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TRANSCRIPT:
Alex: About 10 years ago in mid-July, my cousin and I decided to go narwhal hunting in our small aluminum boat while the ice was starting to break up.
Swimming somewhere beneath the surface of these summer waters, still covered in patches of ice, are narwhals – known as the “the unicorn of the sea” for what looks like a spiral horn protruding from their heads.
Alex Ootowak has been hunting them for years in the remote waters of Canada’s Arctic Archipelago.
Like his father before him. And his father before him.
Alex and his cousin pull the boat up onto some ice … and wait…
Alex: You're always taught to be extra, extra quiet and careful, because that they're so sensitive.
As kids, I remember being scolded for even stepping off the boat or kicking the boat or any sort of loud noises when we're in the vicinity of narwhal.
Alex says narwhal meat has been part of Inuit survival for at least 1,000 years. So, his dad really wasn’t kidding around when he would say:
Alex: [imitates scolding in Inuktitut]: “Stop making a ruckus!”
The placid waters that meander in and out of the inlets and fjords near Alex’s home have traditionally been a safe haven for narwhals to calve their offspring.
But on that particular day, an icebreaker and oil tanker rumble by Alex’s hunting ground…disturbing the peace…
Alex: About 10 minutes after the two ships had passed, a small pod of whales popped up…
The narwhals slip back under the water. Alex and his cousin head toward them hoping to get one when suddenly a narwhal pops up … surprisingly close.
Alex: We were able to drive right on top of it and harpoon it, which is not something we were expecting to do. We were just trying to get closer and um … we figured out afterwards that that whale was temporarily deafened by the ice breaking that had just occurred and could not hear this aluminum motorboat drive right up to it.
Alex’s community has seen its narwhal population plummet by nearly 90 percent in recent years – and they suspect those ships he saw that day have something to do with it.
Alex: We were able to harvest this whale and we were very happy at the time. This feeling of joy and gratitude soon changed to feeling of the wanting to protect these animals from icebreaking, just from the amount of noise that's happening and the effects that we obviously witnessed that day.
In this episode, we’re going to hear more from Alex about how he’s working together with marine scientists to track noise pollution in the mysterious seascape of the Canada’s far north … in the hopes of finding out what’s actually happening to narwhals, one of the most enigmatic species in the Arctic.
This is Living Planet, I’m Kathleen Schuster.
Narwhals look a bit like unicorns, and they kind of act like those mythical creatures, too, in terms of making themselves scarce.
Though, did you know that narwhals don’t actually have a horn on their heads? It’s actually the upper left canine tooth, and usually just called a tusk. More on that later…
So narwhals are skittish, unless they’re free to roam, like back when Alex was a child.
Alex: The numbers of whales that we used to watch as we were in the hunting camps, they would start in the morning and be migrating to their calving grounds into the inlets.
And it felt like a never-ending, looped-over scene of whales just constantly swimming past you all in the same direction, all migrating throughout the day, sometimes more than a day.
Alex lives in Mittimatalik, also known as Pond Inlet, which is an Arctic town in Canada’s far north, right near the gateway to the Northwest Passage.
There are stunning views in every direction – narrow fjords with steep cliffs to its west… white capped mountains, interlaced with glaciers to its north, and to its east, the open ocean waters of Baffin Bay, which separates Canada from Greenland.
When the winter ice begins to melt, the speckled grey narwhals leave Baffin Bay, pointing their tusks west toward Pond Inlet, and migrate into its safe waters.
Alex: They're actually quite playful among themselves when there's no human activity around. So if you're just watching them and not hunting, you'll see all sorts of behavior that you don't normally see and is rarely captured on camera with the tusks being pointed straight up or the calves playing amongst themselves, just swimming about just having all sorts of fun. It's surreal to say the least.
But those sights are a thing of the past. Alex says he doesn’t even think his son has ever witnessed a migration event like that.
At the beginning of the 2000s, there were about 20,000 narwhals living in the area. But by 2013, that number had dropped by nearly half.
It wasn’t clear where the whales were going…and as to what was impacting their numbers, there were a few suspects – like a warmer climate and cruise ships.
But around 2015, something else alarmed the community. A local mine run by a company called Baffinland opened a port nearby.
Within two years, roughly 4 million tons of iron ore had been shipped through those waters.
Alex: The health of the narwhal started dropping. We were noticing they were becoming skinnier and that in turn also meant that they were harder to hunt.
The hunters especially worried how these new noises would affect narwhals, which already seemed to be disappearing into thin air.
So they approached Alex and a marine biologist named Kristin Westdal who were both working for a Canadian marine conservation network called Ocean North.
Kristin and Alex, her field technician, decided to try to figure out how this noise was traveling underwater. By lowering special microphones called hydrophones through the ice and nearly half a mile, or 800 meters down into the water.
