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Whales Rebound in Alaska
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - A depleted population of beluga whales has stabilized five years after Alaska Natives agreed to virtually stop hunting them, the National Marine Fisheries Service said yesterday.
Beluga whales in Cook Inlet, an icy channel that runs from Anchorage to the Gulf of Alaska, number 187 this summer, according to a count just completed by the federal agency. They numbered 174 last year and 192 the year before that, it said.
More than 1,000 belugas may have lived in Cook Inlet in the 1970s and 1980s, but the population shrank precipitously after that, service experts say.
In 1999, an agreement between Natives and the agency sharply limited hunting. A year later, the service designated the whales as "depleted," a protected status authorized by the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
Hunters killed only six belugas between 2001 and 2004, the agency said. Whether the change caused the beluga population to stabilize is debatable, said Dave Rugh, an agency wildlife biologist.
"When the hunt stopped, the decline seemed to have stopped," Rugh said. "On the other hand, you can say the hunt stopped, but the population's not going up."
Agency experts have said that aggressive hunting had caused the population to drop.
"The hunt was unregulated and was quite large," Rugh said, with 50 or more whales sometimes taken each year.
Some say pollution from Anchorage and elsewhere, along with waste from Cook Inlet oil and gas operations and disturbances from vessel traffic have combined to harm the region's whales.
Belugas, named for the Russian expression that means "white one," are small whales that are gray as juveniles and white as adults.
The Cook Inlet stock is one of five recognized beluga whale stocks in U.S. waters.
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