In days gone by, men of great physical and mental strength would seek their fortune from whales rich in oil. Some sailors would travel far out into the ocean. As the sea is a lonely place, many of the whaling crews would look to those with musical talent to pass the time in song. Some would make up tunes about whales and whaling.

Although whaling has gone out of style, men (and women) still go to sea searching for whales. Their typical mission is to discover the ways of the water world and to save whales from extinction.

One such man is Jonathan Stern, who is part of a team studying the behaviors of minke whales. Check out the team members as well as the goals of the Northeast Pacific Minke Whale Project.

Now, Jon will be the first to admit that spending hours in a boat scanning the horizon for whales can do something to one’s mind, especially when the sun is beating down as it does in the San Juan Islands. He shared this report with Orca Network:

The minkes have been very good to us lately. We have been seeing multiple whales a day feeding, moving about, doing their daily chores, all yielding invaluable data for our model… It is particularly cool to see minke whales and killer whales together.

There was a bit of a tussle between a minke and a killer whale today. We found the minke whale with shreds of killer whale skin streaming from its baleen. Just a warning: keratin - it’s nature’s, well, backscratcher, come to think of it. Ok, it is late; I have had too much sun; and that’s my story. And, no, we did not see the skin in the baleen. I do have property in Florida for sale though.

Jon’s capper for the day was a fine piece of song writing. Actually, he stole the tune from Bob Dylan, but we won’t hold that against him.

JUST LIKE A MINKE
(Sung to “Just Like a Woman” by Bob Dylan)

Nobody sees any blow
Back and fin is all they show
Then you have to guess
Where it’ll surface next
Either right next to your boat
Or the Gulf of Mexico

And she slinks-just like a minke
And she thinks-just like a minke
And she sinks-just like a minke
And she stinks-just like overcooked broccoli

—that’s as far as i got - then i quit—-Sorry Bob–

OK, Jon, you can finish this song next time you’re out scanning the horizon for minkes with a little too much sun on your brain. I’ll be happy to share your lyrics when it’s done.

The Navy has agreed to limit its use of low-frequency active sonar during testing and training exercises for the next five years. See the Associated Press story by Marcus Wohlsen in the Kitsap Sun.

LFA sonar involves loud blasts of low-frequency sound, which travel long distances in the ocean. It’s safe to say that advancements in this new technology are still being made, and this settlement is far from the end of the story. Most of the news reports I’ve seen have missed the point that this is a five-year permit under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the issue will come up again and again.

Years ago, the Navy planned to deploy LFA sonar on many of its ships, and it could return to those plans one day. For now, the Navy is planning to use it on four ships.

The story is complicated because it goes back to the original permit issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service. The permit, challenged by the Natural Resources Defense Council, would have allowed deployment of LFA over 75 percent of the world’s oceans. This settlement (PDF 360 kb) limits the deployment for testing, training and routine surveillance to the Western Pacific Ocean near Japan and The Philippines plus areas north and south of the Hawaiian Islands.

While it limits locations for testing and training, the agreement does not limit the use of LFA sonar during conditions of combat, potential combat or heightened threat conditions.

The settlement remains a trade-off, because there is no guarantee that marine mammals won’t be present in the areas of testing or training. One thing that would help is more research on the movement of whales and marine mammals, so the Navy can plan their operations with the least risk to sea life. With better understanding of both the technology and its effects of marine animals, the Navy could reasonably expect to expand its use of this technology to protect the nation’s interests. For details, check out the Navy’s LFA page.

Another issue worthy of attention is the proliferation of LFA sonar by other countries, including Canada, France and Great Britain.

Michael Jasny, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said he would like to see the U.S. State Department work out agreements with other countries about when and how potentially damaging acoustic transmitters would be deployed.

“We’ve been trying to involve regional seas agreements, conventions and processes that would have guidelines for these systems,” Jasny told me. “In the Mediterranean, for example, habitat has been established for marine protected areas. What we’ve been advocating is the formulation of guidelines that would identify where sonar training should not occur. It would be ‘soft law” and would not impose an affirmative duty, but it would be a huge step in the right direction.”

