Sperm whales have their own unique cultures, accents, and potentially a phonetic alphabet. A team from MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) may have decoded this phonetic alphabet that reveals sophisticated structures within sperm whale communication that could be similar to human phonetics and other animal linguistic systems. 

“Sperm whale calls are, in principle, capable of expressing a wider space of meanings than we previously thought!” MIT computer science graduate student Pratyusha Sharma tells PopSci. Sharma is a co-author of a new study published May 7 in the journal Nature Communications that describes these findings. 

Sperm whale ABCs

With some of the largest brains of any species on Earth, sperm whales have complex social behaviors. They travel in pods and have various cultural groups that dive and hunt together and even take turns looking after younger whales. They do this all in almost complete darkness, so they need strong communication to coordinate their lives in the ocean’s deepest depths.

[Related: Science Says Sperm Whales Could Really Wreck Ships.]

Sperm whales use a complex system of codas–short bursts of clicks–to communicate. In this study, the team collected 9,000 codas from sperm whale families in the Eastern Caribbean sperm observed by The Dominica Sperm Whale Project. They used acoustic biologging tags, called D-tags that were deployed on whales. The D-tags captured details of the whales’ vocal patterns. 

The team found that these short groups of clicks vary in structure depending on the conversational context. With this data in hand, they used a mix of algorithms for pattern recognition and classification, and on-body recording equipment. It revealed that the communications were not random or simple, but more structured and complex. 

The sperm whale’s essentially have their own phonetic alphabet. Various auditory elements that the team call rhythm, tempo, rubato, and ornamentation work together to form a large array of distinguishable codas. Depending on the context of the conversation, the whales can systematically modulate certain aspects of their codas. They may smoothly vary the duration of the calls–rubato–or add in some extra ornamental clicks. The team also found that the building blocks of these codas could be combined in various ways. The whales can then build many distinct vocalizations from these combinations. 

“The sperm whale communication system is a combinatorial coding system,” says Sharma. “Looking at a wider communicative context allowed us to discover that there is fine-grained variation in the structure of the calls of sperm whales that are both perceived and imitated in the course of their exchange.”

Using AI

The team developed new visualization and data analysis techniques that found individual sperm whales could emit various coda patterns in long exchanges. Using machine learning is important for pinpointing the specifics of their communications and predicting what they may say next. 

[Related: How bomb detectors discovered a hidden pod of singing blue whales.]

Scientists are interested in determining if these signals vary depending on the ecological context they are given in and how much the signals follow any potential rules similar to grammar that the listeners recognize. 

“The problem is particularly challenging in the case of marine mammals, because scientists usually cannot see their subjects or identify in complete detail the context of communication,” University of Pennsylvania Psychology Professor Emeritus Robert Seyfarth said in a statement. “Nonetheless, this paper offers new, tantalizing details of call combinations and the rules that underlie them in sperm whales.” Seyfarth was not involved in this study.

Alien communication on Earth

In future studies, CETI hopes to figure out whether elements like rhythm, tempo, ornamentation, and rubato carry specific intentions when communicated. This could provide insight into a specific linguistic phenomenon where simple elements are combined to present complex meanings. This “duality of patterning” was previously thought to be unique to human language. 

Research like this also parallels hypothetical scenarios in which humans contact alien species and need to communicate. 

“It’s about understanding a species with a completely different environment and communication protocols, where their interactions are distinctly different from human norms,” says Sharma. “Essentially, our work could lay the groundwork for deciphering how an ‘alien civilization’ might communicate, providing insights into creating algorithms or systems to understand entirely unfamiliar forms of communication.”

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Dolphins and other toothed whales–or Odontocetes–use their heads to create sounds that help them communicate, navigate, and hunt in their murky marine world. These sometimes vocal-fry-like sounds reveal information about their murky marine world that is critical for survival. Some new genetic analysis suggests that the collections of fatty tissues that enable echolocation in toothed whales may have evolved from their skull muscles and bone marrow,changing how these animals eat and sense the world around them. The findings are described in a study published in the April 2024 issue of the journal Gene. 

Toothed whales include numerous dolphin species as well as orcas, sperm whales, belugas, and narwhals. Echolocation produced by a bulbous mass of fat tissue inside of their heads called the melon. 

Alongside of the jawbone of dolphins and toothed whales is a group of sound producing extramandibular fat bodies (EMFB). Another set of acoustic fat deposits called the intramandibular fat bodies (IMFB) are located inside the jawbone. The evolution of the melon, the extramandibular, and intramandibular fat bodies was critical for echolocation to develop in these marine mammals. However, little is known about how these fatty tissues themselves originated genetically. 

“Toothed whales have undergone significant degenerations and adaptations to their aquatic lifestyle,” Hayate Takeuchi, a study co-author and PhD student at Hokkaido University in Japan,  said in a statement. 

One of these adaptations was the partial loss of their sense of smell and taste, alongside the gain of echolocation. To look closer at this and other adaptations at a genetic level, the team from Hokkaido University studied DNA sequences of genes that are expressed in these acoustic fat bodies. They measured the gene expressions in harbor porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) and Pacific white-sided dolphins (Lagenorhynchus obliquidens). 

[Related: This dolphin ancestor looked like a cross between Flipper and Moby Dick.]

They found that the genes which are normally associated with muscle function and development were active in the melon and EMFB’s on the outside of the jawbone. There was also evidence of an evolutionary connection between this fat and a muscle called the masseter muscle. In humans, the masseter muscle connects the lower jawbone to the cheekbones and is one of the the key muscles used in chewing.

