It is sad to see another story of whales so far upriver where they do not need to be, and one hopes the story ends well.
Sounds fail to budge whales
By Matt Weiser and Carrie Peyton Dahlberg - Bee Staff Writers
Published 12:00 am PDT Friday, May 18, 2007
They changed boats, they rotated whale sounds, they adjusted volume. But after a day of trying Thursday, veterinarians and biologists were unable to entice a mother whale and her calf to leave the Port of Sacramento.
From 10:30 a.m. until 4:50 p.m., the experts played a menu of whale sounds through an underwater speaker dangled from two Coast Guard boats in the port's murky waters. Biologists watched intently for any hint of a response.
Despite flurries of hope, nothing seemed to work.
Pieter Folkens, a research associate with the Alaska Whale Foundation, acknowledged that whale experts themselves are in uncharted waters.
"We've never been in a situation with a cow-calf pair, both of whom are injured," said Folkens, and so far upriver. "What our scientists are attempting to do is basically an experiment."
Yet the experts aren't despairing. They're using sound relatively early in the whales' plight, and believe they have time to experiment with the little-understood ways that whales respond to each others' voices.
"The bottom line is, nobody really knows how whales communicate," said Jan Straley, a marine biologist at the University of Alaska at Sitka who studies humpback behavior.
