Cree students from Mistissini, Quebec selected to go to national science fair
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Two students from a northern Cree community will be going to Fredericton, New Brunswick, at the end of May after winning second place in their category at the Quebec Indigenous Science Fair.
Errol Mianscum and Mark Petawabano from Voyageur Memorial High School in Mistissini were among 80 students from 21 Indigenous communities invited to present their science projects at the science fair held last week in the twin Cree and Inuit communities of Whapmagoostui and Kuujjuaraapik.
Judges noticed their project, called Niibii: The Source of Life, and chose the two Secondary 3 students (which is the equivalent of being in Grade 9) to go to the 2025 Canada-Wide Science Fair, along with two youth from the Naskapi Nation of Kawawachikamach.
"Participating was a big deal for all of us because we were representing our school," said Petawabano.
The chairperson of the Cree School Board, Sarah Pash, believes the fair was a resounding success.
"The students were able to make connections with their peers in other communities and share their similarities and their cultures", she said. "The fact that it was in the blended community of Whapmagoostui and Kuujjuaraapik was very symbolic of the bringing together of nations."
Pash said the project presented by Mianscum and Petawabano is important for the Cree because it is about the land and it also took elders' knowledge into consideration.
For their project the two teenagers compared different kinds of water. They used bottled water from the store, tap water, snow, and water from a natural spring on their traditional territories near Mistissini.
"For many years, our elders have told us that the water where we are is safe to drink. And we wanted to prove that using science."
And the elders were right, according to the students' report.
"The natural water source from their hunting territories, their family traditional territory, came out to be the cleanest water in terms of other matters present in the water," said Pash. "It really valued that [elder's] knowledge as scientific knowledge."
The team hopes their findings will encourage more people to drink fresh water from local sources. Pash said it's something the local government and other communities may be interested in looking into as well.
"It's very consistent with the research that is already done in our territory and I am sure the Department of Environment at CNG [Cree Nation Government] will be very interested."
Pash said Mianscum and Petawabano are becoming role models for the youth of Eeyou Istchee. She said that their invitation to the national fair demonstrates that a Cree community can make it to the national level when it comes to science.
Other projects presented at the Quebec Indigenous Science Fair included a comparison of Schefferville's landfill and Knob Lake's contaminants, and a study on Labrador tea as a healer for arthritis.
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Globe and Mail
an hour ago
- Globe and Mail
A moveable feast
This is the third story in a series on Canada-U.S. cross-border measures to protect North Atlantic right whales. Yards from Herring Cove Beach on a crisp day in late March, a young North Atlantic right whale grazes the surface of Cape Cod Bay's crystal-blue waters. As he glides, mouth agape, his fringelike baleen plates filter seawater so he can feast on small planktonic crustaceans called copepods. 'That's what we call mowing the lawn,' says Daniel Palacios, program director of the Right Whale Ecology Program at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, Mass., describing the whale's skim-feeding behaviour as his team surveys from a boat. For more than eight decades, from winter through spring, these critically endangered whales have returned to feast on an abundance of zooplankton in Cape Cod Bay, which has been seasonally protected to limit fishing activity and vessel speeds since 2015. That includes this young male, identified only by the number #5245, and his family. Sea and air surveys show he first visited with his mother, Slalom (#1245), in 2022, just as she likely did with her mother, Wart (#1140). Every year, both Slalom and Wart would then guide their calves to the Bay of Fundy, which was once considered the northernmost limit of the right whales' typical geographical range. But in 2022, Slalom brought #5245 further north to the Gulf of St. Lawrence – a change that, when it began more than a decade earlier, cued attention to an increasingly urgent problem that still plagues researchers and policy-makers today. As #5245 and the other whales continue to head to colder feeding grounds in the coming weeks, where they all will go next is a mystery. Climate change is affecting ecosystems and changing the availability of their food in different areas, resulting in the species popping up in new spots. The consequences of the whales' shifting habitats are dire: Under threat from