The Safina Center Podcast Episode 1: Katlyn taylor
On this episode of the Safina Center Podcast, we had the opportunity to speak with Safina Center Fellow Katlyn Taylor about her recent expedition to Antarctica, her current projects, and some whale news.
Katlyn Taylor is a marine biologist, naturalist, guide, and U.S. Coast Guard licensed captain. She has worked the past eight years on ecotour vessels all over the United States. She has a passion for science, particularly marine science, but what really drives her is sharing that passion with other people. She strives to share her knowledge with people in a way that inspires them to care more for our planet and take action to protect it.
You can find more of Katlyn’s work at https://www.thewhalenerds.com/podcast and https://www.wildmontereybay.com/.
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Louis: Hello everyone, my name is Louis Pagillo, and you’re listening to the first episode of the Safina Center Podcast.
Joining us today from Portland, Oregon, is Junior Safina Center Fellow Katlyn Taylor. Katlyn is a marine biologist, naturalist, guide, and U.S. Coastguard licensed captain. For nearly a decade, she’s traveled the Ocean on ecotours, educating guests and sharing her passion for marine science.
Between her expeditions, Katlyn is the host of the WhaleNerds podcast, where she recounts her recent travels, provides updates on the whales and wildlife she sees, comments on major marine news, and interviews scientists, conservationists, and artists.
This year, Katlyn and marine photographer Jodi Frediani, plan to release their book “Wild Monterey Bay,” an anthology of stories from over 40 different people detailing their most memorable experiences with the wildlife in Monterey Bay.
Thank you for joining us today, Katlyn.
Katlyn: Thank you, happy to be here.
Louis: So, as you mentioned before we started, you’re back on land for the first time in a little while.
Katlyn: Yeah, it’s been a while! I was working in the Antarctic for about five and a half months. I mean, we would come back to sure for one day and port in Argentina or Chile every couple weeks, but otherwise mostly on the ship.
Louis: So tell me about your last expedition. How long were you gone, where’d you go, all that.
Katlyn: Yeah so, it was a bit of a snowball winter, really. So I started with a contract to go down to South Georgia, Falkland Islands in Antarctica, and that week as I was preparing to leave, I signed contracts to stay on that ship for another six weeks, and ended up while on that ship picking up work through the end of March.
So I didn’t really intend to be in Antarctica working five and a half months, but that’s how it all ended up working out. Laughs
Louis: So that was just like a single, straight expedition, pretty much? Just five and a half months down south.
Katlyn: Yeah, so I switched… I worked on four different ships, I had two two-week breaks in the middle of things, which was good. But yeah, there was one stretch where I worked on the same ship for seven weeks, and then I worked on another ship for a month straight, and then at the end I did one ship for three weeks and one ship for a month.
Louis: And you do eco-tours on those ships, what exactly does that entail for you?
Katlyn: Yeah, so, they’re expedition-style cruise ships, but they are cruise ships. So what that means is that they’re smaller, they’re not like the floating cities that you see maybe in the Caribbean or around Florida or something like that, or maybe in the Mediterranean. But, they still have a hundred to 500 people on them, but when you’re in Antarctica, part of the Antarctic treaty is that there’s no infrastructure for tourism. That's not allowed. You’re not allowed to build docks, you’re not allowed to build an air strip, nothing like that.
So how we get people on shore in these remote areas is we take them in the zodiacs. We have these little inflatable boats that are stored on the bigger ship, and then we drop those down onto the water and then we drive them those to shore, or we take them to drive around in the zodiacs. And so that part is more like the actual tour part, so like you take them on sure and lead them on a hike, or you take them to a penguin colony or you drive them around and talk about the wildlife and the ice.
There is still guiding that you do on the ship, but then the guests can also kinda do what they want. They can hang out in their room and watch TV, they can go sit at the bar… you know, so there’s some guiding you do on board and lecturing, but most of it happens when you’re off the ship and taking people out into the field and experiencing these remote places.
So it is still, like, tourism… we do a little bit of research, we support whatever the government organizations or the research bases need where the can, but we’re mostly taking people out to experience this place.
Louis: Mhm, and something I’ve always really admired about when you do those tours is that you, as a marine biologist, sort of bring a lot more information both in and out of them, especially on the WhaleNerds podcast.
Katlyn: Yeah!
Louis: I feel like every time I’ve listened to an episode of the WhaleNerds, you’re always like, ready to talk about a very specific whale that you’ve seen, both like, the name, where it’s from, where it was last spotted and everything, and I’ve always loved that and how much you keep track of that.
Katlyn: Yeah, I mean, it’s in the name right? Like, totally a Whale Nerd! Laughs
I think one of the things that makes an experience with wildlife more meaningful for people is when it’s personal… and now, especially with the technology we have at our disposal—like the ships have Star Link Wi-Fi, so often we have coverage to look up who the whales are… and then HappyWhale is an incredible tool where they have the matching software where you can get a match for what whale you’ve seen within just a few seconds.
And so, being able to go back on the ship, run the ID on the computer, and then be able to tell guests before dinner who those whales were, is a really powerful tool. And some of them we know a lot about them, some of them we know nothing about them, and some of them are new to science. Like, in Antarctica especially, we had all kinds of whales that had never been documented before. And that’s exciting for guests too, like they got to help document this whale for the first time ever.
