By Sharon Oosthoek

The killer whales of Hudson Bay

As Arctic sea ice melts, orcas are cashing in and Inuit hunter may be the ones to lose out

link to New Scientist

WHEN a pod of orcas swam past the Canadian town of Churchill on the edge of Hudson Bay in August last year, word of the sighting spread immediately. Walkie-talkies crackled to life as Parks Canada staff radioed nearby tour operators piloting boats full of tourists: “Killer whales in Button Bay. They’re coming around the point.”

Remi Foubert-Allen, the driver of a boat for Sea North Tours, could barely contain himself as the whales swam just a stone’s throw away. “Look at the male’s dorsal fin – it must be seven feet! I can’t believe I’m looking at orcas. I’ve wanted to see orcas my entire life,” he shouted above the noise of the outboard motor.

The lifelong Churchill resident had good reason to be excited. Killer whales are extremely rare visitors to Hudson Bay. Extensive writings from European explorers, dating from the early 1600s, contain no mention of orcas before 1900, and only a handful of sightings over the next 60 years. Since the 1960s, however, there has been a small but steady increase, leading to a peak of 40 sightings in the last five years, and prompting plenty of questions from scientists and Inuit hunters.

“We’re wondering what’s going on,” says Noah Nakoolak, an Inuit hunter from Coral Harbour, Nunavut, across the bay from Churchill. “It’s exciting to see them, but why are they here and what are they eating?”

Biologist Steve Ferguson at Fisheries and Oceans Canada is among those looking for answers. His findings suggest there is much at stake. It would appear that the orcas, a population at risk of extinction in this part of the world, are preying on other endangered marine mammals. What’s more, they may threaten the Inuit hunters’ livelihood.

Ferguson is convinced that climate change explains the whales’ presence in the bay. The entire Canadian Arctic is covered in ice for most of the year. Orcas, with their tall dorsal fins, generally avoid ice, which can trap or injure them as they swim beneath it. But recent declines in the extent of summer sea ice in Hudson strait are opening up the route to Hudson Bay, says Ferguson, and that could explain how killer whales from the north-west Atlantic end up in these waters.

In a paper published in 2009, he and independent consultant Jeff Higdon concluded: “Hudson strait appears to have been a significant sea ice choke point that opened up approximately 50 years ago allowing for an initial punctuated appearance of killer whales followed by a gradual advancing distribution within the entire Hudson Bay region” (Ecological Applications, vol 19, p 1365).

The big thaw

The latest figures from Stats Canada bear this out. They show that in the past four decades, summer sea ice in Hudson strait has declined by 5000 square kilometres, or 16 per cent, per decade. In Hudson Bay, ice cover is down by 16,500 square kilometres per decade – an 11 per cent fall every 10 years- and the ice now starts breaking up three weeks earlier than it did in the 1970s. “As the open ice period continued to expand, killer whales learned to use the area to capture prey and were able to stay longer,” says Ferguson.

To track orca numbers over the same period, Ferguson and Higdon turned to Inuit hunters and other people living around Hudson Bay for information. They tallied 12 reported sightings of a single animal or a pod in the bay during the 1960s. The 1970s saw a drop to just three sightings. But every decade thereafter there has been an increase in numbers: eight in the 1980s and 12 in the 1990s. Then came a big jump with 23 in the five years from 2000 to 2005.

That’s when scientists at Fisheries and Oceans Canada started to pay close attention, encouraging those living around the bay to systematically report any orcas they spotted. This resulted in 40 sightings between 2006 and 2011, although Ferguson acknowledges that the increased surveillance probably had an impact on the number of sightings.

The trend surprised Ferguson and others who study such ice-covered ecosystems. “We weren’t thinking about killer whale predation when we were thinking about warming and loss of sea ice,” he says.

Nevertheless, orca predation could have a big impact on the local ecosystem. Narwhals, bowheads and beluga whales are already on the menu, according to preliminary research by Cory Matthews at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, who looked at stable nitrogen isotopes from the teeth of two orcas that died in the bay.

A predator is not what these already threatened whales need. Belugas in the eastern bay are classified as endangered by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, while the larger western population is listed under special concern, meaning that it is not in imminent danger but could be if circumstances change. The local bowhead population has the same rating, despite having recovered well from commercial whaling. But Ferguson is most worried about the narwhals. Although in Canada as a whole narwhals are listed as being of special concern, the population in Hudson Bay is hovering at a barely sustainable 5000 individuals.

