Women in conservation make waves at inaugural Women Loving Whales talk
- Ellie Ruel
- Sep 10
- 10 min read
New organization hosts first-ever speaker event, discusses future plans, three new flukes nicknamed
By Ellie Ruel
Juneau Independent
This story has been modified to update two of the speakers' titles and the mission of Women Loving Whales.
Cetacean fans filled Gold Town Theater on Thursday night to listen to a lineup of five women leading in conservation and science discuss their projects. The “Making Waves” speaker series was the first larger event and main fundraiser for the new local conservation and activism organization Women Loving Whales, which launched on World Oceans Day during Pride Month this year.
“We believe if people are supported, they will feel more empowered to be more honest and effective science communicators and conservationists. We think science is for everyone, no more mansplaining or gatekeeping jargon,” said cofounder Chloe Brown. “We want everyone to feel safe, to spirit, to share their passions and to learn, and ultimately, we hope that more marginalized people will feel confident to explore their passions, leading to healthier marine ecosystems, and a stronger connection between people and our oceans.”
Brown, Rylee Landen and Sam Carmack kick-started WLW after venting sessions between whale watches about misogyny, homophobia, racism and ignorance they felt in the ecotourism industry and issues related to the climate and wildlife. Lacking an official space to find support and connection, they made their own organization dedicated to blending science, conservation, and creativity.
"We talked about how there needed to be a dedicated and inclusive space for people to feel seen, heard, empowered and supported, be it in the marine science, conservation, ecotourism, or just as someone who cares about the oceans," Landen said.
"The truth is the constraints of working in ecotourism and the anxieties of living in the Trump administration, as well as the lack of inclusive leadership in the maritime industry were draining us. So while ranting and dreaming between shifts, we dreamed up Women Loving Whales," Carmack added.
Since its inception, the organization has hosted two beach cleanups and a camping retreat. Proceeds from ticket, raffle, and auction sales will go toward more WLW community-centered workshops, cleanups, and camps.
While some of the speakers weren’t specifically focused on whale conservation, all of them had some tie to Juneau and exemplified the spirit WLW is trying to convey.
“All these women are people who either created something on their own or maybe they didn't have the exact academic background or the ‘permission’ to do this,” Carmack said. “They just make their own space, so that's really inspiring to us.”
Like many of the speakers, Suzie Teerlink acknowledged the question of “Why whales?” She is a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration marine mammal specialist, assistant large whale entanglement coordinator, and founder of Juneau Flukes, an education and outreach website featuring whale fluke identifications and nicknames.
Teerlink said she was really "wearing that Juneau flukes hat" for this talk, and focused on her personal research and experiences through Juneau Flukes rather than her work for NOAA.
“I just keep coming back to the fact that I am captivated by them,” Teerlink said. “I find them so incredibly absurd, their size, the way that they live, the way they make their living. It's so bizarre to me, and we have this relationship with them, where we're so close but we're so far away.”
She emphasized that cetacean curiosity isn’t always easy to satiate, especially due to the size and habitat constraints whales bring to the table.
“We can't ask them questions,” Teerlink said. “We can listen to them, but we don't speak their language. We don't understand what it means, and we are terribly clumsy in their environment.”
Marine surveys can be used to track prey movements, hydrophones record underwater communication systems, and fluke photography can create a matchable catalogue of whales in the area. According to Teerlink, physical sampling gets a little trickier, since traditional methods of dart biopsy can provoke negative responses.
“It gets darted and then it just sinks,” she said, showing a video to the audience of a tissue sample being removed from a whale via dart biopsy. “It's unhappy with that, it didn't feel good, right? So I bring this up because I think that we constantly need to be evaluating this and understanding if the science is worth that effort, and so we have kind of moved away from biopsy. We've learned a lot from it, but we are in constant search of less invasive methods.”
One of those methods is a more complex suction tagging system, where tags with cameras and trackers are applied to a whale’s body using a vacuum. Drone photogrammetry has also progressed to the point where researchers can use top-down images to determine body composition, fat percentage, and whether or not the whale is pregnant. Researchers have also explored a novel option of attaching petri dishes to drones to collect droplets of mucus expelled from a whale’s blowhole, which can be analyzed.