Louis: And so you also contribute to like, HappyWhale and other various archives that document them?
Katlyn: Totally, everywhere I go I definitely will always support putting data into HappyWhale unless there’s some sort of research ask not to, but for the most part I put it all in there. And any time the ship is supporting another project, if it’s I-Naturalist, if it’s a small research lab… sometimes we collect plankton samples and process them and send them to a lab, and whatever we can do to help people get this work done in these remote areas, I’m all for it.
Louis: So I do want to ask one more question about that last expedition. I believe it got… you ran into some problem with the avian flu.
Katlyn: Mhm.
Louis: Could you talk about that a little bit?
Katlyn: Yeah so, on our first trip to South Georgia of the season, we were one of the first ships to visit the island—I think we were like the third or fourth ship for the year and we all came within a couple days of each other. And at that point, we had quite a bit of warning and education from the management organizations that manage the Southern Ocean, so that’s the South Georgia government, and the IAATO organization—the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators—giving us a lot of tools ahead of time. Like, “HPIA has made it all the way to the bottom of South America, so we’re expecting it to cross the Drake… so what we need you to do is be our eyes and ears and let us know what’s happening, and if you see avian flu or if you see mass mortality, we want you to not operate in those locations.”
And so, the first trip of this season we saw a few things that were suspicious, like there were maybe a few more dead seals than were “normal,” but when you have a beach with thousands of seals on it, there are going to be a few dead ones, that’s just how it works. But we also saw like, animals floating and being eaten by other birds and things like that, and so we kind of were like “this is a little suspect, we’re not sure if it’s HPIA or if it’s just normal mortality.”
And then behind us, there was another couple ships that visited a lot of the same sites just a few days later, and they reported mass mortality. Like we saw maybe four or five dead animals, they saw 30 or 40 dead animals just a few days later. It did end up being avian influenza, so especially in elephant seals it really was more of a seal flu than it was a bird flu in South Georgia, and it really started to build… by the maybe second or third trip of the season, about a third of the island had sites closed—and that’s determined by the government of South Georgia—and so it really changed how we had to think about operations, like “Where can we go?” We’re using sites that are not used very often, so then we kind of got a different situation with risk assessment and experience. And then even at some of those sites, we saw things that were suspicious… you know, we saw, maybe they weren’t in the penguin colony but we saw a bunch of dead birds up on the hill, or maybe we saw a few seals that were acting kind of funny…
By my last trip of the season down to South Georgia—which was February?—only two sites on the whole island were open. Well, three, but one of them had a bunch of carcasses all over it, and we were not going to land people there, even though we were told it was safe.
So yeah, very challenging! Laughs
Louis: You had mentioned in the most recent story that you wrote for our blog that like… there were also all these different precautions you had to take that were almost similar to COVID
Katlyn: Yeah
Louis: Like disinfecting all of your equipment, like doing all of that… and I can’t believe that you guys were like… sort of some of the first people to witness it as it happened down South like that.
Katlyn: Yeah… Yeah so it’s um… some of the protocols that were recommended to us… when you go to remote areas, you always do some level of biosecurity because guests are coming from everywhere in the world. They have seeds in their backpacks and in the soles of their shoes, and dirt and rocks and who knows what else. Like, sometimes you are cleaning people’s equipment and they’re like “I’ve never done this to my stuff before!” and I’m like, “You just told me you’ve been on three continents in the last five months!
Laughs
It’s not good! That’s scary!
But yeah, so we always clean their stuff… and then it used to be that you just cleaned the ship’s gear between regions. But now, it’s between every single site. So, if you’re doing two operations a day, you are cleaning and sanitizing that equipment twice a day so that it’s prepared for your next operation. You always clean it when you come back in.
So we have like a… a chemical called Virkon, it’s like a chlorine-based biocide, so everything physically needs to be washed, if it’s got dirt or sand on it or whatever on it then it’s gotta be sprayed with the biocide. And we started to get pretty clever and efficient to like, minimize how much time we were spending cleaning stuff, but we would also like, use tarps and cargo bags to put things in. So as long as your bag didn’t touch the ground and it went inside the cargo bag or on the tarp, it was okay, and if you suspected it was dirty, then spray it with the biocide.
But yeah, it’s a lot of extra work to manage people’s equipment. They can’t set anything on the ground so then you’re constantly like “Please don’t set down your bag!” or like “Put your lifejacket in the bag!”
Laughs
It’s kind of like the “Please put your mask on!” thing, except like “Please don’t sit down, please don’t sit on the ground” haha.
Louis: Yeah, except with like, everything pretty much
Katlyn: Yes!
Louis: It really does remind me of like, earlier COVID, during the early pandemic when nobody was really quite sure yet, so most people were just taking every single precaution.
Katlyn: Yeah.
Louis: And I love seeing that for wildlife, because I feel like, you know, we don’t often hear about that.
