 Welcome everyone to North Branch Nature Center to the Naturalist Journeys Lecture Series. Thank you so much for coming. It's great to see so many familiar faces and also some folks who I think are new to North Branch or newer anyway. So welcome to all of you. I'm Emily Seifert. I work in communications and development here at North Branch. And this series is made possible by, well first of all, this is our 23rd year bringing this series to the capital city. Yep. Raise your hand if you used to go in the basement of the UU church. Yep. So we have, for all that time, we've been bringing biologists and researchers and natural historians to our capital city so that all of us can learn from their research and enjoy a little bit of armchair traveling in the depth of winter. So this series is made possible by three generous sponsors, Capital Copy and Hunger Mountain Co-op and Green Vest. If you can join me in thanking them. And I'm sure you know the first two. But if you didn't get a chance yet tonight to meet Craig Walker. Craig, can you just stand up for a second so people can get eyeballs on you? This is Craig. Hopefully you can meet him after the talk. Craig has just opened the Montpelier Office of Green Vest, which is a company which helps people make sure that their financial investments are in alignment with their social and environmental values. And because our values are so much in line with Craig's, he's generously supporting North Branch. So yeah, it's pretty exciting to have him and to have all of you here. I have one other little plug to put in if you are looking to wet your whistle after the talk tonight or any time in the month of January if you could head down to Bar Hill to do so. It's just off Berry Street. It's the big new distillery. They are generously donating all of their tips for the month of January to North Branch Nature Center. And yeah, and so the way that they do this is they have, they pay their employees a livable wage and then they donate the tips. And the other nonprofits who've been the beneficiary of this program so far have raised in the neighborhood of $10,000 in a month. But that means we all need to go raise our glasses to North Branch. So you can go any time this month, go early, go late, drink often. But don't drive after. It's use the new bike path. Right, the bike path is finished. And if you want to come on January 23rd in particular, we're having a sort of cocktail hour open house where a bunch of us will be there and we can play ping-pong together and drink bee's knees. So yeah, it's Thursday the 23rd. Thanks Abby. I'm gonna get there at 4.30 and I think that there's maybe a board meeting. So Chip's gonna get there kind of later. We're gonna, we're gonna try to cover the whole evening. 4.30 to, we're pooped. We're gonna be welcome at Bar Hill from 4.30 on that evening. Okay. Yep, yep. So, okay onto our main event. Our speaker tonight, Joe Roman is a researcher and a conservation biologist at UVM. Born and raised in New York. He's the author of two books, numerous articles and he's editor and chef of a website called eattheinvaders.org which is dedicated to fighting invasive species one bite at a time. And I was fascinated to learn that Joe is also exploring the pivotal role that environmental stewardship has come to play in our modern economic systems including that of coastal Massachusetts where I grew up and where of course the colonial economy was supercharged by the lucrative and bloody whaling trade. So tonight Joe will be sharing his research and insights into whales. Sounds like from the Gulf of Maine to Cuba. He's been studying these gentle giants and their place in the web of life. And I like to picture that while other whale watchers might be hoping to capture a thrilling shot of a tail slap or a breaching whale, Joe's out there with a net trying to collect a humbler souvenir of whale poop. So I'm looking forward to learning all about his insight into the critical role that whales and their poop can play in the nitrogen cycling process and have an impact on the restoration of our marine ecosystems as we humans move from hunting to preserving whales. So take it away Joe. Thank you Emily for that excellent really generous introduction and yes there will be poop, you'll have to wait a little bit. We'll get there and also for the tip on Bar Hill. Yeah. If it's open after this, it might be there. Absolutely. Okay, thanks for that. All right, so I'll talk about this in a moment but I just got back from a year. And some of you may know that Iceland still allows commercial whale and I'll talk about how I got there and what the invitation involved in a little bit. I was on the full break there but it gave me a lot of time to reflect on what the value of a whale is. And for some it would be the future, right? It would be what the, how much you get. So we're in a small landlocked country and on most of you have. When I asked that in Iceland, many people that were actually interested in it that so many in the small land like state many of you guys have been out there and it's, right. That's in a way how we think about it. There's another way of course as well which is their heritage. What's the value of spiritual value even if we never go out and see a whale for many of us that existence value is important, right? That they're still out there in the oceans. For most of human history this would probably be all we would see in a whale. So it's a blow. Can rise up to 30 feet for the largest whales. Whale comes to the surface and exhales and you see this large blow of the exhalation. They'll float at the surface for a bit, inhale, exhale. And then for the buoyed whales they'll throw up a fluke before they die, right? And from if you're standing on the shore you could really not quite sure what you would see, right? What else is going on beneath the surface? And that's a lot to say. What whales actually look like. These are described as Leviathans. Oles Magnus wrote a manuscript at Scandinavia in the 1500s describing it was a map of Scandinavia and also describing why people leave oceans, right? And you can see just from this picture that there's some other relationship right there people to their creative whales. And they're throwing things in there. And I think anything that is a citation if you see that blow, right? So once you see that it's probably something like a whale. This one on the lower right was described as Leviathan but it actually has some plots for fins and that's based on mistranslation. From the original Scandinavian into Latin they mistranslated the word for fins to claws and even though no one ever saw a claw citation it lasted in both science and in the natural history of literature. So you get these and this perception persists for a long time. There were of course ways that we could see whales up close. One might be one way that you might be able to see a whale up close even if you're not getting out of the water. Each whale. Yeah, each whale or stranded whale is one way. But of course there are one of the reasons that a lot of us think about great whales before we started hunting them they actually comprised more than 90% of all marine mammal biomass. So there were lots of whales and they traveled great distances. So they have the longest migrations of a male. Great whales feed up off the coast of Russia and Alaska and they're breeding down off Mexico. Here in the Atlantic you have hudbacks feeding off of Iceland and breeding off of a breeding in the Caribbean. So they're moving around a lot, they're highly visible and they're also playing a role in ocean ecosystems. So one way that we could have seen these up close even if you didn't get out off shore would be during stranded. And in early manuscripts around that same time 1500s, 1600s, this was seen as something that was wrong. When you had marine creatures, ocean creatures on land it was a sort of challenge to God's order. And you can see in this broad tube right here there is father time, if you can see closer, the time is right now in his hourglass. There's a solar eclipse and a lunar eclipse. So it offers something to kind of go off, right? You can see even in this picture that they were fascinating to them. And I know whenever I'm on the coast, as Emily said, I grew up in New York and you see strandings there, more strandings than you used to, and you're never alone. It really does attract people. People come, even if they're not taking anything from it they want to measure it, they want to look at it, they want to see it. So one way that you're approaching whales again is when they strand and then of course the other was through whale, through hunting. And this is a petroglyph, the earliest known image we have of a whale. And it's a group of men, a group of hunters that are tethered to this. It comes from Korea about 4,000 years ago. It's the