All three species are unused to dealing with killer whales. Their normal tactic is to use ice to hide from predators, but with less of it around in summer that is becoming increasingly difficult. Instead they have had to adopt a different approach, taking advantage of the Hudson Bay orcas’ dislike of shallow water.

“When the killer whales are around we see creatures huddling in the inlet and close to shore,” says Gabriel Nirlungayuk, director of the department of wildlife and environment for Nunavut Tunngavik, an organisation which represents the native treaty rights of the Inuits of Nunavut, many of whom live around Hudson Bay. “If these creatures could walk on land to escape, they would. They’re that scared of killer whales.”

There is no doubt that they are up against a formidable foe. Orcas are opportunistic predators, switching prey depending on availability. They can roam far in search of food, and they adapt as they travel and are exposed to different ecosystems. “Killer whales can learn very complicated behaviours that allow them to hunt and catch large, dangerous and difficult prey,” said John Durban at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Perhaps the most extreme example is seen in Antarctica, where pods of orcas use their bodies to make waves that wash seals off of small ice floes (Marine Mammal Science, vol 28, p 16). “It approaches what primates do in terms of using tools,” says Ferguson. Inuit hunters have seen the same behaviour in Hudson Bay.

This is not the only hunting technique that the Hudson Bay orcas use that is also seen elsewhere. For example, they have been observed suffocating bowheads by covering their blowholes, and holding down mothers long enough to kill calves. When hunting in groups, some will bite onto a tail or fin while others go in for the killer blow. However, their preferred technique is still the tried and tested method of ramming their prey from below.

Ferguson admits that it is hard to know what impact orca predation will have on Hudson Bay’s mammals. Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen of the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources in Nuuk believes it might not be as bad as some fear. He points out that an increase in orca sightings does not necessarily mean an increase in numbers.

“You don’t need a lot of killer whales in Hudson Bay to make it look like a lot,” he says. “These are animals you notice.” He detects an orca phobia, which he believes is unjustified. “Ten years ago, the scientific community argued that killer whales were responsible for the failure of the bowheads to recover in eastern Canada, but the bowheads have recovered,” he says.

John Ford from Fisheries and Oceans Canada is similarly unconvinced that orcas will harm other whale populations in Hudson Bay?- at least in the short-term. “But it’s going to be important to keep track of how things change over the coming years,” he cautions.

Biologists won’t be the only ones keeping a close eye on the orcas. “They are hunting the same species we’re hunting,” says Nirlungayuk. The Inuit are the only people in Canada permitted to hunt belugas, narwhals and bowheads under a quota system meant to keep the whale populations healthy. “Are there going to be some implications? I couldn’t tell you yet,” says Nirlungayuk.

Nevertheless, in Hudson Bay the orcas are eating the Inuit’s lunch. That has prompted Ferguson to warn that the local marine ecosystem is now shifting from one with Inuit hunters at the top, to one where orcas reign supreme. “It could be a problem in the future for traditional subsistence culture,” he says.

Sharon Oosthoek is a writer based in Toronto, Canada

Some like it hot:

Orcas are not the only marine mammals cashing in on global warming. Along the west coast of Greenland, harbour porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) are thriving. They visit seasonally to feed on Atlantic cod, and Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen of the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources in Nuuk has found that they now hang around longer than they used to, feeding on the fish whose numbers are rising along with water temperatures (Ecology and Evolution, vol 1, p 579). He believes this helps explain the porpoise’s fat, healthy condition.

Bowhead whales also appear to be benefiting from global warming. In August 2010, Heide-Jørgensen’s team used satellite tracking to record two individuals?- one from the Atlantic Ocean, the other from the Pacific Ocean?- meeting in the North-West Passage where sea ice once blocked their route (Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.0731). He suspects the two populations have been breeding since the ice began to disappear, which may explain why the Greenland population is bouncing back so quickly from the ravages of commercial whaling.

Thawing of the North-West Passage might even allow grey whales to recolonise former habitats. Grey whales have been extinct in the Atlantic Ocean for more than 200 years, but in May 2010, one was spotted swimming off the coast of Israel in the Mediterranean. It probably made its way there from the north Pacific by traversing the passage.