And I know that, like you said, you guys do sanitation and whatnot every time you go to a different region and every sort of remote travel, but hearing it being done so often, and specifically to try and combat a different pandemic, is sort of like, reassuring? It’s not reassuring to hear that it still spread anyway, and hear what had happened, but it’s nice to know that humans are putting an effort into like, not making things worse than they already are.
Katlyn: Yeah, I mean, it’s such an immense privilege to be able to go to these places… I mean, Antarctic tourism is growing, but like a fraction of the world’s population is visiting this place. And so, that’s, in my opinion, kind of like the contract you signed by agreeing to go to a really remote area like this, is that you agree to do whatever you can to keep it a safe place and a healthy place.
And you know, I know it’s annoying, especially if you go on a trip that’s like, Falkland Islands, South Georgia, and Antarctica, you’ve gotta like, vacuum your clothes and your backpacks like three times. But we ask them to check their boots before they go out every single time, and we check their boots at the gangway, you know. We’re really on it about trying to make sure that things are clean.
And I know some people definitely got annoyed… just like with COVID, with people having to wear their masks going places. But I think that actually kind of helped, that we had just gone through our own pandemic, and so people weren’t unfamiliar with the fact that we had to do some sort of sanitation protocols.
Louis: Mhm.
Katlyn: I mean, transmission risk to people is very low, but we don’t want to take infectious material from one place to another and spread it either to the animals. Like, maybe we’re not going to get sick by not cleaning our boots, but we could take that material to another penguin colony and they could get sick.
Louis: Right. So, I wanted to ask a bit about Wild Monterey Bay.
Katlyn: Yeah.
Louis: Tell me a bit about what that project is, and what working on it has been like.
Katlyn: Yeah, so it started… it’s quite a long time in the making. So when I was working in Monterey, I met Jodi, who’s my co-editor on the project, and it really was her idea, that she had wanted to collect these stories from people about Monterey…
Because it’s just one of those places where everybody’s got a wild story about something, like Steinbeck’s wrote about, like Cannery Row is definitely true.
Laughs
Katlyn: It’s just one of those places! And it has some amazing, world-class wildlife. I mean, some of the roughest weather you’ll ever operate in, but the BBC and Nat Geo are there every couple years for a reason, because it’s just such an incredible place.
So she told me this idea years ago, probably like 2014, she was like “I really want to collect stories from people here.” And I was kind of like “Yeah, okay!” and she kind of brought it up again and was more serious… and she was like “I want to do video interviews, and I have a list of people already that I want to interview,” and I was like “Oh, okay… let’s do it!”
So, over the course of maybe two years, we collected about 40 different people’s stories… and we tried to get a variety of stories from people, like we chose people that worked in the commercial fishing industry and the recreational fishing industry, not just whale watching people that we knew.
Louis: Mhm.
Katlyn: And scientists, and people that were surfers… and everybody wanted to tell us a whale story!
Laughs
We were like, “No, but you’re a fisherman,” and they were like, “Yeah, but my most memorable wildlife encounter is with a whale!”
Laughs
Louis: That’s a sentiment I’ve heard from a lot of people!
Katlyn: Yeah, I mean, someday I’ll maybe try and figure out another book about the most memorable whale encounter. Because they are memorable animals, they’re very charismatic…
It’s just funny, by the end of the interviews, we had to started to have to ask people at the beginning like “We’d really like a story about your most memorable encounter pertaining to this,” to try and prevent how many people were giving us whale stories
Laughs
Louis: So I’m curious, I know you mentioned Jodi already had a list, but how exactly did you go about finding people to interview?
Katlyn: Some of it was, umm… that we started on the Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey. So there’s kind two areas in town if you’ve never been there: there’s the Fisherman’s Wharf, and then there’s Cannery Row. And they’re… as much as they’re similar, they’re like two separate universes in the same neighborhood.
And so, we started with the people we knew on the Wharf, like boat captains and things like that. And so we interviewed them, sometimes on their boats… like if you watch the videos that we put on YouTube, they’re like in their wheelhouse or in their cabin on their boat, because we needed a sort of quiet place to interview them, and on the Wharf there’s seagulls, and people running around, and hoses, and boat noise, and yeah.
Louis: It’s quite funny to think that the quietest place around was still on a boat.
Laughs
Katlyn: Yeah! Well in the offices, the phones are ringing and people are walking in and out of there, and yeah…
So we started with people we knew, and then kind of branched out from there. And the more years I lived there, the more people I had like, direct contact information with anyway… and once we had a few stories collected, that kind of helped us have some credibility to contact other people.
And then we started going for like, people at the Monterey Bay aquarium, which is a lot more of a formal process to request an interview… you know, like they have a PR department, and they need you to contact them first… you can’t just be like, even if you know the scientists personally you can’t ask them for an interview without going through the PR department.
So it kind of just spread out from there and then we got researchers at Moss Landing Marine Labs, and Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, and some of them were people that Jodi knew in Santa Cruz… like the two people that… one’s about someone on a paddle board and one’s about a lady surfing… fish and wildlife management folks Jodi knew from her career in the past working in forestry and things like that… so it was a little bit of a mix of like, who we knew, and who we had heard from people who would be like “Oh, you should talk to so and so!”
So that also snowballed it from there, too.
