(Original Source : By Yereth Rosen, Tue Jan 16, 4:53 PM ET Yahoo! NEWS & Yahoo!Images)
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - Beluga whales were once so thick in the waters along Alaska's biggest city that boaters had to take care to avoid bumping them.
But now Cook Inlet's population of small white whales, beloved by locals and tourists, may be headed for extinction, according to a report from government biologists last week. A new count by the National Marine Fisheries Service puts the Beluga whale population at 302, less than half the number in 1994 and well below the 1,000 to 2,000 believed to have been swimming in earlier years in the glacier-fed channel that runs from Anchorage to the Gulf of Alaska.
"There's basically a one in four chance that this population is going to become extinct in 100 years," said Bruce Smith, a National Marine Fisheries Service biologist studying the belugas.
The Cook Inlet belugas, a genetically distinct population already listed as a "depleted" and meriting special management under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, are candidates for new safeguards under the Endangered Species Act.Biologists say the reason for the precipitous decline since the 1990s was simple -- overharvesting by the area's Alaska Natives, mostly Athabascan Indians, who are entitled by law to pursue their traditional whale hunts.
Native groups agreed to curb hunting until stocks return to higher levels, but that does not appear to be helping the whales recover, according to Smith.
Environmentalists say it should be no surprise that belugas are faltering in Alaska's most industrialized waterway.
Native groups agreed to curb hunting until stocks return to higher levels, but that does not appear to be helping the whales recover, according to Smith.
Environmentalists say it should be no surprise that belugas are faltering in Alaska's most industrialized waterway.
OIL AND GAS INDUSTRY
Oil drilling, associated bustle and noise, vessel-traffic pressures from thriving cargo-shipping and commercial fishing activities, sewage and storm water runoff from Alaska's most densely populated region and other industrial factors are likely hurting the belugas, according to environmentalists.
Particular scrutiny should focus on the oil and gas industry, with its constant marine disposal of wastewater and its reliance on loud seismic surveys that disrupt the underwater whale communications, said Bob Shavelson, executive director of the environmental group Cook Inletkeeper.
"Everybody said, 'OK, it was the hunting.' Everybody said, 'OK, once we get a handle on the hunting the problem will go away.' Lo and behold, we're not seeing any increase; we're seeing what's likely a decrease," Shavelson said.
Oil and gas industry representatives fear new restrictions will unfairly burden them.
"There's a lot of interest in being able to use the inlet the way it's been used by the people, bringing all the groceries in and all the cars in as well as the oil and gas, and still protect the belugas at the same time," said Judy Brady, a former state natural resources commissioner who heads the Alaska Oil and Gas Association.
Past tests have shown that belugas and other sea life in Cook Inlet are untainted by industrial pollutants, Brady said.
Smith said it may be the nonpollution factors, such as noise, inadvertent harassment, large-scale beach strandings, disease outbreaks and the occasional predation by killer whales that are keeping the beluga population low.
Those factors might have been easily absorbed in the past, but not anymore."It could be now that the population is reduced to the point where some threats and impacts that weren't threatening to the whole stock, now are," he said.
