Transcriber: Elena Montrasio Reviewer: Patrizia C Romeo Tomasini
Good evening.
Well, with that audio, we've now entered the realm of the giants.
And these are true-to-life giants.
They are so massive that no dinosaur could compare to them in size.
Their hearts are as big as a small car,
and their young are already giants when they are born.
They grow at an astonishing rate,
putting on a ton of weight every nine-and-a-half days.
Never has one of these giants harmed a human being.
It is said that they can directly communicate with one another
over distances approaching 1,000 miles,
making the loudest sounds in the entire animal kingdom.
Recent times have been very difficult
for these giants.
However, some of them are still here with us today.
Let's meet them.
Our giants are blue whales,
the largest animals that have ever lived on this earth.
Of course, they take the biggest breath in the world.
What you're looking at is the exhalation of an adult blue whale
going 30 to 40 feet in the air.
The back of an adult blue whale is as big as a school bus.
This is a lactating female; her calf was nearby.
Very typical to see the vertebrae sticking up through the back,
because she gives off so much weight as she's nursing.
Blue whales are baleen whales.
All of them have two blowholes,
you can see that very clearly here.
All toothed whales and dolphins have one blowhole.
We want you to get to know these animals a little.
I want you to get know them a little.
We identify blue whales individually,
by the unique pattern of pigmentation they have on their body,
that they keep for life.
This is the right side of a blue whale,
and you can see the combination of dark and light colors.
The area around the dorsal fin is particularly important
for that identification process.
Because - here's another right side -
quite a different dorsal fin, bigger and more hooked.
This animals is a little darker,
but again, this particular animal will keep its pattern of pigmentation
for its entire life.
In catalogs, we match the blue whales together.
This is a match.
The same animal, taken four years apart,
the lower picture by me,
and interestingly enough, about 1,500 miles apart.
This is a beautiful picture of the 20-foot-wide fluke
of an adult blue whale,
dropping a huge waterfall into the sea.
But let's keep in mind,
this is a pretty picture, not a scientific one.
There's no identification that can be done there.
However, with the same individual,
a little bit later on in the dive process,
we see the bottom of the fluke open up.
Here we can pick up scratches, scars, nicks
and a little bit of pigmentation.
And when blue whales dive with their flukes up,
which they don't always do,
this is an important picture for identification as well.
Now that we're getting to know the blue whales,
I'm going to play a theatrical video that was made off my boat
a couple months ago on the Sea of Cortez.
You'll get to know them a little bit better here.
(Spouts air)
So, a couple of years ago,
I wanted to engage my old college roommate,
who was a pretty famous activist in the United States,
had a lot of success,
I wanted to engage him in helping me to start a nonprofit
to help the whales.
So I brought him to Baja California -
he's on the boat right here -
and I showed him a blue whale like this.
And it worked.
We founded the Great Whale Conservancy.
Our mission statement is, basically,
to help the plight of the world's great whales
and their home, the oceans.
For the last 20 years,
I've done a lot a field work with blue whales,
in the Saint Lawrence River, Quebec, Canada
and still, annually, in the Sea of Cortez,
off Baja California, in Mexico.
And it became really evident,
in the early days of the Great Whale Conservancy,
that of all the great whales,
the blue whale being so globally endangered,
and also the largest animal that's ever lived on earth,
that that would become sort of our keystone or umbrella species
of greatest concern.
Let's talk a little bit about the plight of the blue whale.
First, we must say that in the 1800s and the 1900s,
so many of our harpoons took so many other their lives away,
that right now, as we sit here, over 98% of the world's blue whales
are gone.
It's very fair and accurate
to say that what we have left on this planet today
are genetically poor remnant island populations.
Separated by vast distances, these populations -
the total population is about 10,000 individuals globally,
and the largest of the subpopulations
is the Northeast Pacific subpopulation,
which numbers about 3,000 animals.
For me,
it is a perfectly cooked artichoke
with warm lemon butter to dip the leaves in,
or an incredibly exquisite tropical mango.