Louis: Yeah, I was really curious as to how you found all of those people, because looking at the website—which, for the listeners, I believe all of these stories are on the website… could you give us that URL?
Katlyn: Yeah! WildMontereyBay.com
Louis: So much simpler than I thought it was!
Laughs
But I was really shocked to see like, how many people from different walks of life you got, and I was really curious if you were doing man on the street interviews at that point, just because of how diverse they are.
Katlyn: Laughs
Yeah, well, and that was sort of strategic as well… because we very easily could have gotten like 40 different people that work in the boating industry to give us stories directly on the bay… but we wanted to try and stretch things a little bit more. Because, for me and Jodi, the wildlife is incredible… and so the stories being about wildlife really speaks to that. But I thinkt he stories and the people make the place. So showcasing the people and a wide variety of people and backgrounds is also part of the goal, because you know, more than just Steinbeck has wrote about the Monterey Area and Pacific Grove and Carmel, and like, it really is a unique place, and so we wanted it to be just as much about the people as it is the wildlife.
Louis: And at the same time like, all of those people’s stories and their relationship to the bay are totally shaped by the wildlife and those experiences
Katlyn: Yeah.
Louis: I love that like, almost symbiotic relationship you portray.
Katlyn: Yeah, I mean it’s definitely been… I wish some more publishing houses saw that!
Laughs
Because that part has been the hard sell, you know. They like, really want it to be a wildlife book, or they’re trying to like, put it into one category and Jodi and I are both kind of like “nah, but it’s not,” and then publishers are like, “No thanks!”
Louis: Yeah… that’s disappointing to hear, because there really is so much there.
Katlyn: Yeah, and you know, the Safina Center is part of why we’ve stayed hard on pursuing finding a publisher, because we had kind of gotten to the point where we were like “Well, maybe it’s not going to happen.” You know COVID threw a wrench in most industries, and publishing was one of them. Like, a lot of publishing houses were leery about taking on risky books, because they were just like “We don’t have any margin to not make money.”
Which is understandable, I mean it really rocked the world, and it still affects how we make decisions about projects. And, so when the Safina Center approached me and was like “Well, we still think this is a worthwhile project, this is important and it should be published.” I was like, okay, we’re gonna keep trying. We’re going to find someone, and we have! We found an editor whose affiliated with a small publishing house, and so things have momentum again and it’s starting to look like a real book, not just a pile of essays that we collected.
Louis: I’m so excited to hear that! Are there going to be any “never before seen” stories in the book, or is it all from the website.
Katlyn: No, it’s all from the website. We had some ideas of maybe trying to fill out the diversity a little bit more of people and stories, but, it’s like, if you add one more, how many “one mores” are you going to have? You have to kind of like, make a line somewhere
Laughs
Louis: Yeah.
Katlyn: There’s a little bit of writing from me and Jodi, just providing some context about the project and about Monterey. But, mostly it’s just going to be those stories compiled, and we’ll start with a print book with photos in it from Jodi, and then we’ll see how things go from there. I mean it would be really cool I think to make it an audio book at some point, but we have to get the printed one first and see how it goes.
Louis: Right. I actually didn’t know there was going to be photographs in there, and I’m really excited because I love Jodi’s photography. I haven’t seen much of it, but from what I have seen, it’s astounding.
Katlyn: Yeah, she has some really beautiful stuff! We have a few photos that we’ve asked storytellers to provide or that we’ve gotten from sources in Monterey or in California, just things that we don’t have photos of like bioluminescence and a couple other things. But mostly it’s Jodi’s photos, and yeah, it’s going to be really good.
Louis: I want to ask you about your other major project, the WhaleNerds.
Katlyn: Yes!
Louis: So tell me about how that started, how long you’ve been working on it now.
Katlyn: Yes, it’s been five years… it started with me and some friends in the Winter time when whale watching is really slow in Monterey. We were just like hanging out at Slater’s house, and like, I think we watched Free Willie or something.
Laughs
And then we were just nerding-out about whales and Slater was like “We should record this! We should record these conversations!” and I was like “Really?” “No dude, we really should make this a podcast or something.”
And so then we were like “…okay!” and so we started recording the podcast… I think we tried to do it at his house and it was just too noisy, like with the dog and everything… and then his wife had like a beauty studio… and so we would use the back room and record in there.
Laughs
And we would all sit at a table together because like… we didn’t really… we were just winging it! We had no plan!
Louis: Uh-huh
Laughs
Katlyn: The first 10 or 15 episodes, we don’t even have a topic list hardly, we just liked talking about whales.
Louis: I love that you had your own little recording studio!
Katlyn: Yes, yeah!
Louis: It makes it feel so much more official than just like, a few people talking about whales in a back room.
Katlyn: Honestly, it was kind of hard to like, not use it anymore. Like once she wasn’t using that space anymore, we were like “No, we lost our spot!”
Laughs
And um… the guests that we would have on like, they would either come to the recording studio and we would share microphones and be really close to each and both talk into the same one, because we had no budget, like we were just using our own money. And in the Winter, you don’t have that much money when you work in the whale watching industry because you don’t run that many trips.
