Coastal Institute

The bowhead whale is important both culturally and as a food resource to the Inupiat people of northern Alaskan coastal communities. These communities still depend on subsistence hunting and fishing for most of their nutrition. Archaeological evidence shows that bowhead whales have been harvested by Inupiat hunters at Utqiaġvik (formerly Barrow) for centuries. The rate of change of summer-fall conditions in the Arctic has accelerated. The fall of 2016 saw almost no upwelling winds, important for the generation of feeding hotspots along the Beaufort Shelf, and the bowhead whale migration path lay offshore of the shelf, almost out of range of the Utqiagvik hunters. The summer of 2019 was extremely warm along the entire Alaskan coast, with numerous die-offs of seabirds attributed to starvation because of a paucity of the large crustacean prey (copepods, krill). The landing of only one whale during the 2019 fall bowhead hunt at Utqiagvik is symptomatic of these changes. Also, aerial surveys sponsored by BOEM showed very few bowheads migrating during fall on the Beaufort Shelf; presumably the whales migrated offshelf in deeper water. Thus, evolving environmental conditions on the Beaufort Shelf appear to be changing the utilization of the shelf by the whales. Yet, our ability to diagnose the changes near Pt. Barrow and across the Beaufort Shelf that may have influenced the bowhead whale migration and the persistence of this “new normal” is impaired because we have no contemporary measurements of hydrographic and whale prey conditions.