When I am eating my favorite foods,
my attention and enjoyment to their flavor is so great,
that really, I'm not able to react to outside stimuli as much
as if I'm not eating those foods.
For blue whales, it might be the taste of krill,
but it's more likely to be the severe energetic demands required
to support such a massive body.
But whatever it is,
when the food is thick,
the blue whales are so focused on getting it into their mouths,
that they also are not able to respond to outside stimuli
as they normally would.
This is precisely when the giants become their most vulnerable.
The results - I forgot that slide, sorry about that -
the results, at times, can be tragic.
The numbers we can't exactly know,
reason being, blue whales sink when they die.
But for every blue whale that we find dead on a beach
or wrapped around the bow of a giant boat that comes into port,
victim of a ship strike,
there are for sure, definitely, no question about it,
many more that are killed by these ships
that we never find out about.
This presents a very a severe problem
for an already depleted population.
So what's the solution?
Well, the solution is, actually, incredibly clear.
We can't go to the blue whales
and ask them to forego the bountiful banquet of food
that they feed in,
and go someplace else to get their food.
So the only answer is to take the ships and the shipping lanes
and move them away from the areas
where great whales are known to feed in high concentrations.
It's very simple. That's the only solution.
Why has this not been done?
That is a good question:
Why has this simple solution not been done?
And the reason is,
that even though there have been meetings
in the Northeast Pacific - which I'm keying on, that area;
there have been meetings with all kinds of people
for all amounts of years -
the public has not been involved.
And until the public is educated, informed
and has become passionate about the survival of these animals,
nothing's going to be done at these meetings.
But with the public pressure,
the political will will be there, to move these shipping lanes
and help eliminate more unnecessary blue whale deaths.
But the public doesn't know about the problem.
A lot of the public doesn't even know that the whales are there.
They don't know how awe-inspiring the animals are,
and they're just not well-versed on the problem.
So how can we get the public to understand this problem,
to be aware of, and understand this problem?
Well, we thought long and hard about it.
We can't take millions of people out to see a blue whale.
So we went to work, building a blue whale -
true to size, an actual female animal that I know -
and it took a year.
We got measurements from old whaling records,
and we made everything as absolutely accurate as we could
to build an inflatable, life-sized blue whale.
Less than two weeks ago, we berthed her
in a semi-private event off the coast of Southern California.
I was there.
It was pretty windy, but it was an amazing event.
Here's another view of her.
And here's a real view of her,
with her calf, in 2009, in the Sea of Cortez.
So now we can take the whale to the people.
And we can take the whale anywhere in the world to the people,
because it folds up into a duffel bag -
a very large duffel bag.
But it folds up into a duffel bag
and we can literally ship her anywhere in the world,
and with the media that we experience in our lives today,
the world - both the people that are there and the world -
can see what a blue whale really looks like.
You're about to see some footage right now
that's never been seen.
Some of it has never been seen by anyone, anywhere.
It's some unique footage that we shot with a remote helicopter
in the Sea of Cortez, off my boat,
a couple months ago.
And you're going to get to see an interesting view of a blue whale.
No sound here;
the helicopter was up in the air, without sound.
(Spouts air)
There you go. Bigger than the dinosaurs, and still here with us.
But the blue whale, in my opinion,
has a bigger job than saving itself.
The oceans are in a bit of trouble,
and the oceans need a voice.
And I can't imagine a better voice for the plight of the oceans
than the loudest voice in the oceans.
And I believe one of my goals here,
is to get the blue whale to literally become the voice of the ocean.
And it needs to tell humanity
that its food needs to be there for it to continue to survive.
And here's a little twist:
it needs to tell us
that the food that they eat needs to be here for us to survive,
because most of us grew up thinking
that photosynthesis and oxygen production
largely, if not totally,
happened in the forests of the world.
But, actually, it's the oceans that assimilate about half of the carbon
that we create from our fossil fuel use.
And the plankton assimilates that carbon
and utilizes it, among other things,
in the photosynthesis process that gives us half, if not more,
of the oxygen that we breathe.