first known image, first relationship that we know of, we're having with whales are through hunting, right? And this is probably a gray whale or a red whale to the postal species that were there that were hunted early on with basic technology of hand-thrown foos and lancets. Our guess is probably at that point there wasn't a large impact on whale populations. Hunting was relatively low. It had a big impact on the communities because you're thinking about how much food that could mean especially before winter sets in. It could allow the entire community to survive off of these whales. So the whale hunters played a central role in those societies. Things started to shift about 1,000 years ago, however. And that's when the earliest records we have of commercial whale, the earliest receipt is from bass whalers. This is a right whale right here. The first whale that we know that was commercially hunted it was called the right whale because it was the right whale hunt, right? The right whale was killed. It was coastal and floated when you killed it so you didn't have a high risk of losing the animal. So at that time, they were largely hunted for meat in the early, at around 1,000 AD. Why? Whales so important because they were considered fish by the Catholic Church and therefore they could be eaten during Lenten days and at that time there were many days when you couldn't eat meat. So there was mostly the time that was consumed which could be about way up to a ton, right? So a lot of meat from that whale. So this is the right whale. They're miss the seeds. You can see here, they're filter feeders. They're usually feeding on a small fish or smaller crustaceans and filtering out that food from the water column. These family plates were also really important. They were like an early form of plastic for spring steel. So they would be used for umbrellas or for fishing rods or for bed springs. So highly valuable in many households in Europe and North America as well. This is a sperm whale. These are toothed whales. They weren't really, they were hunted first really by Americans, by American whalers out of New Bedford and off the coast of Massachusetts. Toothed whales were not hunted for their teeth. The teeth were valueless and in fact they were used for streumtia some of them could see in that so they were used by the men that were on board the ships. But their lover was very valuable and the sperm said that came from their heads. It burned brightly. It was more reliable than vegetable oils because you didn't wear any risks from droughts or from floods. And it was used in everything from lighting houses to street lamps to lighthouses. And oddly in North Carolina I've been told that in the early 1900s there was a fire that lighthouses had to use. Whale or marine matter oil and where does it support that? And they were measured mostly in barrels, right? That was the values. How many barrels of oil do you get out of that? So the most valid even though so the sperm whale was used to light the light but the main product that was used for from the baleen actually rarely saw the light again. And I would have been in these courses. So this fashion started in the 1500s but I married Tudor in England. And it caught on throughout Europe. And Catherine de Medici in France heard about this and she wasn't gonna be outdone by Britain in fashion and she declared an idea of way size to be about 12 inches. Okay, so a little more than this comforts of a CD. And that caused it to float and it could break red and this caused internal damage for women but it did maintain this wasp-like waist. Look for centuries, it lasted really until the 19th until the 19th century at that point. Of course, as bad as it was for women, it was worse for the whale. And this shows you just one port in San Francisco from the 1860s and these are baleen clades from bogey whales. It was worth them for one of these ships to leave from New Bedford to go all the way around South America up until the North Pacific. Hunt these bowheads and just the baleen from a single bowhead whale could pay for that entire cruise. It was incredibly valuable. And it was never intended to be sustained. This was, they didn't talk about sustainability. In fact, what hunters would usually do is you go in and you wanna be the first one there and you hit them really hard and then you move on. So you have this serial depletion which we saw around the world, not only for different populations but also for different species as well. And things progressed sadly even worse in the 20th century even though we no longer did we have replacements for this. Whales were still hunted, especially in the Southern hemisphere. You can see here on the bottom here this is the number of whales killed, hundreds of thousands of whales killed per year in the Southern hemisphere and then in the Northern hemisphere. You start off with the largest whales, they're starting off with the blue whales, the ones that are most valuable and then working their way down to the smallest ones. So these are Miki whales by the 1980s which they had to refashion their brinee harpoons that they were using at that point because they were too big for these small whales. So great whale populations declined by 85% since the advent of commercial whales. So almost maybe they're down to 15% of whales are left by the 1980s when things, the 1970s and 1980s, when things started to shift. So the good news is that there is, you can change this and we did for whales. The story for many centuries was one of depletion but then we started to turn things around. This depletion idea was, it's so familiar to many of us, especially in commercial issues. This is Dan Pauli Hirofus, paper called The Shifting Basin Syndrome in the 1990s. And the idea is that you set your baseline from when you were growing up or if you're a scientist growing up. That's what you think is natural. Your grandfather or your grandmother would have had a different view of what was natural in the oceans and things change over time. But just like when we go for a hike here that you think, well, that's probably what Vermont looks like, but a hundred years ago they were different things. So he proposed this idea of shifting baseline that each generation, if you will, raised in the 1950s, abundant large fish, but by 2007 it was smaller. And we're thinking, we tend to think about this baseline as defined. It doesn't have to be that way. And this is some work that colleagues and I have done is we can change that policy and actually bring back these populations. In the United States, we made a very intentional decision in 1972 to protect large whales and all marine animals today. There were very few countries in the world where zero tape, we're just gonna shut down all marine animals. And this led to the Endangered Species Act, the following year I spoke to Lee Talbot who outright the draft this legislation. And he said chose marine animals, he chose whales on purpose because it wasn't gonna be so easy to pass a freshwater and muscle protection. People weren't gonna get that excited about it, but people got behind this and it made a really big difference. 10, 15 years later, there was an international moratorium on commercial life. 1986, other countries joined that moratorium. And the good news is, there's a huge difference. Some of these numbers really are beyond what no scientist could have expected. In the North Atlantic in 1955, there were only 1,000 humpbackers. Now there are 20,000. West of Australia is really amazing. Down to 660,000 or 25,000, right? So populations are back close to what they probably were historically Western population, excuse me, are also increasing. And as Emily mentioned, I grew up in New York. I never saw whales. Talk about this shifting baseline. We call it lifting baselines, right? That this baseline can shift. They never saw whales off the coast of New York. Now humpbacks are being made, right? And we're seeing other, and fin whales are back as well. So these populations are increasing. US marine animals trends are up about 66% of marine animals are increasing and then about three quarters of all of the great whale populations are increasing. So that's the good news. We're turning these populations around and it's resulted in, it's really, let's say, some successes, some cause of celebration. But there's also been a pushback when populations increase. You said in Massachusetts, has anyone seen the gray seals off the coast of Cape Cod in the recent years? There's just a few of you. Okay. Did anyone see them, that anyone that's from Massachusetts see the money with kids? No. No, they weren't there. They were absolutely gone. They were eradicated from the entire human coast. There was a small population on the coast. Now, there's about 40,000 of them off the coast of Massachusetts, leaving, and this is a cause