Special to The Star

Flybits is the odd name given to a made-in-Toronto smart-phone app changing the way commuters here and in Paris navigate their surroundings as they go.

Flybits is also the name of the company Hossein Rahnama founded to build the app.

“It’s about bits — zeros and ones — that fly. It represents wireless computing,” says Rahnama, director of research at Ryerson University’s digital media zone.

Flybits began life in 2004 as a research institute within the DMZ, until Ryerson spun it off into a separate company with the help of MaRS, the Toronto-based innovation incubator.

Rahnama launched Flybits’ first big-time app in 2010 as a pilot project for Paris Metro commuters whose mobility is constrained, and for blind passengers or those with poor vision.

Full article

by Sharon Oosthoek

Aboriginal rock paintings show that thylacines, or Tasmanian tigers, once lived all over Australia and on the islands of Tasmania and New Guinea. At the time, they were the largest meat-eating marsupials in the world. But then humans hunted them to extinction.

Benjamin, the last Tasmanian tiger, died in 1936 in Tasmania’s Hobart Zoo. That’s when zoo staff discovered the animal they thought was male, was in fact female. Their mistake was an easy one to make: both male and female Tasmanian tigers had pouches. Females raised their babies in the pouches, and males used them to protect their external reproductive organs. Tasmanian tigers’ scientific name, Thylacinus cynocephalus, actually means, “pouched dog with wolf head.”

Hunt and Be Hunted

While it was more related to kangaroos than wild dogs, the Tasmanian tiger had a dog’s body, a tiger’s stripes, and a muscular tail it used for balance. It could open its jaws a whopping 120 degrees. By comparison, a wolf can open its jaws about 90 degrees. Why such a big mouth? Thylacines were opportunistic hunters capable of taking down large creatures like kangaroos. They were strong hunters, but unfortunately that earned them a bad reputation.

“It was wrongly blamed in Australia for killing sheep,” says Andrew Pask, a molecular biologist at the University of Connecticut who studied the tigers. “People were really poor and were stealing each others’ sheep and blaming it on the Tasmanian tiger.” Because of these rumors, bounty hunters were given rewards to bring in dead thylacines. It didn’t take long before population levels dropped dangerously low.

Every few years since Benjamin’s death, people claim to have seen a Tasmanian tiger in the wild. In 2005, German tourists snapped photos of an odd creature that vaguely resembled a Tasmanian tiger. The blurry images inspired the imagination of those who want to believe the animals somehow survived extinction in Tasmania.

An Australian magazine, The Bulletin, offered $1.25 million to anyone who could capture a live, uninjured Tasmanian tiger. No one did, but the Tasmanian tiger was suddenly alive again in people’s imaginations…and so was its DNA.

A Mighty Mouse

In 2008, Dr. Pask led a team at the University of Melbourne in Australia that extracted a gene from a long-dead baby Tasmanian tiger. The baby had been preserved in alcohol for 140 years and kept in a museum. The gene they extracted was the thylacine’s blueprint for growing bone and cartilage, a tissue that acts like elastic to connect joints.

DNA is a bit like a set of instructions that tells a living organism how to grow. Each gene inside DNA contains instructions for specific characteristics, including the way bones, skin, and organs form.

Dr. Pask injected the thylacine gene into mouse embryos. As the embryos grew into adult mice, they developed bones and cartilage…without any apparent problems. That meant the Tasmanian tiger gene worked properly, long after the tiger had died.

“It’s important because we’d really like to understand how [the Tasmanian tiger] evolved its particular body plan,” says Dr. Pask. “We can look at the DNA and we can pick out the genes we think are important, but unless we put them into another living organism like a mouse, and see what they do, we don’t really know.”

Back in Order

In 2009, scientists from Penn State University studied some of the Tasmanian tiger’s genes using hair samples from two museum specimens. They successfully sequenced some of the animal’s DNA. That means they figured out the order, or sequence, of the instructions inside the genes.

Knowing the order of an animal’s genetic structure helps scientists understand how that animal is made — and it may even give some clues about why thylacines became extinct. “Tasmanian tigers were really interesting animals,” says researcher  Webb Miller. “It’s so sad they’re gone.”

Dr. Miller explains that by practicing on the Tasmanian tiger, he and his fellow scientists learned a lot about how to sequence the genes of other extinct species and species at risk of extinction.