“This study has revealed that the evolutionary tradeoff of masticatory muscles for the EMFB—between auditory and feeding ecology—was crucial in the aquatic adaptation of toothed whales,” study co-author and genome scientist and evolutionary biologist Takashi Hayakawa said in a statement. “It was part of the evolutionary shift away from chewing to simply swallowing food, which meant the chewing muscles were no longer needed.”

[Related: We finally know how baleen whales make noise.]

When the team analyzed the gene expression in the intramandibular fat on the inside of the jawbone, they found active genes related to some elements of immune response and regulation of a group of white blood cells that fight infection called T cells. The team believes that this is due to its proximity to bone marrow–which helps produce T cells–and requires more study.

The team also credited the Stranding Network Hokkaido as another important aspect of the research, as the samples used in this study were collected by them. The organization has  collected specimens of stranded whales along the seashore and river mouth in Hokkaido. Performing necropsies on stranded marine mammals have been critical for sampling and research to learn more about the potential causes of strandings and death, but also anatomy, physiology, and evolution. 

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

John Ford still recalls the first time he heard them. He’d been puttering around the Deserters Group archipelago, a smattering of spruce- and cedar-choked islands in Queen Charlotte Strait, between Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia. He was piloting a small skiff and trailing a squad of six killer whales. Ford, then a graduate student, had been enamored with cetacean sounds since listening to belugas chirp while he worked part-time at the Vancouver Aquarium as a teenager. Now here he was, on August 12, 1980, tracking the underwater conversations of wild killer whales through a borrowed hydrophone.

Ford had spent the previous two summers painstakingly recording the sounds made by other groups of these iconic black-and-white marine mammals, known as resident killer whales. In summer and fall, the residents traveled in noisy, tight-knit pods that often hugged the shorelines of British Columbia and Washington State, breaching in spectacular aerial displays that delighted tourists, scientists, and other bystanders. They emitted rapid overlapping clicks and thumps, along with squeals, honks, and bleats that could resemble seal barks or, occasionally, human flatulence.

Yet to Ford, the vocalizations he captured on his reel-to-reel that August day sounded nothing like the resident killer whales he’d recorded in previous years. They were coming from a gang of whales researchers had taken to calling “the oddballs,” because they appeared to scientists to be social outcasts who had left or been driven out of the resident group. Their calls were tonal, more alien, and far louder, sometimes sounding like a rusty hinge on a closing gate. Clicks were infrequent when they came at all. “I was amazed,” Ford says now.

While Ford spent the rest of his career studying whales, eventually leading the cetacean research program for Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s Pacific Biological Station before retiring in 2017, he never forgot his reaction that day: these must be different creatures.

More than 40 years later, science is poised to agree.

A new study published last week in the journal Royal Society Open Science by a team of top whale experts argues that across the North Pacific, resident killer whales and the oddballs—long since renamed transient, or Bigg’s, killer whales—aren’t just different ecotypes. They’re entirely distinct species. The researchers contend that both are separate from a third species that encompasses the rest of the world’s killer whales.

Ford, who was not involved in the study, calls the research thorough and definitive, drawing from data collected across disciplines and over decades. “There’re just pieces of the story that have fit together to build, I think, a compelling case,” he says.

By proposing to split Orcinus orca into three separate species—residents, transients, and everything else—scientists aren’t only changing the taxonomic record to more accurately reflect what it means to be a killer whale. They’re also acknowledging the ways that communication, behavior, and even culture can help shape speciation as surely as genetics and physiology do.

Killer whales traverse all the world’s oceans, from polar waters to the tropics. They are the seas’ apex predators, described in scientific literature in 1869 as “wolves of the ocean,” who swim “in small companies” while “living by violence and plunder.” That’s true. Some killer whales eat birds or baby whales or balls of herring. Others prey on manta rays or sea turtles. In Antarctica, they work together to wash seals off ice by swamping floes with waves. In both hemispheres, killer whales have been seen surging onto beaches to pluck seals right off land.

There have long been signs that such hunting behaviors and dietary differences might be more than mere preference. In 1970, whale rustlers herded several killer whales into Pedder Bay, southwest of Victoria, British Columbia, with the intent of capturing them for marine theme parks. For more than 11 weeks, two of the whales refused to eat the fish that handlers served them, becoming more and more emaciated. What no one knew then was that these captives were transients, not the resident killer whales who were known to specialize in chinook salmon as prey. Scientists didn’t yet understand that transients even existed, or that they’d eat seals, porpoises, dolphins, even humpback calves—but not fish.

“These prey specializations aren’t just choices that orcas make on a daily basis—they are hardwired,” says Bob Pitman, a marine ecologist and affiliate of Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute. In fact, both populations are so set in their ways that researchers have spied resident fish-eating whales slaughtering harbor porpoises for sport without consuming them.

For decades, scientists misunderstood these behaviors, which are consistent everywhere residents and transients are found, from California, British Columbia, and Alaska to Japan, Russia, and beyond. “We didn’t recognize that as being evolutionarily significant,” says Phillip Morin, a marine mammal geneticist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Southwest Fisheries Science Center who led the Royal Society Open Science study.

By 2003, the population of one subsection of residents—the southern residents, often spied in and around the Salish Sea, which stretches from BC’s Strait of Georgia to Washington’s Budd Inlet—had plummeted to 83 individuals from an estimated high in the 19th century of more than 200. Scientists in the United States trying to advise the government on how to offer federal protections to these particular whales struggled to describe how they fit in with the rest of the world’s killer whales, and vice versa. Nor did scientists know how long members of a group struggling to survive had gone without breeding with other killer whale groups in the same area.

