Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
outer Bay of Fundy every summer. It was feared that so few females had survived that the population had gone
through a “genetic bottleneck” and was therefore limited in its reproductive capacity.
But it became apparent that a second factor limited their natural increase— high mortality due to ship strikes
and entanglement in fishing gear. As a result, international shipping lanes in the Bay of Fundy were moved in
2003, and fishers both in Canada and the United States are being taught how to prevent whales from getting
caught up in their nets, traps, and lines. Even so, as recently as 2001, only one right whale calf was produced
on the birthing grounds along the southeast coast of Florida. But the very next year, thirty-one calves were
born, and in 2009 a record thirty-nine calves entered the population. It appears that an abundance of zooplank-
ton in the Bay of Fundy is contributing to the health of adult whales, which are then more likely to procreate
and reproduce.
This population, which was the target of the first industrial “fishery” in the New World, may finally be on
the sea road to recovery, providing hope that other severely depleted species might also be saved.
Home Waters
Last summer I boarded the ferry in Blacks Harbour, New Brunswick, for the two-hour passage to Grand
Manan Island. It was a brilliant summer day, a gentle sea breeze moving the waters and a silvery light glancing
off the wave crests. Astern, a large, heart-shaped herring weir was silhouetted in the harbor, and we were
hardly away from the dock when I saw the first spouts of whales chasing herring along the shore. “A family of
fin whales,” the ferry deck hand said. “Been here all summer.”
We were entering the Grand Manan Basin at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy. This section of the Northwest
Atlantic, where the famous Fundy tides drive the food production system, is the last refuge of the North At-
lantic right whale, but it is also home and meeting place for a number of other cetacean species, including the
fin whale, the second-largest of the great whales, and, at the other end of the scale, the relatively diminutive
harbor porpoise. I soon spotted the black backs of these porpoises as they too pursued shoals of herring.
Other fishers were at work. On the horizon were two fishing boats, long-lining for cod and pollack. Gannets
were soaring on their great black-tipped wings and diving headlong into the waves, sending up geysers of their
own. Cruising between the wave troughs were scores of shearwaters—greater and sooty—seabirds that annu-
ally flee winter in the South Atlantic to take advantage of the abundant food resources in the bay. Small, dark
flocks of auks—razorbills or puffins, hard to tell apart in the strong light—and sea ducks also rode the waves
on feeding forays from their nearby breeding islands.
These were also my home waters, I realized, for I had grown up just across the bay on the Nova Scotian
shore. This gathering of marine life—herring, whales, and seabirds, underpinned by an invisible blossoming of
microscopic phytoplankton and zooplankton—had nurtured my early interest in the natural world and my
long-term commitment to its preservation. Seeing this marine bounty on display once again stirred the same
ecstatic feelings that I had experienced at St. Vincent's Beach in Newfoundland, when I watched through the
natural aquarium window of a breaking wave as humpback whales rushed ashore to gulp down capelin trying
to beach themselves in an orgy of renewal.
A week later, I found myself in the inner Bay of Fundy, on the shores of Minas Basin near Wolfville, where
I had taken my degree in biology at Acadia University. I drove past the Grand Pré National Historic Site,
which commemorates the tragic Expulsion of the Acadians in 1755. One branch of this New World diaspora
became the Cajuns of Louisiana. Here, their legacy lives on in the fertile dykelands that they created from the
salt marshes three and a half centuries ago by holding back the sea with an ingenious system of earthen dykes
and drainage devices called aboiteaux. The still-productive fields of ripe corn and grain were beginning to turn
an autumnal gold.