fishing gear entanglements and vessel strikes, the dwindling North Atlantic right whale species – with a population of 372 – requires agile protections to survive. But if researchers can't find them, then policy-makers don't know where to put such measures in place. Every season, North Atlantic right whales travel hundreds of kilometres, facing these hazards along the way, including at their destinations – the critical ocean habitats where they feed, breed and care for their young. The United States is the exclusive winter calving grounds for the whales and prime winter and spring feeding grounds, while Canada is prime summer and fall feeding grounds. In both countries, there are a variety of protections, from seasonal closures to limits on fishing activity, vessel speed or routing – but the measures don't yet follow the whales wherever they go. For decades, researchers observed the whales feeding in the Gulf of Maine – spending January to May in Cape Cod Bay, the Gulf's southern extent, then migrating to the northern extent, the Bay of Fundy, from June to November. With both bays' tidal systems acting as nutrient pumps, cold water mixes with nutrients to create a rich soup that supports an abundance of zooplankton, providing the whales with the energy they need to survive. The Gulf of Maine is one of the fastest-warming ocean regions in the world owing to climate change. But Cape Cod Bay has remained insulated from these broader ecosystem shifts, says Christy Hudak, a right whale researcher at the Center for Coastal Studies. Nowhere else in their geographic range are as many of the whales observed in one place; half the population was seen in the area between January and May. 'Water temperatures in Cape Cod Bay are not increasing as rapidly as in the northern Gulf of Maine. The zooplankton cyclic pattern remains stable, providing the right whales with a consistent food source, at least for now, compared to other historic habitats like the Bay of Fundy,' Ms. Hudak says. Since the mid-1970s, scientists have observed right whales returning annually to the Bay of Fundy, known for its vibrant palette of sunlight-reflecting blues, tidal-sediment browns and algae-rich greens, straddling New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Maine. It has served as a North Atlantic nursery ground for right whale mothers and calves and is home to Grand Manan Basin, a deep-water area that is one of the whales' critical habitats. But beginning in 2010, a decrease in Bay of Fundy right whale sightings concerned scientists. That period also marked the species' most recent peak at 483 whales, but the population then began to plummet. While their rise was part of a slow but steady recovery attributed to an international ban on whaling, their decline was still attributable to human causes, mostly vessel strikes and fishing gear entanglements. The problem was researchers were struggling to locate them. 'We were always trailing behind the whales. It took us nearly five years to figure out they went to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and then the year when we went up there, then a bunch came back here [to the Bay of Fundy]. How do you explain that?' says Moira Brown, director of science at the Canadian Whale Institute in Campobello Island, N.B. In 2015, having surveyed areas of high plankton concentrations and similar oceanographic features to the whales' critical habitats, researchers discovered right whales in the Shediac Valley, located in the Gulf of St. Lawrence between the Acadian Peninsula in New Brunswick and the Magdalen Islands in Quebec. That discovery followed similar habitat changes. In 2014, scientists had observed fewer whales southwest of Nova Scotia in another critical habitat, Roseway Basin. Before that, researchers had identified the Gulf of Maine's Jordan Basin as a winter mating ground for right whales, but ahead of publishing their scientific paper in 2013, the whales had already abandoned the area, having emerged in a new winter and spring feeding area south of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, Mass. 'We thought we had the mating ground identified in the central part of the Gulf of Maine. As soon as the paper got published, that's it, the whales didn't use it any more. I don't know how they read this stuff,' says Dr. Brown, who has a PhD in marine biology. The shift to the Gulf of St. Lawrence especially worried researchers because, in contrast to the protective measures established in the Bay of Fundy, none were yet implemented in the gulf. For example, in 2003 Transport Canada rerouted Bay of Fundy vessel traffic around the Grand Manan Basin, marking the first time in International Maritime Organization history that shipping lanes were moved to protect a marine mammal species. But the Gulf of St. Lawrence – a much busier seaway, dense with the world's largest cargo vessels and tankers – had no such measures. That situation came to a head in 2017, when North Atlantic right whales faced the worst die-off event recorded since researchers began tracking them in 1990. Seventeen deaths that year – most in Canadian waters, including half in the Gulf of St. Lawrence – prompted the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to declare an "Unusual Mortality Event" (UME). 