The scientists have since found out that when a species is close to extinction, there is a noticeable lack of genetic diversity from animal to animal. When animals of the same species have slight differences in their genes, the species as a whole is able to fight off disease or adapt to dramatic environmental changes. But if their genetic code is the same, one disease can kill all of them. “Right now there are lots of cool animals teetering on the brink of extinction,” says Dr. Miller. He hopes that by breeding endangered animals with the widest possible range of genetic diversity, their babies might have a better chance of survival.

Tasmanian tigers may have disappeared 75 years ago, but they still have something to teach us today.

Mugshot:

Tasmanian Tiger

Size: About 60 centimeters at the shoulders

Weight: About 30 kilograms (65 pounds)
Color: Yellow-brown with dark brown stripes

Favorite food: Wallabies, wombats

Distribution: Tasmania, mainland Australia, and New Guinea
Last seen: Tasmania, 1936

Closest Relatives

Thylacines’ living cousins include numbats and small carnivorous marsupials called quolls, as well as the Tasmanian devil. Thylacines were not related to dogs or dog-like animals or tigers at all!

by Sharon Oosthoek

What plant is so menacing it’s an outlaw in the United Kingdom? If you move it across state borders in the United States without a permit, you’re in trouble? The answer is giant hogweed. The rock band Genesis even wrote a song about it threatening the human race in a plant-o-pocalypse scenario. (Yes, you can download the ringtone.)

“Everybody knows about yellow jacket wasp and bee stings,” says Jeff Muzzi, Manager of Forestry Services for Ontario’s Renfrew County, “but where things get a little more dangerous out there is with giant hogweed and [its relative] wild parsnip.”

The Burn That Lasts

Both plants can burn your skin, giving you blisters, and maybe leaving scars. Their sap contains chemicals called furocoumarins, which are phototoxic. That means the chemicals become active in the sun.

“After a day or two, your skin turns red and starts to blister. It’s ugly and can take up to a month to clear up,” says Muzzi. “But the photosensitivity (sensitivity to sunlight) will last for years. You won’t have any protection against the Sun — you’ll get instant sunburns every time you’re exposed.” If you’re unlucky enough get the sap in your eyes, you can go temporarily, or even permanently blind.

Settlers to North America brought wild parsnip with them from Europe over 100 years ago as a food source. Boil the roots and you have a nice starchy meal. Of course, the settlers knew enough to wear protective clothing at harvest time. Wild parsnip grows a bit taller than a mailbox and is topped with small clusters of yellow flowers.

Today, wild parsnips are everywhere, especially in roadside ditches and meadows. Giant hogweed, thankfully, has spread more slowly. Originally from the Caucasus region between Southwestern Asia and Europe, people brought them to North America because they thought they were pretty and liked to have them in their gardens. Giant hogweed stems reach up to five meters — that’s taller than a one-storey building — and are crowned with large umbrella-shaped cluster of small white flowers.

Painful Plants Aplenty

Plants can also cause you pain in more obvious ways — with sharp thorns and barbs for example. Botanists (scientists who study plants) call this a mechanical defense.

Roses and cacti have mechanical defenses. While their thorns can puncture your skin and make you bleed, you’ll easily recover unless your wound gets infected.

A more sneaky strategy is something botanists call a chemical defense. In this case, the liquid on a plant’s leaves or stems contains toxic chemicals that react with your skin, whether or not you expose it to the sun. Poison ivy, oak, and sumac all use a chemical defense by spreading an oily liquid called urushiol. (Well, it’s probably an accidental defense against humans since deer, goats, horses and birds eat parts of the plant.)

Urushiol is very sticky and doesn’t dry, so it clings to anything that touches it — skin, clothing, and pet fur. Even breathing in the smoke of a burning poison ivy, oak, or sumac can make your eyes and nasal passages red and tender. But if you touch poison ivy, you may not realize it until the next day, says environmental chemist, William Schlesinger, president of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York.

“You will wake up with a mild case of fluid filled blisters, which are extremely itchy and you can’t help but scratch,” he says. “That breaks the blisters and spreads the fluid across your body. If it’s bad, the blisters will coalesce (come together) and the entire surface of your skin will fall off and you’re left with one big, open, oozing sore.”  Eewww.

Unfortunately for the 80 percent of us who develop rashes from poison ivy, Dr. Schlesinger and other scientists have figured out the plant will get better at causing harm as we pump more carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the air. CO₂ is released by power stations that make electricity and comes out of the tailpipes of our cars, and it is causing the climate around the world to change.

