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6/20/13

After spending his entire career hoping to spot a rare North Pacific right whale, researcher John Ford had given up ever being able to see one of the rarest animals on earth.

The last time one of the majestic mammals was seen off the coast of B.C. was in 1951 — before the 58-year-old scientist was even born.

That was until last week, when Ford and fellow department of fisheries and oceans whale researchers James Pilkington and Graeme Ellis spent a day near Haida Gwaii monitoring a whale that’s the size of a semi-trailer and weighs more than 20 SUVs combined.

“It was a thrilling experience,” said Ford. “We would never have imagined that we would be able to see one. They are critically endangered and extremely rare.”

Ford estimates there are between 38 and 50 of the animals left on the eastern part of the Pacific Ocean and no more than a few hundred in the world.

This sighting south of Langara Island was only the seventh in the past century, he said.

The right whale — so named because it was the “right” whale to hunt for its blubber and its valuable baleen plates that hang from the roof of its mouth to filter out everything but its preferred meal of the tiny zooplankton called copepods — was harpooned almost into extinction in the mid-1800s.

In one decade back then, 30,000 of them were killed in one decade, said Ford.

“They were big, slow and easy to float once they were killed,” he said.

The right whales were coveted for their 500 baleen plates, which are three metres long and 25 cm wide, because the substance was strong and flexible and used for various products, including “whalebone” corsets popular a century ago.

The North Pacific right whale is mostly black, large and stocky, and is easily recognizable for its highly arched jaw and growths of white thickened skin on its head called callosities, according to the DFO website.

“If you do spot one, you may have just won the marine mammal lottery,” according to the DFO.

Hunting of the animals have been banned since 1935 but the Soviets continued to hunt them illegally in the 1960s, which likely delayed their recovery, said Ford.

He said it’s “very, very doubtful” that any nation would continue to hunt it because of its endangered status but the whales are at risk from collisions with ships and getting entangled in fishing line.

“It was not only exciting personally to see one of the whales but it was wonderful for us to be able to confirm that this species still exists,” said Ford.

He and his colleagues for identification purposes videotaped and photographed the whale, coming to within 25 to 50 metres of it but not close enough to disturb it.

The researchers were able to collect some of its prey and its scat, which they can analyze to genotype the animal through its DNA and learn more about it, such as its gender.

The Canadians have already compared photos with the Americans’ catalogue of 19 whales and none of them match, which means they likely have discovered a new whale.

Ford said they spent as long as they could monitoring the whale, which seemed “pretty indifferent” to their presence.

“It’s an opportunity we may never have again,” he said.

This is the first sighting in over 50,000 km of whale surveys off the B.C. coast over the past 10 years, said Ford, who is head of the cetacean research program at the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo.

But he said he remains hopeful that the sighting is a sign that the population will survive. The DFO has been implementing a strategy to help it recover.

The whale was first spotted by Pilkington on June 9 and Ford and Ellis joined him on June 13 to observe the whale.

“When we realized what we were looking at, we were in a state of disbelief,” said Pilkington in a press release. “I never thought I’d see a North Pacific right whale in my lifetime, let alone have the opportunity to study it over several days. I was ecstatic!”

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6/6/13

Look out across Monterey Bay, and one hardly thinks of a junkyard. But below the surface, decades of garbage have been piling up, a new study by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute shows.

Go 1,000 meters down, and it's still there. Go a mile down, it's still there. Go two miles down and beyond -- down to the limits of scientific exploration -- and it's still there. Old boots, tires, fishing gear and especially plastic, litter the ocean floor.

"Once it gets in the ocean, it's not going to get cleaned up," said Susan von Thun, a senior research technician at MBARI. "Especially with plastic or metal, it doesn't really break down. It'll be there for possibly thousands of years."

The study is based on 22 years of deep-sea video accumulated and cataloged by marine researchers. They decided to search their database and came up with more than 1,150 hits for human-produced garbage in the Monterey Bay region alone, much of it within the boundaries of a national marine sanctuary.

While there have been some eye-popping finds -- a shipping container full of 10,000 steel-belted tires lies at the bottom of the bay -- about a third of the findings were plastic, with about half of those being plastic bags.

PLASTIC POLLUTION

That goes to the heart of an ongoing debate about single-use plastic bags, with the plastics industry recently helping defeat a proposed statewide bag ban, as well as a second bill, by Assemblymember Mark Stone, D-Scotts Valley, aimed at getting plastics producers to help cut back on pollution.

When the bag ban was defeated by three votes, the industry group American Progressive Bag Alliance hailed its victory, saying the proposal was based on "unfounded stats, junk science and myths."

Dave Asselin, executive director of the American Progressive Bag Alliance, reiterated the group's position in a statement Wednesday.
"We have not had a chance to review this particular study, but we do know that the rationale behind efforts to ban or tax plastic bags is largely based off of junk science and exaggerations," Asselin said.

