Officials ask Natives to call off beluga hunt

By The Associated Press

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But representatives of two Cook Inlet Native whale-hunting organizations said they have misgivings about suspending the small annual hunt only four years after it resumed.

Last year, scientists confirmed the deaths of 20 whales, including five or six suspected to have died when 46 whales were stranded in Turnagain Arm on Aug. 28.

Under previous agreements between local Natives and the National Marine Fisheries Service, the harvest would stop if more than 18 whales die in a season.

Formal regulations, however, have not yet been published and made final, though they contain the same trigger of 18 whale deaths. As a result, the agency has asked Native groups to voluntarily suspend the hunt as part of a 2004 co-management agreement, said biologist Kaja Brix, chief of protected resources in Alaska.

"The decision does not wholly rest in our hands," Brix told the Anchorage Daily News. "We did some accounting, and we sent out a letter that we hit the trigger in our agreement. ... We're still trying to get some feedback from the parties."

Representatives of two Native whale-hunting organizations question whether the agency's biologists took into account a recent surge in baby belugas.

More belugas swim in Cook Inlet than scientists may realize, said Peter Merryman, head of the Cook Inlet Marine Mammal Council and traditional chief of the Athabascan village of Tyonek.

"Every spring we see more calves," he said. "It's not our fault that they died naturally (in 2003), and why should we suffer?"

The depleted whales are thought to number 350 to 400 in one of the smallest genetically isolated cetacean populations in the world. Once thought to number 1,300, the belugas plunged to an estimated 347 by 1998 in a decline federal biologists blamed on overhunting by Alaska Natives.

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