- Beluga Cam is a long-running initiative that aims to document the migration of almost 57,000 beluga whales through Hudson Bay in Canada.
- The project is run by the nonprofit Polar Bears International in a bid to collect more data about beluga migration as well as to create more awareness about the species.
- The initiative got an upgrade this year with a new boat that houses the cameras and other equipment deployed for the work.
- As the Arctic rapidly loses sea ice, species such as beluga whales and polar bears bear the brunt in terms of losing access to food and their habitats.
Before pivoting her focus to the Arctic, Alysa McCall worked extensively in the grassland ecosystem. There, the interventions required for ecosystem restoration and wildlife protection were much less complicated. You could introduce more water in case of a scarcity. Or put up a fence to protect animals.
The Arctic, however, was a whole other ballgame.
“We can’t grow more ice. We can’t put a fence up,” McCall, director of conservation outreach and staff scientist at the nonprofit Polar Bears International, told Mongabay in a video interview. “The conservation approaches, management and planning are just so different.”
Since then, McCall has worked with her colleagues to study and protect the Arctic and its native species, such as polar bears (Ursus maritimus) and beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas). One of the organization’s long-running projects, called Beluga Cam, uses boats in the Churchill River in Hudson Bay, Canada, to gather footage of the annual migration of about 57,000 beluga whales.
The initiative is part of a larger citizen science project that brings people from around the world to help researchers identify belugas from the visuals and make observations about them. This year, the project got an upgrade with the use of a new boat that houses the cameras and other equipment during the course of the migration season.
“We have also been able to, over time, actually identify individuals,” McCall said. “To see that whale come year after year is super exciting because it’s really hard to get that sort of stuff usually.”
Alysa McCall spoke with Mongabay’s Abhishyant Kidangoor about the Beluga Cam, her hopes for conservation in the Arctic, and the interventions required at local as well as policy levels. The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Mongabay: What got you into this line of work? What is it about protecting belugas, polar bears and sea ice that attracted you?
Alysa McCall: I stumbled into this work. I was always interested in wildlife and was interested in being a wildlife biologist when I was doing my bachelor’s degree. I was in British Columbia in the grasslands area doing projects on mice and helping with badgers and these small animals in a desert landscape. My supervisor for that work knew this polar bear researcher in Alberta, and connected me there for my graduate work. When I moved over, I started looking at polar bears. It’s hard not to love a polar bear and be in awe of them.
I found the conservation of it also so fascinating from a biologist’s point of view. When I was in the grasslands, we were looking at things like the impact of grazing on small mammals. We could add water to an area, and in a month or two, we would see a change to the animals. Or we could put up a fence and immediately change the landscape and the animals within it. Everything was really quick and achievable. Then you go to the Arctic and you see there are also these habitat concerns, but we can’t do anything about it. We can’t just grow more ice. We can’t put a fence up. We can’t manipulate this right now. It really is this global thing that’s going on. The conservation approaches, management and planning are just so different, and it’s a really interesting challenge, but one that can also be frustrating. But that’s why I love this stuff because we need people working on the things that aren’t immediately changeable.
Mongabay: How are polar bears, belugas and their habitats faring? What are the challenges they face?
Alysa McCall: The sea ice forms the base of the ecosystem in the Arctic. We like to say that the sea ice is to the ocean what soil is to a forest. Everything’s coming out of there. The algae are growing within the sea ice. We have this underwater garden. They’re feeding the little creatures that feed the fish that feed the seals. The seals then feed the polar bears and, of course, the belugas are eating the fish. Then people are up there too. All these different creatures rely on that sea ice as the base of the ecosystem.
Beluga whales, because they have no dorsal fin, can get right up among the sea ice and get protection from orca whales [Orcinus orca] that have a dorsal fin and can’t get in the sea ice. Belugas really are ice whales and blend in with the ice. Polar bears, of course, live on top of the ice and they’re using it as a platform to access seals. Their main prey is seals because they eat seal blubber. They are using ice for traveling, for mating, for hunting, and so it’s critical to them.