The study is far more exhaustive that any prior examination of debris on the ocean floor, with MBARI's submarines routinely plumbing depths rarely seen by human eyes. Whether it makes a difference in the political debate about plastic bags remains to be seen. Wednesday, Stone held a previously scheduled legislative hearing that dealt with plastics and the marine environment.
Laura Kasa, executive director of Santa Cruz-based Save Our Shores, a group that holds beach cleanups throughout the region, said the study is another sign that plastic bags need to be banned.

"This is why it's so important that we prevent trash that people leave on the beach from getting into the ocean," Kasa said. "If one person doesn't think that it makes a difference, if they leave their piece of trash on the beach, they're wrong. It'll end up in the bottom of the ocean."

Von Thun said researchers combed through video for instances where marine life interacted with plastic and found several. They include plastic bags wrapped around deep coral -- which eventually will kill the coral -- and debris serving as habitat for anemonies and other marine life, giving them a home in areas they would not normally settle.

The study also found plastics and metals were more likely to be found in deeper waters, and researchers speculated that because Monterey Bay is a national sanctuary and subject to heightened environmental protections, it is likely that oceans elsewhere have a more significant problem.

"I was surprised that we saw so much trash in deeper water. We don't usually think of our daily activities as affecting life two miles deep in the ocean," said Kyra Schlining, the study's lead author. "I'm sure that there's a lot more debris in the canyon that we're not seeing."

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The "UpState RailConnect Committee" - Dedicated to Completion of the Alternative Rail Route Feasibility Study - will meet June 26 at 10 a.m. at the Wharfinger Building in Eureka.

Read on for the meeting agenda.

For information regarding this meeting, please contact the Upstate RailConnect Committee at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

6/18/13

With the announcement that the two remaining San Onofre nuclear plants in southern California are being retired permanently, you may wonder what will happen to the remains, some of which retain significant levels of radioactivity, and how the costs will be covered.

My colleague Jordan Weaver blogs in detail on the mess that a failure to plan for decommissioning --and its costs -- is creating around the country. California, however, has avoided the uncertainty on how to pay for decommissioning that is plaguing others that bet on atomic energy at a time when nuclear proponents still claimed its operating costs would be so low, it would be “too cheap to meter.”  

Way back in 1983, when “nuclear dinosaurs” roamed the California Public Utilities Commission, an environmental colleague and I initiated an effort to require that utility customers’ contributions to decommissioning nuclear plants be invested in such a way that they would be available when the operational lives of these facilities were over.  

We were residents of Humboldt County at the time, and the local nuclear plant had been shuttered seven years earlier due to its proximity to earthquake faults. What would happen when it was dismantled, we wondered?  How would the utility (PG&E in this case) pay for it?  What about larger nuclear plants? We, with other locals in a group known as the “Redwood Alliance,” decided to find out. We organized the first public conferences ever held on nuclear decommissioning.

The first event at Humboldt State University was keynoted by Amory Lovins, then a rising star in the energy world, who gained notoriety for his essay in Foreign Affairs magazine entitled: “Energy Strategy, the Road Not Taken.” The second was keynoted by Ralph Nader, whose organization the Critical Mass Energy Project had begun to wonder about the nuclear end-of-life issues, too. We invited experts from the nuclear industry, government scientists, economists and contractors from Battelle Pacific National Laboratory, and private sector scientists to help us figure it out.  As we learned more, a plan began to take shape and we decided to plunge into the deep waters of the California Public Utilities Commission to propose a policy that would protect California’s people and resources when it came time to retire her nukes, big and small.

The idea was to ensure that funds for decommissioning would be protected from loss should a nuclear accident (or other factor) force the plant owner into bankruptcy. At the time, the two Diablo Canyon plants in central California represented half of all PG&E’s assets, and errors in the construction process had raised serious issues about the affordability of plant completion and operation. Having the money run out prior to completion could create a public safety challenge, we reasoned.

The proposal I made (with my friend and colleague J.A. Savage, now a prominent energy journalist and editor) was to set up an independently administered fund, external to the utilities’ assets. Contributions from ratepayers would be collected and when combined with earnings and interest over the plant’s lifetime, would pay for decommissioning when the time came. It was important that the funds be segregated from utility assets because if anything happened to the solvency of a utility (say in the event of a nuclear accident affecting a major portion of a utility’s capital investment), the fund could be protected from creditors. At the time many scoffed at the idea that a utility could ever go bankrupt. But in fact, California’s policy protected Diablo Canyon’s decommissioning fund during PG&E’s bankruptcy in April, 2001. Then- (and now) Governor Jerry Brown supported the proposal through his appointees at the California Energy Commission, and assigned Commission staff to assist us. Our proposal was adopted by the Public Utilities Commission and remains in effect. California is the only state with such a policy. The fund now contains more than $6 billion. Time will tell if it is enough.

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