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--music--
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My name is John Moran,
and I work for the Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Juneau, Alaska.
And I work with humpback whales and herring.
I'm looking at predation effects of humpback whales
on some local herring populations in the Gulf of Alaska.
I do a lot of winter fieldwork in the Gulf of Alaska--
Prince William Sound,
Sitka Sound, and Lynn Canal.
My day-to-day routine involves photo ID,
biopsy, collecting prey,
and sampling prey with different nets and fishing lines, plankton tows,
trying to figure out what humpbacks are eating
and how much of the prey that they are eating.
"Here he goes."
--camera click, click, click--
"Got 'em."
"That's, ah, that's Smudge."
So, we use photography to identify individual whales,
it gives us an idea of the whales abundance.
Humpback whale flukes are uniquely marked.
The markings identify an individual.
And we can actually follow individuals to see if they have prey preferences,
location preferences,
and then it all fits into a formula and figure out how many whales are actually around.
Our research is happening because of the success of the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
Humpback whales have had a remarkable recovery.
Humpback whale numbers are going up 5 to 7 percent a year
and we're looking at potential conflicts with fisheries,
with the herring population, with other forage fish populations,
and we wanna know what the ecological impact is of all these humpbacks.
So it looks like in Sitka Sound the whales aren't really having an effect.
They're probably taking less than one percent of the herring.
In Lynn Canal, we're not sure what's happening here.
They could be having an effect,
depending on what the herring population structure is.
And in Prince William Sound it looks like
they're eating about 15 to 20 percent of the herring biomass in the wintertime,
so that's about the equivalent of the commercial fishery that used to happen there.
So they've basically replaced the commercial fishery.
So what we're having is a lot more conflicts with marine mammals now
Now we're having entanglements with humpback whales
in commercial fishing gear, in sport fishing gear.
There's conflicts between Steller sea lions and fishing gear.
We're having conflicts between *** whales and longliners off the coast.
So this new regime with lots of marine mammals,
it's forcing us to adapt and re-look at some other issues
and come up with some solutions that'll hopefully
benefit the fishermen and the marine mammals.