When we lose sea ice, we see all sorts of things happen. Beluga whales are still doing OK right now, but they will be impacted by the changes in the ice in terms of having less protection. There will be more orca whales, and then the fish species that they eat are shifting. We’re seeing changes in the fish as the waters warm up.
Polar bears, as we lose ice, are losing access to food. In certain areas, they’re not eating as much. And for any animal, including humans, if you don’t have as much nutrition, over time, bodies get smaller and weaker. You don’t have as many babies. The babies can’t make it to adulthood. We’re seeing several polar bear populations shrink. For humans in the north, also, it’s getting more dangerous because they use ice also to travel, to hunt and to get access to food. They’re losing that and it’s becoming less predictable.
Even outside of the Arctic, sea ice is the Earth’s air conditioner. It reflects so much sunlight away from Earth. It prevents the warmth from being absorbed in the water. But as we’re losing it, we’re not able to have that cooling effect as much. We need that cooling effect because sea ice helps regulate climates all over the planet. We really do want to keep it around for all these different reasons. We can’t overstate how much we love sea ice.
Mongabay: Your latest project has to do with beluga migration. Why is that important to monitor?
Alysa McCall: There’s a handful of populations of beluga in the Arctic. Some stay in the Arctic their whole lives, but there are tens of thousands of beluga whales that do migrate every summer. The population we’re looking at is the Western Hudson Bay beluga population. It’s almost 60,000 belugas, maybe 57,000 belugas. They stay in the Arctic all winter and then in the summer months, they come down into Hudson Bay and they fill up these estuaries and these rivers.
This is another Arctic species that’s going through a lot of changes we don’t know a ton about. It’s a species that’s really important to Indigenous people and just has a lot of conservation management concerns in the long term. The more we know now, the better we can do in the future.
Mongabay: What is the Beluga Cam? What are you learning from it?
Alysa McCall: Our beluga cam is in the Churchill River. There are maybe around 5,000-6,000 belugas in that general area right around Churchill. It’s so cool to see them. They’re coming in the summer. It’s like their summer holiday. They’re enjoying the relatively warmer waters. They’re molting their skin safely. When they’re in the river, again, they’re safe from orca whales because orcas can’t swim in the river. It’s too shallow.
They’re molting their skin. You see them sloughing off their skin. They’re eating a ton of fish. They’re taking care of their babies. They may be giving birth late in the summer, and they’re just kind of protected. It’s all these family groups that are swimming around and they seem quite social. This is part of what the cam is getting at because it’s amazing to see thousands of whales arrive every summer. But, of course, it’s hard to study things underwater.
With these cams, we can take videos and snapshots of all the whales we see all summer long. And then, we can use citizen science help on this platform called Zooniverse to sort out all these pictures by having people look at thousands of images and tell us what they see. We can get at females and males and family groups. How many babies are there? What moms are they with? What are they doing with each other? Are we seeing individuals come back year after year? There’s a researcher who’s looking at the vocalizations of the whales using a hydrophone to pick up the singing and the chattering because they have quite a sophisticated language.
Researchers have been able to pull out contact calls between moms and babies. So how do moms and babies communicate? There’s a ton of stuff we’re learning and a lot of stuff we don’t know.
We have a new boat this year and so we have more capability. The cameras are updated, and we have better internet out there. The stream is steady. I think it’s just like a great year of advancement for us.
Mongabay: Could you tell me more about the contribution of citizen scientists to this?
Alysa McCall: Beluga Cam has been going on for years now. We knew a researcher at the Assiniboine Park Zoo in Winnipeg, Manitoba. We knew him through other things. He approached us and was like, “Hey, this camera stuff you’re getting is really great. I think we could actually learn a lot from it. Let’s work together.” His team built this platform, Beluga Bits.
Every season, all our viewers, people around the world, are watching the cams and taking snapshots. These pictures also get put in the cloud and, at the end of the season, his team downloads a ton of data on these belugas, and they put it into Zooniverse. Then anyone can sign up to be a citizen scientist and genuinely help researchers understand what’s going on. These citizen scientists can log in, get a little lesson on what to look for, and then it starts showing them pictures and then they get to basically answer questions.
