Never a dull moment week, Part 2

So after a live and a dead turtle, the week kept rolling at a high pace.  The next morning after necropsying and burying our stinky leatherback friend, eight of us crawled into a mini-truck and headed out at 5:30am.  We were heading to Pamilacan Island (one of my most favorite places here) to do two days of workshops with the local whale watching guides.  As I mentioned in my first post about Pamilacan, it used to be a whale and whale shark hunting community. When the ban against hunting cetaceans and whale sharks was put into place in the 1990s, the former whalers transferred their livelihood to whale and dolphin watching with the help of the government and some NGOs.  The switch has been moderately successful (though the industry could definitely grow) and now vessel guidelines (similar to BC’s Be Whale Wise guidelines) are being legislated.  We were putting on the workshop in coordination with Balyena, a sort of sister organization that also does cetacean work in the Philippines.  We work closely with them and Jom (the head of Balyena) is currently doing her PhD looking at the transition of Pamilacan’s marine economy.  The Bohol Tourism Office and the municipality were also there to talk about logistics of the whale watching in the area.

Some of our audience

The whole thing was pretty successful.  The first day I actually didn’t do much with the whale watching program, as Tch and I had decided to put on a Kid’s Day while the adults were all at the workshop.  It was a really fun afternoon with about 25 little ones.  I pulled out a lot of my usual tricks (wire ‘jawbones’, measuring strings for different lengths of cetaceans) and we also put together some new activities (I nearly killed myself laughing as 25 kids delighted in blowing up balloons and then let the air out in a squeaking fashion to show how ‘monkey lips’ work in cetacean sound production- it was a cacophony of sound and they were loving it!).  We also did a craft and then a beach clean-up.  Let me tell you, make it a competition and boy do kids move.  We had two teams to see who could pick up the most plastic trash (after talking about why it is dangerous to marine wildlife).  The kids flew along the beach and within minutes we had two huge bags full.  Tch had to translate almost everything for me, as especially the little ones didn’t understand a word I said, but it didn’t seem to be too much of a detriment. 

That evening, we went for a snorkel to check out the lovely corals (again, see my previous post about Pami for pictures) and also to look to see if there were any whale sharks around.  Around the full moon, whale sharks will sometimes congregate around Pamilacan.  No luck.  Reports were that fishermen had seen one, but quite deep and we never found it.  I did, however, discover that I have a bit of an irrational fear of not being able to see the bottom of the ocean when I am swimming.  We were hanging out in the water outside the marine reserve, waiting to see if any whale sharks showed up, and I felt so creeped out by the fact that I couldn’t see all the way down.  To make matters worse, we then all got to talking about shark movies and how one of us would probably be dragged under and disappear.  Not good for my over-active imagination, but we all managed to survive. ;)

Road across the island

The next morning, we continued with the workshop and I delivered a talk about the value of education in whale watching tours.  It went ok, I wasn’t as prepared as I would have liked and the audience wasn’t super keen in doing much active participation, but I do think that they got what I was trying to say and conceded that they need to increase the amount of actual educating they do (right now, they pretty much don’t say anything to their passengers unless directly asked a question).  I made up laminated sheets for them to take on the boat with one side having some information about cetaceans in general and one side specifically talking about spinner dolphins (the most common species seen on whale watching trips there).  We also did up laminated id sheets as well, so at least there are some materials on board now. 

Some of the materials I put together for the boats

The second day was only a half-day of workshops, so in the afternoon we went out for a survey.  It was a great day for sightings-  at one point there were dolphins as far as the eye could see.  Spinners, melon-heads, fraser’s.  We spent a few hours collecting photo id and as we returned home, flying fish darting out of the water, melon-headed whale cruising slowly, a big, almost-full moon rising, the sun was setting in the most amazing colours.  It was one of those ‘it-is-so-surreal-and-incredible-that-this-is-my-life’ moments. 

