This marine biologist discovered a unique blue whale population in Sri Lanka

Pooping whales changed the course of Asha de Vos’ career.

The Sri Lankan marine biologist turn into aboard a research vessel near her home island in 2003 when she spotted six blue whales congregating. A bright red plume of whale waste turn into spreading across the water’s surface.

De Vos, then a master’s student, recalls being “super excited.” What she witnessed went against prevailing dogma: Her textbooks and professors had taught that blue whales, like other large whales, embark on long-distance migrations between chillier feeding areas and warmer breeding and calving areas. But seeing whales pooping in tropical waters meant the behemoths ought to be feasting in the community.

Intrigued, de Vos spent the next few years documenting how blue whales near Sri Lanka differ from those in other places on the earth. For one, the population feeds on shrimp in its place of krill. The whales even have unique songs. Nonetheless the important thing difference, she realized, is that they continue to be year-round within the waters between Sri Lanka, Oman and the Maldives — making them the most effectiv nonmigratory blue whales on the earth. Abundant upwellings of nutrient-rich water from the ocean depths enhance a gradual food supply for the whales.

Finally, the International Whaling Commission, the intergovernmental body dedicated to protecting whales, recognized Sri Lanka’s blue whales as a distinct subspecies often often called Balaenoptera musculus indica.

This distinction is critical for conservation management, explains retired whale biologist Phillip Clapham, formerly of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service. Small, localized populations — comparable to the one in Sri Lanka — face higher risks of being wiped out within the face of environmental or human threats, comparable to deep-sea mining.

More than twenty years on, de Vos is now one in all Sri Lanka’s most famed scientists — famed for nurturing the u . s . a .’s nascent marine biology scene. She is likewise an ardent champion for greater diversity among researchers in ocean conservation.

De Vos has garnered an outstanding deal of accolades, including being named a National Geographic Explorer, a TED Senior Fellow and one in all the BBC’s A hundred most inspiring and influential females of 2018. But such recognitions don’t spur her on.

“I’m driven by attempting to find to make a transformation,” especially around the negative narrative many Sri Lankans hold for the ocean, she says. “I'd like people to fall in love with the ocean … to acknowledge the ocean as this incredible space it truly is life-giving in so many ways.”

Setting her own course

For all her love of the deep, de Vos’ early memories of the ocean — a mere mile from where she grew up in Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo — are, surprisingly, tinged with fear. Like her compatriots, she turn into raised with repeated warnings that the ocean turn into “an infinite beast” to steer clear of, unless you were fisher­folk with little choice but to venture into such unforgiving territory.

“There were often stories of drownings that came with people that went to sea,” she says. Nearly all people in Sri Lanka never learn how to swim, in spite of living on an isle so picturesque it’s often often often called the “pearl of the Indian Ocean.”

“People have this disconnect with the ocean” de Vos says. “Life always ended at the shoreline.”

The few people that do learn how to swim basically follow swimming pools. The ocean is “no longer recreational space,” de Vos says. “I’d say it’s a common problem, especially in poorer nations where you don’t have time to waste and there’s no frolicking on the beach.” But her forward-thinking mother sent her for swim classes. The young girl took to the water so well that she soon began competing in freestyle sprint events.

Her love for the ocean, alternatively, stemmed from the other source: secondhand National Geographic magazines her father would bring home from the local book shop. “It turn into just the images that essentially drew me in,” de Vos says.

By the point she turned 17, de Vos had narrowed her career path to marine biology. No local universities offered this form of course, and she hadn’t heard of anyone from Sri Lanka who had ever ventured overseas to pursue the subject, but that didn’t deter de Vos. Nor did just missing the specified grades for her dream school, the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, which has a strong marine biology program. “I often often called [the university] and said, ‘Look, I essentially come to your school. I do know I’m capable,’ ” she recalls with fun.

Her powers of persuasion worked, kick-starting an academic journey that may take her through three continents — including a Ph.D. in Australia and a postdoc within america that she completed in 2015.

The journey hasn’t always been smooth sailing. The naysaying began when she applied for university. “There’s no scope in this u . s . a . for a marine biologist,” people would say. “They couldn’t have in mind that there would possibly possibly be work, there would possibly possibly be jobs out at sea,” de Vos says. “I always shaggy dog story now that maybe people thought I turn into going to maneuver to university and then change into a fisherwoman.”

As de Vos stepped forward in her career, the criticism continued, both from within and outside her u . s . a .. In a non-public essay she penned for the New York Times, de Vos recounts a handful of fellow scientists from wealthier nations who questioned her authority as a researcher from an impoverished u . s . a ., assuming that she would “lack the data, know-how and interest to participate in marine conservation.”