for celebration, but it's also a cause for conflict. Two things. One has been the interactive fisheries, especially commercial, recreational fishing, rather, because you've got a fish that's flapping on the line and gray seals sees it, and it'll take it right on, right. One thing that I think surprised most people was when these populations came back. So, too, did the great whites, right? White sharks are now back, and this is what probably many of us, any of you who've read it out, is this concern. And I was there to talk about the return of whales and end up in marine mammals recently, and it's just sitting at the bar in Yarmouth. Most of the people were there and they don't let their kids in the bar, right? People have really changed the way they interact with the oceans the next time. We had a shark biologist from California come there, he said, well, you know, we've been living with sharks for a long time, most of California. What do they do? Well, one thing is they have lifeguards on paddle boards, and if there's a shark, come in, and then there's no shark. People are just swimming in the water, right? So, as this lifted baseline, I think it's here to say, there are some people that really are angry about that. I believe they're gonna have to learn. Their kids are gonna be like, oh, there's sharks here, there's sea lice in the water. They're gonna be used to that, right? And we'll see how humans adapt to that as well. One of the other changes was the rise in the whale watching industry. Started in San Diego in the 1960s, and now it's more than $2 billion a year. Industry, this is off the coast of Iceland, so it's much more valuable to see whales than to hunt whales in Iceland. But so it is set up that conflict. But this has really changed, I think, our perception of whales that most of you have been out there to see them. But, you know, of course, as conservation biologists, the work that I do, I'm used to managing animals that are in decline. If you read the early conservation literature, and many of you would know, it's about rare species that are getting rare, right? We're not really used to working with species that are becoming more abundant because of our animals. And this is really, it's just, what does that mean? It means that it's good news, but it also means that we're also often seeing animals, right? There's this idea of density dependence, this idea that there's how many animals can place support. Well, maybe now people use words to run a social fence and kind of stuff. How many animals are people willing to accept in particular areas? So, one country that reacted to this rise in whale populations was Japan, right? So they didn't really buy in, so the more you heard early on, and as populations started to increase, they started increasing hunting for whales. They claimed it was for two reasons, that in addition to cultural reasons. One was because there were too many whales and they were eating our fish and that's still on their website. And also, that as whale populations, some of the populations increase, it could result in other endangered whale populations. I worked in Japan doing DNA analysis of whales that were being sold in the markets in the late 1990s, and this was still being argued as a reason-wide whale search. And you see that in Norway and Icelandic culture. So, this must have been on my mind when I was taking a class in marine ecology at the University of Florida in the late 1990s and heard about this idea, which is called the biological problem. This is one process, an ocean graphic process in the ocean. The idea is that photosynthesis can only occur at the surface of the ocean. That's where the light is. And then as phytoplankton and zooplankton consume the phytoplankton, the organic matter sinks out towards the bottom. And the idea is that the carbon-matter-grade changes are dropping from the surface to the bottom of the ocean and we're losing those nutrients. From really the first time, my first research cruise looking at the North Atlantic Ray Whale, one of the whales in front of us rose to the surface, it had mud on its bottom, on its head, so it would be feeding at the bottom, and it was floating, resting at the surface and then it threw up the flutes and it released an enormous fuel. An enormous fuel, right? And I was sitting there, I thought, you know, dangerous, you often do a class and I'm like, well actually there's one process that's missing here and that is that whales are doing the opposite, right? So I was, we were insulating our attic recently and I actually found my notes from that day. Oh my God, this is, so here it is. This is, as I was sitting in my class hearing about the biological pump and it's like, well right away else they dive down to feed and they come to the surface and they release those species and maybe there are nutrients in that poop that's being taken up by the phytoplankton and then it's consumed by the copepods and the whales are eating those copepods so it could be a positive feedback move. I was a graduate student, you can see, I had to remind myself to eat with them. So, but this was in my mind, it was not my research at that point but I've always wanted to revisit this idea, right? That at some point maybe this is a process that would counteract that biological pump. So, I did my PhD at Harvard with Jim McCarthy, who was my mentor, good friend and an amazing man, really one of the best academics and one of the most wonderful people I've ever met. Sadly, he died last night. So, I want to dedicate this talk to him. He was the reason why I'm here today in that he's a biological oceanographer who was open to this idea that whales might make a difference because most oceanographers look at bottom-up processes. They're looking at the role of climate and how that drives it and Jim's like, I don't know, you know, maybe we can go out and get it, but maybe we should examine it. So, this is the model that we put together. Here's that biological pump, feces, migration, death, that usual way. Whales, however, are feeding the death. They're often feeding in the dark so they're taking nutrients, this is the, it's very nutrient rich here. They feed at depth, 100 meters, 200 meters down. They come to the surface, they rest, they digest, and they release feces. And as it turns out, also feed. But that's a lot harder to collect. So, we put together a model for this work, right? Like, okay, as one of my colleagues, another oceanographer said, okay, I can believe that there's some nutrients in whale food, but is it ecologically important or is it a far harder to take? It's very hard to do that, like, okay, so how much does that mean it's a big ocean, right? And they're whales, but they're not anything like this, right? So this is what we set up today. And what we found is that this nitrogen, that's the limiting nutrient just like, in your garden, you need nitrogen or you might need phosphorus, it's another thing to study. Well, we were looking at nitrogen because when the nitrogen levels go down in the summer, then productivity increases and we wanted to know how it was, would impact that. And what we found is that they bring more nitrogen to the system than all the rivers combined, right? And almost as much coastal point sources as humans, almost as much as we put out there. Not as much as atmospheric deposition, which is what's coming from industry and other things and being dropped out of the atmosphere and thinking of the acid rain or something like that. But, important. We submitted this to a couple of high-end journals and it rejected. One was, I think, some bias against it, but one of the researchers had it before and he or she said, why you guys are there, you're right on the coast there, why haven't you done any field work? Why haven't you actually gone out of the way? And you're like, all right, this person is right, but this means it's gonna be another year at least of work, but we decided, okay, it's worth it. We had colleagues who could get out on the boat so we could analyze the amount of nitrogen in this so that not only could we get an idea of what it was throughout the ocean, throughout the space, but also on the smallest. And some, the journalists caught on that. That there are some folks that are sort of tick-baked, whether you know, studying Lyme disease, that's probably a workshop that's being tick-baked. But fair enough, if you do get, for right whales, if you get the pieces on your clothes, you have to throw it away. It is a very strong sign. And that plays an important role in one of the allies that we use in order to find these pieces because it's hard. You're following whales around all day, if you're following them around long enough, it'll poop, but maybe they could be night when you're not gonna be able to see it. So what we used was a snigger dog. A 90-pound rockweiler