St. Lawrence Blues: The Magnificent Obsession of Richard Sears
BY JEFF STOLZER
PHOTOGRAPHS BY RICHARD SEARS & JEFF STOLZER
"The largest animal ever to live on Earth has proven to be a strangely elusive creature."
This thought crossed my mind as I sat in the crow’s nest of the Shelagh, a 45-foot converted fishing trawler that was motoring slowly back and forth in the Gulf of St. Lawrence along the north shore of Quebec’s Gaspe Peninsula. It was the first Saturday of September 2006, and I had joined a research team led by Explorers Club member Richard Sears, one of the world’s preeminent experts on the blue whale.
It was my first day out on the water, and I had been tasked with photographing any blue that we spotted from the ship. Armed with a ten megapixel digital camera equipped with a 200mm telephoto lens, I clung to the railing of the crow’s nest as the Shelagh chugged to a location where a blue whale spout had just been spotted by a member of the boat’s crew.
We had only about a minute to “race” to the area and attempt to photograph the animal’s dorsal fin and back before it dove for the bottom, where it would feed on krill for up to 20 minutes. Where it would surface the next time was anybody’s guess.
The Shelagh is sturdy but not very speedy or nimble. It was serving as the base for two smaller inflatable boats with outboard motors, which were much better equipped to pursue a blue once it had spouted. Sears and his assistant, Fred Paquet, were on the faster of these inflatables, the Mistrale, prepared to photograph the blues that they spotted and biopsy them if they were lucky enough to get that close. The Shelagh motored to within a quarter of a mile of our blue, but I was only able to take a single photograph before it dove. Reviewing the shot on the camera’s tiny display, the whale appeared too small and distant to make any kind of real identification.
Great. I’ve spent six hours on the water and have absolutely nothing to show for it.
This wasn’t the first time I had journeyed from New York to Quebec in search of blue whales with Richard Sears. A year ago, I made a similar trip and couldn’t even reach Sears at his temporary base in Forestville, on the north shore of the St. Lawrence. The remnants of Hurricane Katrina had washed out the single road to the tiny town, and I was unable to meet up with Sears. . . or see a blue whale.
This year, I had at least succeeded in rendezvousing with him at the remote fishing village of L’Anse-à-Valleau, but the blue whales had proven largely elusive, at least in terms of getting an up-close view.
If it was any consolation, I wasn’t the only one who had had a bad day. Sears and Paquet had pursued one whale for six hours but had not been able to successfully biopsy the animal. The St. Lawrence had been choppy, making it difficult to approach the blue. Sears was frustrated, but he remained patient. That was something he had learned early on in his 30-year career studying the giants of the sea.
Sears first became interested in blues in 1976, while working for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on a salmon study project at the Meramec field station on the St. Lawrence River. Three times a day he would do a cursory watch for whales, and when he spotted one, he would take out an inflatable boat to observe the animal. The first time he saw a blue whale, Sears was awestruck.
“I still remember how big the blue whale looked,” he told me during a recent interview. “It was pale blue-grey in color and I was so impressed by the size of the blowhole. I felt I could almost jump into it.”
Sears returned to Meramec three years later, at the urging of Bill Watkins and Bill Scheville, two mentors at Woods Hole who understood that little was known about the blue whale population in the St. Lawrence. In fact, at that point in time, precious little was known about blue whales, period. Despite being the largest animals in the world and the largest creatures ever to live on our planet (including the dinosaurs), blue whales had not really been studied in a systematic way by scientists.
“Species like the humpback whale and the right whale can be observed closer to shore; they are more demonstrative and they show their behavior, so they are easier to identify,” Sears told me. “Blue whales were considered offshore and less accessible. They wouldn’t come over to your boat. They seemed to be these huge things that just swam by, impersonally.”
Inspired by a project in the Gulf of Maine to photographically catalog humpback whales, Sears set out to do the same for blues in the St. Lawrence. “I borrowed a boat from a colleague, hitched it to my used Volkswagen, and drove up to Meramec. Sometimes we would follow the blues to the Mingan Archipelago. We brought tents and we would camp on the beach. We’d set up our boat and go out and find the blue whales. There was something romantic about it, in an 18th-century kind of way. I was having a great time – it was like a dream.”
Sears soon discovered that blue whales were more commonly found by the Mingan Archipelago and out toward Anticosti Island. In 1979, he founded Mingan Island Cetacean Study (MICS), a nonprofit research institute, and based it in the sleepy village of Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan.
For nearly 28 years, Sears has diligently added to his photographic catalog of blue whales in the St. Lawrence, which now totals more than 400 animals. He identifies them individually by the patterns of pigmentation and other distinguishing marks on their fins and backs. But the catalog is as much in his brain as it is on paper—he has a remarkable ability to identify individual blue whales by sight.
In 2004, Sears was working off the coast of Sept-Iles on the north shore of the St. Lawrence when he spotted a blue whale with a very unique pigmentation pattern. At first he thought it was a new animal, but when he got back to the field station at Mingan, something about the mottling started to bother him.
“I thought the pattern looked a lot like an animal whose picture I had taken from the air in 1982, up by the Strait of Belle Isle.”
Sears scanned several of those photos into his computer, manipulated them, and was able to confirm that the blue in the picture was the same one he had seen off Belle Isle. The 22 years between sightings is the longest for an individual animal that Sears has experienced during his career.
“You know, I can’t remember people’s names,” he admitted during our interview. “Yet somewhere in my brain, I can remember a pigmentation pattern that I have seen before or differentiate a pattern that is new.”