If the blue whales have no food to eat,
then humans have no oxygen to breathe.
I thank you very much,
and I will leave you with a video that was referred to earlier.
I was simply on the water,
having a great day with blue whales.
My family and a few friends were on the boat.
And on our way to lunch, this is what happened.
(Video) Michael Fischbach (narrating): On Valentine's day,
while plying the waters of the Sea of Cortez,
I came upon a young humpback whale that appeared to be dead.
We floated next to the whale for several minutes,
but we saw no signs of life.
Suddenly, the whale rose slightly in the water,
and forcefully exhaled.
(Forceful exhale)
I decided to ease into the water with my snorkeling gear,
in order to assess the situation.
I quickly discovered the whale was severely entangled
in a gill net of the type used by local fishermen.
As I swam alongside the animal,
our eyes met.
There were no words we could share,
but I wanted to let the whale know that we were there to help.
It took some effort to stay focused,
given the great emotion of the moment.
The sight of this large and beautiful creature
trapped and so close to death
was almost overwhelming.
The situation was indeed bleak.
The tail was entangled in so much gear,
it was weighted down a full 15 feet below the surface.
Both pectoral fins were pinned to the side of its body,
and the nylon gill net went all the way up the whale's back,
forward of the dorsal fin.
(Forceful exhale)
Man: Let's break it out.
MF: I got his dorsal fin free, that's it.
MF (narrating): While I was working around the pectoral fin,
my boatmates, George and Güero,
had managed to get some of the net pulled over the side of our panga.
I came back aboard
and we pulled and cut the net as fast as we could.
We were maneuvering the boat into proper position with a paddle
and only had one small knife,
but after great effort we managed to free one of the pectoral fins.
(Spouts air)
(Forceful exhale)
Sensing a spark of freedom, the young whale started to swim,
taking us on a Nantucket sleigh ride through the Sea of Cortez
for about a half of a mile.
MF: We're being taken for a ride by a whale!
MF (narrating): The whale eventually tired and came back up right underneath us.
We continued to grab more and more net,
and haul and cut, haul and cut,
and after nearly a half hour,
the other pectoral fin came mostly free.
And when the whale tired,
we began cutting the net off the powerful tail fluke.
(Forceful exhale)
Man: Vamos Vamos Vamos, come on!
MF: Watch out, watch out, watch out!
Man: Hold it, hold it!
Grab that pike, grab that pike!
MF: I got the pike.
Man: Get it down below, get it down below!
You've got to use the Fulcrum.
MF: Yeah, I am, I am. I got him. I got it.
MF: I think you might need to cut it and let her go with it.
MF (narrating): Finally, after about an hour of exhausting work,
we decided we had enough net aboard to make the final cut.
We were hoping enough net was off the fluke to free her.
MF: The tail is free.
Cut, cut, cut! Cut, cut, cut, cut!
(Whale spouts air)
MF: Come on, keep going!
It's so close!
Cut, cut, cut, right here. Right here.
Did we get it?
Güero: Yes! (Spanish)
MF: Yeah, yeah! We did it!
All: Woo! (Laughter)
MF (narrating): She slowly swam away.
But about 500 feet from our boat, she breached high into the air.
I cleared all the net from underneath the boat,
and we headed off, five tired but exhilarated people,
with a boatload of nylon netting.
(Video) Woman: Free!
Free to live life!
Man: Yeah! Hooray!
MF (narrating): For the next hour,
she provided us with an incredible, full-surface display.
We all believed it was at least a show of pure joy,
if not thanks.
(Laughter)
Child: Mommy, I know what she's doing.
Woman: What is she doing, honey?
Child: She's showing us that she's all free.
MF (narrating): We followed her for about four miles over the next hour,
and said goodbye.
Needless to say, we were all proud and thrilled
that we saved this fantastic young life.
It was an incredible experience
that none of us will ever forget.
(Applause)
MF: I just want to thank you very much,
and say that we saved Valentina's life,
and that was saving the life of one whale.
And my hope is that with all of you and more,
we can help save the lives of all the great whales.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)