So Morin spent years coordinating with fellow experts, amassing evidence about the peculiarities of residents and transients across the North Pacific. Some elements had been known for decades. For instance, transients don’t just eat differently than residents, they hunt differently, too. Unlike their chatterbox neighbors, transients use stealth, and stalk meals in silence (likely because their prey use sound too). And while residents live in stable pods for decades, transients travel in looser groups with shifting alliances.

Furthermore, killer whales often live in communities with their own rituals, which get passed down from one generation to the next through social learning. Even subgroups of resident whales that are nearly genetically identical and overlap geographically can behave quite differently, their dialects as unalike as Spanish and Japanese. Northern residents, for example, frequently zip into shallow waters to scratch their bellies on the gravelly seafloor. Southern residents, who frequent similar waters, have never been documented doing that. Instead, they hold multi-pod gatherings and occasionally push baby salmon with their snouts—neither of which is a popular pastime with northern residents.

Alone, none of these differences is enough to classify different communities or ecotypes as distinct species. But for some groups of killer whales, what started out as behavioral traits handed down through generations may have ultimately helped lead to something more. “Most people tend to think [something is] either a different species or it’s not,” Pitman says. But “you have to understand: evolution is a slow change over time. It’s not a black-and-white situation.”

Over several decades, Morin’s compilation of research helped illuminate differences both subtle and extraordinary, through methods as diverse as finding and studying whale skulls and using cameras attached to drones. Transients, compared to residents, are longer and fatter, with more triangular dorsal fins. Their jaws are more robust and curved—a necessity, perhaps, for wrangling a half-tonne dinner of Steller sea lion.

But some of the most compelling distinctions come from work by Morin and colleague Kim Parsons, a research geneticist at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center. When studying tissue samples, Parsons found that whenever whales look, act, feed, and sound like transients, they have DNA that’s noticeably distinct from residents. In fact, Morin’s work showed that the two whale types, even when swimming in nearby waters, are so genetically removed from one another that they haven’t interbred for at least several hundred thousand years. As Parsons puts it: “They’ve obviously been on very separate, very divergent, and independent paths of evolution for a very, very long time.”

This pattern remains true across the North Pacific. Andrew Foote, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oslo who has studied killer whales but wasn’t part of this study, says that this speaks to how robust the barriers to gene flow are between residents and transients.

Morin’s best guess is that as ice ages came and went, groups of whales became isolated by changing geography and were forced to specialize. “There was this physical separation, which is the normal way that speciation starts to occur, and the cultural variation was overlaid on top of that,” Morin says. When the environment shifted again and whales came back together, “cultural differences reinforced the separation.”

Other animals that separated for millennia then reunited might not have a problem reintegrating, Morin adds. But killer whales have such cohesive family bonds and distinct dialects that “this cultural aspect helps drive their divergence—or at least helps maintain it.”

For the moment, killer whales globally will remain a single species. The Society for Marine Mammalogy’s taxonomy committee will debate the findings of Morin and his colleagues, maybe later this spring, and many experts suspect they will eventually accept the proposed partitioning of killer whales into three species: transients (Orcinus rectipinnus), residents (Orcinus ater), and everything else, including the offshore whales that also call the North Pacific home. All of those would still go by Orcinus orca—at least for now. This research may eventually pave the way for further divisions among the rest of the planet’s killer whales.

In the meantime, Ford looks forward to being able to finally settle a longstanding argument. “What this paper is going to do is resolve a problem I’ve had for years,” he says, chuckling. When he talks to the public highlighting differences between these whales, or tells someone at a dinner party how he spent his career, he invariably faces a question: “Why aren’t they different species?”

Now he can say, “I think they will be soon.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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A distinct subpopulation of orca whales appears to be using specialized hunting techniques to hunt the marine mammals that they eat. Orca–or killer whales–are the ultimate apex predators, who have been observed attacking great white sharks, porpoises, and even blue whales. They are found in every ocean on the planet, and the specific environments that they live in have largely shaped their particular food preferences. The killer whales that forage near the deep submarine canyons off the California coast may use the sloping seascape to inform the ways that they catch food. These findings are described in a study published March 20 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

Residents vs. transients

Groups of orca whales can form different populations or ecotypes. They have their own social structures, food preferences, and hunting techniques. Resident killer whales, like the three endangered pods that spend the summer and fall months in and around Puget Sound near Seattle, Washington exclusively eat salmon and have a more round dorsal fin.

[Related: Orca observed hunting and killing a great white shark by itself for the first time.]

The other type of killer whales called transient killer whales specialize in hunting marine mammals. Transients are typically slightly larger than resident orcas have a more pointed dorsal fin. 

The transients that forage in the Northern Pacific Ocean can also be further divided into two groups. The inner coast whales feed in shallow coastal waters, while outer coast whales hunt in deeper water. Most studies have focused on the orcas that hunt closer to shore and not much is known about the foraging techniques for the more offshore whales, such as those near the Monterey Submarine Canyon in California.

“Monterey Bay provides a conducive environment to investigate transient foraging ecology and behavior, due to it having a large deep submarine canyon system occurring close to shore that is accessible to researchers,” study co-author and University of British Columbia marine ecologist Josh McInnes tells PopSci. 

Two distinct foraging behaviors

McInnes and his team looked at the outer coast transient killer whales that foreage around the undersea Monterey Canyon, which is one of the deepest in the United States. They compiled and analyzed data from marine mammal surveys conducted between 2006 and 2018 and whale-watching ecotours between 2014 and 2021. The whales mainly ate California sea lions, gray whale calves, and northern elephant seals. 

The orcas were observed using two different foraging behaviors that appear to be unique to these more offshore transients. When foraging open water, the groups spread out and searched independently for marine mammals to eat. Each whale would also surface at a different time. 

However, if they were looking around the deep submarine canyons and shelf-breaks, groups of whales would search for prey following the contours of the canyon. The group would also surface at the same time. 

