Chaos and Copepods

Right Whales Are Messengers

Mi’kmaq artist Melissa Labrador explains here the traditional importance of right whales in Mi’kmaw culture, and the fundamental lesson we should learn from their changed migratory patterns.

For the Mi’kmaq the whale has always been respected as a messenger. As the oceans warm and the whale leaves our waters, what is the message she is trying to tell us?

The L’nu have always been shaped by the world we inhabit. For centuries we listened to the seasons, living summers by the ocean and winters in the forest, taking only what we needed to survive. The trees, the oceans and all the dwell within them, including the whale, are fundamental to understanding who the Mi’kmaq are as a people. There can be no separation between humanity and nature.

Since time immemorial, the Mi’kmaq have watched, admired and hunted the whale. The Right Whale was seen as especially important to Mi’kmaq ways of life as it swims in the shallow waters closer to shore. It was hunted for food but also honoured. The whale is etched into the stones at Kejimkujik National Park, signifying its importance to the cultural life of the Mi’kmaq. And while the Mi’kmaq no longer hunt the whale, she is still known as a messenger and deserves the respect she was accorded in history.

In times past, the whale could be seen feasting all along the eastern shores of North America but now they follow the food, further and further North. And what it is that has driven the whale from our waters?

A lack of respect.

We, as people, need to reclaim respect for ourselves, each other and the world around us. Until this happens, we are destined to be out of balance with nature and we cannot be sustained without balance. Is this what the whale is trying to tell us as she travels further abroad in search for food? And are we willing to listen?

In recent years, North Atlantic right whales (E. glacialis)–which are one of the world’s most endangered species–have changed their migration patterns. Scientists tell us they are following their food.

There’s less and less food in the Bay of Fundy, since 2015 approximately, and the food is more abundant in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which brings a whole new lot of species, like the North Atlantic right whale.

–Marine ecologist and CEO of Expertise Marine Lyne Morissette

It started with changing water temperatures, leading to changing pH levels, changing calcium levels, changing currents. Those currents are probably what shifted the plankton. The plankton were followed by the highly endangered North Atlantic right whale, hundreds of which were encountered by fisher harvesters in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 2017, some with fatal results. Blaming fisher harvesters is not only unfair, it’s counterproductive. They, like scientists and governments, are scrambling to adapt and learn to coexist with the whales. But with constant and frequent change, it’s hard not to wonder what’s next.

Right whales are copepod specialists. Their favored food is widely believed to be a species of copepod called Calanus finmarchicus, each of which is no bigger than a grain of rice. Its superpower, says ocean ecologist Sean Brilliant, is that it “describes where everything else in the ocean goes,” from basking sharks and other fish to sea birds. And yes, whales. “They are at the base of the food chain.”

Where the Calanus go, their predators go.

Right whales eat little bugs in the ocean. They especially focus on deep-water layers of high densities of these bugs that form thick, soup-like layers… That layer and those bugs disappeared [from the Bay of Fundy].

–Sean Brilliant, Canadian Wildlife Federation

As the ecology of the ocean and its currents change, tiny plankton have relocated northward. The whales have followed in search of sustenance.

It’s important to note that the movement of whales has never been perfectly predictable. There has always been more we don’t know about these enigmatic creatures than we do know. Brilliant’s research has shown that right whales have never been as simple in their migration patterns as we once thought.

Whales are much more mobile than we realized … animals do not use migratory corridors, there’s just widespread seepage wherever they need to go… They really are all over the place.

–Sean Brilliant

But climate change–not just warming waters but changing pH levels, calcium levels and currents, things that have for many years been stable–is making their movements even less predictable, and more surprising.

The most difficult thing is it’s making things a lot less predictable, and we don’t know what’s going to happen and we don’t know how things are going to recover and we don’t know if animals are going to go back to where they were.

–Sean Brilliant

Peter Norsworthy, a fisheries consultant who prides himself on knowing and using the best available data in making decisions, says that while the available information about the ocean has dramatically improved in the past few decades, the Atlantic fisheries still lacks true ecosystem management, because there remain too many unknowns about the ocean.

As much as people say they want a full ecosystem model, to my knowledge there isn’t one out there and I’m not sure there’s a good enough understanding of all the factors at play to create such a model at this time. They’re moving towards it and considering more and more factors all the time [but] we don’t understand the interrelationships of all these things.

–Atlantic fisheries consultant Peter Norsworthy

We do know that whales have significant ecological significance. They accumulate many tonnes of carbon in their bodies over their long lifespans, contributing toward a reduction of CO2 as their carcasses sink to the bottom of the ocean. Their copepod slurping in the deep stirs up many important food for other lifeforms.

Change is Disruptive and Expensive

The biggest effect that the whales have is stress on people worrying about going fishing. I mean if they close down the crab area, you might as well close down this side of Cape Breton.

–Joe Buchanan, fish harvester from Bay St. Lawrence

The movement of North Atlantic right whales has put stress on the fisheries, especially crab harvesters, as Canadian and US governments, in an effort to prevent whale entanglements, restricted fishing in some areas and ordered short-term closures after whale sightings.

It’s quite disruptive to the harvesters, because they got to stop their fishing activity, go back to an area, pull their pots, and then move them to a different area. So, it certainly increases their costs.

–Atlantic fisheries consultant Peter Norsworthy

Harvesters in turn have had to compress their seasons from months to weeks, and that has in turn affected fish processers.

So then you’re at a plant where your workers are working and it’s ten o’clock, twelve o’clock at night, you have to start all over the next day. It really puts a strain on the workforce. As opposed to having a two to two-and-a-half-month season to capture your quota, you’re trying to capture your quota in three or four weeks.