“We can scrape them down and look for hormones. And we're really excited about exploring this particular method,” Teerlink said.
Teerlink said she enjoys talking about scientific methodology to make the subject more approachable.
“It's not rocket science,” she said. “It's actually just coming up with ideas and trying to test them out and figuring out what is within the realm of possibility, what's within the realm of funding.”
Teerlink’s talk wrapped up with a live vote to nickname three new flukes spotted this summer near Juneau. Mothman, Sprog and Astra won, and will be featured in the official Juneau Flukes catalogue.
“Every day on tour, every trip, guests ask how the whales get their names, because nicknames are something that really allows people to personify and individualize and connect with them,” Brown said. ”So it really is an honor to be involved in giving a couple of the flukes we’ve seen this summer here in Juneau that don't have their names, names so that they can have their fluke names in the database.”
Local researcher Kim Raum-Suryan also spoke, this time with a non-whale focus. She is a part of the Pinniped Entanglement Group, or PEG. Pinnipeds are a carnivorous sub-order including seals, sea lions and walruses. Raum-Suryan dabbled in different wildlife fields all over the country before discovering her passion for stellar sea lions while conducting surveys for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in 1998.
“This is the year 2000, so digital cameras were a big deal, and I begged my boss to get one, and he finally said yes,” Raum-Suryan said. “I was able to start photo documenting entanglements at the same time that we were doing these surveys, and then Fish and Game continued with this work. From 2000 through 2023, we've seen just a minimum of 870 individuals either entangled in marine debris or that have swallowed fishing hooks.”
She said most pinniped entanglements in Southeast Alaska result from loose plastic packing bands, rubber bands, and fisheries debris. Her advice to people is to “lose the loop,” or cut any looped material before throwing it away, since it could make its way to the ocean and pose severe hazards to wildlife.
Raum-Suryan and her 215-person team at PEG have been working on developing better strategies for freeing entangled sea lions by using a less risky blend of sedatives during rescue operations. The drug used previously, Telazol, is fatal to sea lions if they fall back into the water after being dosed. This also allows for better tagging and tracking, which can help PEG learn more about the population.
“After 13 years of just being able to collect this entanglement data, we are finally actually able to start responding to entangled sea lions,” Raum-Suryan said.
The rescue operations are still risky and expensive, so PEG is also focusing on deterring sea lions from entering high-risk fishery areas.
“This is a lose-lose situation for everyone. The fishermen are losing their gear. They're losing their catch. It's affecting their livelihood, and then the animals are being injured, and they also die as a result of some of these hooks,” she said.
Current research is focused on using acoustic technology to activate sea lions’ startle reflex. Triggering that reflex is important because sea lions can become accustomed to normal sound-based scare methods and eventually will start ignoring them.
“You see a lot of information in the news about whales, but you don't really see pinnipeds,” Raum-Suryan said. “That's my mission, to kind of get them back out there in the spotlight, educate others, find solutions to reduce entanglements, improve and expand upon our response techniques, and then, of course, safely, rescue and release them.”
Kelly Landen’s work as co-founder of Elephants Without Borders, based in Botswana, might seem like a far cry from whales, but she got her start on research vessels in Southeast Alaska. Landen discovered her love of elephants after a client at a boat company offered to show her philanthropic work in Africa. From there, she moved to Botswana, where she met her partner, Mike Chase, and founded her nonprofit aimed at tackling elephant conservation by circumventing bureaucracy and using a holistic yet data-driven approach.
“‘Why elephants?’ Because they're a keystone species, they're an umbrella species. If we can conserve the habitat for elephants across Africa, we're actually conserving the land for all wildlife,” Landen said. “That's why studying them specifically really helps.”
Humpback whales are also a keystone species, which have a disproportionately large effect on their natural habitat in comparison to their population numbers and can be common indicators of large-scale environmental shifts.
