tursiops.org - Whale Watching Bonanza. NY, USA

lauricedeephd writes "Concerns over the health of the ocean, particularly in light of the BP oil spill, are growing. But the good news here is that the marine mammals seen in summer in the waters off of Montauk, which had been plentiful and close to shore and then virtually absent from inshore waters in recent years, have returned.

Sightings of finback whales, dolphins, minke whales, and other ocean species on whale-watching trips aboard the Viking Fleet, sponsored by the Coastal Research and Education Society of Long Island, have been creating excitement not only among the passengers thrilled by a good look at the elusive creatures but among researchers happy to observe what they believe could be a longtime pattern changing.

Artie Kopelman, a science professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology who has been leading whale watches since 1989 and established CRESLI in 1997, said that daily whale-watching trips were halted in July of 2002 as “the whales that normally would have been close in were no closer than 40 nautical miles” from Montauk. For several years, his organization did only a once-a-summer, three-day offshore trip to the Great South Channel off New England, in order to see plentiful groups of whales. (This year’s offshore trip will be Aug. 15 to Aug. 17.)

But in 2008, the whales began once again to frequent areas closer to Montauk, and last year CRESLI was able to offer daily trips again.

This year, on six-hour trips that head out on Wednesdays through Sundays, sightings of whales and dolphins have been consistent. On only three trips so far has the boat been unable to get close to whales, Mr. Kopelman said, and even on those trips, blows — the tall mist-like columns seen when whales come to the surface and exhale — were seen from afar.

Information about recent sightings, along with photographs, is posted on the CRESLI Web site at cresli.org. A link to the Viking Ferry Web site, where reservations for the whale-watching trips may be made, is also found there.

“It’s very reminiscent of back in the very early ’80s. In those years we used to see whales off Southwest Ledge off Block Island,” only about nine miles from Montauk Point, as well as at a point about 12 miles southeast of Montauk, said Samuel Sadove, a founder of Okeanos, a precursor to CRESLI, who conducted whale-watching trips and marine mammal research here for decades.

Mr. Sadove is leading the CRESLI whale trips every Wednesday this year.

Sightings were also consistent in past years, he said, at the East Grounds, an area about 17 miles south of Montauk, where whales have been seen again recently. Then, from around the mid-1980s on, he said, the animals were “shifting locations, and offshore more.”

“The other thing that’s really fascinating is the number of minkes out there,” he said. Minke whales, a smaller baleen whale, are common here but often notoriously hard to spot and track.

In past years, “we would have to pass through groups of minke whales to get to the fin whales,” Mr. Sadove said, “and in essence that’s what I see happening again.”

Another recent trend mirroring the past, he said, is seeing whales along with “a load of tuna and marlin.”

Mr. Sadove said that he suspects that the movements of the large baleen whales are on a “broad, cyclical, 20-year pattern.”

“Now we’re in the gangbuster period again. Five years ago, things were definitely in that doldrums time.”

“Most things in nature take place in cycles,” Mr. Kopelman said, calling Mr. Sadove’s theory “a reasonable hypothesis.”

“We’re out there to show people, and get them engaged, but also to figure this out,” he said.

While in Long Island waters, the whales are on a mission: to load up on food.

This year, as was common years ago, fishermen and whale watchers have again been seeing “massive amounts of bait,” Mr. Sadove said, including bunker in large numbers.

Whether the whales’ movements are based completely on the distribution of their prey species is unknown, but “very probably, at the very least,” Mr. Sadove said, they are “food-linked.”

Besides bunker, the baleen whales here are eating other small fish such as herring and sand eels. “The food is back, and that’s the key,” Mr. Kopelman said.

Though fin whales are the most commonly sighted species off Montauk, humpback whales also frequent the area, particularly when their favorite food is abundant here. Mr. Kopelman noted that for about a month, whales, particularly humpbacks, have been seen off Jones Beach and Long Beach, in western Long Island, and off Fire Island. Last week, he said, there was a brief glimpse of a humpback here.

Mr. Sadove said that he has reviewed information dating from the 1960s, including New York State museum and newspaper archives and anecdotal reports of sightings, as well as data collected by Okeanos.

Because he long suspected there was a pattern to the whales’ distribution offshore, he had instituted a “cruise track,” or regular log of locations visited, as part of regular data collection on whale-watching trips.

“This second round of the cycle will kind of confirm it,” he said of his theory. Mr. Sadove said he hopes to complete a statistical analysis based on a “sightings-per-unit-effort” procedure, a modification of what whalers did to try to pin down the whale population and its location.

The procedure entails comparing a particular “effort,” which refers to a search for whales over a certain time period or distance, with its results, i.e., how many whales were found. “It’s a statistical means to confirm what your gut is telling you,” he said.

A photographic identification project begun here in the late 1970s shows that a number of animals return to our waters year after year.

By comparing identifying marks that are unique to each animal — on humpbacks it is the markings on the underside of the tail fluke, and on fin whales it is a coloration pattern on the jaw and flank, along with the fin shape, on both — researchers can gain valuable information about the lives of whales, particularly their movements from year to year.

On July 8, Mr. Kopelman photographed a juvenile fin whale and discovered that he had taken a picture of the same individual exactly a year earlier, at a location 12 miles from where it was seen this year.

Along with CRESLI naturalists, each whale watch is staffed with a team of volunteers trained by the organization, which is a nonprofit supported by donations and memberships.

New, fresh eyes eager to help scan the horizon for whale activity are also welcomed, Mr. Kopelman said.

Federal regulations protecting marine mammals prohibit the “harassment” of whales, and in some cases limit how close individual boaters may approach them.

Source: http://www.easthamptonstar.com/"