To make sure there’s no confusion. LFA sonar is different from the mid-frequency sonar used by many ships since World War II. Mid-frequency sonar has been implicated in the deaths of whales, but the effects are much more localized. Mid-frequency sonar remains the subject of a lawsuit between NRDC and the Navy now before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Center for Whale Research has reported a new baby orca in L pod, and researchers captured photos within a few hours of its birth.

Newborn calf born to L-47, “Marina.” Photo courtesy of Center for Whale Research

The calf, spotted Tuesday afternoon off the west side of San Juan Island, has been designated L-111, the next number in the sequence for members of L pod. The young animal is the sixth calf born to L-47, a 34-year-old female nicknamed “Marina.” She was one of the 19 whales that visited Dyes Inlet for a month in 1997.

The new calf joins sisters L-83, “Moonlight,” and L-91, “Muncher,” which were other Dyes Inlet whales. Moonlight had a calf, L-110, which was born last year, making Marina a grandmother. Marina’s previous calf, L-107, was born in 2005 but survived no more than a few months, according to researchers at the center.

Because the new mother was observed without a calf Monday evening, the baby could not have been more than a day old when the photos were taken. The orange coloration and “fetal folds” in the skin are evidence of a newborn orca.

The calf is a welcome addition to L pod, which may be missing two animals this year, researchers say. As of December, the population of L pod was listed at 43.

For more information and additional photos, check the Center’s “Encounters” page.

When it comes to protecting the environment, I think we’ll be hearing a lot more about enforcement in the coming weeks.

I’ve attended several meetings of the Puget Sound Partnership where people have said that we don’t need new rules; we need existing rules to be enforced.

You don’t have to look very hard to see the problem. At the county level, planners and hearing examiners impose rules that sound like they would protect the environment — including up to 100-foot stream and shoreline buffers in some cases. But once a person completes a project, there is no guarantee that he won’t fill in the wetland or cut down the trees in a buffer area.

Unless someone complains, there is no way to know whether the buffers survive over time. Without enforcement against those who violate the rules, the system becomes abusive against those property owners who act in good faith. That seems pretty obvious, right?

Kitsap County Commissioner Steve Bauer, a member of the Ecosystem Coordination Board for the Partnership, seems to understand the frustration of people who see violations but can’t get quick action. In many cases, the penalties are so low that some people violate the rules under the assumption that fines are just the cost for doing what they want.

In a Monday briefing I covered for today’s Kitsap Sun, Bauer expressed support for a more efficient system, including a process that would bring violations to a hearing examiner instead of district court.

I expect that this issue will be part of this year’s county budget discussions. While the budget is growing ever tighter, I’m sure the commissioners understand that you can’t really address this code enforcement problem without additional staff.

The same thing goes for state agencies — whether we’re talking about the Department of Fish and Wildlife, which our protects our wild creatures; the Department of Natural Resources, which addresses logging practices; or the Department of Ecology, which protects our land and waters from pollution. By the way Lisa Stiffler did a nice job examining Ecology’s enforcement problems in yesterday’s Seattle PI.

Back to the local level, health departments must deal with sewage, stormwater, garbage and hazardous waste problems.

Bill Ruckleshaus of the Puget Sound Partnership often talks about how his organization will not create new regulations. The Partnership simply intends to shine a light on the best actions taking place among governments, businesses and volunteer groups.

To the Partnership’s credit, enforcement has already been part of the general discussion. I found the following in the discussion paper about habitat and land use, which covers rules for protecting critical areas:

Most jurisdictions report a lack of funding to accomplish those tasks and further lack the staff to monitor whether the protections remain after a period of years (beyond the period where they hold bonds or other security for a project). Finally, many jurisdictions also report a lack of adequate funding for general code enforcement efforts (where activities take place outside of the permitting process).

The next step is to address the money issues, both inside and outside of state and local agencies. Until someone faces the financial hurdles, it’s just talk.

Last week’s “Amusing Monday” entry was indeed shot at the Seattle Aquarium — and there’s more to the story than meets the eye.

The announcer in the video doesn’t say where the scene was shot, so I put out a request for information. Thanks go to Susan Berta of Orca Network for putting me in touch with folks at Seattle Aquarium, which ultimately led to an interview with biologist and lead diver Jeff Christiansen, who was involved in shooting the video.

