Off Chile, signs of hope for whales
Activists press for sanctuary law
STRAIT OF MAGELLAN, Chile - From the earliest days of exploration, mariners in Chile's cool southern waters marveled at the abundance of whales. A Jesuit naturalist wrote of the sea "boiling" with the spouts of the leviathans.
Among 19th-century Nantucket boatmen, the island of Mocha was notorious as the stamping grounds of "Mocha Dick," an ill-tempered sperm whale riddled with harpoons. Why Herman Melville opted to substitute "Moby" for "Mocha" remains unclear, but literary detectives believe the vengeful whale helped inspire his dark classic.
Now, almost two centuries after the commercial carnage of Melville's era and 22 years after an international whale-hunting moratorium went into effect, some whales appear to be making a comeback off Chile's coast, where a proliferation of islands, fiords, peninsulas, and straits creates tens of thousands of miles of shoreline.
In recent years, researchers combing remote crannies of this elongated coast have confirmed the presence of two seasonally resident populations of whales, including 100 to 150 humpbacks here in the glacier-rimmed Strait of Magellan.
Farther to the north, they've tracked several hundred blue whales, believed to be Earth's largest-ever animal, at 100 feet long and more than 100 tons - bigger than any dinosaur.
"The likelihood is that they were not completely hunted out, and these are remnant populations," says Bruce Mate, who heads the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University and who worked to tag Chilean blue whales and track them via satellite.
Although encouraged, conservationists say it's too early to celebrate the comeback of a creature pursued to the verge of extinction. Oil from sperm and right whales hunted off Chile's coast was once a prized staple, a globalized commodity with parallels to today's petroleum.
"It could be we're just seeing more whales now because of increased interest and tourism," says Barbara Galletti, who heads Chile's Cetacean Conservation Center.
With the International Whaling Commission scheduled to hold its annual meeting in Santiago in June, activists are pushing for a law that would declare a permanent whale sanctuary throughout Chile's territorial waters, where Yankee whalers once confronted Mocha Dick.
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