And so, we were just trying to make it work and… our friends that we’d put on the contest that were there, or like, people that came from out of town, we’d be like, “You’ve gotta come on the podcast while you’re here!”
And Slater, you know, he’s an incredible photographer and social media guy, so he just took the WhaleNerds Instagram especially and just ran with it, and it got really popular quickly. At the time, there wasn’t a whole lot of podcasts about whales… I think there’s only like five or six big ones on Apple Podcasts. And so, we kind of had like the corner of the market, so all of our whale friends were just pushing it out like “Check this out! Let me know if it’s good! Ask us questions!”
And then we started to kind of get into a rhythm and a regular recording routine, and then I was like “Okay, we need some structure in these episodes.” And so that’s when we started with the intro sound of like, the whale blowing in everyone’s face and they’re laughing… we had an agenda that we were going to talk about and like research papers that I would like, read ahead of time and that kind of stuff.
And then we would formally try to invite people and do it over… we were doing it over Skype, then we started doing it over Zoom… yeah, and so here we are, five years later.
Different people have come and gone—hosting, co-hosting… and it’s still like… we do it on the side for fun, so like, whoever’s available and whatever’s going on, if we can record then great.
I do episodes by myself, which is fine because like, my schedule is very unpredictable so I just do it when I can.
Yeah, but I think it’s a fun way to communicate science and it’s something that’s not super traditional… I don’t know what other scientists think of it, but the ones that come on have a lot of fun. Like, they’ll usually email afterwards like “That was so fun!”
Louis: Yeah I think that’s something… you know, you mentioned it’s mostly a “for fun” thing, even though it’s grown so much… and I actually love that, because it’s hard to find science podcasts that are really just like, passionate people like, nerding out about a topic.
Katlyn: Yeah!
Louis: Like they’re normally a lot more structured, so that’s something I’ve always found really refreshing about WhaleNerds.
Katlyn: Yeah, and I mean, we don’t really have the capacity to do all of these inserts and like, audio stuff… and we don’t have the kind of budget to like, send it off to an editor to put it together and stuff like that…. But, I really love the podcast “Ologies” with Alie Ward, I think she’s an incredible science communicator, and she also ahs a lot of fun on her episodes, and she’s just like a true total nerd at heart… and so when I listen to her podcast, I’m like “Oh man, it would be so cool to do some of this stuff for WhaleNerds…”
But at the same time, she’s got like, a budget and a production company and like…
Laughs
Louis: Yeah.
Katlyn: And I’m just like, “um… I do this in my family bedroom.” Like in my parents house, in my childhood bedroom recording this, you know?
Laughs
Louis: A lot of people don’t realize how much work can go into a podcast!
Katlyn: Yeah!
Louis: Even now, you know… this was an idea where we were like, “Oh, we’ll interview our fellows and record it!” But there’s so much more beyond that, like, behind the scenes.
Katlyn: Yeah.
Louis: And even for like, lower-tech podcasts such as the WhaleNerds, there’s a lot that goes into it! You need like, advertising, social media stuff… And I know you’ve said Slater is very good with that.
Katlyn: Mhm.
Louis: And that’s something I’ve definitely noticed, I love the WhaleNerds Instagram!
Katlyn: Yeah!
Louis: Yeah, I’m impressed that you guys have kept going for this long and garnered such a huge following, too.
Katlyn: Yeah there was a few times, especially during COVID where none of us were on the water, where we were like “I don’t know, maybe we give up…” And I was like, “No! No, we’re not! We’ll take a break, and we’ll regroup…”
And then the same thing when I started working on the ships, it got a lot more difficult to schedule like, time to record, we haven’t had guests on in a long time… But I still was like, you know what, part of what was our podcast was trip reports, and I’m going to some pretty cool places. When I come home, I’m just going to record about that, and like, just keep it going and see what happens.
And yeah, we still have really great listenership when I pull the statistics, and people will still message me on the Instagram, or like email the WhaleNerds account and comment on the latest episodes. I’m like, “People are still listening,” and so that’s motivation to be flexible and keep it going.
But yeah, I mean it’s a lot of work, even just doing a trip report. I have to like, write out ahead of time what I’m going to say so I can kind of like, kind of have a logical episode.
Laughs
Louis: Uh-huh, I’ve noticed like, they still feel structured enough to where it doesn’t just feel like someone sitting there like “uhh… so then I went here…”
Katlyn: There is still some of that!
Laughs
But it is like, I try to have it in order, and then like when I do a research paper one, trying to pull together two or three different papers that fit the same theme that are recent science… you know, it takes me a couple hours to like, read those and then process them into digestible information and be able to report it on the podcast, and then also link the papers to each other while I’m talking, you know.
For a science episode, it’s probably five or six hours worth of research and writing ahead of time. And then with guests, you know… even though it’s easy to just have a chat and have guests, you still have to write questions ahead of time, you’ve got to read about the person if you don’t know them and make a bio for them… yeah, it’s a couple hours worth of work sometimes.
Louis: Yeah, for sure!
I wanted to ask you about some whale news on that topic.
Katlyn: Yeah, sure!