According to McInnes, both foraging behaviors appear to be unique to these whales from the other transient groups that hunt in shallow water. 

[Related: Raising male offspring comes at a high price for orca mothers.]

“Their ability to locate and follow the contours of the canyon was surprising based on our focal follow surveys,” says McInnes. “We hypothesize that transient killer whales hunting in submarine canyons may listen to water being upwelled along the continental slope or shelf-break.”

Ramming or punting sea lions

The orcas also deploy special techniques if their prey couldn’t be easily cornered in open water. They subdued their prey by ramming into them with their head or body–as some orca do to boats. The whales also used their powerful tails to hit or launch sea lions out of the water and into the air. 

McInnes and the team believes that these outer coast whales are a distinct subpopulation that has developed these hunting techniques in such a deep water habitat. It’s also possible that these foraging behaviors may be culturally transmitted from one generation to the next. The team was surprised by their affinity for along the slopes of the canyon and shelf-break and just how much time they spent foraging and feeding. 

“Transient killer whales in Monterey Bay, California spend 84 percent of daylight hours foraging (searching, pursuing, and feeding), which is a significant amount of time,” says McInnes. “Feeding appears to be related to the size of prey these whales tackle, with long hunts involving gray whale calves and California sea lions.”

McInness also said the team “really appreciate” any photographs or sightings of killer whales. Images of killer whales can be sent to oceaniceologyrg@gmail.com.

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When their kin aren’t attacking boats and porpoises or monitoring their large adult sons, some pods of orca whales are also known to attack the fearsome great white shark. Groups of these marine mammals are known to hunt and kill these giant fish in an epic battle of apex predators. Now, a solitary orca–aka killer whale–has been observed eating a great white shark for the first time. The findings are described in a study published March 1 in the African Journal of Marine Science.

“The astonishing predation, off the coast of Mossel Bay, South Africa, represents unprecedented behavior underscoring the exceptional proficiency of the killer whale,” Alison Towner, a study co-author and shark biologist from Rhodes University in South Africa, said in a statement. 

Pack hunters–Willy vs. Jaws

Typically, orcas work together in groups to catch their prey–most often sea lions, seals, sharks and even other whales. When hunting together in a pod, they surround their prey and use combined strength and intelligence to attack. South Africa’s white sharks are predators in their own right and known for their stunning acrobatics and solo hunting. 

[Related: Watch what can happen when killer whales tangle with great white sharks.]

In 2022, the same research team revealed that a pair of orca named Port and Starboard had been hunting and killing South Africa’s white sharks since 2017. Their predatory behavior has since driven large numbers of the sharks away from their natural aggregation sites. While orca whales can hunt large animals individually, this most recent occurrence is the first time that a single whale has been observed attacking a great white shark.

‘The scent of shark liver oil’

This incident was observed in June 2023 near Seal Island in Mossel Bay, about 248 miles east of Cape Town and is challenging conventional beliefs about the cooperative hunting behaviors in the region. Starboard the orca was working alone to “incapacitate and consume” an eight foot-long juvenile white shark in only two-minutes. Later, the orca was observed carrying the shark’s liver in its mouth. 

“Upon reaching Mossel Bay’s Seal Island, the scent of shark liver oil and a noticeable slick indicated a recent kill. Tracking Port and Starboard near the island, they remained separated,” Esther Jacobs, from marine conservation initiative Keep Fin Alive, said in a statement recounting the day. “Witnessing a white shark’s fin break the surface initially sparked excitement, but that turned to a somber realization as Starboard swiftly approached. The moment Starboard rapidly preyed on my favorite shark species was both devastating and intensely powerful.”

What Jacobs and the others on the water that day were observing is a specialized feeding behavior. Orca in South Africa appear to have a strong preference for eating the lipid-rich livers of white sharks.

[Related: This could be the first newborn great white shark ever captured on camera.]

“Over two decades of annual visits to South Africa, I’ve observed the profound impact these killer whales have on the local white shark population,” added Primo Micarelli, from the Shark Studies Centre and Siena University in Italy. “Seeing Starboard carry a white shark’s liver past our vessel is unforgettable.”

At least two great white sharks were killed during these interactions, as a second carcass measuring 11.6 feet was also found nearby. 

“This sighting revealed evidence of solitary hunting by at least one killer whale, challenging conventional cooperative hunting behaviors known in the region,” said Towner. 

Shifting dynamics at sea

In addition to offering some new insight into predatory behavior in orcas, it’s also helping provide context to the ecosystem changes that may happen when orcas displace sharks as the apex predator. Understanding the dynamics at play as killer whales continue to prey on large sharks underscores the need for conservation strategies that can be adapted in a timely manner as the environment and ecosystem changes. 

[Related: Great whites don’t hunt humans—they just have blind spots.]

“The observations reported here add more layers to the fascinating story of these two killer whales and their capabilities,” ecologist Simon Elwen said in a statement. “As smart, top predators, killer whales can rapidly learn new hunting techniques on their own or from others, so monitoring and understanding the behaviors used here and by other killer whales in South Africa is an important part of helping us understand more about these animals.”

Elwen is a whale ecology expert at the University of Stellenbosch and Founding Director and Principal Scientist at Sea Search Research & Conservation. He was not an author of this specific study. 

These new findings and future studies should provide scientists in the region with more insight in how to adapt conservation measures. According to Towner, skilled “shark spotters” in Cape Town documented a record of over 300 great white shark sightings across eight beaches in 2011. Since 2019, there haven’t been any sightings in the area, as the sharks are moving further away from Cape Town. Threats from orcas like Port and Starboard and dwindling resources have prompted these great white sharks to begin to move further away. 

