THE SOUNDS OF BELUGA WHALES

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:00:04] Baby beluga in the deep blue sea. Swim so wild and swim so free. Peter, have you ever heard the song Baby Beluga? [00:00:14]

Peter Gros: [00:00:15] Yes, the Raffi song. I used to sing it to my kids. Baby beluga down by the sea. [00:00:22]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:00:24] So then, did you know that it was inspired by a real beluga whale named Kavna, who Raffi Cavoukian met at the Vancouver Aquarium? That encounter left such a deep impression on him that he wrote the song. [00:00:36]

Peter Gros: [00:00:36] I love that story. It is such a great example of how animals can inspire us to create art, to open our minds and, well, our ears, too. [00:00:46]

Dr. Kristin Westdal: [00:00:47] Belugas are extremely chatty, and you'll hear all these squeaks and whistles and buzzes, and it's almost continuous. So even without a microphone, if you get on the water, you can hear the animals through your boat quite easily. You can hear them above the surface of the water. They're so loud. And in a kayak, if it's dead calm, you could actually feel the vibration. It's incredibly special. [00:01:11]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:01:14] On today's episode, we're meeting someone who's not just listening to belugas, she's using her research to protect their habitat and secure a future for them. [00:01:24]

Peter Gros: [00:01:25] I'm Peter Gros, Wildlife Expert and Educator. [00:01:28]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:01:28] And I'm wildlife ecologist Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant. And this is Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, The Podcast, episode 12, The Sounds of Beluga Whales. [00:01:38]

Peter Gros: [00:01:48] Hard to believe, but we've made it to the final episode of season two of our podcast. Rae, I say, let's wrap up this season with an animal we were able to see up close in their natural habitat, the beluga whale. [00:02:00]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:02:01] These whales have cruised our oceans for thousands of years, thriving in the icy waters of the Arctic and surrounding seas. And one of their most famous gathering spots is Churchill, Manitoba. [00:02:12]

Peter Gros: [00:02:13] Rae and I got to travel there for our TV show, Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, Protecting the Wild, and we found ourselves in kayaks surrounded by belugas. All right, they're sort of circling around us now. [00:02:25]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:02:26] All right, I'm the mama of beluga here, trying to be part of the pod here. Yeah, that's right. It's my initiation. Oh, look, it's coming. [00:02:34]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:02:35] Coming right to us. Joining us that day was Dr. Kristin Westdal, science director at Oceans North. That's an organization that supports marine conservation in partnership with indigenous and coastal communities in Canada. But her path to studying belugas wasn't exactly planned. [00:02:53]

Dr. Kristin Westdal: [00:02:55] A year of traveling abroad with a friend. I wasn't really sure what I was going to do. I was guiding, kayak guiding in Namibia. And like a lot of people who are fresh out of high school are in their first two years of university wondering what the future is going to hold. Where am I going to be in a few years? What's the plan? And my dad called me up and said, you know, there's a bunch of kayaks for sale in Churchill, Manitoba. And I was like, oh, well, I mean, I'm good at guiding. So, I guess I could do this. So, I got a business loan, bought all these kayaks and all this gear, and started taking people out on tours to see beluga whales. And that's kind of where it really started for me, is I was spending all this time on the water around these animals. And I was just more curious about, you know, what are they doing and why are they [00:03:39]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:03:40] As she watched the beluga whales with curiosity, Kristin quickly realized they were watching her too. [00:03:46]

Dr. Kristin Westdal: [00:03:47] And I was on the water every day for two and a half months. It's a lot of time. And I would have these three juvenile males that would approach my boat first. They would come straight at me and just start like knocking my boat around, little left, little right, lift me out of the water. And it would go on for a couple of minutes and then they would head on over to check out the other kayaks. [00:04:08]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:04:10] Justin would go on to sell her kayaking business to pursue a master's degree and a PhD. Now she's a marine mammal expert studying narwhals and belugas. So where in the world are we talking about with your kayak guiding business with the beluga whale population that you fell in love with? Like where are we and then what is this area like? [00:04:30]

Dr. Kristin Westdal: [00:04:31] So we're getting close to the center of Canada, I would say, if you can imagine that. So, Hudson Bay is this huge part of the Arctic Ocean that kind of carves into Canada if you could imagine that, and Churchill is at the southwest corner of the bay. And so, you have all this Arctic water coming down into the area, and then a whole bunch of rivers in this corner of Hudson Bay sort of... Draining into that section creating this really intense and productive ecosystem and that's where these beluga whales are gathering in the summertime [00:05:04]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:05:05] Around 200,000 belugas exist worldwide, and each summer, 60,000 of them gather in the western Hudson Bay. When Peter and I were there with Kristin, we were surrounded by them. It was incredible to see how beautiful and playful these animals were in person. [00:05:21]