But how exactly did they get their hydrophones through five feet of ice in the first place?
Kristin Westdal: And so when we first went out, I just assumed that we were going to bring some kind of an ice auger and (laughing) we were going to be drilling a hole through the ice to get this stuff through. And Alex looked at me like I was totally bananas.
Like, “How the heck are we going to get through that much ice? You have to be crazy, Westdal!”
So, what he had come up with, which was obviously brilliant, is we were going to search around for a seal hole, you know, pretty close to the location that we were after.
So, it turns out ringed seals, which are named for the light-colored rings on their blubbery little gray bodies, scratch breathing holes into the ice.
Kristin says if you put your arms in front of you and connect your fingers to form a circle, that’s about the size of a seal hole.
And here’s what that scratching sound sounds like…
Kristin: And of course, there's so many ringed seals in this area that it's really not hard to find a seal hole even like 100 meters from exactly where you're hoping to be.
So we deployed our first instruments through seal holes, and I think Alex still does if he deploys some of them in the spring.
At first, Kristin and Alex thought their equipment was broken because they weren’t picking up sound. Turns out, Arctic waters really are some of the quietest on Earth.
But then once spring set in, the water came to life…
Alex: Once open water season starts, you start getting more seals coming at first … different species of seals, bearded seals, harp seals…
That strange whistle, like a falling bomb, is the mating a bearded seal makes in the spring . Love bombing his potential mate, if you will…
And then the whales begin to arrive – first come the narwhals…
Some years we start seeing beluga, not every year. Further down, we'll start seeing bowhead whales… they come early, earlier in the season and then seem to move away…
Kathleen: And do you have a favorite sound of one of those animals?
Alex: I gotta say, I'm a little biased towards the sound of narwhal clicking and the presence of narwhal because it's such a majestic animal.
Kristin: It's an incredibly abundant area, I would say. And if you're there in the summertime, it's very common to see seals popping up in the water when you're looking out.
And this is also where you're going to see narwhal. And often you'll see their breath or you'll hear their breath before you actually see the animals, which is quite special, just kind of hearing that like coming out of the water and then scanning the water desperately trying to figure out where the whale is coming from.
And if you're at the flow edge in the springtime, which is June into early July, standing out on the ice, then you can also see a lot of whales and seals coming towards that flow edge, waiting for that area to break up and they make their way into their summer habitat.
So you can see narwhal there, you can see bowhead, loads of seals. It's a very dynamic and exciting place to be.
Before we delve farther into noise pollution, it’s important to have a sense of how narwhals figure into the bigger picture of Arctic ecosystems and cultures.
The world’s 80,000 plus narwhals mainly live in eastern Canada and Greenland.
And by the way, if you’ve been wondering throughout this episode (like I did), is it narwhal or narwhale? It is, in fact, narwhal – a word derived from the Icelandic “hval” [kval] for “whale” and “nar” for “corpse.”
… legend has it sailors used to say the whale’s spotted pattern made them look like dead sailors in the water…
And it’s one narwhal, two narwhals, not two narwhal…
In the dialect of Inuktitut spoken in Pond Inlet, narwhals are called …
Alex: Qilalugaq.
Which translates to “the black one”. As opposed to “the white ones”, which would be beluga whales.
So, beyond the etymology of the word narwhal, scientists don’t actually know that much about this species since it’s difficult to observe them in the frozen landscape.
This is also why it’s been so hard to pinpoint the exact cause or causes of the dramatic drop in narwhal numbers near Pond Inlet … making indigenous knowledge all the more crucial to scientific observation.
And the need for collaboration goes both ways, too, considering that any threat to the survival of these animals is also a threat to food security in the Inuit communities, which rely on narwhals as a key source of protein, iron and vitamin C to prevent disease.
Alex: We were always taught that you only take what you need and take everything that you harvest. And we were always taught to save as much of the meat for future because the winters aren't always promised. So having that food source throughout the winter has also been something that we try to keep in practice and hand down to the next generation.
Adult narwhals can run anywhere from 16 to 17 feet (or roughly 5 to 5 and a half meters), with the males being the bigger of the two sexes.
Males are, incidentally, generally the ones with a tusk, which is roughly 6 feet (or nearly 2 meters) long. It’s unclear what exactly the tusk is for, but many biologists say it’s likely a way for females to identify a strong mate.
Once they’re harvested, their meat is eaten fresh or fermented underground for the winter.
Alex: You have to prepare the hole dug down to permafrost and then set stones to create a barrier from the meat to the sand. And then you've got to find rocks big enough to cover all that meat up once it's in place to prevent polar bears and foxes from digging it up in the fall. It's such a great delicacy that most people brought up with it, crave it if they move away.