“Despite my awe for these predators, I’m increasingly concerned about the coastal marine ecology balance,” said Micarelli.

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Researchers using an AI photo-scanning tool similar to facial recognition have learned that there’s been a 20% decline in North Pacific Ocean humpback whale populations over the past decade. The researchers pointed to a climate change related heat wave as a possible culprit. The findings, published this week in Royal Society Open Science, used the artificial intelligence-powered image detection model to analyze more than 200,000 photographs of humpback whales taken between 2001 and 2022. 

Facial recognition models used to identify humans have faced sustained criticism from researchers and advocates who say the models struggle to identify accurately identity nonwhite people. In this case, the model scanning humpback whale photos was trained to spot and recognize unique identifiers on a whale’s dorsal fin. These identifiers function like a one-of-a-kind whale fingerprint and can consist of marks, variations in pigmentation, scarring, and overall size. Researchers used successful photo matches to inform estimates for humpback whale populations over time.

[ Related: The government is going to use facial recognition more. That’s bad. ]

Images of the whale tails, captured by scientists and whale watchers alike, are stored by a nonprofit called HappyWhale, which described itself as “largest individual identification resource ever built for marine mammals.” HappyWhales encourages everyday “citizen scientists” to take photos of whales they see and upload them to its growing database. The photos include the data, and location of where the whale was spotted. 

From there, users can track a whale they photographed and contribute to a growing corpus of data researchers can use to more accurately understate the species’ population and migration patterns. Prior to this AI-assisted method, experts had to comb through individual whale tail photographs looking for similarities with their named eye, a process both painstaking and time-consuming. Image matching technology speeds that process, giving researchers more time to investigate changes in population data. 

 “Having an algorithm like this dramatically speeds up the information-gathering process, which hopefully speeds up timely management actions,” Philip Patton, a  University of Hawaii at Manoa Phd student who has worked with the tool said in a previous interview with Spectrum News. 

Research links humpback whale population decline to climate change 

Humpback whales, once on the brink of extinction, have seen their population grow in the 40 years since commercial hunting of the species was made illegal, so much so that the giant mammals were removed from the endangered species list in the US in 2016. But that rebound is at risk of being short-lived. Researchers analyzing the whale data estimate their population peaked in 2012 at around 33,488. Then, the numbers started trickling downwards. From 2012 to 2021, the whale population dropped down to 26,662, a decline of around 20%. Researchers say that downward trend coincided with a record heat wave that raised ocean temperatures and may have “altered the course of species recovery.” 

That historic heat wave resulted in rising surface sea temperatures and decreases in nutrient-rich water which in turn led to reductions in  phytoplankton biomass. These changes led to greater disruptions in the food chain which the researcher says limited the whales’ access to krill and other food sources. While they acknowledged ship collisions and entanglements could be responsible for some of the population declines, the researchers said those factors couldn’t account for the entirety of the decline. 

“These advances have shifted the abundance estimation paradigm from data scarcity and periodic study to continuous and accessible tracking of the ocean-basin- wide population through time,” the researchers wrote. 

Facial recognition can shed light on animals on a population level 

Whales aren’t the only animals having their photos run through image detection algorithms. Scientists use various forms of the technology to research populations of cows, chickens, salmon, and lemurs, amongst species. Though primarily used as an aid for conservation and population estimation, some researchers have reportedly used the technology to analyze facial cues in domesticated Sheep to determine whether or not they felt pain in certain scenarios. Others have used photo matching software to try and to find missing pets. 

[ Related: Do all geese look the same to you? Not to this facial recognition software. ]

These examples and others highlight the upside of image and pattern matching algorithms capable of sifting through vast image databases. In the case of conservation, accurate population estimates made possible by these technologies can help inform whether or not certain species require endangered classifications or other resources to help maintain their healthy population.

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Baleen whales, including today’s blue, humpback, and fin whales rely on sounds to live in their watery world. Their songs must be able travel far in the murky, dark ocean so that they can find their kin and migrate hundreds of thousands of miles. In the more than 50 years that scientists have been studying whale song, it’s remained unclear what physical structures baleen whales use to make noise until now. A  study published February 21 in the journal Nature finds that baleen whales evolved unique parts in their larynx that create their complex vocalizations.

[Related: The planet’s first filter feeder could be this extinct marine reptile.]

“Whales are absolutely amazing creatures, they are the biggest animals to have ever lived. They’re way bigger than the largest dinosaurs, they can dive deep, and are very social,” Coen Elemans, study co-author and a voice scientist at the University of Southern Denmark, tells PopSci. “Because it is so difficult to find another animal in a huge ocean, many of these behaviors are guided by sound. Thus understanding how they make sound is crucial to understand the biology of whales in general.”

Toothed whales vs. baleen whales

Whales fall into two main groups–toothed whales (Odontocetes) and baleen whales (Mysticetes). Toothed whales include, orcas, sperm whales, dolphins, and porpoises. Many of these species have visible teeth that they use to crush their prey.

Baleen–or whalebone–is a hard substance made up of keratin. It grows from the whale’s upper jaw in plates with bristle-like fringes. It works like a sieve to filter out the small fish or zooplankton that it eats. 

“Baleen whales make sound with their larynx and toothed whales in their nose,” explains Elemans. “Both use the same mechanism of vibrating tissues just like human vocal folds, but with completely new structures.”

Evolving new vocal structures

In the study, the team examined three stranded whales. Each specimen was from different baleen species–sei, common minke, and humpback whale. Whales that strand themselves on  the beach can provide researchers with an opportunity to study their anatomy closer. After the larynx of each whale species was extracted, the team built a computational model of the entire whale larynx in the lab. The model included accurate 3D shapes of the muscles surrounding the larynx, which made it possible to simulate how the sound frequency is controlled by muscle movement.

