Off the shores of Costa Rica, scientists study a stronghold of whales that once hovered near extinction…
The blue whale, Balaenoptera musculus, is the largest creature ever to live. Linnaeus derived the genus name from the Latin balaena, "whale," and the Greek pteron, "fin" or "wing." His species name, musculus, is the diminutive of the Latin mus, "mouse"—apparently a Linnaean joke. The "little mouse whale" can grow to 200 tons and 100 feet long. A single little mouse whale weighs as much as the entire National Football League. Just as an elephant might pick up a little mouse in its trunk, so the elephant, in its turn, might be taken up by a blue whale and carried along on the colossal tongue. Had Jonah been injected intravenously, instead of swallowed, he could have swum the arterial vessels of this whale, boosted along every ten seconds or so by the slow, godlike pulse.
The great swimming speed of the blue whale, together with the remoteness of its stronghold—where three of Earth's oceans merge in the ice-cold waters around Antarctica—protected most of the species until early in the 20th century. With the invention of explosive harpoons and fast, steam-powered catcher boats, the stronghold was breached. Through the first six decades of the 20th century 360,000 blue whales were killed. The population around South Georgia Island was extirpated, along with those that once fed in the coastal waters of Japan. Some blue whale populations were reduced by ninety-nine one-hundredths, and the species tipped at the very brink of extinction…
For Bruce Mate and John Calambokidis, the head scientists aboard Pacific Storm, the irony is deep and poignant. The blue whales they study, the 2,000 animals that summer off western North America, once just a splinter group, now make up a significant population.
Mate, director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, is the world's most inventive and prolific satellite-tagger of whales. The dome first caught his attention in 1995, when a blue whale he had tagged off California in summer began transmitting from off Costa Rica in winter. Calambokidis, a co-founder of Cascadia Research, in Olympia, Washington, is the West Coast's most prolific photo-identifier of whales. A tall, lean biologist with a Quaker seaman's beard and monomaniacal dedication to bringing back diagnostic images, Calambo¬kidis was tantalized by the reports from the satellite. In 1999 he made a reconnaissance of the dome by sailboat. The voyage was plagued by bad weather, and the sailboat was too small for its mission, yet at the dome Calambo¬kidis managed to photo identify ten whales that he had photographed off California.
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