LETTER FROM MONTREAL
The effects of the Covid-19 pandemic may have had a virtue: that of having made the inhabitants of all the large confined cities of the planet discover silence. At a minimum, the absence of noise. At the bottom of the oceans, marine mammals have undoubtedly had the same experience for the first time in a long time. History does not yet say what momentary upheavals this return of calm will introduce into humans, but scientists in the marine world are already gloating about the idea of observing the effects that this sound lull will have on their favorite objects of study. .
Quebec is preparing in particular. On the whalemap, you can follow live the arrival in the Gulf of St. Lawrence of the first right whales, returned from the warm waters of the Florida coast where they spent the winter. The beluga whales, described as “white porpoises” by the navigator Jacques Cartier who spotted them during his second trip to the country in 1535, also approached at the end of spring of this prized maritime crossroads constituted by the meeting of the St. Lawrence River and the Saguenay River.
Endangered species
Robert Michaud, scientific director of the Marine Mammal Research and Education Group (Greem) based in Tadoussac, a tourist mecca for whale watching in Quebec, ignites: "I know it is wrong to welcome this pandemic, but it is our duty to try to take advantage of such an opportunity! Perhaps this year we will be able to test hypotheses that we have been making for several years, namely that the behavior and health of whales are directly linked to the noise generated by human activity ", explains the one who is currently piloting with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, a study on the impact of maritime traffic on Saguenay whales.
Whales are indeed equipped with a powerful sonar, on which they depend to move, communicate with each other and feed. The intensive fishing they suffered until 1979 first decimated them – there are only 410 right whales listed by the Greem and some 900 belugas -; the exponential human activity of recent decades would end up weakening these endangered species by invading their acoustic habitat. The humpback whale even had to adapt to the deafening noise generated by the passage of ships and cargo ships, by modifying its song to continue to be heard by its companions.
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