Alisa Schulman-Janiger and her band of whale spotters returned early Wednesday, Dec. 1, to a lookout perched high over a foggy Pacific Ocean.
It had been 21 months since the volunteers gathered at the Point Vicente Interpretive Center and peered through their binoculars over the cliffs of Rancho Palos Verdes to collect data about the annual gray whale migration.
The yearly census count — part of the American Cetacean Society Gray Whale Census and Behavior Project, conducted by its Los Angeles chapter — normally happens every December through May.
That all stopped, with the rest of world, in March 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic.
And Schulman-Janiger, director and coordinator of the project, said that means there’s a big gap in data now about gray whales. But the last time she checked in, the gray whales didn’t look so good.
The purpose of the census is not only to count the whales, Schulman-Janiger said in a recent phone interview, but also — more importantly — to determine trends. Over the past two censuses, many gray whales appeared thin and observers spotted them with fewer calves.
“We should know in a couple of months how the gray whales are doing,” she said. “Do they look skinny? Are there fewer calves? We just don’t know yet because we haven’t started the project for this season.”
The annual 12,000-mile migration takes the gray whales from the Bering Sea, off the coast of Alaska, to Baja California, in Mexico. After mating and giving birth in the lagoons of Baja, the whales return to Alaska.
During the 2018-19 season, census takers saw a steep decline in southbound whale counts compared to the previous season, 929 to 543. Northbound sightings dropped from 1,951 to 1,612 during the same time period.
It is unknown, Schulman-Janiger said, what has caused the decline, why the whales appear to be skinnier or why there are fewer calves than before.
Observers, meanwhile, also look for other marine creatures.
During that 2018-19 season, volunteers spotted around a dozen marine mammal species over 176 days. They saw killer whales, humpback whales, blue whales, fin whales, minke whales, as well as dolphins, seals and sea lions.
Schulman-Janiger said last season’s coronavirus-induced census shutdown came during peak northbound migration. But before the shutdown in March, her crew had counted 440 southbound whales, including 35 calves, and 882 northbound grays, including 13 very young calves.
This whale watching begins around 6 a.m. and continues until around sundown, seven days a week. There are normally four or five volunteers working different shifts throughout the day.
On Wednesday morning, Redondo Beach’s Stacey Hiram was waiting for the fog to lift. As she lingered, Hiram reminisced about a day about two years ago that she she saw something unusual.
“There were three whales out and they were all breaching at the same time,” Hiram said. “It was amazing because I had been here at that point, I’d been watching for the whales, probably about three years, and I had never actually seen a breach.”
Volunteer Deborah Leon, a Lomita resident, said arriving at 6 a.m. when it is still pitch black out, can be a beautiful experience.
“It’s so quiet, so still,” Leon said, “that when the whales go by you can hear them blow.”
Schulman-Janiger, for her part, first heard about volunteering for the Cabrillo Whalewatch Program when Carson High School marine biology instructor Bill Samaras advertised for helpers. Samaras and Laura Osteen ran a pilot Gray Whale Census project from 1979 to 1981 at Marineland of the Pacific for a few weeks per season.
Schulman-Janiger restarted the program in 1984 as a full-season gray whale census.
But Marineland closed in February 1987.
The whale census program eventually moved over entirely to Point Vicente.
And it’s been there since.
This season, meanwhile, Schulman-Janiger appears to be hoping for the best.
“If they could find food, that would be terrific,” she said. “And then just come down the coast and look nice and plump. And hopefully, we’ll see more calves this year.”
For more information on the project, visit acsonline.org/gray-whale-census-and-behavior-project.
Source: Orange County Register
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