Take Action: How to Help
The non-profit organization has four permanent scientific and managerial staff, and while not affiliated with any government agency or academic institution, it works with researchers from many universities in the Americas and in Europe. MICS was founded in 1979 by Richard Sears, a French-american biologist with an abiding passion for whales. He remains president of the organization, but the scientific leadership of the group is now shared with a German marine biologist named Christian Ramp who is also a research fellow at St. Andrews University in Scotland. Over its 40 years of activity, MICS has been a pioneer in photographing and identifying individual whales and was the first organization worldwide to conduct photo-identification studies on blue whales.
The St. Lawrence gulf and estuary is the southernmost ocean expanse covered by ice in winter (although less and less so because of climate change). That means that whales don’t come here in winter. But they come in summer when the mix of water from the Arctic flowing through the Strait of Belle Isle and fresh water from the St. Lawrence River allows for an abundance of planktonic species such as copepods and krill, which the baleen whales feed on. Five species of mysticete (baleen) whales are endemic: right, blue, fin, humpback and minke.
Year after year, whales that come to the estuary and gulf are photographed and identified and their whereabouts recorded. Each summer, between 20 and 25 volunteers migrate to MICS to work on and help expand the photographic inventory of whales in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Post-graduate students (past participants have come from Germany, the U.K., the Netherlands, France, the U.S. and numerous Canadian universities) come to Mingan to deepen their knowledge and further their master’s or PHD research on cetacean biology, behaviour and ecology. Research partnerships are a source of revenue for the non-profit. The organization also gets income from fees paid by tourists who want to experience a few days of research on the water.
From the early 1980s to the end of 2017, MICS teams identified more than 870 humpbacks, 524 blue whales and 635 fin whales.
Weather permitting (fog, along with other inclement conditions, frequently make it unsafe), a pair of mid-size inflatable boats with powerful outboard motors criss-cross the 40-km channel between the shoreline and Anticosti Island due south, facing Mingan. When a whale spout is spotted, the captain rushes to the area to position the researchers equipped with powerful telephoto lenses to capture identifying photos and sometimes collect a sample of blubber.
MICS is also responsible for the census and cataloguing of the blue whales of the eastern North Atlantic. The principle behind the “markrecapture” methodology (an adaptation of how bird censuses have long worked) is that a yearly identification campaign, done in a systematic way, allows for a reasonable estimate of the size of the whole population. If new individuals are identified each year, that is a fair sign that the population is larger than the recorded sample.
Coupled with their photo-id work, the teams perform selective DNA sampling, harvested by firing a hollow-tipped crossbow bolt that penetrates about two centimetres into the skin and thick blubber and then releases and floats to the surface to facilitate retrieval. The group uses the DNA of an individual to compare it to others in and outside the Gulf of St. Lawrence to draw conclusions on the relatedness within and between disparate populations. These biopsies allow for DNA mapping of each individual so the genealogy patterns of the North Atlantic populations of blue whales, humpbacks and right whales can be tracked or inferred. The biopsy activity also allows researchers to identify other biomarkers such as stress hormones, pregnancy hormones and exposure to toxins and contaminants.
When the weather prevents the boats from heading out (they were able to be on the water only 49 days in the summer of 2018), the researchers have a lot of indoor work to do comparing and classifying pictures on computers, preparing samples for biopsy analysis, and cataloguing the results. There is also ongoing research to compare DNA of fin whales across the North Atlantic.
Because the smaller minke whales have more subtle physical characteristics that make photo-identification more challenging, it has been difficult to identify individuals and record repeat appearances. Genetics has traditionally revealed that minkes appear to belong to a single large pan-atlantic population, and it was said that they did not regularly return to any particular site. However, recent photo-id data is challenging the genetics data and showing that actually they do regularly return to the area, as some of the same individuals have been identified in the gulf area over time.
Recently the group has been experimenting with drones, developing a method to identify individuals and photographically survey wounds and scars caused by entanglements in fishing gear and collisions with ships. The new technique has also led to rare footage of behaviour such as bubble net feeding by humpbacks that release a stream of air from their blowhole while swimming in increasingly smaller circles, creating a net of bubbles that corral the fish, making them easier to scoop up. It is both beautiful and awe-inspiring.
To see this extraordinary footage and to learn more about MICS, visit its website at rorqual.com.a