'I give the whales a lot of credit for responding to a changing environment and finding food in all the wrong places. It has cost them their lives for some of them because there weren't any protection measures in place,' Dr. Brown says. Eight years on, the UME remains open, with 157 dead or injured whales – and that number continues to rise. Right whales also continue to surprise researchers with where they aggregate. Last summer, while fewer whales than usual were observed in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, dozens were discovered in Hudson and Block Canyons, near busy New York-New Jersey shipping corridors and fishing areas. By late fall, dozens more lingered in the Bay of Fundy, up to a week before the Canadian commercial lobster fishery opened. Then, by early winter, unprecedented numbers aggregated in shipping and fishing areas around the Gulf of Maine's Jeffreys Ledge. Individual right whales have also astonished researchers by travelling beyond their known range. In 2018, male right whale Mogul (#3845) captivated scientists when he was sighted off the coast of Iceland and then off France the following year. This spring, a pair of female right whales, Koala (#3940) and Curlew (#4190), similarly caught researchers off guard when they were spotted off the Bahamas, after spending many weeks in the Gulf of Mexico. Sightings in the gulf are rare, and right whales had never before been documented in the Bahamas. Meanwhile, scientists have established that the species cannot sustain even one unnatural death, yet the whales continue to die from human causes faster than they can reproduce. Take for example the 10-year trajectory of five mother-calf pairs last known to have returned to the Bay of Fundy nursery in 2015 or 2016. 'Of the five mothers, three of those are either definitely or more than likely dead, and one of the calves – the lone female – is also dead," says Philip Hamilton, a senior scientist at the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life at the New England Aquarium (NEAq) in Boston. Scars and marks on all five mothers, including survivors Clover (#1611), last seen in 2023, and Calvin (#2223), presumed dead until she was seen this spring after evading researchers for nearly three years, punctuate the plight of North Atlantic right whales, as do death and injury statistics. Eighty-eight per cent of documented right whale deaths are attributed to human interactions. Eighty-five per cent of the population has experienced fishing gear entanglement at some point in their lives. Most vessel-strike deaths and injuries go unseen or unreported. And just more than a third of all right whale mortalities are observed at all. Since industrialized whaling days, human-caused deaths have dramatically cut the lifespan of North Atlantic right whales short. According to a peer-reviewed paper in Science Advances, while southern right whales – the Southern Hemisphere 'cousins' of North Atlantic right whales – have a median lifespan of 74 years and can live past 130, North Atlantic right whales have a median life expectancy of 22 years, rarely surviving past 45. 'Quite frankly, I'm amazed there are any right whales. But what keeps us going? Because we think we can, and this species is clearly responding to what they need to exist,' says Dr. Brown. 'This population did grow to almost 500 whales, and then climate change came along, habitat shift came along. It really looks like if we could stop killing these whales, they could probably claw their way back. They've been hanging on by their flipper-tips for tens of decades.' Canada's decisive response to the die-off event eight years ago is the dynamic policy effort North Atlantic right whales need for a fighting chance, says Sean Brillant, senior conservation biologist at the Canadian Wildlife Federation in Halifax. 'Up to that point, Canada had not made a lot of progress. It wasn't until 2017 when suddenly things started moving, and we've been working in this direction ever since,' Mr. Brillant says. To reduce vessel strikes, Transport Canada issued an emergency slowdown – first voluntary, then mandatory – for ships in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. To mitigate entanglements, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) shut down fisheries early or did not allow them to open at all, particularly those using vertical-buoy lines (VBLs), which anchor surface markers by vertical rope to bottom-fishing gear. The Canadian government continues to rely on an adaptive management approach, annually adjusting vessel-strike and entanglement mitigation measures, enhancing monitoring and enforcement, including investigating and fining non-compliant cases; and developing longer-term strategies such as DFO's Whalesafe Gear strategy, forthcoming this year. 