At sunset on the opening day of the annual gray whale count at the Point Vicente Interpretive Center, volunteers had just begun packing up when Robin Zimmerman took one last peek through her binoculars.
Zimmerman thought she saw the back of a gray whale but wasn’t sure. The San Pedro resident called over to marine biologist Alisa Schulman-Janiger to take a look.
“Gray whale!” Schulman-Janiger shouted in response. Zimmerman and the group broke out in cheers.
Schulman-Janiger followed the whale through her binoculars earlier this as it came around the cliff just under the Point Vicente Lighthouse. It passed about a quarter-mile offshore, never fluking.
This is the second season that the group’s first gray whale sighted was northbound, instead of an expected southbound migration.
“This juvenile gray may have not completed the full migration to Alaska and may have remained off California,“ Schulman-Janiger said.
The group also counted two humpback whales, a group of Risso’s dolphins, common dolphins and bottlenosed dolphins as the season opened Dec. 1.
It was a successful start to the 34th season of the count, part of the American Cetacean Society’s Los Angeles Chapter Gray Whale Census and Behavior Project founded by Schulman-Janiger in January 1984.
After years of working on the water teaching students about marine life, Schulman-Janiger realized there were more ways to engage citizen scientists. She thought a project that collects baseline data on types of marine animals seen in a typical year might be useful for scientists and the public.
She decided to work with volunteers. The group — now numbering 100 and including everyone from college professors to stay-at-home moms — has been counting whales from the same area for 33 years.
Each year, the whales pass Point Vicente in Rancho Palos Verdes on their annual migration along the West Coast. They arrive in the lagoons of Baja, where they give birth and mate. Then the gentle giants — which mostly rely on shrimp-like creatures at the ocean floor to provide a daily 660 pounds of food — head back north to Alaska with their calves in tow. Some whales travel more than 12,000 miles.
Every day, sunrise to sunset, from Dec. 1 until May 31, volunteers perch on chairs with binoculars and high-power scopes. They watch for gray whales that hug the coastline along the Palos Verdes Peninsula. They can see as far as Point Vicente Lighthouse and Catalina Island to the south and to Malibu, the Santa Monica Mountains and Point Dume to the north.
With her wealth of data, Schulman-Janiger has keyed in on changes in the gray whales’ health, behavior and migration.
The start of the gray whale season is something Dave Anderson, who operates Capt. Dave’s Dolphin Safari and Whale Watching, waits for all year. He spent two years writing a book on a gray whale named Lily that beached herself and died at Doheny Beach after becoming entangled.
“Last year, two grays courted each other inches from our boat for an hour off Dana Point, and eight of them swam together like a beautiful pod of dolphins as I filmed them from my drone,” Anderson said.
He counted 1,482 gray whales last season. Now, he’d like to start a census like Schulman-Janiger’s this season at the Dana Point Headlands.
Loved marine mammals since child
Schulman-Janiger knew when she was 5 that she wanted to study marine mammals. And ever since, her focus has been on education, conservation and citizen science.
Over 33 years, her census volunteers have put in thousands of hours watching and counting gray whales and other species that come within the watchers’ 6- to 7-mile range.
Schulman-Janiger shares her data with the scientific community such as Journey North, an online global study of wildlife migration and seasonal change, and with scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“Her group’s work provides a huge value,” said Dave Weller, the lead marine biologist with NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries in San Diego studying the gray whale migration. “It allows the community to be part of science. It invigorates them and they become advocates for nature.
“Part of what we do is estimate the abundance of gray whales at a different part of the coast with slightly different techniques and analysis. Her work gives us a pair of eyes to look at one area for more than 30 years. In years where we’re not surveying, it helps us think through how the migration is unfolding.“
In 1985, Schulman-Janiger and her volunteers watched as two gray whales passed by. They saw them dive, but only one whale came back up.
“It circled waiting for the other whale to come up but it never did,” she said. “Later we saw a dead whale float up in the water. It was caught in a drift gill net.”
Schulman-Janiger’s census data was used in 1990 when state officials decided that drift gill nets — used primarily to catch swordfish — had to be three miles from shore to avoid snagging gray whales that traveled close to shore.
“I feel we had a hand in that,” she said. “It was a big deal.”
Her first year with the census, starting Jan. 1, 1984, stills stands as a record, with 3,412 northbound gray whales counted.
In 1999 and 2000, the population plummeted, with hundreds of deaths up and down the coast from Mexico to Alaska. During the so-called “unusual mortality event,” the strandings in 1999 were seven times higher than average based on 1995-1998 numbers. In 2000, the stranding numbers were nine times as high. Schulman-Janiger and her group saw skinny whales, and the number of calves dropped dramatically.
In the summer of 1999, the opportunity for food got better in the Arctic and the whales stayed longer. Migration that year was three weeks late off Point Vicente.
By 2001, the population had improved and the group was seeing more babies.
The highest December counts in the group‘s history have been in the last five years — with the top being 393 southbound whales in December 2014. Last season was the group’s highest count of mothers and babies. Thirty-three traveled south and 341 north.
Schulman-Janiger said the gray whales seem to be starting their migrations earlier. With less ice in the Arctic, they can reach their feeding grounds earlier and eat longer.
“It makes sense that in the last five years, the gray whale is actually doing better due to climate change,“ she said. “Because there is more access to food in the Arctic because the ice is not covering it.“
Sheila Parker met Schulman-Janiger in January 2011 when she stopped in at the patio to ask about something she saw on the water.
“I was so impressed with her passion for the program and the animals,“ Parker said. “It got me hooked.“
Parker, 51, is starting her sixth season with the group.
“She treats everybody the same and makes us all feel important,“ she said. “That inspires me and makes me feel like being here matters.“
