There is no better place in the world to watch whales than this speck of a town set amid the sand dunes on Argentina’s
Patagonian coast.
As boatloads of visitors look on, chunky black right whales lift their tails into the air for minutes at a time and then approach the boats, stopping with their noses just inches away.
Calves frolic alongside their mothers, leaping into the air and slapping their fins on the water in a ponderous baleen ballet.
In all directions, the choppy bay teems with nearly 200 whales mating, giving birth and teaching their young, the salty air punctuated with great hollow blasts as the animals surface to breath.
“There’s no other place in the world where you can see this,” said Mariano Coscarella, a marine biologist at the National Patagonia Center, rooting unsuccessfully in his camera bag for more film.
Argentina’s Valdes Peninsula, which juts into the southern Atlantic Ocean, has long been one of the best places to see marine wildlife.
More than 13 species of dolphins pass through the area, as do southern sea lions, southern fur seals, elephant seals, humpback and sperm whales, and the great white shark. Cormorants, arctic doves and penguins feed on the coastline, and llama-like guanacos and Patagonian ostriches roam the sandy sagebrush-covered plains.
But it is the blubbery southern right whale, one of the largest and most endangered whale species, that has made a name for the Valdes Peninsula and its pioneering conservation efforts.
In 1971, when studies of the animals began, just 380 of the whales, which spend much of each year feeding in the Antarctic, used the Valdes Peninsula area as a mating and birthing ground.
Last year, researchers estimated the population at 2,577.
That huge rate of growth, of around 7 percent a year, has come at the same time as northern right whales, which live off the Atlantic coast of the United States and Canada, linger near extinction.
The differences between the populations are providing new clues about the threats faced by endangered whales and how they might be saved.
“Argentina has done a great job here,” Coscarella said, but “there’s a lot left to do.”
Right whales, the third-largest species behind blue and fin whales, were the first to be hunted, starting around the 12th Century off the coast of Spain.
Until the 1900s, whalers targeted right whales almost exclusively because their thick blubber made them the only animals that would float after being killed. They were the “right” whales to kill, hence the name.
In 1935, after being hunted close to extinction, right whales became the first to win international protection and be covered by a hunting ban, said Vicky Rowntree, right whale director at the Massachusetts-based Whale Conservation Institute.
In the largely unpoliced southern Atlantic, however, the ban barely slowed the whaling fleets.
During the 1960s, Soviet Union records show that its vessels took 1,100 whales off the coast of Brazil.
In Argentina, former dictators used the migrating whales for aerial target practice, dropping dummy bombs on them, said Luis Galina, a tourism director with the Patagonian state of Chubut.
That all began to change in 1974. With the help of the Whale Conservation Institute, the Gulf of San Jose on the Valdes Peninsula was declared the world’s first whale sanctuary and put off-limits to boats and fishing.
In the mid-1980s, Argentina gave right whales national monument status, a protection shared by only one other animal, a small mountain deer.
The country also directed its fleet of coast guard boats, helicopters and planes, which patrol for pirate fishing boats, to keep an eye on the whales.
The comeback has been spectacular. Southern right whales, which also mate off the coasts of South Africa and Australia, have experienced growth rates of around 7 percent in nearly all of their ranges, but nowhere has the comeback been more dramatic than on the Patagonian coast.
As wool prices for Patagonia’s ubiquitous sheep have plunged, whale watching and ecotourism have become staples of the economy in towns such as Puerto Piramides. Nearby Puerto Madryn, the largest city in the area, with a population of 55,000, has quadrupled its number of hotel rooms in the last few years. Its first huge five-star resort hotel is under construction.
Whale-watching boats, which by law can approach no closer than within 300 feet of the whales (though the whales often approach them), draw big crowds, and even the local lottery has a smiling cartoon whale as its mascot.
“There’s an economic interest in whales here,” Coscarella said.
“Whatever brings in the most money has the most sway,” Rowntree added. “If people love the whales, they force the government to act.”
Not all the news is good for Patagonia’s whales. Since 1980, international fishing fleets driven out of the North Atlantic by depleted fish stocks have flocked to the Patagonian coast in search of shrimp and hake.
The huge increase in boat traffic–more than 400 fishing vessels ply Argentina’s coastal waters each season–threatens the slow-swimming right whales, which can be killed in collisions with boats.
With hake stocks in Patagonia collapsing from overfishing, boat traffic is expected to decrease. The whales, however, face a new threat from an overpopulation of seagulls, which, deprived of waste fish from the trawlers and processing plants, are biting chunks of blubber from the surfacing whales.
Thirty-two percent of whales now bear bite scars, up from just 2 percent in the late 1970s, and Rowntree estimates that the whales now spend 25 percent of their time diving to avoid the gulls.
Pollution from the growing cities along Patagonia’s coast seems so far not to have affected the animals, scientists say. That may not be the case, though, with northern right whales, who are reproducing at much lower rates than their southern cousins.
Scott Kraus, director of research at the New England Aquarium in Boston and an expert on northern right whales, says he believes the northern populations suffer high mortality from collisions with the more than 30,000 ships that cross the North Atlantic each year, from entanglement in fishing gear, and possibly from pollution.
“What stands out as the fundamental difference is the amount of human activity” between the North and South Atlantic, he said. The North Atlantic is one of the most heavily trafficked industrial zones in the Northern Hemisphere, with lots of engine noise in the water, a bother for whales who navigate largely by sound.
Scientists suspect northern right whales, which feed on certain crustaceans, also may not be getting enough to eat.
Lack of adequate fat reserves to reproduce would explain why northern right whale females calve only every four or five years; southern females calve every three years.
“We haven’t found a smoking gun,” Kraus said. “The problem is mortality and reproduction, and both sides of that equation are in trouble in the North Atlantic.”