Dr. Schlesinger and his team figured out the effect on poison ivy by buying CO₂ from a fertilizer factory and pumping it into a patch of forest in North Carolina until it reached levels scientists expect by 2050. They studied the forest from 1997 to 2004 and found the poison ivy grew faster and bigger, and its urushiol was more powerful. Ouch!

 Why urushiol?

Plants around the world contain the chemical urushiol. It’s purpose might have less to do with defense and more to do with protecting a plant’s wound.

 OW! Factor: OUTRAGEOUS plants

 • The manchineel tree’s sap, bark, and leaves are all highly toxic. It produces a sweet-smelling fruit that looks a lot like a crab apple, but don’t touch, and absolutely don’t eat. It contains a chemical that causes terrible pain and swelling.

Merely standing under the tree while it’s raining will cause your skin to swell and blister painfully. The tree grows in the Bahamas, the Caribbean, Central and South America, and in some parts of Florida.

• The giant stinging tree and the gimpie-gimpie are related trees that both grow in Australian rainforests and have large soft leaves covered in little hairs. The hairs contain a neurotoxin (a poison that affects nerve cells), and they can slide into your skin, delivering a sting that some people say is as painful as being scalded with boiling water and can last for months. You can even get sneezing fits just by standing next to a gimpie-gimpie.

By Sharon Oosthoek

July 13, 2011

If you looked at the plastic in your sneakers under a high-powered microscope, it would resemble cooked spaghetti, with each noodle tangled in the others.

Plastics are made of groups of many atoms — the smallest building block of any element — linked together into molecules. Molecules, in turn, are the smallest complete unit of any chemical. In plastics, the molecules are linked into long chains called polymers.

Polymers “become entangled with each other much like a single strand of cooked spaghetti gets tangled up with other spaghetti strands in a bowl of pasta,” explains Annette Jacobson, a chemical engineer at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

That entanglement makes it hard to break plastic, which is a good thing when it’s in your sneakers, toothbrush, bike helmet or hundreds of other products we use every day. But plastic’s strength is also its weakness — at least when it comes to the environment.

The reason: Plastic takes years, sometimes centuries, to completely disintegrate. So our garbage dumps fill up with discarded plastic — bags, food containers, tattered soccer balls and, yes, even old sneakers.

Full story

April 26, 2011

SHARON OOSTHOEK

Blame it on Augusta and the advent of colour television. Up till then, most golfers were content to play around the odd weed and didn’t get overly upset if skunks dug up turf.

But starting in the late 1960s, colour broadcasts of the Masters Tournament at the Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia showed the world a meticulously-maintained course shimmering like an ethereal Emerald City. Golfers turned green with envy.

“We call it the Augusta syndrome,” says Rob Witherspoon, director of the University of Guelph’s Turfgrass Institute and Environmental Research Centre. “The expectation of standards used to be lower. Golfers saw that and said ‘Why doesn’t our golf course look like that – blemish-free, no weeds?’”

But such standards come at a cost to the environment. Fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and astounding amounts of water are all necessary ingredients.

(more)

Area to become marine conservation area

By Sharon Oosthoek

Last summer was a stressful time to be the mayor of Grise Fiord, a tiny hamlet on Nunavut’s Ellesmere Island. Meeka Kiguktak was keeping tabs on a research vessel motoring to Lancaster Sound to conduct seismic testing. Kiguktak and others in Grise Fiord and nearby communities were worried that the federal government scientists aboard would discover oil and gas deposits, putting an end to a proposed marine conservation area for the sound, which is sandwiched between Baffin and Devon islands.

Full article

February 3, 2011

By Sharon Oosthoek

A water flea about the size of the equal sign on a keyboard has more genes than any other creature analyzed so far, say scientists, who suggest its sophisticated genome could one day double as a highly sensitive and inexpensive environmental monitoring tool.

Vaccinating prairie dogs may be the key to saving rare black-footed ferrets

by Sharon Oosthoek

Behind the brick walls of the National Wildlife Health Center, past security doors leading to an isolation room, black-tailed prairie dogs dine on peanut-butter-flavored pellets. These tan-colored rodents with black-tipped tails were captured near Wall, South Dakota, and now live in burrows of stainless steel boxes connected by plastic pipes. Normally, they would be eating alfalfa pellets, carrots and broccoli. But on this summer day in Madison, Wisconsin, the only thing on the menu is peanut butter snacks, served up by the center’s scientists.