The next morning we got up early and did another half-day of survey with lots more dolphins.  The same three species as the day before, plus my new faves, Risso’s dolphins.  For you cetacean-types, we even witnessed this really neat interaction where the group of Risso’s was approached by a group of melon-heads, and they sort of lined up facing each other- then everyone dove and we could see the Risso’s retreating with the melon-heads following behind.  Super weird- especially since Risso’s are a much larger species. Check out the LaMaVe facebook page for more pics.

That afternoon we headed back to the mainland and went to unwind by having a nice lunch at a nearby beach resort.  It was all very mellow and we were all feeling a bit worn out form the previous few days and were planning on taking it easy that night.  Apparently, relaxing was not in the cards.  On the drive back from our late lunch, piled into the mini-truck with all our gear, we passed a beach in Garcia-Hernandez (the town next to Jagna) and noticed a large group of people on the beach.  Ale slowed down the truck to see what they were looking at and through the crowd we spotted a tail fluke.  The truck screeched to a halt, and before I had even clamoured out of the back, Ale was flying down the rocks to get a closer look.  Turns out we had just stumbled across a super rare beaked whale caracass.

Beaked whales are a group of whales that are really poorly known by science since they tend to live in remote, deep water areas and they are incredibly deep divers.  I’ve only ever seen one species of beaked whale, a group of Baird’s beaked whales on my offshore survey with DFO a few years ago.  Now, here I was in the Philippines on the way back from lunch and we had just stumbled across a dead one.  The animal was in rigor mortis, so had been dead at least a few hours, but likely not more than 24.  A make-shift necropsy started right away and we had to work quickly because not only was the tide rising, but we only had about an hour and a half of daylight left.  How handy that we had not one, but two trained vets with us (Jom is also a vet!).  Moving the animal up the beach was the trickiest part- it took about 12 guys and they still only managed to move it about 6 meters.  Measurements and an external exam were under taken before Ale and Jom sliced into it.  I’ll spare you all the gory details, but let’s just say there was a lot of blood, though it did smell moderately better than the leatherback from earlier in the week.  The entire time, we had a huge audience of locals and some crowd control was essential.  By the end of it, we had been able to assess most major organs and collect a bunch of samples.  There was no real obvious cause of death from the gross necropsy, so perhaps histology will tell us more.  The animal was a juvenile female and the only sign of human interaction was a hook located in her stomach, though it had not perforated the tissue and probably hadn’t caused any major damaged thus far. 

Even more puzzling, we aren’t entirely sure what species it is.  Many females of beaked whale species look very similar, and the teeth were not erupted, which can often be diagnostic.  We are pretty sure it is a Blainesville’s beaked whale though there is a possibility that it is a ginko-toothed beaked whale.  The individual was covered in cookie cutter shark bites (a parasitic shark that comes and takes perfectly oval bites of larger species), which isn’t uncommon for either species.

As the light went down (necropsy by sunset is a bit surreal), Jom and Ale rushed to finish up their exam.  At this point, Ale looked like he had just commited an enormous massacre, his white tshirt covered in blood.  The local community had been awesome, providing us with all the necessary equipment- buckets, tarps, ropes, even a light as darkness fell.  They also arranged for a backhoe to come and transport the whale for burial.  Ale and Jom wanted to keep the head, so once we were finished, the next hurdle was maneuvering this 4m long, headless whale into the bucked of the backhoe.  After some leveraging with bamboo poles and such, it was in.  I will never forget the look on the faces of a passing bus we had to stop on the road as the backhoe emerged from the beach with a dead, bloody whale perched in its bucket and a crazy Italian vet, also covered in blood, hanging off the side of the backhoe’s cab.  The backhoe then trundled 10km down the road, holding up traffic, dripping blood everywhere, crazy blood-soaked Italian still perched on the side.  It was a sight to see. 

Like the turtle, we package it up in some net to keep the bones together, and it was buried on some municipal land with hopes of recovering the bones later.  The head was brought back to our place and we had hoped we might be able to CT scan it at the hospital the next day, but unfortunately they said no (what, really, you don’t want a rotten whale skull in your fancy equipment?).  The guys did a bit more dissection the other day and then we sunk it nearby for cleaning. 

What a week.  Never a dull-moment, that is for sure.