St. Lawrence Belugas: There’s More Than We Thought! – Quebec Science
Biologists studying the Saint Lawrence beluga have refined population estimation techniques. Result: It was believed that there were only 900 individuals, they were more likely between 1500 and 2200. But their situation is still not rosy.
During a major three-day symposium held in Montreal on May 3, 4 and 5, reviewing the state of knowledge about the St. Lawrence beluga, the news spread and surprised several specialists. Véronique Lesage, whale biologist at Fisheries and Oceans Canada, presented the results of several years of analysis of methods used to conduct beluga inventories.
“These numbers are estimates extrapolated from the animals we can see and count,” she explained to a hundred Quebec specialists interested in belugas. Based on current data, we can say that our projections underestimated the number of people by about half. You would not be 900, as has been said for more than a decade, but 1850, with an uncertainty of plus or minus 350.
This does not mean, as several researchers have pointed out, that the beluga population has increased; rather, our way of estimating their number has changed and become clearer.
It must be said that small white whales are difficult to identify. Coming to the surface to breathe from time to time, they mostly swim at a depth that makes them invisible in the river’s brown waters.
Beluga population estimates are based on many elements, including numerous aerial photographs, visual counts from low-altitude overflights, the percentage of young among the 10 to 20 carcasses that wash up on shore each year… From these parameters, officials extrapolate Pay. We have therefore just checked how the extrapolation has to be carried out… and corrected the inventories upwards.
Good news, but…
“This is good news,” says Arnaud Mosnier, a biologist at Fisheries and Oceans Canada who was involved in the research effort that led to these findings. Belugas still face several threats, but at least the number of individuals is further than previously thought from the threshold below which the species would begin a sharp decline. This leaves a little leeway for preservation. Not to mention that a larger population sees fewer risks from inbreeding and is more resilient if, for example, part of the group should succumb to a sudden illness. »
But the St. Lawrence canary is not off the hook: While in the 1980s and 1990s the incidence of cancer in the population was known to be highest in wildlife, a problem is now being solved by reducing the release of pollutants into the water the aluminum smelters of Saguenay, it is now the females who mysteriously die in childbirth, and the few-day-old babies are unusually numerous among the stranded carcasses.
The Montreal Symposium, organized 35 years after a first international forum on the future of the beluga held in Tadoussac in 1988, made experts realize that the scientific research is far from over – only the research questions have changed.
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Melissa Highsmith, Downtown, has been reunited with her parents, Alta Apantenco and Jeffrie Highsmith.