–Gilles Theriault, business development manager at McGraw Seafood in Tracadie-Sheila, NB

Those plant workers are an average of 59 years old, Theriault says, and it is difficult to recruit new employees. The compressed season also hurts their chances of qualifying for employment insurance payments for the offseason, meaning they’re more likely to seek employment elsewhere to cover the bills.

It’s stressful for the fishermen because they don’t know if and when they can go fishing, but it’s also stressful for other parts of the community, like the people working in these plants because they just don’t know if they’re going to have a job this year. That translates into a lot of stress that spreads through the generations and what we see right now is … sons of these fishermen who could … continue the legacy of fishing in the family and they are not interested in that anymore.

–Marine ecologist and CEO of Expertise Marine Lyne Morissette

Learning to Share the Ocean

In response to the moving copepods, and the whales following them, the fishing industry has been working with NGOs and government to learn how to coexist with the newly present sea giants.

We’re in the process of working with NGOs and the New England Aquarium and other groups, and also corporations, and we are in the process of setting up a FIP, a fisheries improvement project, and basically we’re reviewing everything, and that’s the steps that we believe will take us to [Marine Stewardship Council certification] again.

–Gilles Theriault

Crab harvesters lost that MSC sustainable catch certification after 13 right whale deaths in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 2017.

Lyne Morissette says that we only have about twenty years to save the whales, so collaboration is key to innovating quickly enough.

In the Gulf of St. Lawrence we had a crisis in 2017, and … in 2020 we have a ropeless system that has been tested with real fishing people on fishing vessels for the first time, and it works.

–Marine ecologist and CEO of Expertise Marine Lyne Morissette

The goal for the fishing industry, including harvesters, is to learn enough about North Atlantic right whales to coexist safely with them. At the moment, there is great optimism for “ropeless gear” or popup-buoy technology:

We are making progress with ropeless traps and different types of measures from that perspective and that will allow us I think over the next few years to fish in the zones where there are whales. And that’s a real coexistence where if you don’t have any ropes, the ropes are on the bottom and they can’t get entangled and you just press a button and a buoy would pop up there’s a rope to the surface—everybody was making fun of it at first but you know we’re really making progress on it.

–Gilles Therieault

There was a bunch of initial trials in 2019, but this year there was much broader testing of it, and I think that’s certainly a good tool in the toolbox, so fishing really should be able to continue in areas where right whales are present, if you’re using this popup technology. So, I think it’s really the key solution for the future.

–Peter Norsworthy

Just the Beginning

At the same time, the industry recognizes that much oceanic change is being driven by an even larger change: climate change, and that while individuals, and individual industries, have a role in fighting it, it is a humbling force.

[Climate change] appears to be out of control. We are just sort of at the mercy of the events caused by this change.

–Gilles Therieault

One thing right whales are teaching us is that the impacts of climate change can’t all be predicted. No one would have guessed that tiny copepods would move northward and one of the ocean’s largest, and most endangered, species would follow, heightening employment insecurity in North Atlantic coastal communities.

The many changes fish harvesters, industry managers, and deep-sea divers report–warmer temperatures, fish “in much deeper water than they traditionally were in” as plant manager Jan Voutier said, predator fish like striped bass found in places they hadn’t been before, the arrival of tropical fish–point to the unpredictability and sometimes suddenness of change.

The traditional fishing plans that were used at one time … is changed a lot now. We have fish in … much deeper water than they traditionally were in, and it’s to the point now where we’re having to develop new technology to deal with the problem of heat on the water. …  We need a lot more technology to provide good quality product to the marketplace. 

–Jan Voutier, manager of Ka’Le Bay Seafood in Glace Bay, NS

Investment in new cooling and insulation technology is just one way climate change is already costing considerable time and money. Crab harvesters have tried to start their season earlier to avoid the North Atlantic right whales, necessitating the use of costly icebreakers to access the waters. One company reports development of a multimillion-dollar trawler to deal with warming.

This company is in the process now of building a new, top of the line, state of the art, multimillion-dollar trawler … It’s all to do with refrigeration and the condition of the fish, and how we handle it. 

–Jan Voutier

[As] the storms become more frequent, and they become more severe, then we have additional sediment moving up and down the coast, which are plugging up harbours … [our boats] could be sitting outside of the harbour for six, eight, ten hours, before they can actually come into the harbour. At times that is very, very expensive for the factories, because they can’t get the raw material.

–Jan Voutier

Osborne Burke, general manager of Victoria Co-operative Fisheries in Neil’s Harbour, Cape Breton, notes that some species decline may already be attributable to changing climate.

If you look at mackerel fishing, mackerel are very sensitive, like tuna, to temperature. Water temperatures are changing. For mackerel, an extra degree or two in temperature could mean an extra mile or two offshore, or not coming in at all, and the fishermen don’t catch them like they used to.

–Osborne Burke, general manager of Victoria Co-op

Burke also notes the economic impacts of these changes.

It seems to be having an ongoing impact to their livelihoods directly at the end of the day… If you go in the heat of first of August, you could be losing a thousand pounds a day of dead crab, and that’s with putting as much ice as we can aboard the vessels, keeping the crab as chilled as possible.

–Osborne Burke

It’s clear from talking to fish harvesters and processors that a changing climate has myriad impacts, many of them unexpected. Climate science tells us we can expect more of the same as the global temperatures rise.

What exactly that looks like in the North Atlantic, and in coastal communities, remains to be seen. But its very unpredictability indicates that old systems of fisheries management must also be adapted to accommodate rapid and accelerating change.