In Canada, the government issues catch limit to the local Inuit communities.
Alex says in recent years they’ve barely used up their allotted 200 or so hunting tags because of population decline.
Within a year or two, Kristin and Alex started collaborating with a “real” acoustics expert as Kristin puts it from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which is based in San Diego.
And that step led to a massive expansion of their ability to monitor the waters of Eclipse Sound and the surrounding region. They’ve gone from 2 hydrophones to well over 10. And from recording for five minutes at the top of the hour, to recording 24-7 for up to 400 days.
Their hydrophones pick up all manner of sounds …like snow mobiles in the dead of winter … and the barking calls of seals when they’re not busy scratching holes into the ice…
And most importantly, they can measure the length of time noise is pervading the narwhals’ environment in the summer.
By compressing hours of cargo ship noise into just several minutes of audio…
Kristin: So when we look at some of the sound maps that have been produced for Eclipse Sound in Milne Inlet, you can see that when a ship is passing through, that entire habitat, the sound profile is completely changed.
It's obviously the sound is quite a bit higher right around the ship, but for 10s of kilometers out, you can see that acoustic environment definitely changing.
Alex says, they can also see the impact from a bird eye’s view on top of a mountain overlooking the port.
Alex: And one of the employees on top of that mountain was an elder that spoke to me during one of our meetings with the Hunters and Trappers Association.
And he was telling us the story about how they get notifications on the radio as soon as a ship has been loaded and it starts getting ready to go.
And he told me that when they get that notification that the engines have fired up and the ship hasn't even moved yet, just getting ready to leave, instantly they start seeing the narwhals behaving different.
They start going away from the shipping channel because they've learned to avoid the shipping channel as the ships have traveled down that same area every time they go into, to and from the mine.
And they've learned this, that as soon as the ship starts their engines, that they move away or stop feeding, stop doing their deep dives where they're feeding on fish at the bottom of the ocean.
So, during these years of developing an acoustics network, narwhal numbers continued to drop. By 2021, there were only about 2,000 left in the area – a 90 percent drop since the early 2000s
Those figures come from a study published last year by their team. It found that narwhal started to behave differently when vessels came within 12 to 24 miles (or 20 to 40 kilometers). And that they were responding to noises below the threshold of 120 decibels, which is considered the disturbance threshold for mid-frequency whales.
They also found that these noises were causing narwhals to leave the area or reduce vocal activity.
So the noise pollution started in earnest about 10 years ago – is it really the culprit here, though?
Kristin: So we do know that there's changes in the environment, which are, you know, a whole host of things are changing, not just the ice, the water temperature, species, all the way from the bottom of the food chain all the way up.
But those things are more gradual and they're taking time and we're seeing them in long-term data patterns and data sets.
But what we did see was this change in population in a very short period of time. And the only thing that changed that quickly in that habitat was the volume of ships coming through.
And that's where this understanding and assumption about narwhal numbers and ships comes from, it’s really that short timeline.
So where exactly have the narwhals gone to? Are they dying out?
Alex has a theory that they might actually be popping up in other regions …
Alex: I was visiting in Northern Greenland in 2024 and talking to hunters there. And I came across this knowledge that the narwhal started appearing in northern Greenland that historically weren't going there during the summer.
They said that narwhal that were appearing were “foreign” because they were longer and skinnier and behaved very different to their narwhal.
The narwhal that they hunt over there are accustomed to being hunted with the kayak and can sense little noises from the paddle splashing as they're approaching.
What would support this theory is that Baffin Bay – the body of water separating the area of Canada Alex is from and Greenland – is where the narwhals usually spend the winter. So instead of going west to Pond Inlet, maybe they’re going the opposite direction, toward Greenland?
Alex: I don't know if that's a pretty good coincidence or not, but that's what we were told when we were visiting.
The other hunters also told him the “foreign” narwhals were swimming around the entrance of inlets rather than finding a more protected spot. In short, they were easier prey, and tasted different, too.
And he says when he asked him when these whales started appearing there, they said it was right around the time shipping increased in Pond Inlet.
We’ll hear more about narwhals in Greenland right after this brief message.
About 500 nautical miles away in Greenland, there’s another narwhal scientist who’s been researching narwhals and noise pollution. Her name is Outi Tervo, and she works for the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources.
I want to get her take on what Alex said about hunters in Greenland spotting “foreign” narwhals, not only because she’s based there, but also because she’s also someone who’s practically hitched a ride on the backs of narwhals to decipher their social behaviors.
Outi does this by attaching little suction cups to these whales that track them using GPS and record sounds with acoustic monitors.
This method has given her unique access to the sounds of narwhals echolocating – for example to locate their prey.
