This past week was busy for the Northern Environment class. We had a focus on wildlife in the North, covering topics as big as the polar bears in Churchill, to as small as the often overlooked invertebrates that are the most common and diverse lifeforms in the Arctic. I found it amazing that whales in the North could live for up to 100 years, while the arctic fox has only a short life span of 3 to 6 years and looking at the respect that the Inuit people from Northern Canada have for the animals they hunt and compete with in the wild.
My favourite part of writing a blog is that I get to choose what I write about, and you have to listen... well I guess you could always skip to the next blog if you really wanted to. After hearing about the presentations this week I thought it would be great to share my own experience I have had with whales. Unfortunately I encountered whales down South in the Pacific, but I already mentioned that I'm going to include the South close to Antarctica in my description of the North, so here we go.
Humpback whales will travel over 5000 miles between their feeding grounds in the Antarctic and the warm pacific water to either mate or birth their calves. The migration of humpback whales is the longest of any mammal living. I met up with these humpback whales in the Kingdom of Tonga on one of the Ha'apai Islands called 'Uoleva. We could get to the island on a boat, or if we ran fast enough along a sand bar connecting the islands while the tide was low, we chose the boat. We were fortunate enough to spend most of a week on this island in a small little hut with no running water or electricity. We made friends with the other island residents, which ranged from 4 people when their was no tourists, to about 30 people when the island was busy. During the day it was common to look out into the ocean to see our Humpback friends playing in the calm, warm water.
One morning we joined a tour boat in hopes of swimming with the whales. The excursion entailed whale watching from the boat, the possibility to swim with the whales, and some snorkeling around a reef with lunch on the boat, totaling about an 8 hour day. The majority of the time we spent looking for the whales surfacing. They would jump out of the water nose first, hump their large backs over and expose their giant tails to us.
The most exciting part of the trip was actually getting into the water with these whales. We caught up with a group of three whales in a stretch of open water including a mother, her calve and the escort. It's common for the whales to travel in packs of three, the escort generally being a male who follows the mother and her calf along the waters. He is often looking to mate with the females, even though she is looking after her baby it is still possible at this point for her to mate. We were able to get into the water after observing the mother resting in one spot. If she was travelling, there would be no way for our sad little flippers to keep up with her large tail and fins. We went in as a group, and stuck close together. We would approach from the side, so she could see us at all times. We don't want the mother to feel surprised when seeing us or threatened if we swim close to her calf. We had the gentle, giant mammals swimming under us, directly towards us, up and out of the water until gradually swimming away. This made for one of my all time most memorable experiences.To learn more about the whales visit ''Whale watch Vava'u'' at http://www.whalewatchvavau.com/whales.html they have information about the whales, discuss their tours and services, and have a pretty amazing gallery of photos and videos of the whales.
In our Northern Environments class we talked a lot about the declining number of northern animals. During one of our learning exercises we discovered hunting, fishing, global warming, and pollution to be some of the largest reasons that their is declining number of animals, and this would be true again for the humpback whales down south. Tourism, such as the guided boat tour I had rode in the Kingdom of Tonga, allows for a way to help protect the animals. If they can make enough money off the animal through tourism then it can make for a better reason than hunting the animal, and then the community will begin to protect the animal. I've seen this many times such as my trip to Rwanda to visit the mountain gorillas, or to Chengdu to visit Panda's or visiting Koalas in Australia. Since learning so much about the polar bears I've added a trip to Churchill to my bucket list in places to go as well.
Some of the highlights from the lectures this week for me include the pure beauty of the Arctic Fox hunting in the snow. You can see the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP15zlyra3cand the discussion of when tourism becomes dangerous for the animals as seen in the reality show 'The Polar Bear Family & Me.'' where Buchanan follows a family of polar bears in a steal cage. Main concerns were towards the polar bear, that found the steal cafe interesting enough to attack. But what would happen if the polar bear injur's a paw, or tooth and can no longer hunt, or if the polar bear did get to the over excited camera man inside the box. You can read more on this topic at http://www.polarbearsinternational.org/news-room/pbi-blog/reality-tv-hits-new-low-high-arctic-bbc%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9C-polar-bear-family-me%E2%80%9D
