Pieter Folkens
PIETER FOLKENS is currently deeply involved in large whale disentanglement. He’s a Level 4, the highest person on the permit in northern California. He got started with whale disentanglement in Alaska with the Alaska Whale Foundation. But the problem of entangled whales is serious in the Monterey Bay area.
Pieter is also engaged in writing books, is involved in Canine Search and Rescue, and is well known for his scientific illustrations, which have appeared in multiple books and posters. His latest illustration project is Marine Mammals, a highly detailed whale-watching guide. And he notes that he hasn’t had a day off in a year. Pieter’s current work depends on the day and his mood.
Pieter was born in Bakersfield, CA. He grew up ‘all over’ living in several foreign countries, as well as spending a lot of time in Alaska and the High Sierras.
His initial intro into the marine world and the Monterey Bay area came in the 1980s when Ken Norris requested that he come to Santa Cruz. Pieter then became Assistant Professor of Science Communications in the Division of Natural History at UC Santa Cruz, which had a close affiliation with the Long Marine Labs.
His interest in marine mammals came long before that, however. At the ‘ripe old age of 8’, Pieter went on a field trip with his 3rd grade class to….. There they discovered a fossil of a 13.5 million year old sperm whale. Pieter was so intrigued by the fossil that he got together a bunch of friends in the back of a Volkswagen the following summer for his birthday, and headed back up where they dug up the sperm whale fossil. He recounts that it was a small animal, mostly skull parts and teeth. In 1979, Pieter went back to the site with the LA County Museum of Natural History and they did a more extensive formal review of the marine mammal fossils in the La Brea Tar Pits, which is a well-known bone bed that covers a lot of the Central Valley.
Pieter is one of the founders of the Alaska Whale Foundation, now in its 20th year, started in 1996. He had met Fred Sharpe, who became Principal Investigator for AWF, a few years earlier. At that time, Pieter was a naturalist for Dolphin Charters and also a field agent for the National Marine Mammal Act. He met Fred in a backwater area and they got talking. Turns out they both had similar thoughts about the color pattern of Pacific humpback whale pectoral fins, and the possible adaption of the coloration as an aid to feeding. That collaboration led to Fred Sharpe’s seminal work on cooperative bubble-net feeding, plus other behavioral discoveries of humpback whales in Southeast Alaska.