'In the United States, such flexibility is largely absent due to poorly enforced laws and legally mandated provisions for multi-step public review of any possible actions, which can result in years of deliberation, frequent challenges in court, and dependence on judicial precedent,' writes Michael J. Moore, a veterinary scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in his 2021 book, We Are All Whalers: The Plight of Whales and Our Responsibility. That still holds true today, says Dr. Moore, speaking to The Globe and Mail. For example, in 2022, NOAA proposed extending its vessel-speed rule for ships over 65 feet in length to include vessels over 35 feet. The goal was to maintain a maximum speed of 10 knots in right whale seasonal management areas. However, this proposal faced strong opposition from mariners and lawmakers. In July, 2024, 54 Congressional legislators succeeded in urging the Biden government to reopen the rule for further input. By September, a bill approved by the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources delayed new speed limits until 2030. In January, days before the new Trump administration took office, NOAA withdrew the proposed rule altogether. 'We were trying to get a more scientifically sound and more effective vessel speed rule put in place in the last six months of the previous administration and just could not get it over the finish line,' says Dr. Rick Spinrad, the former NOAA administrator, a presidentially appointed role he left in January when the new U.S. administration took office. On Donald Trump's first day in the White House, he signed an executive order to pause NOAA spending on tens of millions of dollars allocated for right whale recovery efforts under the Inflation Reduction Act, once lauded as the U.S. government's largest investment in climate and conservation. In February, another executive order led to NOAA disbanding its expert advisories, including its Marine Fisheries Advisory Committee, which was established in 1971 and among its many functions included evaluating processes for the Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act. That same month, the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, began laying off hundreds of NOAA staff. Just as the Commander-in-Chief and Capitol can stall decisions, so too can court challenges. After NOAA extended its seasonal closure, banning VBL fishing to protect right whales off the Massachusetts coast in 2023, the Massachusetts Lobstermen's Association sued the federal department early the next year. In March, 2024, a U.S. District Court sided with the fishers, forcing NOAA to lift its February to April annual closure. However, in January, the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision, restoring the closure. Pitting conservation efforts against commercial efforts is one of the pervasive problems, says Dr. Moore. 'It's a total conflict of interest. That's certainly true of NOAA, which is supposed to be conserving the industry and the species – how can you do both? One way is acoustic retrieval of traps in areas seasonally closed to vertical lines to prevent entanglement, allowing whales and trap fishing to co-exist,' says Dr. Moore. In Canada, DFO has the same conflict, as evidenced by the fisheries minister's decision last spring to walk-back closures when faced with industry opposition. In May, 2024, following DFO's announcement of a new Lobster Fishing Area closure because of a right whale sighting off the northeast coast of New Brunswick, east of Miscou Island, protests erupted with representation from the Maritime Lobstermen's Union and federal politicians, who argued the closure would have amounted to a crisis, forcing hundreds of lobstermen to remove tens of thousands of traps. That same day, after what the department says was a reassessment of its own data on where the right whale was sighted, DFO overturned its own closure. 'What have we learned? Progress in right whale conservation is a slow, endless, and incredibly frustrating process of trying to stay ahead of a moving target,' says Dr. Moore. Even measuring progress can be a frustrating task. On the surface, the decline in right whale deaths in the Gulf of St. Lawrence signals Canadian efforts are working – while 40 per cent of the 41 right whale deaths since 2017 have occurred in the St. Lawrence, none have been recorded there since 2019, and one death has been observed in Canadian waters since 2020. The latest population estimate, released in October, also shows the number levelling out after more than a decade of decline. But Dr. Moore cautions against relying on 'body counts' and says the real proof is not in the population estimate, but the population health. About one-third of the population is injured, while 10 per cent are so severely injured they are unlikely to live. The population's high injury rate is also stunting the whales' growth. Since 1981, researchers have observed the whales' body lengths are decreasing, in turn limiting reproduction and making subsequent entanglements more lethal because smaller whales struggle more to break free from gear. 