Sears’s passion for his work is palpable. On the morning after our frustrating Saturday in September, he looked out from the small wharf at L’Anse-à-Valleau and found the St. Lawrence looking unusually calm. “Conditions today seem ideal,” he observed hopefully. He invited me aboard the Mistrale, the small, speedy inflatable that he and Paquet use—eight to ten hours a day, seven days a week in the summer and early fall—for their ongoing research on blues in the St. Lawrence.
Out on the water, the wind was barely blowing, the surface a flat sheet that reflected the picturesque shoreline of northern Gaspe. Unlike the previous day, when it was downright chilly on the water, the sun was now beating down and I didn’t need the fleece sweatshirt and windbreaker that had kept me warm on Saturday.
The calm and quiet were surprising and startling. I could clearly hear the conversation of two researchers on the other inflatable, which was about a mile north of our position. A moment later, I heard the spout of a blue whale and turned in the direction of the sound, but saw nothing. Sears pointed out that on a calm day like today, you could hear a blue’s spout up to two miles away.
Suddenly, a flurry of activity in the water nearby caught our attention, and Paquet gunned the throttle, getting us closer. What we saw was an astounding sight.
A male blue whale was challenging a second male, who had already paired up with a female. The two males were engaged in what Sears calls a “rumba,” a competition of aggressive swimming moves designed to impress the female, who would ultimately choose between her suitors.
As the Mistrale got closer and Paquet shut off the engine, Sears snapped pictures of this rarely seen display of behavior. It was my first glimpse into the social interactions between these remarkable creatures, of which not a whole lot is currently known.
The rumba finally ended and the surface became still again. It appeared that the female had chosen the male challenger, displacing her previous suitor. Sears took a moment to appreciate his good fortune, but quickly returned to the task at hand—photographing and biopsying blues.Paquet spotted a blue whale spout about 200 yards to the east of us and skillfully maneuvered the Mistrale to a position about ten yards from the animal. When its dorsal fin and back broke the surface, Sears snapped a picture of its pigmentation pattern.
Satisfied with the photo, he directed Paquet to navigate the inflatable around to the other side of the blue. Sears quickly grabbed a crossbow equipped with a round-tipped arrow and, balancing himself on the bow of the small boat, took aim and fired it at the back of the blue.
The arrow bounced off the back of the huge animal like a toothpick hitting a brick wall. Paquet steered the Mistrale so that Sears could retrieve the arrow from the water. He handed it to Paquet, who removed the tip of the arrow, which contained a one-inch-long cylindrical section of the whale’s skin and blubber. The tip doesn’t go in deep enough to reach any muscle tissue, so the technique does not cause any pain in the animal.
Paquet carefully removed and stored the tissue sample. The skin will be sent to a lab for DNA analysis, which is currently the only way to identify the sex of a blue whale. The blubber will be subjected to toxic studies. Sears has already learned that the levels of PCBs in the St. Lawrence are significantly greater than those off the coast of Iceland, where he has also conducted research, and this may offer an important clue into the reproduction patterns of these discreet groups of blue whales.
Sunday proved to be a most productive day, as we went on to photograph and biopsy seven more blues. It was simply thrilling to be able to get so close to these enormous creatures that I could almost reach out and touch them.
As Paquet guided the Mistrale back to the wharf at L’Anse-à-Valleau,my mind flashed to my experience in Quebec a year earlier. I had not been able to reach Sears at Forestville and was forced by circumstance to head up to his research institut in Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan.What I found there reminded me of one of John Steinbeck’s Monterey novels.
Sears had assembled a small cadre of dedicated researchers at the institute, who had come from around the
world to join him and conduct research into blue whales and other cetaceans in the St. Lawrence. The hours were long and the pay was minimal, but the group lived communally in an old wooden-frame house and had a tremendous esprit-de corps. Their idealism and passion were inspiring. Sears told me he considers this his greatest success.
“If you had asked me five years ago, I would have said that my greatest accomplishment was starting this project, which was the first long-term study of blue whales anywhere on the planet. But now I think my greatest success was creating the field station in Mingan, where a lot of young people could come and pursue their interests, complete their master’s degrees or PhDs, carry on their studies, and go even further. I am really proud to have created a place that fosters that kind of interest.”
Ironically, the core group of blue whales that Sears had seen regularly in the Mingan Islands and which caused him to create his institute there in 1979 had disappeared by the early 1990s. So where did they go? Sears doesn’t know—he has never seen them again.
That is just one of the mysteries surrounding the blue whales of the St. Lawrence, a piece of the puzzle that Sears has yet to figure out. A clue might be found in the Atlantic waters of eastern Canada, into which he would like to expand his research. Are blue whale populations there discrete from those in the St. Lawrence, or is there movement of animals between the two areas?
“Beyond the North Atlantic, we need global studies,” he told me. “We don’t know what goes on with blue whale populations along the Atlantic coast of South America. We don’t understand what is happening along the African coast, or in the Indian Ocean. We have a few tidbits but no real, definitive studies.”
After a long and successful Sunday on the water, the work had not ended. In the galley of the Shelagh, Sears grabbed a quick bite for dinner and, as he ate, reviewed the pictures that were taken the past two days. A smile suddenly appeared on his face, and he called me over to his side. The picture that I had taken a day earlier from the ship’s crow’s nest, which I’d thought was too distant for identification purposes, was actually in sharp focus, and Sears was able to zoom in on the pigmentation pattern on the blue whale’s back.
“This is an animal that we first identified back in 1988 and haven’t seen since then, until now,” he informed me. “Not only did your photograph make a positive identification of this blue whale, it is actually a better photo than the one we have, so I am going to replace the existing one in our catalog with yours, and you will receive the credit.”
I could not contain my excitement, and a huge smile etched across my face. The blue whale, my obsession for over a year, had proven to be not so elusive after all.