Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Fairbanks, says, “No, it's not rocket science, it's cetacean biology, and that's a lot harder,”
and he tells us what it takes to be a whale. It helps if you can control the amount of oxy-
gen in your body at a molecular level and get rid of your carbon dioxide underwater.
“Apollo 13 would have been fine if the crew had been whales,” Mike says.
Flip Nicklin is a National Geographic photographer who tells us “There is no lens wide
enough to photograph thirty whales traveling off Lahaina,” and then shows us slides of
narwhals caught in Arctic ice, a killer whale breaching, a thousand belugas bunched up in
one lagoon, and a white sperm whale calf.
Dr. Jim Darling says of gray whales, “They're bottom feeders, they'll eat anything, her-
ring, shrimp, crab larvae, which probably explains their recovery.” Recovery of the Pacif-
ic Northwest group of gray whales, he means; there used to be four separate populations
of gray whales in the world's oceans. Gray whales are gone now from the Atlantic and
there are less than a hundred of the Asian grays. The gray whales traveling between
Alaska and Baja number around 26,000, and while healthy, Jim says, they are pretty much
all that's left.
The audience is a mix of scientists and enthusiastic amateurs. After each panel there is
a question-and-answer session and then more often than not the biologist giving the talk
will attend the next panel and pose questions to the next speaker. “The first year,” Jan
Straley, a marine biologist from Sitka and a
Whalefest!
organizer, says, “when we went on
the whale watch somebody asked me, 'Why do they have to come to the surface?' I real-
ized then that we have to start really, really basic.”
The speakers she has invited have a gift for rendering scientific jargon into a vernacular
everybody can understand. Harold Yurk, on staff at the University of Berlin, is studying
vocalizations of killer whales. Killer whales talk to each other, and each pod has its own
language made up of clicks, whistles, and calls. He plays us a tape. They sound like dol-
phins with head colds.
Harold says that resident orcas are “somewhat picky eaters. They eat mainly salmon,
and mainly king salmon.” My kind of whale.
Friday night there is the sea chantey concert. Don Sineti, a shantyman from Mystic Sea-
port in Connecticut, has a voice that booms out of his barrel chest like a big brass bell. He