Narwhals click and buzz as they dive half a mile below the surface of the water foraging for food.
Outi Tervo: We have seen animals that have been tagged simultaneously that they do dive to the approximately to the same depth and they echolocate at the same time, but whether that is sort of cooperation or whether they are maybe eavesdropping on each other that they can hear that “my neighbor is also starting echolocating, so probably there's something now, so I better start as well, look for fish where I am.” That we don't know yet.
But they do vocalize a lot.
Their clicks and buzzes range from as low as 500 Herz and climb beyond 20 kiloherz, think dog-whistle range…
And the ability to hear is to narwhals, what the ability to see is to humans. So just like bright headlights or a flashlight to the eyes would temporarily blind us humans, sounds that interfere with narwhal echolocation profoundly disrupt their activity.
Outi Tervo: So, it's not sort of, maybe not like a startle reaction, but I think this is a sort of a reaction that they are, they're changing their behavior so that they are ready to escape it if they think that “I'm in danger.”
One behavior this is interfering with is foraging … Outi has observed noises from shipping and airgun pulses from oil and gas exploration caused narwhals to stop foraging … and this lines up with Alex’s observation of seeing skinnier narwhals.
She’s also quick to point out that narwhals do not stray from their foraging or calving spots very easily. They have what is called “high site fidelity”.
Which brings us back to what Alex said the hunters in Greenland told him about seeing quote unquote foreign narwhals.
Is this likely and has Outi heard anything about this?
She says, no “not that she’s aware of,” but …
Outi Tervo: Then if they are experiencing a lot of noise in that area, I wouldn't be surprised that they would then, sort of if that sort of is too much for them to handle, that they would go to somewhere else.
But then in the 1st place, why they chose this particular site, that is because they have something there that is very important for them.
She also adds that, between the issue of high site fidelity and the limited places narwhals flee to, it’s vital that their habitats be protected.
Outi Tervo: The Arctic is very limited. They can't sort of, they can't swim to the Caribbean and spend the winter there.
They are super adapted to the Arctic. And the Arctic is sort of decreasing in size in that sense that because the ice is not sort of protecting the area anymore, they are sort of running out of space.
So I do think that it's very important to take the needs of the animals into consideration and yeah, and try to make some safe havens for them.
One thing all of these researchers agree on is that noise pollution is far from the only threat facing marine life in the Arctic, which is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet. The region is seeing ice disappear and previously rare species, like killer whales, are hanging around longer.
But the good news is that the project Alex and Kristin spearheaded has led to greater awareness about noise pollution in the area.
The local mining company, Baffinland, has lowered its shipping speed to 9 knots and is using fixed routes. It’s also agreed to stricter rules for when ice breakers can be deployed.
Cruise ship companies have also been quick to get on board, too.
But Kristin, who in the meantime has risen to vice president of Oceans North, says they’re going to need much more data and much stronger oversight moving forward. Especially to keep a handle on noise pollution as companies eye the internationally-disputed waters of the Northwest Passage for international shipping.
And to this last point, Kristin says the Northwest Passage remains precarious.
Kristin: The Arctic is a very dynamic place. And we're not going from a situation of multi-year pack ice to open water. It's not like that. And we find there's changes and variability from year to year, but there's always ice in those areas.
And, you know, we're finding there's vessels going through and grounding themselves, you know, because it's also not well charted in certain spots, even in the Northwest Passage.
And so we're both at a risk to marine life from underwater sound and pollution, but we're also putting those communities at risk, you know, when we have vessels running aground and vessels moving through habitats that they're not familiar with.
And I think that having policies and regulations in place in the Arctic is going to be really important in getting ahead of this that’s coming.
She says the only way to move forward on conservation in the Arctic is to work with local communities. They’re the ones who know their environment best and they’re the ones who can point scientists to the best spots to collect data, which can ultimately lead to better solutions.
As to whether their measures are making a difference in narwhal numbers, Alex says last year was the first time in a decade that people were happy with what they caught during the fall migration. A healthy narwhal population means a healthy community.
Alex: I find it kind of funny when you're shopping in the South and you hear the advertisements about like free range eggs, for example. They're still born and raised on a farm and they're not free.
They're still in a cage somewhere, whereas the food that we're collecting is 100% organic and These are completely free animals.
And we prefer our way of collecting meat because that's healthy and all the vitamins that we need, we are getting from the animals that we harvest because we've done it for thousands of years and these animals have the vitamins we require to live.
So it's something that needs to be understood that it's not a sport. It's not something we do just to kill and take animals for sport.
This is our means of staying healthy and connected to the land and our culture.
That’s all we have for this episode of Living Planet, which was produced and soundscaped by me, Kathleen Schuster and edited by Neil King. Our sound engineer was Jürgen Kuhn.
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