Photo courtesy of Seattle Aquarium

Before 1987, the dome exhibit often included three octopuses — the number required to almost guarantee that people would see one, Christiansen told me. The octopuses would hang out in a recessed area under the lower windows inside the tank, he said. That was before the rocky reefs were installed.

Also in the tank were a number of dogfish sharks, another native of the Puget Sound region. But not all the dogfish survived.

“If you were lucky enough, you could see it happen,” he said. “They would wait for fish to swim by, then you’d see the arms flash out and a bit of a struggle. Whatever the octopus didn’t eat was chucked out.”

Frequently, aquarium workers would arrive in the morning to see the remains right in front of the viewing windows. The middle of the dogfish carcasses were completely eaten down to the bones, but the head and tail were intact.

“It was considered bad to have dead animals sitting down there in the tank when you opened up (the exhibit) in the morning,” Christiansen said.

Divers, who normally went into the tanks in the afternoon, had to put on their gear and make a special trip into the tank, he said. Today, divers are in the tank several times a day.

Although the sharks were easy to replace, especially in those days, aquarium managers were worried about losing rare and valuable fish, he said. In fact, once an octopus was able to eat a sizable salmon before the decision was made to take the octopus out.

Anyway, about 10 years ago, Mike DuGruy of National Geographic Films was doing a feature on octopuses when he heard the story about the shark-eating creatures.

“He came to us and asked if we could recreate the situation,” Christiansen said. “Being the film-whores we are, we said ‘sure.’”

The details of the recreation are somewhat proprietary, Christiansen said. But that’s how the dramatic battle of the shark and the octopus came to be a National Geographic story.

Today, with the recent remodel of the aquarium, octopuses have their own space. With divers in the tanks several times a day, they could feed the octopuses enough so the animals wouldn’t go after fish, Christiansen said. Still no decisions have been made to put octopuses back in the big tank.

The timing is truly mind-boggling.

Last night, in this blog, I wrote about an eight-year legal battle by environmental groups to get the federal government to examine the true hazards of insecticides on salmon. (See entry below this one.)

In this morning’s Kitsap Sun, I noticed an Associated Press article by Dina Cappiello that talks about eliminating a portion of the Endangered Species Act that made this process possible.

A draft of the rule that Cappiello talked about has not been made public. It’s pretty technical and we should wait for the specific rule to be published. But it looks like federal agencies proposing certain actions would be allowed to do their own analysis with little or no interference from the agencies assigned to protect endangered species.

So what would be wrong with the Environmental Protection Agency examining the effects of pesticides on salmon without further review by the National Marine Fisheries Service?

According to federal biologists, the EPA has adopted protocols for reviewing chemicals as they go on the market.

“They (EPA scientists) have a pretty rigorous set way they analyze the chemicals,” Jim Lecky of NMFS told me last week. “We have taken that information ourselves and used it in our analysis.”

Lecky, who is director of the Office of Protected Resources of NMFS, said the EPA uses surrogates to represent a group of species. For example, rainbow trout was the surrogate for salmon.

“Our mission is to look at endangered and threatened species,” Lecky said. “EPA extrapolates from rainbow trout to chinook salmon. We go a little further and try to find additional effects. I think we have identified the best available information.”

Patti Goldman of Earthjustice reminded me that five years ago the EPA said in its first review of pesticides that the chemicals would have little or no effect on salmon. If the proposed rule had been in effect, EPA may have escaped further analysis of its findings.

It took two lawsuits by environmental groups as well as scientists in a separate federal agency to finally give status to the idea that pesticides on the market, as used today, pose a serious risk to endangered salmon.

It’s been a long time coming, but the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides is on the verge of getting the federal government to change its policies with respect to three insecticides that can harm salmon. They are diazinon, chlorpyrifos and malathion, all neurotoxins affecting the central nervous system.

As I described in a story in Sunday’s Kitsap Sun, the National Marine Fisheries Service has issued a finding of “jeopardy” under the Endangered Species Act. That means the chemicals pose a risk of extinction for the salmon. Scientists are now considering findings for other pesticides.

Concerns about 54 pesticides were officially raised in 2000, about the time NMFS was spelling out the environmental risks — including pesticides — to more than two dozen threatened and endangered salmon.