Can you clearly see a beluga there? What are you seeing? Is it an adult? Does it look young? Are there scars? I think at this point, we’ve had over 34,000 volunteers, and there’s been over a million classifications. There’s published research that they’ve been able to put out. It really has been a wonderful collaboration.
Mongabay: I’m curious to know if there was something that surprised you from all the data you have collected.
Alysa McCall: There was a jellyfish species that was spotted on the cam that no one knew was present in Hudson Bay. That was new. Maybe it’s always been there and no one has seen it, or maybe things are changing as the water’s warming up. We are learning all these things that go on underwater that we don’t know about.
We have also been able to, over time, actually identify individuals. There are thousands of whales, and they all look pretty similar. But there have been a few cases where our citizen scientists have been able to say, “Hey, look at this particular mark or scar. This is the same beluga whale.” To see that whale come year after year is super exciting because it’s really hard to get that sort of stuff usually.
Belugas are always so chatty and happy. They’re the sweetest. The beluga season is always really nice for us. A lot of us play the cams in the background while we’re working. It’s just nice to see them every day and I think we can all use a reason to smile.
A big part of our mission is to inspire people about how amazing the North is, and how these animals are incredible. There are good things worth protecting out there. Using this kind of inspiration and awe to inspire some conservation action, or just have people spread the love and talk about these things, ultimately benefits all creatures and people.
Mongabay: Why is this initiative more important now than ever before?
Alysa McCall: The world is at a boiling point in some way. We are also at a tipping point, or getting there, for climate change. We really do need big actions taken broadly. We need leaders that care about future generations, about protecting the world, managing our natural resources, and doing things that set us up for success. It is about belugas and polar bears, but ultimately, it’s about our own future and encouraging change. We need to keep this Earth as beautiful as it is, and we need to be acting now. If we do nothing to change our current path, we’re going to lose a lot of sea ice and polar bears and other Arctic species by the end of this century.
Mongabay: What more needs to be done at a local level as well as a policy level?
Alysa McCall: The most direct and obvious thing we need to do is use cleaner energy systems. We need to be moving away from fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, and toward cleaner energies like solar and wind. Nothing is perfect in this transition, but we need to be making that transition. I know we can do it. It wasn’t that long ago that there were no cell towers around. We didn’t have planes a century ago, or more than that. Humans can absolutely make these big infrastructure changes and we need to be doing that. We need to be switching to cleaner energy. That’s number one. We need to be getting these emissions out of the atmosphere, or lowering our emissions.
To accomplish that, we really need to be talking about it. We need people to understand what’s going on. We need to get people passionate, maybe even a little bit angry, at some of their leaders and politicians and business owners who are making these decisions. The people in power need to care about the people. Talking about it, voting, spreading good information and letting yourself fall in love with Earth and wanting to protect it is hopefully going to help.
Mongabay: Pertaining to the belugas, what is your biggest hope? If we chat again in five years, what do you hope you’ll be telling me?
Alysa McCall: Even if we made a lot of changes now, we might not see the positive impacts in five years. But I would say, in five years, I hope the Beluga Cam is still going strong along with the things we were learning more about, like family structure.
When it comes to bigger changes, I have seen a slow shift. I’ve been working with polar bears for 15 years now, and 15 years ago, when I used to talk to people about climate change, I got a decent amount of pushback. Now, I feel like there has been a shift, and more people are getting serious. In five years, I would like to see even more of a shift with people getting on board with cleaner energy, and clean energy becoming more accessible and affordable to more people.
So more affordable clean energy. More people on board with a clean future. And the belugas are doing great. That’s the hope in five years.
Banner image: A beluga whale in the Arctic Ocean near Norway. Image by Vincent Kneefel / Ocean Image Bank.
Abhishyant Kidangoor is a staff writer at Mongabay. Find him on 𝕏 @AbhishyantPK.
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