They found that baleen whales evolved to produce sound with the  vibrations of specific internal structures in the larynx, that toothed whales do not have. These specialized structures in baleen whales allow for sound to be produced and air recycled, while preventing the whales from inhaling water. 

While both types of whales can still produce sound with their larynx, baleen whales have novel structures that do this. They use cartilages called the arytenoids that are also found in the human larynx. The arytenoids change the position of human vocal folds. In baleen whales, they appear as  large, long cylinders at the base of a U-shaped rigid structure that covers the full length of the larynx, instead of small cartilage. This helps keep their airway open when moving large amounts of air through their massive bodies and not choke. 

“The toothed and baleen whales evolved from land mammals that had a larynx serving two functions: protecting the airways and sound production,” Tecumseh Fitch, a study co-author and  biologist at the University of Vienna in Austria, said in a statement. “However, their transition to aquatic life placed new and strict demands on the larynx to prevent choking underwater.”

Turn it down

While the study showed how baleen whales produce low frequency vocalizations for the first time, thesound production that they have honed over millions of years of evolution is becoming threatened in an increasingly noisy ocean. 

“They can’t make sound very deep and most species can’t make high frequencies,” says Elemans. “This limits the range of their communication. On top of that, these depths and frequencies overlap with human made noise in the oceans, such as boat traffic, and thus the whales cannot escape this noise by singing for example higher.”

[Related: Is it loud in the ocean?]

The authors cite the flurry of conservation and political activity in the wake of the first acoustic recordings of humpback whale song in 1970. Roger and Katy Payne’s album Songs of the Humpback Whale was considered so important that selections from it were included on a record aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft, to give any extraterrestrials who may find the spacecraft an idea of what life on Earth is like. The oceans have only gotten noisier since the 1970s, and similar conservation efforts are needed to reduce noise. 

“We need strict regulations for such noise, because these whales are dependent on sound for communication,” Elemans said in a statement. “Now we show that despite their amazing physiology they literally cannot escape the noise humans make in the oceans.”

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Despite only eating fish, the Southern Resident orcas of the Pacific Northwest’s Salish Sea are known for a perplexing behavior. They harass and even kill porpoises without eating them and scientists are not really sure why. A study published September 28 in the journal Marine Mammal Science looked at over 60 years of data to try and solve this ongoing mystery.

[Related: Raising male offspring comes at a high price for orca mothers.]

While their relatives called transient killer whales eat other organisms including squid, shark, and porpoises, the Southern Resident orcas exclusively eat fish, particularly Chinook salmon. The strange porpoise-harassing behavior was first scientifically documented in 1962. The new study analyzed 78 documented incidents and found three plausible explanations.

Orcas at play

The behavior may be a form of social play for orcas. Like many intelligent species including dogs, elephants, and kangaroos, these whales sometimes engage in playful activities as a way to bond, communicate, or just simply enjoy themselves. Going after porpoises might benefit their group coordination and teamwork.

This theory may be reminiscent of the orcas who became famous for sinking boats in Spain and Portugal. While the Southern Resident killer whales and the whales from the Iberian Peninsula are two different populations with distinct cultures, their affinity for play could be something both populations share, according to the authors of the study. 

Hunting practice

Going after a larger animal like porpoises might help these whales hone their critical salmon-hunting skills. They may view porpoises as moving targets to practice their hunting techniques, even if a meal is not the end result.

Mismothering behavior

The orcas may be attempting to provide care for porpoises that they perceive as either sick or weak. This could be a behavioral manifestation of their natural inclination to help others within their pod. Female orcas have been observed carrying their deceased calves and have been observed carrying porpoises in a similar manner.  

Scientists also call mismothering behavior displaced epimeletic behavior. It could be due to their limited opportunities to care for their young, according to study co-author and science and research director at Wild Orca Deborah Giles. 

“Our research has shown that due to malnutrition, nearly 70 percent of Southern Resident killer whale pregnancies have resulted in miscarriages or calves that died right away after birth,” Giles said in a statement.

An endangered group

Southern Resident killer whales are considered an endangered population. Currently, only 75 individuals exist and their survival is essentially tied to Chinook salmon. A 2022 study found that these orcas have been in a food deficit for over 40 years and another study found that the older and fatter fish are also becoming more scarce in several populations.

“I am frequently asked, why don’t the Southern Residents just eat seals or porpoises instead?” said Giles. “It’s because fish-eating killer whales have a completely different ecology and culture from orcas that eat marine mammals—even though the two populations live in the same waters. So we must conclude that their interactions with porpoises serve a different purpose, but this purpose has only been speculation until now.”

Even with these three theories for the behavior, the team acknowledges that the exact reason behind porpoise harassment may always remain a mystery. What is clear is that porpoises are not a part of the Southern Resident killer whale diet, so eating them is highly unlikely. 

“Killer whales are incredibly complex and intelligent animals. We found that porpoise-harassing behavior has been passed on through generations and across social groupings. It’s an amazing example of killer whale culture,” Sarah Teman, a study co-author and marine mammal biologist with the University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine’s SeaDoc Society, said in a statement. “Still, we don’t expect the Southern Resident killer whales to start eating porpoises. The culture of eating salmon is deeply ingrained in Southern Resident society. These whales need healthy salmon populations to survive.”

However, this research does underscore the importance of salmon conservation in the Salish Sea and the Southern Resident’s entire range. They generally stay near southern Vancouver Island and Washington State, but their range can extend as far as the central California coast and southeastern Alaska.  Maintaining an adequate salmon supply will be vital to their survival and well-being of the Salish Sea ecosystem as a whole.

