First gray whale seen in centuries
Paul Dudley, an official in colonial Massachusetts, wrote in 1725 about a “scrag whale” that could be seen off New England’s coast. The account is one of the last known documentations of the gray whale in the Atlantic. Scientists believe they disappeared from that ocean by at least the 19th century.
But the 90,000-pound mammals, which still inhabit the Pacific Ocean, appear to be returning to the Atlantic. Last week, an aerial survey team from the New England Aquarium spotted a gray whale about 30 miles south of Nantucket, Mass., the aquarium said in a news release.
“My brain was trying to process what I was seeing, because this animal was something that should not really exist in these waters,” Kate Laemmle, one of the researchers who observed the mammal, said in the release.
This is at least the fifth observation of a gray whale outside the Pacific in the past 15 years. The gray whale spotted off the coast of New England on Friday appears to be the same whale seen last year near Florida, based on its markings, Orla O’Brien, an associate research scientist at the New England Aquarium, said in an email.
Nick Pyenson, the lead curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, said the sighting would mark the first confirmed observation of a gray whale in New England’s waters since the 18th century.
Researchers suspect the return of the gray whales is due to warming global temperatures that have melted arctic ice floating in the Northwest Passage in northern Canada.
“The extent of the sea ice typically limits the species range of gray whales … as the whales cannot break through the thick winter ice that usually blocks the Passage,” the aquarium said. “Now, gray whales can potentially travel the Passage in the summer, something that wouldn’t have been possible in the previous century.”
Leigh Torres, a marine ecologist at Oregon State University who has documented gray whale sightings in the Atlantic, said this could be “both a good thing and a bad thing.”
It’s good in that whales can travel from the Pacific to the Atlantic more freely, she said, but bad “if the gray whales are venturing to the Atlantic in search of food” because of a big decline of prey in the Pacific.