Researchers at the New England Aquarium were conducting a routine survey of the waters south of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket in Massachusetts last week when something caught their eye.
What they found, a whale without a dorsal fin, led researchers to believe it was a North Atlantic right whale, a critically endangered species that the aquarium is closely monitoring. But the skin of the whale has a stain, and if it is a right whale, something is wrong.
“I had a little bit of a strange feeling about it,” Orla O’Brien, an associate research scientist, said in an interview. “Something doesn’t seem right.”
So when the whale reappeared and Ms. When O’Brien and his observation partner, Kate Laemmle, a research technician, saw the clear shape of its head and mottled gray and white skin, they couldn’t believe their eyes: It could be gray whale? In the Atlantic Ocean?
“It’s really hard to get your head around it,” said Ms. O’Brien.
But it was a gray whale, an aquarium sight described in a statement on Tuesday as “an incredibly rare event.”
Gray whales are regularly found in the North Pacific, but sightings in the Atlantic, where the whales disappeared in the 18th century, are extremely rare. Experts say it’s unclear why they disappeared, but whaling may have been a factor.
There have been five sightings of gray whales in the Atlantic and Mediterranean in the past 15 years, according to the aquarium. The most recent was off the coast of Florida in December, and the New England Aquarium believes the whale is the same gray whale that researchers saw off Nantucket last week.
Scientists say climate change is largely to blame for the strange sightings. The Northwest Passage, which connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans between the Canadian mainland and the North Pole, has been ice-free during the summer months in recent years, in part due to rising global temperatures. Without the ice, gray whales would be able to swim across the passage, something that would not have been possible a century ago, the aquarium said.
The whale that Ms. O’Brien and Ms. Laemmle did not appear to be in bad shape, and the two watched the whale feeding, “which was good,” Ms. O’Brien.
“But you’re left with ‘How did it get there?’ part,” he said. “Which, on the whole, is not a positive story because it’s only because of warming temperatures that these passages were created to go through.”
said Ms. O’Brien and Ms. Laemmle was unable to determine the whale’s age or sex, but planned to send photos to researchers in the Pacific to help identify it. He also said that the only way to track the whale is through reports of other sightings.
Joshua Stewart, a quantitative ecologist at Oregon State University published a study on gray whales in Octobersaid the gray whale sighting in the Atlantic was “pretty cool” but there were two important pieces of context.
First, whales can swim between ocean basins because of melting Arctic ice, which he said is “an expected result of climate change.”
Second, said Dr. Stewart, the gray whale appears in what is known as an “unusual death incident” in the last four years, probably due to the loss of prey in the Arctic. According to the latest estimate, there are believed to be about 14,000 gray whales, down from 27,000 in 2019, he said.
said Dr. Stewart that the mass die-out appears to be diminishing. During a mass mortality event, gray whales start eating things they don’t normally eat or go out to places they don’t normally see, like the Atlantic.
“There is a potential that some of the unusual sightings in the Atlantic could be the result of that,” he said. Pacific and Arctic gray whales “just aren’t getting what they need to survive so they’re looking for food elsewhere, so we’re seeing them in all kinds of weird places.”
But sporadic sightings of gray whales outside their usual habitat could be a sign of things to come, he said.
“What’s really cool is that we can watch the recolonization of Atlantic gray whales in real time,” said Dr. Stewart.
He said he doesn’t expect a full recolonization of Atlantic gray whales to happen anytime soon, noting that the process could take decades, even centuries. But due to the rapid rate of water heating, Dr. Stewart, “we may be witnessing the very beginning of this.”
However, Ms. O’Brien that it’s too early to say if anything like that will happen.
“The timeline is beyond what we can observe,” he said. “For many whales to come and stay here will take time.”