The prairie dogs—13 in all—gobble up the new offering and that’s good news because the pellets contain a vaccine against plague. Three weeks from now they will be exposed to Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the deadly disease. Remarkably, nine of them will live.

The vaccine-laden pellets are the handiwork of U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) epizootiologist Tonie Rocke, who believes they hold the key to saving an animal once thought extinct.

Full story

by Sharon Oosthoek

Over three thousand years ago, a cargo ship sunk off the coast of Turkey while carrying tin, copper, glass, and ivory hippopotamus teeth — likely gifts from one king to another.

The boat rested on the sea floor for 3300 years before a Turkish diver looking for sponges spotted some strange-looking objects. He told his captain they looked like “metal biscuits with ears.”

The captain knew some underwater archeologists and told them about the discovery. The archeologists thought the biscuits might be ancient copper ingots — slabs of copper with handles to make it easier to move them.

That’s exactly what the young diver had found. And when the archeologists dove down to the ingots, they also found the royal ship. “The wreck is probably the most important ancient wreck yet found,” says archeologist George Bass, who led the research into the ship’s history.

Nobody knows for sure how many shipwrecks there are, says Bass, who created the Institute of Nautical Archeology to study important shipwrecks. Bass and the institute’s president, James Delgado, believe only a tiny number have been found.

“It’s a big ocean and we haven’t searched it all,” says Delgado. “We’ve maybe looked at five percent of it and we’ve found thousands of shipwrecks.”

Shipwrecks are often found by accident by divers or fishermen. Sometimes they’re found by reading historical records. Archeologists who have a good idea of where ships might have sunk will go out in a boat to look. They tow video cameras underwater, or use metal detectors that can find shipwrecks that carried iron cannons or anchors.

Archeologists may also launch small unmanned submarines to look around. “They dive and work on their own. They go back and forth just like you might mow a lawn — straight lines back and forth all day long,” says Delgado.

The submarines have sonar scanners that bounce sound waves off objects on the ocean floor. The scanner turns those sound waves into a kind of graph that shows the shape of things below the water — including shipwrecks.

Some of the best places to look are close to coastlines because boats often sink after hitting rocks near shore. The coastlines of countries with a long history of sailing are an especially good bet — from the Mediterranean to the South China Sea.

Cold, fresh water is often wreck heaven. No, or little salt, spares wrecks an attack from shipworm, which can chomp through a wreck in 10 years. Until recently, the Baltic Sea was a great place to find shipwrecks in good condition because it was shipworm-free, says Bass. The beautifully preserved Vasa, a 17^th century Swedish warship was found in the Baltic.

“Alas, perhaps because of global warming, shipworms are now being reported in the Baltic for the first time,” Bass says. In fact, shipworms have already attacked about a hundred sunken ships in the Baltic waters around Sweden, Germany, and Denmark. Scientists think salt-loving shipworms can tolerate the warming Baltic waters. The shipworm’s lunch, however, is the marine archeologist’s loss.

Who Owns a Shipwreck?

It depends. If a boat belonging to a country sinks — say a navy ship — it still belongs to that country and its government gets to decide what to do with it.

If a ship belonging to a person sinks, it could end up the property of an insurance company. That’s because ship owners pay insurance companies a little bit every month, and if their boat sinks, the company pays them what it thinks the boat is worth. After that, the company owns the boat.

But what happens when a wreck is so old no one remembers to whom it belonged? If it’s close enough to shore, the closest coastal country gets to decide what to do with it. Some countries require you ask permission before salvaging.

“Each country has their own different law,” says underwater archaelogist James Delgado. “But when you get out into the deep ocean, it’s no man’s land.”

That’s when a judge working in a special court called an Admiralty Court uses the Law of Salvage to decide who owns it. If you find a ship that’s been abandoned far out in the ocean — either floating or sunken — and you bring it, or parts of it, back to land, you can go to an Admiralty Court judge and argue that you saved the boat and deserve a reward for your work.

If the owner can be found, and they want the boat back, the judge could order them to pay you a reward. If the owner can’t be found, as is the case with many ancient wrecks, you could end up owning it.