Dr. Kristin Westdal: [00:05:23] Of a beluga is this beautiful 15-17-foot-long animal that's like snow white. They're like the length of a big sea kayak but when they're born, they're like uh a brown or dark blue color and as they get older, they lose melanin in their skin and that's what causes them to turn white. They also don't have a dorsal fin which is something that um might not be totally obvious but when you think about it and a dorsal fin right is that that piece that's picking up off their back. And then you think of more of like an orca, like a killer whale, you see the big black fin sticking up and belugas don't have that. They have a bit of a ridge, a bit like a bony ridge. That's because they swim really closely under ice in the wintertime. So, think about it, if you had this big fin sticking up off your back, it's going to be really hard to get in tiny little openings where you need to breathe. Wow, that's fascinating. [00:06:12]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:06:13] And can you talk to me about how they breathe? How often are they able to breathe? [00:06:19]

Dr. Kristin Westdal: [00:06:19] To come up for air. So, a lot of the Arctic is covered in ice in the wintertime, but there's a lot that's really mobile pack ice. So, it's not consolidated, but in Hudson straight where they winter, it's mobile and there's pieces of ice moving around because of strong currents. So, it might be 90% pack ice, which means you have about 10% of that area that has breathing holes. And so, the animals are constantly moving around to find these breathing holes, and they winter in these places for protection from predators, like killer whales, for example, that can't get into that pack ice. So, when... [00:06:52]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:06:52] I was out with you. I mean, you took Peter Gross and I on an amazing adventure. And one of the things we did was we went out in little kayaks and little boats, but we actually took microphones and placed them under the water to listen to the beluga whales. And they were very, very vocal. And so, can you tell me about how they communicate, what you're learning about their communication? [00:07:16]

Dr. Kristin Westdal: [00:07:17] Well, I will say it would be really nice with belugas, narwhal, if they could just tell us what they're talking about. Because then we could just be like, oh, this food is important, this habitat is important. But we really don't know what they are saying. Belugas are extremely chatty, hear all these squeaks and whistles and buzzes, and it's almost continuous. So even without a microphone, if you get on the water in Churchill, for example, you can hear the animals through your boat. Quite easily. You can hear them above the surface of the water, they're so loud. And in a kayak, if it's dead calm, you can actually feel the vibration. It's incredibly special, but they do a lot of chatting back and forth. They're very social animals. There's also something called a contact call where mothers and their newborns communicate together back and forward to sort of keep themselves close together. Like, hey, where are you? Oh, I'm over here. Where are you Oh, hi, I am over here, that kind of a thing. Cause just remember that these animals are living underwater. A large majority of the time. As you move down through the water column, you start to lose light. And so, at some point, you aren't necessarily able to see, you know, your family and your friends that are close by. So, you need to use sound in order to communicate with each other, but also to find your food. [00:08:30]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:08:31] Yeah, like they don't have smartphones, so they can't like call and text and whatnot. So, they have to like yell basically, you know, to be like, Mom, where are you? Yeah. [00:08:42]

Dr. Kristin Westdal: [00:08:41] Yeah, that's right. And sound travels over great distances under water and travels differently than it does in air. And so, these animals are using sound quite a bit in their daily life and almost continuously. [00:08:55]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:08:56] But do you have a goal, like is there something very specific that you're hoping to learn about their communication in the next several decades of your work? [00:09:05]

Dr. Kristin Westdal: [00:09:06] So most of my work focuses on habitat and abundance in conservation. So, what I'm really interested in is what habitat is most important to them and why is it important and then using that information to protect their habitat. [00:09:18]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:09:19] About that, because when we were talking about the Hudson Bay and the Churchill area, are those waters protected right now? Or is it possible that they could be developed or changed? [00:09:31]