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The oceans cover more than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, but humans have only visited and mapped 5 percent of them. They remain one of the greatest, deepest mysteries close to home. With the help of scientists and photographers, however, we’re uncovering more wildlife and more about the flows and balances in oceans day by day. While we might never know everything that unfolds beneath the great blue waves, we can always keep our curiosities and appetites alive.

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Climate change is often in the form of extremes in weather like sweltering heat domes, devastating inland flooding or record breaking wildfire seasons, which puts lives and livelihoods at risk for humans. However, the world’s animals who are on the front lines of an ever changing planet experience these changes a little differently. 

[Related: We don’t have a full picture of the planet’s shrinking biodiversity. Here’s why.]

“When we see climate change in the news, we often think of big storms or major weather events but animals are vulnerable to the smallest changes,” wildlife filmmaker and host Bertie Gregory tells PopSci. 

In the new series “Animals Up Close with Bertie Gregory,” viewers can get a look into these subtleties and changes. In one episode, the team is searching a dive spot in Indonesia for the elusive devil ray, when a swarm of hundreds of jellyfish approaches.

“Avoiding their stingers was like playing a video game! We were told that huge jellyfish plumes like that were becoming a more regular sight in these tropical waters, which is not a good sign,” Gregory says. 

When Gregory checked the dive thermometer, it read 87.8 degrees Fahrenheit, in water that should have been about 82 degrees. A few degrees might not always sound like much, but has an outsized impact on animals.  “Jellyfish are thought to tolerate climate change better than other species, hence their huge numbers on that day. For us, it meant no other signs of life,” says Gregory.

[Related: Maine’s puffins show another year of remarkable resiliency.]

The series spans the planet and uses high-tech drones and cameras that Gregory calls a “game changer” for wildlife filmmaking. The tech allows the filmmakers to catch a glimpse of the outer lives of animals and even some of their more inner workings.

“We also used a military grade thermal imaging camera to film elephants at night in the depth of the jungle in the Central African Republic—it uses heat to “see” in the dark and elephant ears look incredible as you can see all their veins!” says Gregory.

The series also captures just how difficult it is for terrestrial animals like the pumas of Patagonia and marine mammals like Antarctica’s orca whales to get a solid meal and how climate change continues to threaten vital food sources. 

An episode features a group of Antarctic orcas known as the B1s during what Gregory says was the warmest Antarctic trip he has ever experienced. These killer whales are known for a unique strategy to hunt seals resting on the ice that might remind some orca enthusiasts of the hydroplaning killer whales near Argentina’s Valdés peninsula who thrust their 8,000 to 16,000 pound bodies up onto the beach to catch seals. 

Instead of using surf, sand, and rocks like their Argentinian cousins, these Antarctic killer whales work together as a team to create waves that wash the seals into the water. 

“We witnessed and filmed the staggering intelligence and adaptability of a group of killer whales. There are thought to be just 100 of these unique killer whales in existence, and during filming it was clear they were struggling to ‘wave wash’ seals from ice because there wasn’t much ice,” says Gregory.

[Related: Orcas are attacking boats. But is it revenge or trauma?]

The whales had to constantly adapt their strategy just to get a single seal, sometimes risking an escape from their prey in order to teach the younger whales strategies to carry on to the next generation. 

These constant struggles offer up sobering reminders of the macro and micro ways that the planet is changing and making life more difficult for almost every living thing.. Over one million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction, a rate of loss that is 1,000 times greater than previously expected. The  United Nations agreed upon a biodiversity treaty at the end of 2022 pledging to protect 30 percent of the Earth’s wild land and oceans by 2030. Currently, only about 17 percent of terrestrial and 10 percent of marine areas are protected through legislation.

The same location in Indonesia where Gregory and his team encountered the stingy jellyfish swarm is home to the Misool Marine Reserve. Despite climate change’s constant challenges, the area is a conservation success story thanks to community-led initiatives to protect the area from overfishing by implementing specific parts where fishing is allowed.

“Now, Misool is one of the few places on earth where biodiversity is increasing. What they’ve managed to do could be a blueprint for how we can protect oceans around the world and proof that if given the chance, nature can make an amazing comeback,” says Gregory. “It’s good news for wildlife and good news for people.”

“Animals Up Close with Bertie Gregory” premieres September 13 on Disney+.

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This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

Memes galore centered on the “orca revolution” have inundated the online realm. They gleefully depict orcas launching attacks on boats in the Strait of Gibraltar and off the Shetland coast.

One particularly ingenious image showcases an orca posed as a sickle crossed with a hammer. The cheeky caption reads, “Eat the rich,” a nod to the orcas’ penchant for sinking lavish yachts.

A surfboard-snatching sea otter in Santa Cruz, California has also claimed the media spotlight. Headlines dub her an “adorable outlaw” “at large.”

Memes conjure her in a beret like the one donned by socialist revolutionary Ché Guevara. In one caption, she proclaims, “Accept our existence or expect resistance … an otter world is possible.”

My scholarship centers on animal-human relations through the prism of social justice. As I see it, public glee about wrecked surfboards and yachts hints at a certain flavor of schadenfreude. At a time marked by drastic socioeconomic disparities, white supremacy and environmental degradation, casting these marine mammals as revolutionaries seems like a projection of desires for social justice and habitable ecosystems.

A glimpse into the work of some political scientists, philosophers and animal behavior researchers injects weightiness into this jocular public dialogue. The field of critical animal studies analyzes structures of oppression and power and considers pathways to dismantling them. These scholars’ insights challenge the prevailing view of nonhuman animals as passive victims. They also oppose the widespread assumption that nonhuman animals can’t be political actors.

