difference in osmotic pressure between fresh and salt water triggers changes in all organisms. Some can handle it, and some can’t. It’s like mountain climbers. Some will never make it to the top of Denali, not for lack of skill or determination, but because their bodies can’t adapt to the changing chemistry of high altitudes. It’s possible, even likely, that a marine mammal like the beluga will be stressed by changing levels of salinity. Additionally, because salt and fresh water have different specific gravities, they create current when they meet. These currents affect the movement of tides and all things tied to them, from algae blooms to thunderstorms.

Over-harvesting of food sources. Belugas and humans both eat pretty high on the food chain. Not only that, some of our favorite foods are theirs as well. These include eulachon, salmon, trout, cod, halibut, and clams. Trout, eulachon, and clams are pretty well only eaten locally. Residents and visitors number in the thousands, but they pale by comparison to the appetites of the millions abroad who await shipments of salmon, cod, and halibut. There is no way that the beluga can compete against worldwide demand for those food sources. And not only that, belugas can get in the way of the harvest of marketable fish.

Predator elimination. Just like the brown bear, the bald eagle, the wolf, and other species, the beluga has been targeted as a harmful predator. They eat tons of salmon. Even kings. They tear up nets. Maybe they would even tip over a skiff. This kind of behavior in Alaska gets you shot. True, since 1972 you can’t legally shoot belugas just for the heck of it, but you can when nobody’s around.

Toxic discharges. Cook Inlet has some of the cleanest water in the world. But its watershed includes metropolitan, residential, and industrial development. The population of that watershed is approaching half a million people. Non-point source pollution is an issue. Parking lots, roadways, and lawns all contribute to fouling water. Worldwide smog (permasmog) falls from the sky and enters the water. Some of the fallout is highly toxic and persistent. The City of Anchorage dumps partially treated sewage straight in to the beluga’s preferred habitat. Numerous shipwrecks over the past 100 years in the Inlet have released thousands and thousands of gallons of fuel into the waters. Some of the shipwrecks have included oil tankers. Lastly, logging, mining, and oil and gas extraction all contribute toxic or deleterious run-off into the Inlet. The oil platforms in Cook Inlet, for example, pump toxic drilling muds straight into the water.

Accidents. These include boat strikes, entanglements in nets, and strandings. Though the beluga is unique among whales for being able to survive strandings because of a more robust rib cage, they don’t always make it. Strandings have apparently become more frequent in recent years in Cook Inlet and more harmful. Increased ship traffic may be one reason. Increased predation by orcas may be another. Whatever the causes, the effects have been harmful, since the climate has warmed enough that belugas suffer and die from exposure to the heat of the sun before the next tide enables them to make it to deeper water.

Disease. Because the Cook Inlet beluga is an isolated and genetically distinct small population, it is especially vulnerable to disease whether infectious in nature or caused environmentally. Native hunters have remarked that Cook Inlet belugas have seemed sick lately.

Beluga whales are of considerable interest and concern to local area residents. Their numbers appear to be in serious decline in Cook Inlet and Kachemak Bay. On August 7, the National Marine Fisheries Service issued a petition to list the Cook Inlet beluga as an endangered species, following a recent aerial survey that located only 153 whales, the lowest number to date.

Local author Nancy Lord has done an admirable job in her book Beluga Days in identifying the people and players that have an impact on the fate of the Cook Inlet beluga whales. Salmon fishermen and women, Native subsistence hunters, commercial whale hunters, freight vessel operators, oil and gas extractors, and possibly everyone who contributes to anthropogenic climate change, all play a role in the life of the beluga. Additionally members, administrators, and officers of regulatory agencies such as National Marine Fisheries Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and Alaska Department of Fish and Game can have a significant influence on what will or will not happen to these whales. At present the National Marine Fisheries Service is considering listing the Cook Inlet beluga under the Endangered Species Act which would of course protect individual belugas but more importantly it would also lead to measures designed to protect the habitat in which those individuals dwell. Research biologists are influential in establishing population trends, behavior patterns, and health histories for the whales. Lastly, numerous non-profit environmental organizations are having an affect on the future of the whale through lobbying and media presentations. To all of these players, the whales "mean" something. But even to ordinary persons, the whales hold the meaning of life. Few could look at these remarkable creatures and not feel some excitement.