The Ocean Wise Marine Mammal Rescue Centre, is Canada’s only dedicated marine mammal rescue facility and one of the largest rescue facilities in the world. Their current facilities allow for on-site rehabilitation of seals, sea lions, sea otters, sea turtles and small cetaceans, such as harbour porpoise. They are also equipped to respond to off-site marine mammal emergencies, including disentangling sea lions in the wild. Each year, the rescue program saves 100+ marine mammals and rehabilitates them for release back into their natural habitat. Head veterinarian Martin Haulena was kind enough to answer our questions.
Can you tell me a bit about the Marine Mammal Rescue Initiative, and what your team does?
The Marine Mammal Rescue Centre is the only facility of its kind in Canada. We can respond to all live-stranded marine mammal and sea turtle species. We have a fully capable hospital and highly trained veterinary staff with many years of experience working with these species. We bring animals in from every part of the BC coast and see over 150 live-stranded animals brought into the facility every year as well as work with animals in the field (like our sea lion disentanglement program). This makes us one of the 5 largest marine mammal stranding facilities in the world.
How quickly is your team able to mobilize to reach an animal in distress?
That really depends. A lot of our patients are newborn harbour seal pups that are born in crowded places like downtown Vancouver where people interfere with the mom’s ability to care for them. We can bring an animal like that in immediately. However, a lot of our rescues are very remote and we work with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans for obtaining permission and sometimes help to get to them. We had a sea otter pup reported to us found in distress by a member of the public Friday morning, got DFO permission right away, chartered a float plane and worked with the public to get the animal into our hospital by 12:30 PM. Other animals can be a lot trickier to get to. For example, our sea lion disentanglement program requires two boats, DFO presence, perfect weather and an animal reliably seen for several days in the same spot (they are pretty mobile so are often gone right after being sighted). When we are working on the west side of Vancouver Island, all of these factors may take days or weeks to come together. Accessibility, DFO availability and, above all, weather are huge factors for those rescues.
How did you come to work with Oceanwise and can you tell us a bit about them?
Ocean Wise is the parent non-profit conservation organization that is the parent organization that runs the Vancouver Aquarium as well as other programs. The Marine Mammal Rescue Centre is run under the Animal Health Department at the Vancouver Aquarium and I am the director of that department. I was working for the largest marine mammal rescue facility called The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, California when I was asked to come apply to work for the Vancouver Aquarium as head vet. I had been in California for over 9 years at that time and absolutely loved my job however, after visiting the aquarium and learning about the incredible research and education that happens in addition to the animal rescue (still the thing closest to my heart) the incredible animals that live here (many of them non-releasable animals from the rescue facility), I accepted the offer to move here in 2006. Of course it did not hurt that I grew up in Ottawa and really wanted to spend another chapter of my life in Canada.
People tend to think of the Pacific Northwest as a fairly pristine marine environment. In your experience, is this the case?
Oooh. Yes and no. We are super lucky. It is an incredible and diverse marine ecosystem. We have, in general, a highly educated population that loves to be outside and really cares about our environment on both sides of the border. We have some great facilities that care about educating people about our local environment – from our aquarium to the Seattle Aquarium, from UBC to the University of Washington and cool organizations like SeaDoc Society and yourselves – we have a lot of caring people around. And we are lucky because there is so much coastline out there. However. We have a very vulnerable ecosystem. We have big cities – Vancouver, Seattle and Victoria – that produce waste and contaminants that can last for decades. We have a very resource based economy that can have a potentially huge impact on the local environment – logging, mining, and fishing can all have negative effects. We can argue that perhaps we have not protected our fishing resources well enough and are now paying the price. Certainly our salmon stocks, some rockfish, and abalone are vulnerable and some species and stocks already considered threatened and endangered. We love our “green” energy from dams but those have an incredible impact on local ecology and salmon runs that can have big effects downstream. With the people comes increased boat traffic, transportation of fossil fuels and potential for spills that can be devastating, new diseases being introduced to our native species like cryptococcosis, avian influenza, West Nile Virus and others. Non-native species like bullfrogs or European green crabs have been introduced and are taking over and wiping out our native species. Shoreline development has changed tidal conditions and taken out valuable resources like eel grass beds that a whole lot of larval fish species depend on. And of course we are also not immune to global changes – climate change and ocean acidification are here and they are real. Events like a large scale sea star mortality event a few years ago may be a result of those. In fact, the sunflower star may become an endangered species because of that.
You have worked up close with the local orca population, and their plight is frequently in the news. What can the average citizen do to try and help them recover?
I have been incredibly lucky to have worked closely with this amazing group of animals. The biggest risk factors to their recovery have been identified as contaminants, salmon availability, and noise pollution. There are a lot of things we don’t know and it is actually very rare for us to have a definitive cause of death for any one individual southern resident killer whale. However, I think we all have to understand that we all impact our environment but we can all make choices to make less negative impacts and even do something positive. When we eat food, we should choose things that are sustainable with minimal environmental impact (look for the Ocean Wise label on seafood for example). Do we have to use something that we then have to throw away? Where does our garbage go? Are our clothes made sustainably? Where do our electronics go when we throw them out? Should we support conservation programs and protect vital habitat when we can? What can we teach our kids so they make better choices than we did? We can all be better and it all starts with asking ourselves if what we are doing has an impact and if we can do that thing in a better way. I am super confident we can. I have met so many great young people from so many backgrounds who care so much. I remember my friends and I running around years ago trying to get people to do things differently and we felt so alone. It’s not like that anymore. It’s COOL TO CARE about the environment.