In 2002, a federal judge ruled the Environmental Protection Agency must “consult” with NMFS on those pesticides, as required by the Endangered Species Act. Eventually, EPA found that 37 pesticides could create problems for salmon.

The other side of the consultation — a response from NMFS — was not ensured until the end of July, when the agency signed a settlement agreement with NCAP, Earthjustice and the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations. That agreement lays out a schedule for completing “biological opinions” under the ESA.

The draft biological opinion (PDF 11 mb) is available at NMFS’ Office of Protected Resources Web site.

“The fact that it has taken eight years to get here has left me aware that we need to continue to watchdog the process,” Aimee Code, water quality coordinator for NCAP, told me today in a phone conversation.

“I am thrilled we have gotten this far, but I am very aware that we cannot let down our guard,” she said. “It is hard for me to know that our government has been so irresponsible, allowing the marketing and sale of products they knew were of concern. They let people get comfortable using them (the pesticides) … without looking at the risks.”

An so the story continues.

There’s something about the sardonic humor of Bill Maher that I can’t resist. He cuts right to the quick, although much of what he says is unsuitable for mixed audiences.

Here’s a few of his “New Rules,” which you can find on his Web site. “New Rules” and portions of his program are available on video.

New rule:

Getting up close with sharks doesn’t make you a wildlife enthusiast. It makes you dinner.

A friend was asked to describe the man. He needed only two words: “Good chum.” I thought it was funny, too. Think about it.

New rule:

There’s no such thing as flavored water. There’s a whole aisle of this crap at the supermarket — water, but without that watery taste. Sorry, but flavored water is called a soft drink. You want flavored water” Pour some bourbon over ice and let it melt. That’s your flavored water.

New Rule:

There’s no such thing as a “green” shopping mall. Developers in Chicago are building the first “environmentally sensitive” mall. Yes, nothing says “I care about the planet” quite like a vast, air-conditioned temple to disposable consumerism. Surrounded by 300 acres of concrete.

“Look, honey, the Wetzel’s Pretzel has organic salt!” Some things are just never going to be easy on the environment. Like a mall, a jumbo jet or the septic tank at Rush Limbaugh’s house.

And here’s one of Maher’s extended rants

Read the rest of this entry »

Low-impact development is coming, one way or another, and nobody seems to be raising any serious objections.

The state Pollution Control Hearings Board issued a ruling this week that emphasizes the importance of putting water back into the ground, as opposed to building traditional stormwater ponds. It will be cheaper for developers in most cases, the board says. See my story in today’s Kitsap Sun.

Art Castle of the Home Builders Association of Kitsap County says that market forces are already moving developers in that direction. His organization is working with a task force to create development regulations designed to mesh low-impact development rules with other building codes.

Several folks working for environmental groups tell me that they recognize Kitsap County’s efforts in moving toward low-impact development, but they would like to see the techniques used everywhere. That’s why they appealed the stormwater rules issued by the Department of Ecology.

Let’s be honest about Kitsap County’s situation. The county’s current stormwater rules, developed in the 1980s and relying mainly on ponds, don’t begin to mimic natural conditions. Until much larger ponds are required, such as spelled out in the state’s 2005 stormwater manual, low-impact development may or may not be the choice of developers. A lot depends on whether they understand the alternatives and regulatory options and are willing to avoid cutting trees and compacting soils while installing new kinds of pavement and structures such as rain gardens.

The Pollution Control Hearings Board has placed everyone on firm notice that the board believes that LID is the way to go — and the sooner the better. The Home Builders Association project should help a great deal.

You can find a lot of information about low-impact development on Web sites of the Puget Sound Partnership and Home Builders Association.

At some point, the Pollution Control Hearings Board decision should be posted on its Web site. Look for the “Puget Soundkeeper Alliance” case.

Jump into a fluffy, foamy mass of bubbles at Pacific Science Center, where 20 inflatable pools will be available for kids who can’t get enough bubbles at home.

Showers will be available for washing off, organizers say, but folks who prefer to stay dry can take a kayak ride among the dinosaurs in the big pool at the Science Center. Make your own giant bubbles, play in foam pits or work on crafts.

I haven’t been to BubbleFest, but Science Center staffers usually do a good job with events like this.