By the Journal of Commerce

An international group of scientists, using satellite tags placed in the thick blubber of 20 whales, is getting new information on migration routes and daily habits of South Pacific humpback whales.

The project is a collaboration between NOAA's National Marine Mammal Lab, Operation Cetaces in New Caledonia, Cook Islands Whale Research and Instituto Aqualie. Greenpeace International is the primary financier of the research as part of a scientific collaboration to carry out critical non-lethal research on specific populations of South Pacific humpback whales at risk from a range of threats, including commercial whaling.

Phil Clapham of the NOAA Fisheries Service's Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle said the tagged whales are providing a lot of information for the researchers.

“The whales are telling us where they go, and we have already learned new things about their preferred habitats and migratory routes,” he said.

Tagged off New Caledonia and the Cook Islands, data show individual whales taking divergent and circuitous routes to the austral summer feeding grounds of the Antarctic.

“We hope that they will continue to transmit for weeks or months, showing the final destinations of these animals as they undertake their long migration from the tropics to the cold waters of the Southern Ocean,” Clapham said.

The information may also serve to demonstrate the vulnerability of whales from small, unrecovered populations to the upcoming Japanese whale hunt in the South Pacific.

Last year, a pilot project placed a satellite tag on a mature female humpback in the Cook Islands. The tag stopped working after two weeks, but came to life again after three months of silence, when the whale was hundreds of miles to the south of Tahiti and on her way to the Antarctic. The tag provided the first documented connection between the Cook Islands and an Antarctic feeding area.

The current conservation status of humpback whales in the Southern Hemisphere varies. Some populations, such as those off the coasts of Australia, are recovering well from intensive 20th century whaling, and number in the thousands of whales.

In contrast, there are several small and apparently struggling humpback populations in parts of Oceania, including New Caledonia, the Cook Islands, Fiji and New Zealand. These populations were hit heavily by commercial whaling in the 1950s and 1960s, including huge illegal catches by the former USSR.