Canadian scientists stumble across endangered whales

OTTAWA — For a handful of researchers surveying marine life off British Columbia’s coast — it was a whale of a tale.

This summer, a group of biologists and Canadian Coast Guard members became the first people to report seeing endangered sei whales in Canadian waters in more than half a century.

“This was very exciting because we didn’t expect it,” said Thomas Doniol-Valcroze, a research biologist with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

“People on my team had never seen them.”

The sei whale is part of the same family as blue and fin whales.

At one point, there were more than 60,000 sei whales in the North Pacific, but the population collapsed after whalers started targeting them. There hadn’t been a single reported sighting of a sei whale in Canadian waters since before whaling was banned in the 1960s.

Sei whales are listed as endangered in Canada’s Species at Risk Act.

Doniol-Valcroze was on board the Coast Guard ship near the end of July. It used floating sonar devices to listen for whale calls under the water.

“Sei whales are so rare nobody is actually completely sure what they sound like here in the Northeast Pacific,” he said.

“We started hearing those sounds that sounded very similar to what sei whales were recorded doing elsewhere. We started hearing them more and more and that led us to finding them and seeing them for the first time many years.”

The group saw five of the large creatures swimming amid a pod of fin whales and, using large binoculars, the teams determined they were sei whales.

The researchers were part of a 10-week survey trying to count all marine mammals populations in Canada’s Pacific.