From the vault: Gray whales are suddenly showing up in the Atlantic Ocean.
NewsletterIn 2010, when marine biologist Aviad Scheinin posted a photo online of a gray whale off the coast of Israel, his fellow scientists weren’t buying it. “Nice Photoshopping,” one researcher responded. “Is this April Fools’?” another replied.
If gray whales do migrate to the ocean next door, they’ll find that a lot has changed in the Atlantic since the species last plied its waters, including increased ship traffic and higher temperatures. At the same time, says biologist Elizabeth Alter of the City University of New York, these 40-ton bulldozing bottom feeders could have an oversized impact on their new home — for good and for ill.
This 2010 photo of a gray whale off the coast of Israel surprised marine biologists, who believed the species was confined to the Pacific Ocean. Every year, the nomadic grays take two to three months to swim from the lagoons of Baja California, where they breed and nurse their young, to the feeding grounds off the coast of Alaska. It’s one of the longest migrations of any mammal, a round-trip trek of nearly 12,000 miles every year.
How will these colonizers fare in the Atlantic after all this time? The best guess comes from past population patterns. For years, Alter and her colleagues have meticulously reconstructed the history of the species using subfossils — ancient bones that, unlike true fossils, are not yet fully mineralized and still contain minute traces of DNA.Extracting genetic material from these ancient bones is a meticulous practice.
Nicholas Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institution, reached a similar conclusion after analyzing earlier gray whale fossils from the Pleistocene. Not only are gray whales no strangers to the Atlantic, it seems they’ve thrived there under warmer conditions.These insights into the gray whale’s past have left researchers guardedly hopeful about their future. Gray whales are accustomed to traveling far and exploring new areas.
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