Playful large white beluga whales bring joy and healing to Hudson Bay. Their happy chirps leap out in an environment and economy threatened by the warming water that's melting sea ice, starving polar bears, and changing the entire food chain. Loud and curious belugas swarm boats here, clicking, nudging, and frolicking. At any given summer moment on the Churchill River that flows into the Hudson Bay, as many as 4,000 belugas can be up and down the waterway, surrounding vessels of all sizes. That makes it hard to find a place where you don't see them, said whale biologist Valeria Vergara, senior scientist at the Raincoast Conservation Foundation. It's in their nature. "The social butterflies of the whale world ... You can see it in Churchill," Vergara said, per the AP.
The town of Churchill, Manitoba, is counting on that to continue. The mostly Indigenous community, pulled out of economic doldrums by polar bear tourism, faces the prospect of a dwindling number of bears due to climate change. So it's counting on another white beast, the beluga, to come to the rescue and entice summer tourists—if the sea mammals can also survive the changes to this gateway to the Arctic. There's something healing about belugas. Just ask Erin Greene. Greene was attacked by a polar bear in 2013, and now, years later, Greene said contact with the sociable whales helped pull her out of her post-traumatic stress disorder. Now she goes out in the water with them, on a paddleboard, and sings to and with the whales. She also rents paddleboards to tourists, so they can do the same.
"I've never seen an animal except for maybe puppies bring that amount and capacity of joy to people," Greene said. "Everybody's smiling when they get off the water ... Everybody's just experiencing joy. And it's the whales that provide that." "They really have traits that are so similar to human culture, so we can really empathize with them," Vergara said. Plus, "they're unbelievably vocal. They're probably one of the most acoustically active or vocal mammals, along with humans, on Earth." However, sea ice is shrinking all over the Arctic, and even though this is probably the biggest beluga population in the world, scientists are a bit concerned. "The disappearing ice is going to affect them," Vergara said. "We don't know how they're going to react to shifts in water temperature, shifts in food availability, shifts in the availability of regular prey." More here.
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