whose originally was a companion for an elderly woman. And after she died, he became a snigger dog for drugs in Washington State in her prison. And then he got what I think is a dream job for those dogs who came wildlife detection home. Working, looking for grizzly scouts and other scouts in the Pacific Northwest, and a friend of mine, Ross Raleigh, Raleigh has this crazy idea that if they can work on land, maybe they can work on the oceans as well. Maybe we can use these dogs to find the pieces. Unfortunately for Fargo, he was, he got seasick. He didn't have to take the wrong name before he took them. Worse yet, his colleague Bob was terrified of whales. So he'd be high every time the whale came to him. He was more than one season. He actually retired here in Vermont, sorry. He had a big hand, happy ending for both of you guys. And this is how it works, right? So then you can see how we're collecting these pieces and these lengthenets, like that. But so just like if you've watched a dog on land, the way they go upwind and they're sounding back and forth in the center, right? It's the same thing on the ocean. Advantage on the ocean is you're at trees, right? And you're on a hill, so the breeze is coming straight on. Disadvantages dogs can't run on water, right? And he's going to have to rely on the boat driver to figure out that. And also, there's currents and so it's hard to know even when you're in the same patch of water, they would throw out popsicle sticks in the water or in order to make sure that you, where they were, so in case they were backtracking. But this is at an optical mile away and Fargo's getting ahead. And that means for Fargo, it's often the dogs excited and the tail is wagging, but it's a rockweather. So they're very small tail. We used to call it the happy inch, when he was on a scent. And you can see it with black eyes, he's hitting it. And then X means he's down and he's out of the boat. So then you can see change in course and then he's back on it again and then out. And then upwind and here is when we can smell it. So it's about a hundred years away, people, you can smell it, I'm strong. And then you hit it. And he improved the collection by about 60 fibers. So it would be better than if we had people who were just on boats, looking. So we would be just looking for those samples. So very successful method. A couple of years later, these were the North and I had to write about these species that I've studied most throughout my career. Another way, as it turns out, to reliably find feces is in courtship groups. I don't know why, but this is a female in the center and then there's feces around there. It's also easy to see these courtship groups from a distance, so you can tell really one in the sun in one of our sites. So it could be one female and up to 20 males. And then the last four adults that did this courtship group. So this would really be our most often successful way to find samples. And a little bit, as much as it was really fun that the dog went boat, it was just a little easier a year ago, and followed us. So just to give you an idea of what feet whale poop looks like, here it is, in different varieties. And it depends on the species and it depends on the diet, what the feces looks like. Here is a blue whale, and you can see it's brightly colored. They're feeding on krill, which are red, and there's lots of lipids there, so it floats to the surface. This is probably the easiest to find. When whales are feeding on fish, it kind of looks like an overseas green tea, hard to find. You've got to be lucky to get right on it. So it would be a challenge for us to find the poop from fish feed whales. And this is from a cat, the humpback cat. And Tony Wu, if I am like the whale poop scientist, he's the whale poop photographer he asked. He's the one who asked that I know of. This is just a sample of some of his shots. So what we found was very high levels of nitrogen in those samples. The goodies and phosphorous as well and the important nutrients for simulating primary productivity. And as it turns out, it's most important in the summer. In the winter, there's lots of wind and the ocean is mixed and there's not a lot of sun. So productivity is low and the nutrients are found throughout the waterfall. In the summer, there's low nutrients at the surface because the phytoplankton's there and it's using it. And then a thermoplane form, so basically a great temperature gradient. And then the deeper part of the ocean, which is dark, there isn't any photosynthesis, lots of nutrients because it's not being used up. The whales are going back and forth through that thermoplane and releasing nutrients out of the surface in their feces and they're also actually breaking down mechanically that thermoplane. And so it's when, and it's also when the whales are most common, they come in the summer. So it's here when they're having the biggest impact on the oceans, it's in the summer. And as we have found, it's maintaining these high levels of nitrogen, also phosphorous, and then in the southern hemisphere, the limiting nutrient is iron. So there's a group of folks who are studying the release of iron from whale feces in the southern hemisphere. And it's always in the feces. It's just a matter of what the limited nutrient is what's gonna have the biggest impact. And the idea is that whales are maintaining the prey aggregations in these areas because they're increasing the nutrients, right? So productivity is increasing throughout the situation. They're not actually necessarily defeating the fish populations or cobalt populations because a lot of it is being offset by this increased productivity in that area. But even that first day, I knew that it's something that big differences was, well, right? Well, I said about 400, 500 left to me in North America, highly individual. What about when there were 10,000 whales, right? So what about when they were abundant numbers? So we know that even now the numbers that are out there have an impact, but if we look historically, then whales would have had, before humans hunted them out and had an impact, then they would have had a very large impact on the Gulf of Maine and the other ocean systems. So as whale populations increase, we will see the effects of this on the ecosystems, just as we did, hopefully, in the past. As it turns out, my colleagues were working in 2001, but being whale species. At that point, they were looking at hormones. I was interested in the nutrients, they were interested in the hormones, and we all know what happened on 9-11 in 2001. They just happened to be out there. It was actually a year later, and they were like, we have all these pieces. Maybe we should see if the stress hormones have shifted around that time. Why would it have shifted? Because these ships make a lot of noise. Under the ocean's incredibly noisy, the thought was probably causing stress in some of these, on many of these whales. And what they did find was that those stress-related hormones, unlike in the United States and around the world, for right whales who actually went down. They had, for several weeks in silence, and we got a glimpse of how whales are affected by that noise, right? Because we had a few weeks when that noise was silenced. Interesting use of the data said, they weren't thinking about that at the time, they were just having to be operated, they noticed they thought the next year, we could actually maybe learn something. So, I've been talking about nitrogen. I've worked with some colleagues who work on land who look at movement of phosphorus from everything from dinosaurs to Pleistocene mammals to current mammals, and we thought current mammals thought maybe we could commit this. Maybe the phosphorus that whales are taking off can actually even end up here in Vermont. How so? Well, whales are taking the nutrients up from depth and some whales can dive up to a mile, right? They can dive way down. They're bringing that in those phosphorus to the surface. How would it get to land? Well, at least two parts, there's one seabirds because they're feeding offshore and then they're breeding on land and then releasing water, so they're bringing nutrients onto the land and also imagine this fish, think of salmon in the Pacific Northwest, but there are also eels in other species that are moving here in the North East as well that are moving upstream to breed, whether they die out or releasing nutrients into that surface, and then you have scavengers and herbivores that are moving like phosphorus to that. Historically, we think about here all of us aware of phosphorus in relation to land, but historically, when they're abundant animals, they could actually be bred, it could be a stable state, that is, the animals could be releasing that phosphorus and one of our ideas is can animals be used again to sort of restore