Dr. Kristin Westdal: [00:09:32] So there is no protection right now in Western Hudson Bay, none at all, in their summering habitat. There's also no protection in their wintering habitat, which is in Hudson Strait for this particular population. And with a population this large, that's this healthy, that's a real concern. You know, we often put resources into populations that are in trouble, or habitats that we've degraded really far. And what we really need to be doing at this point is looking to these healthy environments and these healthy populations and trying to put some protections in place while it's still possible. It's precautionary, right? Totally, it's way harder after the fact, way harder. You know, look at Cook Inlet Belugas, for example, that's in Alaska. This population is quite small now and there's all this commercial activity, big shipping. Oil and gas, you know, you name it. It's extremely loud, noisy environment, lots of people around, and they're having a really hard time. And we just don't want to get to that place in Western Hudson Bay in Churchill. And you know it's also about looking forward. So, people might say, and people do say to me, well you know there's no problem right now. So, you know there isn't going to be any oil and gasoline development. It is unlikely that there's going to be a fishery. But we don't know what 200 years from now looks like. [00:10:50]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:10:51] Belugas have amazing hearing, able to hear sounds from 1.2 to 120 kHz. For comparison, humans only hear up to 20 kHz! Unfortunately, all the human-made noises from sea vessels can block vital sounds they need here, like predator warnings or- [00:11:11]

Dr. Kristin Westdal: [00:11:12] mother calling her calf. So, it's important to remember that they use sound to communicate with each other, to locate their prey, and to navigate. And so, when vessels are nearby, it sort of interrupts some of those signals. I think sound is a concept that's really hard to get our heads around. So, for example, plastic pollution is something we can really think about it. It's something tangible. You can see it right in front of you and you can see the garbage piling up and go, oh boy, we got to do something about that. But when you think about sound, we can't really understand what's happening underwater. You know, a vessel passes by, but we don't have any real understanding as a human standing on the shore about what that really sounds like underwater and what those impacts might be because we can see. And so, I feel like issues that happen underwater often get passed over or don't get thought about as much as issues that we can see with our eyes. [00:12:10]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:12:11] To try to illustrate what this must be like for belugas underwater, Kristen gave us an analogy that many of us can understand. [00:12:18]

Dr. Kristin Westdal: [00:12:19] So imagine that you're, for example, in a noisy restaurant, and as soon as the volume starts to get louder in that restaurant, you have to start talking louder to the person across the table in order for them to hear you. And you can imagine that it would be the same with beluga whales as a vessel's coming by and you're communicating between mother and calf. As soon as that sound starts to gets difficult to hear, they're going to have to start communicating in a different way. [00:12:42]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:12:43] Belugas are protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, but there are still many places around the world working to put more regulations in place to help save [00:12:52]

Dr. Kristin Westdal: [00:12:53] them. The Canadian government has just put out an underwater sound policy that's been in the works for some time and you know hopefully that will have some teeth with it. So, for example, if animals respond at say 100 decibels which is quite loud to a vessel, or it stops them from feeding it at that specific sound level then maybe we should be capping certain areas or maybe we should have quiet zones where there's just nothing allowed. Because this is a very sensitive spot for animals. So, lots of NGOs, including Oceans North, where I work, is pushing forward on these things and working with industry to say, let's work on this together and figure this out. Everybody has an agenda, but there's lots that we can do together. [00:13:32]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:13:33] It sounds like there's a lot of opportunity. You know, so often conservation has met with these challenges where we are trying to save something that's on the brink, right? We're trying to restore an ecosystem that's been depleted. And what I'm hearing from you is that we have a healthy population of whales, we have a healthy habitat, and what we need to do is protect this intact ecosystem straight away so that we don't have to do that triage work. We don't have to have an emergency. [00:14:00]

Dr. Kristin Westdal: [00:14:01] Well I think something that gets forgotten sometimes is that conservation also brings economy, brings money, brings jobs, brings infrastructure, and so it can be a win-win for communities as well. [00:14:11]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:14:12] I really hope it happens. And I'm really grateful that you are this wealth of knowledge that can contribute to the advocacy for something like that. Okay, so the last question is fun. Remember back in August when we were all together out on the Hudson Bay, we spent several days together. I mean, the beluga whales were just abundant. You know, obviously there were tens of thousands of them in this one little space. It was our first time being in the. Wild with them so close. Being in a kayak and having to hold myself back from like touching them. Don't touch wild animals. But they were so close to us and not a threat to us. It was really magical. I mean, Peter and I still talk so much about those days that we spent with you. And so, I'm curious, are there moments from when we filmed the Wild Kingdom TV show that stand out to you? Like anything that you just like keep kind of coming back to? [00:15:04]