Susan Murray’s presentation started at the bottom of Alaska’s oceans and finished with whale conservation via sustainable fisheries management in California. Murray is deputy vice president of the Pacific branch of Oceana, an international ocean protection organization. Her talk at Women Loving Whales was her final speaking engagement before retiring from a 20-year career in Alaska.
“I can't think of a better way to go out than in an indie theater in Juneau, Alaska. It's been my hometown since 1990,” Murray said. “The main story here is, ‘How can we have fisheries and not be destroying the very ecosystem that those fish depend upon, and the other animals that are sharing the ecosystem with those animals?’”
Murray’s first exposure to conservation was through her grandmother, Eleanor Fletcher. Fletcher used to walk to the beach near her Florida home every day, recording turtle nests and sometimes housing them in her bathtub.
“I was very inspired by her. I went to Duke University. I was going to be a marine biologist, and they have a primate center, and I fell in love with lemurs,” Murray said. “I became an anthropologist and got certified to teach. I have never in one day of my life done anthropology or been a teacher.”
Her winding path eventually led her to Alaska’s oceans. She joined Oceana Pacific in 2003, a year after a NOAA researcher discovered coral gardens in the Aleutian Islands for the first time. According to Murray, it was legal to bottom trawl in those areas, a fishing method that can damage seafloor ecosystems. A 2004 Alaska Department of Fish and Game article said that one trawl can crush or dislodge tons of coral.
“It's a really effective way to fish. You can catch a lot of fish, but you catch everything else, and you destroy the habitat the fish depend upon,” Murray said. “A coral is a living animal. It's a bunch of living animals together. Their strategy is, ‘How do we build up to get off the sea floor so we can get nutrients that we can filter down to the lower corals?’ They are found, you know, at 200, 250, 300 meters, so they're not used to disturbance.”
Murray said Oceana Pacific went on to petition the National Marine Fisheries Board through the years to limit bottom trawling in areas with coral gardens, and the practice is now illegal along most of Alaska’s coast – except for around Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska.
In 2022, Oceana Pacific conducted an eight-day survey around Kodiak to look for evidence of coral gardens or other seafloor life. Using a remotely operated vehicle, the organization documented a variety of corals as well as a possible lingcod nursery. According to Murray, Oceana Pacific plans to advocate banning bottom trawling in the Gulf based on its results.
The second aspect of sustainable fisheries management Murray focused on was humpback whale entanglements off the California coast. During the state’s dungeness crab fishing season, whales frequently become entangled in pot lines. The problem has been exacerbated by warming seas driving anchovy populations, the whales’ main food source, closer to shore during the crab season.
“When whales are entangled, NOAA estimates 75% of those are fatal. And it is a long, slow, miserable death,” Murray said. “So there's a toolkit of what you can do. It's similar to bottom trawling. You reduce effort, you change gear, or you have time and area closures.”
While California implemented time and area closures that limited the fishing season, which have delayed season openings, Oceana Pacific began experimenting with ropeless pots. Rather than being attached to a buoy that creates a tangling hazard, the rope would remain coiled until fishers signalled for it to float through an onboard transponder. The experimental program allowed boats to link more pots together at the bottom, expediting retrieval trips, and let fishers harvest crab during the closures.
“They lost way fewer traps than the conventional fishery,” Murray said. “They loved it, and they can market it as whale-safe crab.”
Alaskan humpback and bowhead whales can also get entangled in crab pot lines. In 2023, whale calf Herbert was entangled and freed from a crab pot line near Favorite Reef.
For Women Loving Whales, this speaker series was just the beginning. Their future plans include a worldwide hydrofeminism book club, more monthly beach cleanups, a second camping retreat, and expansions to Maui and Mexico. Pursuing nonprofit status and applying for grants are also possibly in the works.
More information about WLW and upcoming events can be found on their new website.
“I think young people, if they feel very scared or afraid of what's going on in this country, that's very valid,” Carmack said. “But doing something action motivated like this in real life, in person, is the best thing to do.”
• Contact Ellie Ruel at ellie.ruel@juneauindependent.com.
