My name is Chris Gabriel, and I'm a whale biologist at Glacier Bay National Park
And I monitor underwater sound and work for the humpback whale population monitoring program.
A humpback whale is a
migratory Baleen whale and that means that it spends part of the year in high latitude waters, like Alaska
feeding and then part of the year down in the tropics for the breeding and calving season and Glacier Bay National Park is
in Alaska, and so the lot of humpback whales come to southeast
Alaska to feed each summer and
the humpback whale monitoring program is a
system that the Glacier Bay National park uses to find out how many different whales are using the park and where they are and
That's important for a couple reasons
One thing we do with that data is track the population trend over years.
This is a very long study, it's long-term monitoring and it started in 1985 and
so we've been able to track the population over that time and
determine that the population has grown at about five to seven percent a year.
Well fortunately for us the whale tails are like a fingerprint. They're unique
individual markings and so we can tell every single whale from every other whale
just by taking a photo of the underside of the tail when they show their tail when they're diving and
so we go out on the water in a small boat, and we find humpback whales
And we take pictures of them as they dive we make notes in the field about
about what we're seeing, what the whales are feeding on, where they are and each of those
individual photographs and set of notes becomes a record in a large database that we have on humpback whale life histories and
because the whales come back here year after year after year
we have histories of whales that have spent every [year] of their life so far coming to Glacier Bay in the summer.
So Glacier Bay is a really important habitat for whales and
I think it's wonderful that the park service is taking such good care of that resource as well as
documenting it and tracking it over time.
So we have a really cool way of
passively collecting a whale DNA and that happens when a whale breaches.
The whales slough skin
kind of like if you had a sunburn you could you slough that skin while wheels are sloughing their skin all the time and
so when they breach or slap their tail on the water
We wait for the whale to leave
and then we go over to the slick where that whale was with a little fish net and
we go and pick up a piece of that skin, and that skin is a gold mine of information. You can find out the genetic
Basically we get a DNA fingerprint of that animal
but you can also find out more about what the animal has been eating
You can find a little bit about hormone levels you can find all sorts of things from that piece [of] tissue
I think that studying humpback whales over the past 30 years so [far]
has had a really strong effect on being able to protect Glacier Bay as whale habitat as well as an excellent marine ecosystem
and a place to visit and
I hope that for the future. I hope that humpback whale monitoring continues long into the future
Because it enriches park visitors experience as [well] as teaches us a lot about
whale biology