that phosphorus cycle if we allow animals to move freely around not only out of the oceans or out of lakes, but also around the lands. Here at Vermont, one thing I'm thinking about is the role of beavers, whether beavers have any back there because of the dams they build. Could that reduce the amount of phosphorus that's going into the lake and that's hopefully a research project that I'm here to do in coming years here. Well, sadly, I do have to give you guys a reality check. As much as the good news about whale populations and other marine mammals, this still amazes me. Research that came out two years ago, this number, so of all mammal biomass on the planet, 36% is us and 60% is Lysar, usually cows and only 4% for wild mammals. I had read that paper twice and it was good for us. This is what I'm dedicated to doing is trying to get that number. A little bit harder at least, right? It's like, can we actually try to restore that? I mean, I don't know that we're going to get anywhere near restoring it in our lifetimes, but can you bring those numbers up a little bit? Similar patterns that are not as bad for chickens and other poultry. And some scientists have proposed that when we look back at our age, it's kind of the chicken bones that we're going to see more than anything else. That they both be, you know, that we've raised so many chickens and bones everywhere that that's probably what we're going to see when you dig through the land, right? So in our relatively short span of being on the planet, there's been 83% of the population. So as much as there's good news, we have a lot of work. But I think the work that we've been doing shows that those Japanese scientific policies, that scientific whaling, that we should reduce and cull whales, that there's evidence, at least through this whale haul and others I'll discuss, that they can actually, they can actually increase productivity and increase fish populations, increase phytoplankton, where they're found. So taking whales out of the system could actually reduce our very high productivity. And we're going to have a meeting at the International Whaling Commission about this in May. I don't really expect this friendly audience to sit down and have a look at it. We'll see. If it's already, I know there's going to be someone from Norway who's going to be there to challenge this work. And that's fair. That's the way science works. So basically, can you see what goes on? Do you have the photograph? Yeah. Was that an actual photograph or is that a commercial? That's a natural photograph. So is that the feces from one whale? That is. I mean, it might be a whole second over there, but that's one plume here. One plume from one whale. I can't tell if there's another plume. Yeah. It's bigger than our whole plume. But it's just going to be huge. So, yeah. And this day of photoshopping, you've got to ask me. Wow. You can see why, when you're not photographing, you can see why when I was out early on, I was like, huh, you've got a huge plume. It's got to be in the sky. So I've been talking a lot about the role of this nutrient transfer, that whales also play a role in what's called trophic estates, that when whales were abundant, there were predators, such as orcas, that were feeding on them and were seeing changes now. They also played a role, of course, as predators. And then, we don't have trees in the ocean. We don't have large plants in the ocean. Most of the productivity is microscopic, but we do have large animals. And that whales, of course, are being the largest. So when they die, they're bringing those nutrients down, actually. And they're creating habitats of death. So these are the pathways that we've been looking at. And we propose that whales can become system engineers in the oceans. And one way, if you guys have seen feeding hotbacks, is this idea of bubble nets. And we got some pushback in the review. We were like, well, it's short-lived, but I have to argue that that is a form of engineering that you can see right there. They dive down a couple of hundred years. They're releasing bubbles in a circle. And that is acting as a net for often preparing their other farage fish. And then they're coming up to the surface. They're short-lived, but it's still form of engineering. Others are, OK, last century. So this is a gray whale. They're feeding on amphipods in the bento, so at the bottom of the ocean. And you can see those divots that they persist for decades and centuries. And they're also bringing a lot of nutrients, like we were talking about the whale pump. You can imagine how much is coming out from when they're feeding them. So this is what a whale fall looks like when a dead whale looks like, and most of them, we have some of them strand, the estimates are about 20% of whales end up on land. But 80% end up sinking into the ocean, and many of them into the deep sea. And although there's a lot of nutrients right below that surface in the very deep sea, there's not a lot of nutrients. It's all coming from the surface and that's all the way. When a whale dies, it can be 2,000 years of nutrients falling in that right at that bottom. There have been more than 60 species found on whales, only on whales, right? Other species have found or have come in with hydrothermal vents in other deep sea communities. This is osodax or bone heater. It doesn't have a mouth, so it actually has a bone. It doesn't have a gut. It doesn't have an inch. It's using the nutrients that are coming out of those bones and there are, sipe out of bacteria in what's called its trophosome that are providing you. So it's providing the nutrients to bacteria, the bacteria providing the sugars and the gases that this species needs. Lots of other really cool species that we just found on these deep sea communities. We just came out, well, paper isn't quite out. We've been working on the paper recently to say, well, what's the impact when you take species? What happened when, as a result of whales, how did that affect those deep sea communities? And it's likely some of the first extinctions in the ocean current in those deep sea communities when we took whales habitat out, right? Think of them as deep sea islands. If you remove those islands, it's, of course, going to affect the amount of species that can persist there. And it turns out that it's the size that really matters and it's those other whales that we took out of them. So we need, if we want to keep these deep sea species, we need, they need these deep sea habitats to persist. It's also been some effort to look at the carbon aspect of these whales when they die. Again, like we think of trees, how important it is for carbon sequestration on land. It's blue-carbon animals in the oceans that play an important role. You can see right here the size of the blue web to a city bus, right? When a blue whale dies, it's sequestering a lot of carbon. Now, all whales sequester about 30 tons of carbon a year. Historically, it would have been about 200,000 tons of carbon a year. So we can bring those numbers back. That was a big impact. What is it going to stop global warming? Definitely not. And not even close. But it could be on the order of a large national park. For example, the Rocky Mountains National Park. It's about, that's been one comparison. So it's not trivial. It can be an important tool. But we had a lot of other things that we have to do in addition to detecting the house. So whales not only are the largest, as I mentioned, species that ever lived on the planet, but they also have the longest migratory distances. Why do they migrate? It's been argued for years about why whales actually go the most long migratory route. One possibility this is a hunt factor we have is in the northern or in the upper latitudes there are more killer whales. And killer whales don't tend to feed on the adults. See adults feed right back. But these are pretty vulnerable early on. So they're bringing it to shallow waters where shallow warm waters with a pure organism. Also, these whales have a chance to fight back. And we're seeing that only in the past 10 years where humpback whales first, that were getting these females were getting hit by these orcas and they didn't know what to do. Now they've been moving towards reef areas and the males in that area started to fight back on the orcas and there's even a paper that males exhibit altruism that they'll fight back even when the orcas are attacking pimpads or seals. They'll also go attack the pimpads. So they're going on these long distance migrations and the whales also can die in those areas. This is a tiger shark off the coast of Australia and a dead cat. And this is actually, as it turns out, is the nursery for the shark. So in the end of the battle this is linked. Historically as these whale populations are coming back there's more nutrients for those