Meanwhile, fellow Sri Lankans criticized de Vos for no longer staying at some point of the boundaries of a “respectable” woman, engaging in relatively risky, labor-intensive outdoor tasks. A fisherman piloting a boat she turn into on demanded to grab what her husband considered her being out on the water and “getting black within the sun.” De Vos answered that she wasn’t married. The man retorted, “I believed as a solid deal.”

Such critics served simplest as fire starters. “I turn into like, ‘OK, whatever. I’ll show you,’ ” she says. “In many ways, I’m grateful for the challenges — they essentially made me who I'm. They made me think outside the box. They made me work superhard and essentially grind at what I do.”

For Clapham, who turn into one in all her Ph.D. examiners, it truly is this steely, determined de Vos he knows and loves. “She’s only a force of nature” and is only relentless, he says.

Making a lasting legacy

As of late, de Vos continues to to grab about cetaceans throughout the Sri Lankan Blue Whale Project, which she launched in 2008. “We've the longest running dataset of blue whales in this section of the arena,” she says, including a photo catalog of hundreds of individuals within the population.

But a solid deal about the creatures is still unknown, including their precise numbers and what drives long-term fluctuations in their abundance. In the end of the project’s first five years, de Vos and her team observed an outstanding deal of sightings of the giants, every so often between 10 and 12 creatures at a go “just blowing in every single place,” she recalls. “But now on the southern coast, we don’t see as many blue whales.” She and her team are hunting for to determine why and whether it’s cause for concern.

Nonetheless the researchers are limited by their vessels, so to simplest enhance day trips in its place of longer journeys farther out to sea. “We're having a look this form of tiny sliver of ocean,” de Vos says.

As well to the whales, de Vos also surveys the biodiversity of their deep-sea environment. She conducted, as some distance as she knows, the first such audit of the northern Indian Ocean in 2022. “I do these items from a conservation standpoint.… Persons have gotten an increasing selection of bold about what would possibly possibly be done in these deep-sea environments,” she says, citing underwater mining as a potential threat. “I work with whales and that’s my primary love. Nonetheless the whales want a superbly healthy ecosystem because they don’t just are living in a bubble where the total lot around them doesn’t bother them.”

A key aim of de Vos’ work is to guard blue whales from ship strikes. Sri Lanka lies along one in all the arena’s busiest shipping routes, and in a survey of 14 stranded whales that had died from ship strikes in 2010–2014, a total of 9, or greater than 60 percent, were blue whales.

De Vos brought the danger of shipping to light in 2012. It “started a whole cycle of conversations” with the Sri Lankan government, International Whaling Commission, World Shipping Council and other bodies. These talks culminated in victory in 2022, when the arena’s largest container shipping firm, the Mediterranean Shipping Company, announced it'd cut back the velocity of its ships when traveling around the island and adopt a more southerly route that shunned the whales.

Another aim is to get more Sri Lankans to appreciate the ocean and the importance of protecting it. “My whole goal is to create love for the ocean and put off the phobia,” says de Vos, who desires to inspire custodians, or “ocean heroes.” To this end, she gives her time to an outstanding deal of outreach events, including public talks and monthly science journal clubs. In 2017, she founded the nonprofit Oceanswell, Sri Lanka’s first marine conservation research and education organization. “For me,” she says, “the education component is as important as the research component.”

“She’s a tremendously engaging and eloquent speaker,” Clapham says. “She’s a sort of fun when she’s doing educational stuff.” He recalls how de Vos once created animation to clarify what blue whales in most cases eat, snubbing more traditional presentation formats. “It turn into very entertaining,” he says.

To lend a hand grow Sri Lanka’s nascent marine biology scene, de Vos advises universities on how to show the subject.

Lasuni Gule Godage is most of the first students to pursue a master’s degree in marine science and fisheries at the Ocean University of Sri Lanka, created in 2014 by the Sri Lankan government to promote oceanic education. De Vos turn into instrumental in setting up and obtaining funding for the university’s pioneering program.

De Vos is likewise a mentor. Gule Godage notes how de Vos advised her on how to conduct fieldwork. “I faced many challenges because there turn into no postgraduate program [at my school],” Gule Godage says. “But Dr. Asha supported me a lot.”

De Vos doesn’t want others to undergo what she did. “My goal is to present away the total lot, whether it’s my knowledge or tips on how to do something better,” she says. “I always tell people after I die, I don’t want the total lot [I’ve done] to end.”