In Big Apple, whale watching bears fruit
NEW YORK — On a gray summer afternoon a double-decker ferry cruised around New York’s Rockaway Peninsula as rain drove down in sheets. Undaunted, the passengers, including 8-year-olds from Brooklyn celebrating a birthday, looked out the windows, hoping to glimpse their quarry.
A voice came over a weak microphone. “You’re going to help all of us find whales,” Catherine Granton said. Yes, whales. In New York. Granton told the passengers to look for whitecaps, where whales might be breaking the water’s surface.
Granton is an educator for the nonprofit Gotham Whale, which, together with American Princess Cruises, has been tracking humpbacks off the coast of New York City since 2011, after fishermen began reporting sightings. To date, the organization has cataloged 60 individual humpback whales in the area.
The whales aren’t alone. Dolphins and seals are now commonplace in New York Harbor, and a project to restore oysters to what was once known as “the oyster capital of the world” is yielding new oyster reefs in the New York-New Jersey estuary.
“What’s happening is they’re returning to waters that they frequented in the past,” Granton said.
New York was once home to abundant marine life. When Henry Hudson sailed into the harbor in 1609, it contained an estimated 350 square miles of oyster reefs, which served as a natural water filter, storm barrier and commercial resource.
Whales, too, including the fin, right, sperm and humpback, were once plentiful. But hunted for their blubber, many species veered toward extinction by the early 20th century.
Hundreds of years of industrial pollution, raw sewage and dredging decimated the marine populations. But slowly, the waters around New York have begun to recover.
In 1972 Congress passed the Clean Water Act, which banned dumping pollutants into waterways, and the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which prohibited the “take” of any marine mammal, including dolphins, seals and whales.
As waterways became cleaner, they once again became rich with nutrients, sustaining algae and plankton, which in turn feed menhaden, an important forage fish, said Paul Sieswerda, director of Gotham Whale. In 2012, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission capped the allowed take of menhaden.
The result? Whale watching with skyscrapers in the background.
One group of humpbacks typically breeds in the Caribbean during winters and migrates to the Gulf of Maine in summer. These whales have increasingly been seen in the mid-Atlantic in recent decades, said Howard Rosenbaum, director of the Ocean Giants Program at the Wildlife Conservation Society.
Other whales, including the fin and sperm, also are commonly spotted off Long Island. But it wasn’t until 2010 that humpbacks began to be reported farther west, off New York City.
In 2011 there were five sightings of three whales, Sieswerda said. The next year there were 15 sightings. The year after that, 33. Sightings plateaued at around 100 in 2015 and 2016, but Sieswerda said he expects this year to surpass that.