scavenging populations. And this is the work that I've been doing in Iceland is looking at the movement of these nutrients from these high latitude, highly productive areas to the low latitude areas that are lead atrophic. Why do we like the Caribbean and other areas clear? Why is it clear and blue? Because there aren't a lot of nutrients there. One of the reasons. So they're bringing those nutrients into those areas and probably having a big impact. We call it the gray whale from there. This idea that whales are feeding in these northern areas and breeding in these low latitude areas and bringing lots of nutrients. This is just looking at carbon. It's equivalent to, I think it was like three million big mackers or something. They are moving every year from Alaska to Hawaii just through carcasses, the whales that are dying there. Just like with many other mammals, the mortality rate, the first year is much higher than this for adults. Capsae of natural causes or because stillborn for a variety of reasons and those nutrients are staining in that system. And we've been putting together now this idea of how that's going to have an impact on the carbon cycle. I've been discussing that whale pump and then there's this great whale conveyor belt. Also when whales are alive, they're also still carbon. So it's biomass carbon as well. I never would have guessed this when I first collected my first whale species sample, but I went to the International Monetary Fund this year to talk about this work at their meeting because they're interested in looking at the carbon and how this is going to be a carbon balance. So what is going to be the value of whales for your store whales? What's the value? And one of their estimates is that a whale could be worth as much as $2 million in the carbon auspices. That's not my number or still working on that, but it's going to be at least significant. That might be a bit higher than we would expect and that's a combination of the deadfalls as well as that whale pump idea. You never know where the stuff is going to lead or what's going to land in your inbox some days. And back in 2017, I got an email from someone who's at the US Embassy saying, you know, we're interested in the work you do. Do you want to come? As it turned out, she used into aerial silk and there's a marigold and I'm like, yeah, sure. To visit, gave her talk there and it's a small country. We think for a month, it's probably only 350,000 people in the whole country. So in a couple of days, I met all the researchers pretty much every time, including the whalers where I might talk as well, which I didn't know before and I'm so glad. So there were a lot of people that attended that and I sort of just think I still would be a good place to examine some of these patterns and they have a long connection to the ocean. You can see, of course, and you can see some of the familiar species that I showed you probably on around the island at that time from the 1500s. They brought me in the US Embassy and a lot of European countries have been trying to convince Iceland to stop it. And they brought me in to discuss the value of living whales in India. If you put, you know, they know the value of where they're going and what's the value of living whales. As I said, I'm not there to convince to try and get Icelanders to stop the whaling, just to know what the trade-offs are if you're gonna continue whaling, what the values of how many more whales around the island. And when whaling was resumed in 2002, there was strong support for whaling. So this is 86% of Icelanders at that point and in June 2002 supported commercial whaling. So this is not an easy task. And it shifted, though. Colleagues of mine at the International Fund for Angle Welfare and elsewhere had been trying to at least stop tourists from living there because people would go whale-watching and then they'd go have whaling, right? This is kind of a disconnect. You know, you should be thinking about what you're doing if that's going to be, you know, you're gonna eat whale and then go see it. And actually, that even if, yeah, it's not a government try to keep the whale boats away, the whale boats away from the whale on due boats, but that didn't go on for some peace. So I wrote my first edit of Icelandic last year when I was on a full drive. And that was interesting when there were ones here and whoever else writing, like trying to edit this, I was like, I have no idea. Because if someone helped me translate this, but that was it, like once it went there, it was off and running. And we did a couple of talks here on TV to discuss this. And Iceland was making a big decision whether to continue commercial whaling on the last year, whether to give another permit. And we lost Iceland, the fishing minister, the agreement whale hunting until 2023 and a large number of whales. And I think many of us were surprised that it's different than the very little left green government, but it's the fishing industry does not go under the prime minister. So they're making kind of decisions. And I'd say, I didn't know anybody about the scenario that they were being in five over the years. Some people, maybe they'll do one more year. The number of whales being built is declining. And then something weird happened over the summer is that they didn't know it was a whale. Like it was a big fight about whether the rights were up. And then the two big whale companies, and this is one of them, the following. They were tied up at the dock all the summer. So I don't know if the future of Icelandic whaling is gonna be one group of minke whale companies that are not going again. Kristian Lofson is a provocateur. And so he may go out again. These are ships he goes out and hunts for fin whales. The odd thing is Icelanders don't eat fin whale and it's shipped to Japan. So we'll see what the results of that are in the coming months. I wanna make sure we all realize though that I've been talking about whaling a lot, but we also whale in the United States. We just don't do it on purpose. We kill whales all the time. Many more whales are killed by fisheries entitlements or getting run over by ships. So in order for us to get cars, here, or to have our relatively cheap lobster rolls, it comes at a cost to marine animals as well. So remember that it's not just about attention. We need to make changes in order to reduce the number of whales that are killed incidentally. The good news is sometimes that can be pretty straightforward. And friends of mine working at Stellwagon National Marine Sanctuary. So this is Kate Cobb here and this is Boston. This was the old shipping channel, shipping lane that went into Boston and red means highest density of whales and blue is lowest. And you can see, it used to go right through the area where they were most abundant and feeding and they used data from whale watching with those and said, well, if you go right in, you can see that blue, you can reduce the potential ship strikes by 60%. And that worked. So that's fairly elegant. And there are other attempts, either slow down ships, even formal whales are there, or best case when you could do that, just move them out of the way. So with that, I'll wrap up there. I'm happy that you take questions. I think this is one of the things that whales do, rocks. Are feeding in different areas and one concept on some of this that's been tragic for the right whale. So that one that was down 500 is the use of that picture that I showed you in the Bay of Fundy where I did a lot of work. They don't feed it anymore. They're now in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and they've gone all the way around Canada. And the first year they moved 18 whales out of the population of few 500 killed and caught in the year there, incredible. So they can have consequences because it's hard to manage a species that's moving around but also we used to think well, we know where they're going up in the air but now we've moved to the other place. So absolutely they'll be changing some of that and also concerns about creating the decisions as well. Is acid acidification effective? Not that I'm maybe, but at least not mechanistically done over there. But certainly you can see that increase acidification could affect the crustaceans that they feed on and then that would have an impact on them. My question's kind of related to that. I heard that in Greenland because of the warming waters there are a lot of whales migrating north there and as a result the feeding grounds are getting completed for the whales and there's a lot of competition around the whales. Is there a scenario out into the future that could improve that? Not the weather, couldn't they mitigate that? Yeah. Gosh, the key is as we all know, we've got to slow down global warming. Especially when we slow down the release of carbon into the