Celebrating milestone anniversaries requires you to strike a balance between nostalgia and looking forward.  The 30^th Sitka WhaleFest hit it just right.  We honored the founder, Jan Straley, for her work and vision.

There was visual display on the history of WhaleFest displayed in front of a recycled “ghost net.”  A ghost nets gets away from its boat and sometimes continues to catch fish.  The Sitka Sound Science Center sponsors both WhaleFest and a marine debris cleanup program.  So far, the Science Center has pulled 1.7 million pounds of debris from Southeast Alaska beaches and waters, including the net. 

Looking forward much of the festival is training high school and college students.  Some of the PhDs at the festival got turned on by science at earlier WhaleFests. Their research carries, and will continue to carry, the festival and ocean research.

The festival is more than whales, as important and charismatic as they are.  It is about the health of the oceans and their eco systems, especially in the face of climate change.  Presentations asked where were we?  Where are we?  Where are we going?  And how can we mobilize our resources, not just in science but in the arts, and other endeavors, aid in our understanding and to carry us forward.

There are 9 science symposium talks, classes around the talks and classes on scientific illustration.  There is an art exhibit and a variety show based on maritime themes. 

At the marketplace craftspeople and artists sell their work and while science and conservation organizations promote their work.  In case high school students get inspired the University of Alaska has a table to recruit new students into STEM programs. 

Then there is whale watching in Sitka Sound.  In Early November whales who summer all over Southeast Alaska gather in the sound to “top up” before their trips to Hawaii or Mexico to breed or give birth.  The watchers spotted 50 different whales this weekend.

I participate in Happy Whale, a citizen science project where folks take pictures of whale flukes and send them to a database to be identified and placed.  Scientists can track whale movement and keep track of genealogies of whales.  You may photograph a whale with its mother, Years later that whale has a photo with her offspring posted.  The advent of AI helps match flukes.  Before that it was a labor intensive project to match up flukes over years and miles. 

At this WhaleFest Jan Straley showed us family trees of whales we know in the sound, how they are related and where they travel.  I’ve taken pictures of some of these whales in both Alaska and Hawaii.  It’s satisfying to know my pictures help build to the scientific database. 

Between the 1920s and ‘50s the British Discovery Investigation tracked whale activity.  They shot numbered lead tipped steel bolts into whales with a 12 gauge shotgun.  The bolts were completely embedded in the blubber meaning they would not fall out and the wound would close lessening the chance of infection.   Discovery marked where the whale was tagged on a map.  When a whaler took the whale with a bolt, they sent location and date when it was taken along the bolt number to London for a cash reward.  The British Discovery Investigation developed a considerable body of knowledge on whale movements but the problem was that any one whale was only tracked once.  Now Happy Whale allows us to track whales over several seasons.  Old Timer was the first whale entered into the Glacier Bay data base in 1972 before Happy Whale.  He had been spotted a few years before.  Happy Whale reported him in Fredrick Sound in Southeast Alaska last month.  He is at least in his 50s and is the oldest humpbacked whale we can date.   

Aside from establishing genealogies and tracking movements we can see if whales are loyal to their feeding and breeding grounds.  This is important because, with climate change, some areas that used to be productive feeding grounds are no longer so good.  Will the whales adapt and change their feeding grounds?  Not easily.  They are loyal to their feeding grounds and are reluctant to make changes.  When the North Pacific “Blob” a hot spot in the ocean, warmed temperatures and reduced the availability of food whales did not go to different feeding grounds and the number of whales declined.  If a whale has not been spotted for 5 years it is presumed dead. 

Whales may not as loyal to breeding areas as to feeding areas. Males are more prone to finding new breeding grounds than females.  This helps maintain genetic diversity. Most Sitka whales go to Hawaii but some do go to Mexico.

One of the discussion topics was whale entanglement with fishing and other maritime gear.  In collecting a database of thousands of photos scientists have learned that more than half of humpback whales show scars from gear entanglement.  We had a talk and a film on whale rescue, helping whales disentangle and designing changes in fishing gear to prevent entanglement.

An endangered fin whale was turned up on the bow of a cruise ship that pulled into Sitka this summer.  There was discussion between scientists and participants about collisions during WhaleFest.  Whales don’t understand the length of ships.  The sound that they hear from props comes from the rear of the ship.  That can be 900 feet or more from the bow.  The whale misunderstands the signals it is getting.  The distance between the props and the bow plus the ship’s speed contributes to whale strikes.  Speed limits for ships are a partial solution.  But should large ships add a sound beacon to the bow to give the whale a better idea of where the danger is?  We need to balance noise pollution with saving whales.

But for me, an avid amateur photographer, the presentation by Flip Nicklin, the noted National Geographic wildlife photographer was the high point.  During the Q&A someone asked him, with all the advances in technology, what was the most important item in his kit.  He didn’t hesitate, “time.”  National Geographic gave him the time on a shoot to get what he needed.  Time and patience, waiting for hours for that one shot.  Which why I will never be a great wildlife photographer.  I am too impatient.

If I lived in a city I would not go to a science symposium.  In cities I’m prone to stay “in my wheelhouse” going to folk or jazz concerts.  In Sitka, when something happens, I go. Sometimes because there is not as much competing, but more often because a friend, like Jan Straley, organized it and I want to support them and in Sitka I know a lot of people.  I am richer for the annual array of festivals and events that expand my comfort zone.