Louis: It’s not fun whale news… I have a feeling you know what I’m about to ask about just from that
Katlyn: Laughs
Louis: So recently, in Japan, the construction of the Kangei Maru, a 47 million dollar whaling vessel, had just completed. It’s the first new ship of its kind in 70 years, according to the Guardian, and a lot of people are very concerned about how exactly it’s going to used. They claim it’s just going to be used in coastal Japan—which is already concerning to begin with because whaling is… definitely not a great practice.
Katlyn: Mhm.
Louis: But a lot of people are realizing that the ship is equipped to go all the way down to the Antarctic.
Katlyn: Mhm.
Louis: And again, they haven’t said that they’re going to do that and they’ve vehemently denied that they will. But, the ship is equipped for that, and people are very scared about that. So I wanted to get your thoughts about this attempted “revival” of the whaling industry in Japan, and where it could possibly go in the future.
Katlyn: Yeah, it’s umm… there’s a lot of like, social and political opinions to consider when you talk about the Japanese whaling… and kind of some human history context as well.
So, after World War II, part of what Japan’s government rations program for providing protein to people was whale meat. And so there is kind of like a recent resurgence of national pride about whale meat, but there’s also conversations happening about “is whale meat even safe to serve anymore?” Like there’s a lot of toxins in it, that kind of stuff. And unfortunately, the general opinion of the Japanese people is not really that in favor of whaling, but the people who have the political willpower and the money that are in favor of whaling are very effective at continuing to keep the industry going.
And they’re not part of the whaling commission anymore, and so there’s less ways to like, peer pressure them into stopping the practice of whaling. And if they’re whaling in their own territorial seas or on the high seas, as long as they’re not taking an endangered species, there’s not really a whole lot of legal infrastructure to do anything. The only other way that people can pressure them is like what with Australia did with the International Court of Justice—if it’s a migratory species that will then affect the economy of that other country, they can bring another case maybe. Because the case with the Antarctic whaling is that they lost their permit, but now that they lost their permit. But now that they don’t even have a permit, they’re just doing their own thing. I don’t even know how you pursue that, like internationally.
The North Pacific is also a really nasty body of water… so even though this ship is equipped to go to Antarctica, it’s going to use a lot of those features in its own home waters off shore. Because, I’ve taken plenty of beatings in the North Pacific as well.
Laughs
Yeah, and I guess some of it is kind of like, we’re going to have to wait and see what they do… and I hate having to do that, like why is that our solution? But yeah, until they cross out of their own territorial waters, or they cross into the exclusive economic zone of another nation, or they cross 60 degrees South and they’re within the bounds of the Antarctic treaty… like, it’s just crime on the high seas. Like, that’s the unfortunate part of how we have legislated the Ocean, is that once you’re outside of the exclusive economic zone of a country, everyone and no one has rights to it.
And so it’s just like, people just go out there and do what they want. I mean, it’s the same thing with like offshore fishing like that, harvesting for sharks is like that… you know, who knows what people are doing out there because it’s really difficult to track, and we can’t just have satellites tasked on every corner of the ocean, and we can’t just have patrol boats out there, that’s just not feasible. So like, does the ship have an AIS tracker, are we going to have eyes on that thing all the time? I have no idea.
Louis: And one thing… That’s very scary to think about, but one thing I do think is worth mentioning, and you sort of touched on it already, is that, at least in Japan, the younger generation is definitely moving away from that.
Katlyn: Mhm.
Louis: Like, the same article in the Guardian—I think they were the first ones to cover this, it’s definitely the first place where I saw it—
Katlyn: Yeah.
Louis: Mentioned that most of the customers and people eating this whale meat, are a part of like an older generation who still have that pride for that post-World War II era economy and whatnot.
Katlyn: Yeah.
Louis: And a lot of younger people and tourists are sort of avoiding it completely. And I think that’s a positive thing to think about? Overall it’s still a pretty scary situation, but from what little I do know about Japan, the younger generation is absolutely moving towards a more like, liberal perspective on sort of everything, and that includes environmental justice.
Katlyn: Yeah, I mean, the same thing echoes across over in Iceland as well, right? It’s really just- you can count on one hand the people that are really involved in maintaining the Icelandic whaling effort. And so, it’s hopefully going to be phased out just by the sheer math of like, these people don’t live forever
Louis: Mhm.
Laughs
Katlyn: But like, how much damage could they do until then is the concern, right?
Louis: Right.
Katlyn: Especially with this new factory-based ship where they can like, take quite a few whales on board and process them every day, and we don’t know exactly what their plan is so we don’t know what species they’re targeting and at what level… and what are they doing with it other than eating it? If they’re just providing for a meat market, like they’re really not taking that many whales, unless they’re wasting a lot of it. I don’t know what other products they’re putting the whales into.
So that’s another question of like… this ship has the ability to process dozens of whales in a couple days.
Louis: Mhm.
Katlyn: The killing potential and power of it is scary. But then, at the same time like, where is it going? So how much are they really going to take? I don’t know.
I mean, I’m not justifying it—I don’t think it’s a good idea at all. But I’m also just not sure how to like, wrap my brain around it yet
Laughs.