atmosphere, number one. I don't know how we're going to mitigate that concern. I haven't seen any evidence that there are too many whales if here's where you're flying because there's not enough food for whales. Well, what I heard, but I'm not an expert on anything, was that the minkies were moving in in great numbers and the whole sacks were having their feeding grounds and they did and therefore. I see. Yeah, I mean, there certainly isn't going to be anything you can directly do to minkie. I mean, I wouldn't recommend to call that, especially if you're working video. I mean, probably there's going to be people who are suggesting that concern for that. But the minkies are definitely moving and so are not that. So if they're moving in, it's going to be very, very surprising changes to that. And I don't know if I, I can't believe a creative way to address that off the top. I've been reading some of the data about whale salt that compares with the past and the pitch of those salt is getting lower over time. Do you have any ideas about that? I don't know that particular study, but certainly they're louder because they have, it's a noisier ocean when they've changed and I don't know specifically, but certainly the calls are different in different oceans because of the lorries and also over time there's good ships and there are people looking, especially humpbacks because they change their songs every year and they learn from each other. They have regional access. That's right. And then they move to different areas and then they'll pick up a new song and it'll change over time. But there's certainly a lot of stuff that. The pitch of all of them, one is lower than it used to be and it's speculated. I'm guessing it's the ocean noise. Just speaking of ocean noise, there's a really neat book called Turning the Rig by a guy named Harvey Oxen, who went out on a sailing boat to study whale salt. Are you familiar with that? It's a beautiful book. Anyway, one of the conclusions that he came to through his studies, if I remember correctly, was that the big ocean tankers, like 200,000 horse power tankers, and that vibration kills everything within something like 15 kilometers. It can't be that far, but it's a long distance. But just the passage of those big ships is still a tremendous amount of damage. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of the geologic study that ships stress on the ship. Yeah. That's one direct, that's direct, I think it's in that case, but there's no doubt this is that expected communication. And they're, because the whales have the largest animal noise on the planet. We used to have a huge number of cross sections. That analysis of several hundred human lives most in the class. And so that's certainly, and it's also most, a lot of whales, hundred percent. So they don't, because it's dark down there, right? So that's one of that, one thing that they rely on, one sense that they rely on, so it can be a thing that they're really not in this problem. Do you do anything with trying to stop the new sonar test? Well, I heard about that a couple of years ago, that we're working on, one of the species that I'm working on now is the Gulf of Mexico. So we're talking about this right way out, which is great. There's probably 30 to 40 human lives at all. And the Gulf of Mexico is noisy. So there are some efforts to try and reduce the sound in those areas to clear who are going to critical habitat under the indigenous species after trying to. But it's a heavy lift. There's a lot of noise down there. And that's probably why they're so restricted is because they've moved away from those areas where there's lots of drilling and seismic exploration or military activity. Are there ways to alter fishing gear to reduce whale entanglement? Yeah. So one of the most exciting is rogeless gear. And there are bits in that there. So you would use, you're just gonna use, I don't know if the technology kind of around, there's a lot of roguemore, or anything else that would have been in Maine, and been on the water, you're seeing bullies all over them, it's great. So, and the whales are often getting caught in the line between the trap and the booty. And the idea is to instead of have that and sonic way of communicating with that, so that you can retrieve the gear without having to pull it up from the surface. So that's one idea. The other is harder than there are, there's closures. So they're parts of often parts of Massachusetts where you just take the gear out of the water, certain time of year when the whales are there. That's not as popular as a technological fix of what people keep the price. That would probably be one of the most secure. So that doesn't really matter too much, just moving the gear away or redesigning it, so we're not giving those examples. Because it's a big problem. Smaller shrimp boats, that's a ton of dolphins. Would you have an idea of why the Icelandic large boats didn't go out then in Japan, nor were there a container that they're not wearing? Japan though, not really. I mean, I think there's strong support, political support for both of those countries. So when Iceland, the reason for those, one is they needed repairs. And it was when they got that permit, it was a little late for them. So it's gonna be expensive to get those ships on the water. And then two is that there wasn't a market. Because Japan, which I didn't get into, but Japan left the international whale recognition last year, in the end of 2018. And they are now hunting commercially off their own coast again, it's the haven't done, for decades. It used to be this, they would hunt down the Arctic and buy some of it from Iceland. So they may no longer need the Icelandic whale, especially because in Japan and other places, fresh meat is more valuable than fruit meat that's been frozen and shipped around the world. So that might be a ship that we're seeing too. I don't, and again, I don't know if the whale or the fin whale is gonna go out again. Because I think that's personal for him. I've heard that he promised his father that he would continue whale, like what his father had just done. So he definitely has motivation beyond economics. That's what we have, and that's a helpful case. It's not an economic issue, so much as a coffee. And are there whale watching, is there an interest in whale watching groups in those countries as well? Absolutely, sure. Yeah, and in Iceland, it's big business and some crucifix where I've given a talk that's by far it's biggest economy. And it used to be whale, but now it's whale watching. And some people claim that it's humpbacks are part of the most valuable marine species because they do typically go to the same places. I mean, there's a whole lot of things are changing, but for the most part they come the same places year after year, and wherever your mom took you, that's where you go to feed your social life. And they're so much fun to do. And they're, yeah, exactly. They are very surface active, and they're doing those big tricks. They're always what everything about stars is about. The PBS program this week major is on whales. And one of the things that they brought up is that there is a trained group of people that will go out in the ocean and try and detangle or cut the line in the rope that's on some of the whales. And then also some of the altruistic interactions with humans and other species in the ocean to doesn't interest you very much. Yeah, I mean, I'm glad that when I first started doing research we did not disentangle. And I can't remember what people started going out and disentangle and what else. I'm glad they're out there at slash resort because they're all suffering. We really were discussing that on populations. But these are ropes that they're going to carve around their bodies. They're dying very easily. So in case we are, it must be incredibly painful that they can take weeks, sometimes months. So you've been disentangling that's important part of that. Mostly, most important is stopping it but in the absence of that taking office. I think one of the motivating factors from what I've learned from people within the author is getting trust level between the fishermen and the people who are disentangling it so that the fishermen are more likely to call all these people to come to us to help if they get their nets back undamaged because they're expensive. And that hits the economics, the target. So it motivates the networking industry. I think it would be unusual for the nets to be undamaged. Yeah, in my regard. But certainly, it's going to be much more effective when conservationists and the fishers work together. There's no doubt about it. And their efforts have been, so one thing is to try and find out where, because often the nets are not marked. So you don't know where they came from. It's hard to manage if you don't know. And