Researchers wish Beaufort Sea beluga tagging will strew light on whale diets, travelling habits
People in a Beaufort Delta segment of a Northwest Territories are anticipating a planned beluga whale tagging program will strew new light on whale habits.
About a month ago, members of a Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), a Fisheries Joint Management Committee and a Inuvialuit Game Council participated in consultations with a whole Inuvialuit Settlement Region on a program, scheduled to start in the summer of 2018.
Shannon MacPhee, an aquatic biologist with a Department of Fisheries and Oceans, pronounced as distant as she knows, this is a initial time a dialect has hold so many consultations on beluga whales.
She combined she hopes a new turn of tagging, that hasn’t happened in a segment given 2005, fills “knowledge gaps” about belugas, including their travel habits.
“In 2014, there were whales around Ulukhaktok and Sachs Harbor, that is surprising to see so many whales so tighten to a communities during that time,” pronounced MacPhee.
Researchers are looking to embark on a new aerial consult of belugas, that will give updated race numbers. A consult hasn’t been finished given 1992. (Fisheries and Oceans Canada)
Researchers are also anticipating to learn some-more about a beluga diet. After study harvested belugas in 2014, MacPhee says her group beheld a change in a belugas’ greasy poison composition, that signified their food sources had altered as well.
“[Their diet] was really different in that year compared to prior years where their diet was especially stoical of arctic cod,” she said.
MacPhee combined a tagging module will yield baseline information about beluga poise and transformation so researchers can pattern an updated aerial survey, that helps guess beluga numbers. Macphee says a final aerial consult was finished in 1992.
Data could uncover impact of shipping on belugas
John Noksana Jr., a lifelong Tuktoyaktuk proprietor and vice-chair for a Fisheries Joint Management Committee, pronounced one of a categorical concerns he has is how shipping impacts a whales.
“[If] we do this beluga tagging, we could put corridors for areas to be avoided, speed boundary and so on and so onward for shipping and oil and gas,” he said.
“Whaling is a large partial of us and a sea is a large partial of a Inuvialuit.”
Pros and cons to tagging
Although tagging can yield most indispensable answers to many questions, it can also be seen as disruptive.
MacPhee pronounced she’s answered questions from residents and members of any community’s particular Hunters and Trappers Committee about how a whales would be handled.
“We have animal caring protocols that we follow and we have really purify methods for doing whales,” she said. “We wish to run a module that people find valuable.”
MacPhee says a subsequent step is to continue systematic formulation and figure out finer sum in a spring.
If approved, a tagging module would final a smallest dual years.
Article source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/beluga-tagging-beaufort-1.4468839?cmp=rss