This story originally appears in dark and is part of the Climate office collaboration.
When Roswell Schaeffer Sr. was 8 years old, his father decided it was time he started learning to hunt beluga whales. Schaeffer was an Iñupiaq child growing up in Kotzebue, a small town in northwest Alaska, where a good supply of beluga whale meat was part of winter survival. Every summer, thousands of these little white whales migrated to Kotzebue Sound, and hunts were an annual tradition. Whale skin and blubber, or muktuk, were valued not only as a form of sustenance and as a trade commodity, but also because of the spiritual value of sharing the catch with the community.
Now, nearly seven decades later, Schaeffer is one of the few hunters still spending the last weeks of spring, just after the ice melts, on Kotzebue Sound, waiting for the beluga whales to arrive. Many people have turned to the bearded seal hunt, in part out of necessity: there simply aren’t enough belugas left to support the community.
In the 1980s, the Kotzebue Sound beluga population started to decrease, from thousands to hundreds, then to the dozens or less who visit the area now. Kotzebue is not alone. Although some stocks are healthy, beluga numbers have declined in about half a dozen regions over the past 50 years. Decades ago, hunting, commercial whaling and other influences pushed whales to the brink. Today, even after the hunt has stopped in some places, stresses such as climate change, increased shipping traffic and chemical pollutants are building a storm that threatens to finish the job.
But some scientists believe that understanding how whales respond to these stresses may prove as important as understanding the stresses themselves. Belugas, like chimpanzees, birds, humans, and many other animals, create cultures by passing knowledge and customs from one generation to the next. With climate change and other human activities reshaping the world at an alarming rate, beluga whales will likely have to rely on innovative cultural practices to adapt – genetic adaptation is simply too slow to keep pace.
However, cultural practices can become routine, and just like humans, other animals can carry on traditions long after they have ceased to have meaning. A key question, according to Greg O’Corry-Crowe, a behavioral ecologist at Florida Atlantic University, is: Will culture allow whales to cross?
“When change is so seismic, perhaps, and so rapid, you try to look for the innovators and trailblazers among social conservatives,” O’Corry-Crowe said. At the same time, Indigenous peoples like Schaeffer face their own dilemma. Continuing to hunt belugas may hurt the whales’ chances of rebounding, but if indigenous groups abandon the practice, they could lose the knowledge that has helped sustain them in the Arctic for thousands of years.
philosophers and scientists have long suggested that animals can learn. But even in the early 2000s, scientists debated the idea that animals accumulate knowledge over generations. One animal that has helped popularize this notion is the killer whale.
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