Guest Author - MaryEllen Schoeman
The beluga whale is a little-known member of the family of toothed whales, which also includes dolphins and porpoises. One look at the beluga will make this clear – belugas have the prominent forehead and and ‘smiling’ expression common to dolphins. Like the dolphins, belugas use echolocation and sonar to find their way in the waters, and also to communicate. They are extremely social animals, congregating in large pods, and they produce a variety of noises to communicate. Some of their talk can even be heard above water or inside the hulls of boats; old sailors often called belugas ‘sea canaries’. Underwater, divers say that the din of a pod of belugas talking is overwhelming. Belugas are also capable of facial expression (rare even among dolphins) and probably use facial expression much the same way humans do, for subtle communications with their peers. In addition, they have extremely flexible front flippers, which they can use for maneuvering impossible to most whales – for instance, they can swim backward. The flippers, too, may be used in communication. They are the only member of the whale family with a flexible neck, enabling them to turn their heads in the water without turning their bodies. They also lack a dorsal fin, probably an adaptation for swimming under the ice, where a dorsal fin might get in the way or get damaged scraping the underside of the ice. (Narwhals, close relatives of the belugas, share this trait.)
Belugas are not as well-studied as some other whale species, in part because of the inhospitable frozen environment in which they live. But they do provide scientists with one opportunity for study – each year the belugas return to their calving grounds, which are in shallow open water where they can be studied. Unfortunately, this is also water where they can be hunted. Hunters have taken advantage of this habit over the years and slaughtered thousands of belugas in the shallow waters of the calving grounds. Belugas are now illegal to hunt, but many former calving grounds are now silent and empty, their entire population killed. Pollution or development in a calving ground is equally deadly to the belugas – they only return to the place that they were born, and if that place becomes dangerous, they continue to return, even if it kills them. If the place totally disappears, the belugas will stop calving and the group will die off in the open ocean, even if there is another suitable calving spot nearby. Because of this, each population of belugas is genetically distinct from the others, and the occasional crossover between the groups is a valuable source of genetic variation. The loss of even one group will affect all the other groups in a negative way. The numbers of individuals in each group has already declined due to pollution, climate change, and other factors. The number of groups overall has also declined, due to the same factors.
And this, of course, is where Sarah Palin comes into the picture. Palin is suing the government to have a population of Beluga Whales removed from the endangered species list, pointing out that there are other populations elsewhere, and that development in the Cook Inlet will not be a problem for the belugas, as they can simply go to these other places. She is clearly ignorant of the life cycle and needs of the belugas, and further, it seems likely that she just doesn’t care. The population of Cook Inlet, formerly in the thousands, is now down to 375 individuals - 375 whales that are carrying genetic stock that doesn’t exist in the other populations, and that will be lost forever if those 375 should die. And die they will, if their calving grounds are destroyed. And development of oil platforms and other forms of machinery will destroy the area. It is now well-known that whales and dolphins suffer from the underwater noise produced by oil platforms and the associated increase in ship traffic. The pollution from this kind of development is also deadly to them. The Yangtze River Dolphin, formerly native to China, has already gone extinct due to the combination of increased ship traffic and pollution. If Palin has her way, the Cook Inlet beluga will be next.
During the presidential campaign, some reporters referred to Palin as a shark. But she is not a shark. Sharks kill to eat and eat what they kill. Palin kills for sport, for bloodlust, for simple convenience. If an animal is in the way of what she wants, she has no problem with killing that animal and driving its entire species into extinction. She hunts wolves from airplanes; kills caribou who are on their way to their mating and calving grounds. And for what? For fun. She has tried to get polar bears delisted for the same reasons she wants belugas delisted – so that she can destroy their habitat in the name of ‘development’. She did not get away with it, because people rose up and told her ‘no, you cannot kill an entire species just because they are inconvenient for you.’ And she will most likely not get away with delisting the belugas, for the same reason - the efforts of people like you, and like me, who support organizations that fight against people like her. We must be vigilant. We must continue to do whatever we can write - letters, donate time and money, make our voices heard. We must make it clear, to her and to people like her: This behavior will not stand. It has no place in our society and we will not allow it. We the people ultimately control the actions of our government, and we the people will be there to fight every step of the way. Sarah Palin, you have been warned.