'While the whales may be adapting to a rapidly changing environment, the continued high level of mortality and serious injury clearly shows we must continue to adapt and evolve our management,' says Mr. Hamilton, the senior scientist at NEAq. Adaptation requires Canada and U.S. leadership, says Heather Pettis, a research scientist at the aquarium. 'In order to protect this species effectively, you've got to manage throughout the range, broadly, and in both countries,' says Ms. Pettis. What works particularly well is when each country learns from one another, ratcheting up each other's progress, says Dr. Spinrad, the former NOAA administrator. History provides several examples. The U.S. listed right whales under the Endangered Species Act in 1973 – more than 30 years before Canada's listing decision under the Species At Risk Act. Similarly, in 2016, import provisions under the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, which is unique to the U.S., started requiring countries that export seafood to the U.S., including Canada, to demonstrate that commercial fishing practices do not kill or seriously injure marine mammals beyond U.S. standards. And the U.S. government's 2017 UME investigation catapulted Canada into action and clearly defined collective impact. As #5245 and the other whales migrate into Canadian waters for the summer, researchers on both sides of the border will continue to monitor vast expanses of ocean by air and boat in search of these elusive and endangered creatures. This survey work includes the Bay of Fundy, where last year the Canadian Whale Institute (CWI) launched a renewed effort to increase research presence on the water since the whales' 2010 decline. 'If we don't look, we won't know. We need negative data to be able to say they're not there. They're really hard to see in this area, especially if they're not in dense aggregations,' says Delphine Durette-Morin, a right whale researcher at the CWI. 'Even if you don't see a target species, it's still negative data,' she adds, pointing out that even with the whales' shift in habitat since 2010, they have continued to be detected every year in the Bay of Fundy. Canadian researchers report observing about 40 per cent of the right whale population each year in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the absence of the remaining 60 per cent can still provide valuable insights into the whales' whereabouts. Meanwhile, as Dr. Brown approaches retirement, she finds herself grappling with the same fundamental questions. 'I'll be damned if the same questions don't still exist 40 years later: Where's the second summer nursery? Because not all the calves come to the Bay of Fundy, and not all the calves go to the Gulf of St Lawrence. Where's the mating ground? And where's the wintering ground?' she says. However, finding answers is only half the battle of the whales' plight; the other half lies in policy-makers on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border then protecting them wherever they appear. This story is part of a series produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center's Ocean Reporting Network. To keep eyes on North Atlantic right whales, scientists must first tackle perennial issues of plane safety Can motherhood help North Atlantic right whales to rise again?
CTV News
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Quebec to invest $10M in company developing Canadian-made satellite launch technology
Quebec Premier Francois Legault looks through a hand-held thermal imager during a tour of Thales Canada Defense and Security Optronics in Montreal on Monday, June 9, 2025. (Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press) MONTREAL — Quebec premier François Legault says the province will invest $10 million in a Montreal-area company that is developing a system to launch small satellites into space. Legault announced the investment in Reaction Dynamics at the company's facility in Longueuil. Economy Minister Christine Fréchette says the investment will allow the company to begin launching microsatellites into orbit from Canada as early as 2027. Reaction Dynamics plans to use a rocket called Aurora to launch the satellites. Company President Bachar Elzein says the hybrid propulsion system they use contains fewer pieces than traditional rocket motors, making them safer and simpler to produce. Legault said Canada is the only country in the G7 without domestic satellite launching capacity. A first demonstration flight is expected to take place later this year. This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 9, 2025. By Morgan Lowrie, The Canadian Press
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Seeking independence from U.S., Canadian Space Agency renews ties with European counterpart
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