you can understand that the fishers have been resistant to putting that tag out there because they're going to be on the hook. For when that is recovered. But I think that's the important part, is knowing where this comes from. Where it comes from and what the hotspots are there and then trying to do some of that. Especially for the North Atlantic right now, I was discussing the marine navigation act. The Indian Species Act is really important because there's a limited amount of whales that you could take incidentally. And that's really what that sort of hammer here is. We've got songs probably for conservation reasons, but also here. Do you have any plans for future whale poop studies? And so it's described. Well, I mean, I like jokes about the whale pee, but the dream is for you to see it show us. Whales, I discuss that grave up in Vegas. So whales are feeding in the high latitudes and feeding in the low latitudes. Well, when they're breeding, they're not eating. So they're not moving. Presumably, they're not very much. But they're burdened through their resources and even their muscle mass. And when they're doing that, we're using nitrogen in situations. So what we want to do using what's called stable isotope. So looking at the signature of the nitrican, can we determine which of the pounder of nitrogen is coming from the whales? And then where it's coming from. So that's the next step. But to say it, the good news is that the calves are feeding in the high latitudes. So we can't collect calf food. I have an unsanitary one because I don't have a lot of it. So that's the dream, is to get a few calves samples. And what we've done, which I did talk about, is the next stage is not only looking at the nutrient levels, but looking at the microbiome. So looking at the symbiotes. What allows whales to break down and kite? So as we know, ungulates like cows can break down cellulose, right? So the most abundant polymer, carbon polymer on land, cows and other, I mean, we can't break down cellulose, but other animals can. Whales can break down and kite. And whales are doing it, it's the symbiotes that do it. So that's the most common polymer they're trying to figure out what it means to do it. There's some indication. Whales are ungulates, so they're related to cows, by the way, as it turns out, it's eggs and it looks like they're using some of the similar pathways to break down the cellulose. That's our next. But then we've done one thing on that. I want to look at how the microbiome shifts through the age and as they move around. I think for my opinion, I think about it. I'm just thinking, Joe, you probably should add snifferdog, C6, snifferdog vomit, or sweet potatoes. I'm just trying to say it's sweet potatoes. You had a really gripping slide about extinct species. And I wondered if, by any chance, you had seen or heard of the extinction rebellion of people that walked into the state house today. No, I was in London. Yeah, they were very effective, silent walking. Faces white replicating the blood of Earth that is being destroyed. They were not allowed in the state house because they had costumes on. But they had a very effective protestable with many others outside. Well, I was just happy to be in London once here. It was amazing. It's a whole lot. They had all the roads shut down around the area. It was amazing. Lovely. Stage three rebellion of honor. Would you see it in the middle of the ocean? Plasticity is affecting humans. Yes, suppressive. I can show you what's come out of the storm well. It's great. They put it out across a tennis court. Like all the plastics that came out of one stream of animal. And this is just the stuff we see. There's all the microplastics that you're not observing. I mean, I've been teaching marine conservation long enough that I never really spoke about plastics in the beginning. And then I posed that thing to the people. Like, oh, yeah, it's out there, it's pollution. But there are all these other really big issues. And that shifted in the past 10 years. Like, now it's out there, it's one of the big issues. I'm shocked actually. I've never guessed how much this is going to be. And whales are, we don't know the many ways that they're susceptible to it. But clearly, they're susceptible. It's not the way that it might work. Inquiring minds, want to know more about the whales fighting back against the orcas? Oh, yeah. So this was very cool. So there's some colleagues of mine off the coast of Australia. They, again, that these moms were not used to being, they had never been confronted orcas before the orcas came down. And some of the moms would fight back. Some of the moms would be like, oh, you know, because it's like this is not a fair fight and I'm going to lose and we're not to do it. And other moms would move their calves up to the coral reefs. And presumably, the orcas are not willing to die on one meal. So there's a dangerous place for an orca to be so they would move back. But then what was amazing is the males started going after the orcas and attacking. It's going around them, around them. And we've seen this happen more and more. And as it turns out, I talked about this with my students. This idea that orcas killed whales was very controversial. And so it is about whether they killed large whales. There have been studies on that. But now there is a way I always had observed it years ago. But that connection, until now, and now we're really seeing things change quickly. I don't know where it's going to end up. But it's amazing to watch. And again, because the males are going after orcas, even when there's not another pump-backed threat, it was really controversial. And just to clarify, the birthing whales didn't know what to do because it was a new population and a new place. Because the orcas all of a sudden had started showing up there presumably because they had worried us in a lot of trade there before. And now all of a sudden there's this revival of the price of the orcas coming back here. And the mom's like, there's this predator that never was considered. I'm not going to be more fun to think this is what we're talking about. But they were not sure how to respond. And so that was very interesting. And then would they, so would the next generation of birthing whales know better what to do? Did they transfer that kind of thing? Certainly the males have changed. So the whales, you'd use the term gentle giant. They're not so gentle, especially a lot of whales, especially the comebacks and others, when we think about orcas, there are two ways to address those whales. One is the smooth-bodied fin whales and blue whales, they're fast, so they seem to work out well. They just don't, because they're orangutans, they swim fast as they can. The humpbacks, the right whales and the gray whales, they're so important to think about them. They go to shallow waters like that. They can't swim fast enough to the heart of the orca. So they've got either, you know, that's their option. And this is sort of the, there's some reemergence. There's no way of that behavior, of how they work. I think they don't even work fast enough. Yeah, but so that's why it was controversial when the orcas closed their eyes. But the calves aren't, the calves are great. So the thought is that they're probably mostly, and that's what we observed, close to focusing on small orcas. And the calves can't swim the best in a vulnerable, or at least what we expect. So you have one slide about the whales disrupting the film accordingly. And I wonder what the advantage or disadvantage of disrupting the film accordingly is. Well, I mean, what I could say, one advantage would be this movement of reachers through there. But for the whales, they, I don't think, certainly I would be not going to say that it's conscious. They just happen to be moving through that. And lots of, so the biggest migrations on the planet are really small zooplankton that are moving through that all the time and they're breaking. They're also having contact with them. And the whales are as well. So I don't know if it's, it's not an adaptation, it's happened to be moving through it. But I know, just in the bigger picture, the film happens to pass that movement. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, so that sort of acts as a barrier. And so you've got those nutrients in the air that's there. And if you think of the earth that's upwelling, there is where the reason why they're so productive is because there's an upwelling of that colder, nutrient-rich of water that's coming to the surface and that's a reason to do it. So the whales have had to have small upwells. So that's the ideal camera in the back. And after the whales put to the water, you're not going to see any upwells. So maybe I'm happy to take more questions individually, but maybe get ready to go. So thank you. Thank you.