Louis: Yeah, and it’s especially weird because, like you said, there’s a lot of older generation people in power who are very much for whaling industries, both in Iceland and Japan. And to my knowledge, it hasn’t really been profitable.
Katlyn: No, not as far as I know, no. And like you know, you can turn it fertilizer and animal feed and things like that, but that’s kind of like you’re coming up with ways to like, use the whale meat? Like, you don’t have a clear reason to take them other than like, whaling is something you want to do.
Louis: Yeah, because you could do all of that, with other animal products as well.
Katlyn: Yeah, and with composting of like, green waste stuff and farm waste… yeah.
But yeah, there’s definitely alternatives for all of the things they’re using whales for, so that’s another reason for so much criticism. And that was part of all of the criticism originally that Japan lost the permit for… you know, they’re doing all of these reproductive studies and like history studies, they’re saying—well, they’re doing diet studies, then they were publishing history and reproductive papers and we were like, “okay, that’s not what you have a permit for.”
Louis: Mhm.
Katlyn: And then, there was enough methods that were non-lethal to answer these same questions that they said they were trying to fulfill with the permit, that finally was enough evidence to revoke the permit. Like, you don’t need to kill the whale to answer these questions: we can do this by breath samples, we can do this by fecal samples, we can do this with biopsies… And so there’s not reason to kill the whale for this question.
And it’s kind of the same thing with like, feeding people, and producing animal feed and fertilizer and stuff like that. You don’t need to kill whales to do that, you can achieve that another way.
Louis: Right, and something that the Guardian article mentioned to is that whale meat is like, kind of a luxury? It’s not even efficient, and they’ve had to make it a lot more expensive to make it close to profitable, which is also turning people away from it even more. So it’s a very confusing and like, difficult situation… it’s sad to see.
Katlyn: Yeah.
Louis: I am a little hopeful because of that younger generation, but we’ll have to see what happens, like you said, which is very frustrating!
Katlyn: Yeah, and I know that like, this isn’t the best solution, but I know that Sea Shepherd is definitely keeping a close eye on whatever is happening. I don’t necessarily agree with their tactics, but I cannot deny that they are effective.
Laughs
And so, there are people that are definitely going to keep an eye on it and try to keep track of that ship as best as they can, and until then I think we all just have to reflect on like, how do you understand the history of why it’s still an industry, and what does it mean to the different parts of Japanese society. And for that matter, Iceland and Norway and the Faroe Islands, you know all of these nations that whale at a larger scale, and then like… is there anything you can do? You know, is there anything that you have the ability to help in the effort to convince people to not do it anymore. Or at least, you know, promote whale protection in your own area, because another thing I’ll say is that, whether we like it or not, we are all whalers. Especially in the United States, we have not found the political clout to change enough of our shipping practice near our coastlines, and enough of our stationary fixed fishing gear practices to reduce whale mortality. We have our own whales that are about to go extinct at our own hands via ship strike and entanglement: on the East Coast, the North Atlantic right whale; in the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea, the North Pacific right whale; we have not seen a serious increase in blue whale populations on the West Coast of the US, because we suspect for as many that are born, just any many or dying because of ship strike and entanglement.
So as much as we want to point fingers at these whaling countries, we also have work to do at home to protect our own whaling populations.
Louis: Right. I think that’s why so many people were like, kind of obsessed with the story of the orcas sinking ships from last year.
Laughs
Katlyn: Yeah, I mean… I just think killer whales are rude.
Laughs
Because they don’t actually hurt the people inside the boats, you know? They’re just like :I can break this, and it’s fun!”
Laughs
But, you see things like, you know on the West Coast US, in the Salish Sea, you see like Tahlequah… she carried her calf for 17 days after it died. You know like, that’s a serious display of grief that I don’t think anyone was really prepared to see go on that long. I mean, we’ve kind of known that like, pilot whales and killer whales have like funerals, especially for calves that die, and we have photos of them carrying them around but 17 days she carried that thing around the Salish Sea—to the point where she couldn’t keep up with her family.
And that’s a population of whales that’s also very likely to disappear within my lifetime if we don’t do anything about how we manage water and salmon.
And so, sinking boats is one thing, that’s like a PR stunt kind of thing.
Louis: Mhm.
Katlyn: But that clear like, “My baby died and I can’t do anything about it,” in a population that’s totally on the verge of collapse… I don’t know how we didn’t get the momentum to do something about the dams on the Snake River after that.
Louis: I actually hadn’t heard about that… and that’s heart wrenching, oh my goodness… that’s… wow.
Katlyn: Yeah, so as much as there’s some finger pointing to be done about the nations that still participate in commercial whaling for, in my opinion, no justifiable reason when you think about whales’ role in the ecosystem, we also like, are still incidentally whaling with our environmental practices in other countries as well.
And that’s an idea that was put forth by Michael Moore, who’s a phenomenal advocate for whales and research he’s had on the Eastern seaboard… I first heard him say that at an American Cetacean Society meeting I think in like 2014 or 2016, and my mouth was like… hanging open the rest of the night. I was like “Oh my god, you’re right!” As much as we want to talk about this, we’re doing it too!
Louis: I think a lot of industries in the US in particular are like, really quick to point figures to other countries. But like, we’re largely part of the problem, if not the problem when it comes to environmental issues.