Dr. Kristin Westdal: [00:15:05] Was out with you and Peter, we took the kayaks quite a ways out into the bay. The water was almost glassy at points, like it was really calm, which is quite unusual for this area. And we had, I can't remember how many there were because you know you're down low to the water, you can't actually see how many whales there are. But when you get a drone up above you can see there might be 20 whales in a pod, but it looks like 10 to you when you're on the water. And there was this moment where we had this large pod of mature males, the beautiful white animals just gliding through the water. And somehow, I got into the middle of this pod, and I started paddling as fast as I could. And all of a sudden it was like, I was moving with them. It's not called tailgating, it's called drafting, right? When one bike is kind of pulling another bike along and it felt like I was being drafted by these whales. Like I was paddling hard, but I was being pulled through the water with them, and it sort of felt like. You know, I was one of the pod and it was just this incredible experience. [00:16:08]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:16:11] Dr. Kristin Westdal, I am such a big fan of yours. I think we really bonded straight away when we were working together up in Canada. We have a lot in common, but your passion just shines through, your knowledge is incredible. And it has been a huge honor and a lot of fun to talk to you today on the podcast. I hope to see you and talk to you again super soon.

Dr. Kristin Westdal: Thank you so much for having me. It's been awesome. [00:16:31]

Peter Gros: [00:16:36] Now, it's time for a conservation connection. We know that the more we can connect with animals, the more likely we are to protect them. Today, we'll hear about another strikingly white and beautiful species. [00:16:48]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:16:49] But unlike our beluga whales, its future in the wild is under threat. [00:16:53]

Speaker 5: [00:16:54] So the Bali myna is a small songbird, so a perching bird. It's all white and has cobalt blue eyes. So, like around the skin is cobalt blue. They're only found on the island of Bali, which is in Indonesia. [00:17:08]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:17:09] Sunny Nelson is the Vice President of Conservation and Science at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. She traveled to Indonesia to collaborate with Bali Barat National Park staff researching these vulnerable birds in the wild. [00:17:22]

Sunny Nelson: [00:17:23] So I was just over in Bali in Indonesia about a couple of months ago, and we counted over 353 at one location in the wild. And so, like, I get chills when I think about that. It was really breathtaking and amazing, but there was a lot of work that went into that. And the reason for Bali minas being critically endangered is because people were poaching them for the pet trade. Exotic pet trade is a huge issue that we're trying to talk about and raise more awareness of. Oftentimes, I think people don't realize the impact that that can have to the entire ecosystem, not only to that individual animal and the welfare that that animal's experiencing, but also the species, the ecosystem, even communities. [00:18:07]

Peter Gros: [00:18:08] Conservation efforts to restore the Bali myna population have been going on for the last three decades, and institutions like the Lincoln Park Zoo have been a part of it. [00:18:18]

Sunny Nelson: [00:18:18] Zoos and aquariums have helped release birds into the wild, have worked with the conservation partners in Indonesia, so there's really been a concerted effort to preserve this species. I think what's really unique is that this species can then serve as an example or a template for some other Asian songbirds that are unfortunately facing the same threats that the Bali myna was facing 30 years ago. [00:18:42]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:18:43] This story is a powerful reminder that conservation is truly a collaborative effort. [00:18:48]

Peter Gros: [00:18:50] Thank you for listening to Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, The Podcast, and remember, if we protect wildlife and the environment today, we can ensure magical moments in the wild kingdom for future generations. [00:19:03]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:19:04] And with that, we end this season of the podcast. We'll be back with season three of our Emmy-nominated NBC show, Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, Protecting the Wild on October 4th. [00:19:16]

Peter Gros: [00:19:16] We'll look forward to seeing you then! Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, the podcast, is a production of Pineapple Street Studios and Mutual Of Omaha. Our senior producer is Stephen Key. Producers are Elliot Adler and Jenny Van Soelen. [00:19:39]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:19:40] This episode was produced by associate producer Lisa Cerda. Editor is Darby Maloney. Executive producers are Barry Finkel, Gabrielle Lewis, and Jen Wolf. Pineapple's head of sound and engineering is Raj Makhija. Senior audio engineers are Marina Pais, Davy Sumner, Javi Cruces, and Pedro Alvira. This episode is mixed by Davy Somner. [00:20:05]

Peter Gros: [00:20:05] Production music courtesy of Epidemic Sound and Hearst Media Production Group. [00:20:09]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:20:10] Episode Clips, courtesy of Hearst Media Production Group. Marketing and promotion by Emily Poeschl. This podcast is hosted by me, Dr. Rae Winn-Grant. [00:20:19]

Peter Gros: [00:20:21] Peter Gross, a special thanks to Kaitlyn Williams, Sophie Radmillevich, and Stephanie Diaz. [00:20:26]

Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: [00:20:27] Today's episode is based on the Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom series created by Don Meier. [00:20:32]

Peter Gros: [00:20:32] Make sure you listen on the Odyssey app, or wherever you get your podcasts. [00:20:32]