Katlyn: Totally. For as big of a nation as “developed” of a nation as we are, we still have a huge environmental footprint in the US. Absolutely.
Louis: So, you know, why whales? Why marine science? What sort of started your passion with that?
Katlyn: Yeah, it kind… I feel like everything that’s happened to me since I’ve been like, interested in whales, has just been an accident, and I’ve just been like “yup, okay!”
I mean, I knew whales were cool, I liked the ocean as a child… but I didn’t have any dreams of becoming a marine biologist. I was just like, “Ah, I’ll be a veterinarian,” or “I’ll work in green technology, or… I don’t know.
And then I took a class at Oregon state about marine mammals. It was like a one weekend, low stakes, pass-fail type of class about marine mammals, and I was like… “oh my gosh… this is so cool!” I was asking Dr. Sumich like, all these questions like “Well what about this, what about this!?” and he was like “Katlyn. Science does not know the answer to your question.” And I was like “What do you mean!? This is a very basic question in biology!” and he was like “Yeah. We don’t know. Like, you need to study whales for a little bit and then you’ll figure out why we don’t know.”
And I was like “Okay,” so I came home from that weekend and changed my major to marine biology.
Louis: Laughs
Katlyn: And it’s basically been whales ever since!
But that’s the thing, right? What is it about whales that fascinates people? Like, with Wild Monterey Bay, everyone wanted to tell us a whale story. Like we had to ask them to not tell us a whale story.
And, it’s something that working in the eco-tourism industry, I’ve always tried to like, wrap my brain around like… what do people think a whale is before they get on the boat? Because sometimes after they see one, they’re like, “It’s not what I expected.” And like… well what are… what were you expecting?
Laughs
But you can’t really ask them that now because it’s biased, right? You know, there’s something about them, I don’t know if it’s just how charismatic they are, how big they are… especially with humpbacks, like you really can see their personality after spending 20 or 30 minutes with them sometimes, especially the ones that have a real distinct personality. And they are like, really graceful and really beautiful, so I don’t know if that’s just enough to captivate people but like… they definitely have that effect.
Louis: Yeah, I think every person I’ve spoken to who’s seen a whale in person is always like, incredibly captivated. And I think part of it has to do with how human they seem, and also how alien.
Katlyn: Mhm. Yeah.
Louis: Because they’re living in an entirely different world from us, yet we can still relate to them, right?
Katlyn: Yup, totally.
Louis: It’s different than, you know, having those same feelings towards a terrestrial animal, I feel like. Because it almost feels like they’re inviting you into their world.
Katlyn: I mean, I do think that there are… like, a lot of the land charismatic megafauna get people really wrapped up in it as well. I don’t know if like, on first impression they do, but I know that people can be really passionate about apes, and elephants, and big cats…
Louis: I’ve definitely heard the same thing about elephants in particular.
Katlyn: Yeah, and elephants and whales are not super unrelated to each other. And they do share some same cultural things and some same communication things. And so, I can see how elephants and whales end up pulling people in for the same reasons, because they have a lot of the same qualities when you experience them in the field.
But yeah, like one time I was working on the deck on a whale watching boat and this guy… super thick New York accent, totally dressed in hip-hop style, like streetwear, big jewelry… he came on the boat with his whole family, most of his family was not engaged, he’s maybe a year or two older than me… he’s running around the boat with his cellphone like “This is the coolest thing ever! These are handsome animals!” like “Wow, what a beautiful animal, man!”
And I was like, “You know what? You’re right.”
Louis: Laughs.
Katlyn: Like this guy had never seen a whale before, I’m sure he’d been on like the ferry to be on the ocean, but this was his first on-purpose whale watching trip, and he was just like… it was just someone that you would like, on first impression, not really think they were going to be into it, and he was having the time of his life. Like the whales got him, and he just loved it. And when I see people like that where I don’t expect them to be into the trip, it just makes me even more excited and passionate about like, getting people to see whales. Because I’m like, “oh yeah, you just never know who’s going totally fall in love after like 10 minutes with a whale!”
Louis: Alright, well I think that’s about all we have time for, so I want to thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Katlyn: You’re welcome!
Louis: And I want to ask, where can people find you?
Katlyn: Uh, so myself personally, Instagram is probably the easiest way to keep track of what I’m doing… kind of.
Laughs
And it’s @Katlyn.t and to follow the podcast, it’s @Whalenerds on Facebook and Instagram, or TheWhaleNerds.com
And then Wild Monterey Bay, it’s @WildMontereyBay for Facebook and Instagram, and WildMontereyBay.com.
Louis: I actually—I love your Instagram, by the way! There’s so many great photos, and I really like the highlights of the two birds… Nelson and Doug I believe?
Katlyn: Yes! Birds that land on boats.
Laughs.
Louis: Everyone should go check that out, so you can know what we’re talking about!
Katlyn: Yeah, I’m a closeted birder… I love whales, but also I’m a bird nerd!
Laughs
Louis: Alright well, this was Katlyn Taylor the Whale and Bird Nerd, thank you so much for talking to me today!
Katlyn: Thank you!