So while meme lovers project emotions and perspectives onto these particular wild animals, scholars of critical animal studies suggest that nonhuman animals do in fact engage in resistance.

Nonhuman animal protest is everywhere

Are nonhuman animals in a constant state of defiance? I’d answer, undoubtedly, that the answer is yes.

The entire architecture of animal agriculture attests to animals’ unyielding resistance against confinement and death. Cages, corrals, pens and tanks would not exist were it not for animals’ tireless revolt.

Even when hung upside down on conveyor hangars, chickens furiously flap their wings and bite, scratch, peck and defecate on line workers at every stage of the process leading to their deaths.

Until the end, hooked tuna resist, gasping and writhing fiercely on ships’ decks. Hooks, nets and snares would not be necessary if fish allowed themselves to be passively harvested.

If they consented to repeated impregnation, female pigs and cows wouldn’t need to be tethered to “rape racks” to prevent them from struggling to get away.

If they didn’t mind having their infants permanently taken from their sides, dairy cows wouldn’t need to be blinded with hoods so they don’t bite and kick as the calves are removed; they wouldn’t bellow for weeks after each instance. I contend that failure to recognize their bellowing as protest reflects “anthropodenial” – what ethologist Frans de Waal calls the rejection of obvious continuities between human and nonhuman animal behavior, cognition and emotion.

The prevalent view of nonhuman animals remains that of René Descartes, the 17th-century philosopher who viewed animals’ actions as purely mechanical, like those of a machine. From this viewpoint, one might dismiss these nonhuman animals’ will to prevail as unintentional or merely instinctual. But political scientist Dinesh Wadiwel argues that “even if their defiance is futile, the will to prefer life over death is a primary act of resistance, perhaps the only act of dissent available to animals who are subject to extreme forms of control.”

Creaturely escape artists

Despite humans’ colossal efforts to repress them, nonhuman animals still manage to escape from slaughterhouses. They also break out of zoos, circuses, aquatic parks, stables and biomedical laboratories. Tilikum, a captive orca at Sea World, famously killed his trainer–an act at least one marine mammal behaviorist characterized as intentional.

Philosopher Fahim Amir suggests that depression among captive animals is likewise a form of emotional rebellion against unbearable conditions, a revolt of the nerves. Dolphins engage in self-harm like thrashing against the tank’s walls or cease to eat and retain their breath until death. Sows whose body-sized cages impede them from turning around to make contact with their piglets repeatedly ram themselves into the metal struts, sometimes succumbing to their injuries.

Critical animal studies scholars contend that all these actions arguably demonstrate nonhuman animals’ yearning for freedom and their aversion to inequity.

As for the marine stars of summer 2023’s memes, fishing gear can entangle and harm orcas. Sea otters were hunted nearly to extinction for their fur. Marine habitats have been degraded by human activities including overfishing, oil spills, plastic, chemical and sonic pollution, and climate change. It’s easy to imagine they might be responding to human actions, including bodily harm and interference with their turf.

What is solidarity with nonhuman animals?

Sharing memes that cheer on wild animals is one thing. But there are more substantive ways to demonstrate solidarity with animals.

Legal scholars support nonhuman animals’ resistance by proposing that their current classification as property should be replaced with that of personhood or beingness.

Nonhuman animals including songbirds, dolphins, elephants, horses, chimpanzees and bears increasingly appear as plaintiffs alleging their subjection to extinction, abuse and other injustices.

Citizenship for nonhuman animals is another pathway to social and political inclusion. It would guarantee the right to appeal arbitrary restrictions of domesticated nonhuman animals’ autonomy. It would also mandate legal duties to protect them from harm.

Everyday deeds can likewise convey solidarity.

Boycotting industries that oppress nonhuman animals by becoming vegan is a powerful action. It is a form of political “counter-conduct,” a term philosopher Michel Foucault uses to describe practices that oppose dominant norms of power and control.

Creating roadside memorials for nonhuman animals killed by motor vehicles encourages people to see them as beings whose lives and deaths matter, rather than mere “roadkill.”

Political scientists recognize that human and nonhuman animals’ struggles against oppression are intertwined. At different moments, the same strategies leveraged against nonhuman animals have cast segments of the human species as “less than human” in order to exploit them.

The category of the human is ever-shifting and ominously exclusive. I argue that no one is safe as long as there is a classification of “animality.” It confers susceptibility to extravagant forms of violence, legally and ethically condoned.

Otter 841 is the wild sea otter off Santa Cruz, California, who some observers suspect has had it with surfers in her turf.

Might an ‘otter world’ be possible?

I believe quips about the marine mammal rebellion reflect awareness that our human interests are entwined with those of nonhuman animals. The desire to achieve sustainable relationships with other species and the natural world feels palpable to me within the memes and media coverage. And it’s happening as human-caused activity makes our shared habitats increasingly unlivable.

Solidarity with nonhuman animals is consistent with democratic principles–for instance, defending the right to well-being and opposing the use of force against innocent subjects. Philosopher Amir recommends extending the idea that there can be no freedom as long as there is still unfreedom beyond the species divide: “While we may not yet fully be able to picture what this may mean, there is no reason we should not begin to imagine it”.

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond is an Associate Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

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Antarctic blue whales, the largest animals on Earth, can reach 98 feet from mouth to tail. But to get to this massive length, these mammals needed the right conditions to grow, whether that was more food or protection from danger—perks of living in water. 

Four hundred million years ago, the pre-mammalian ancestors of the ocean’s behemoths roamed on land on four legs. Ancestral whales returned to the sea 350 million years later. They likely spent so much of their lives in the water that, over time, their bodies completely adapted to swimming. But it’s unclear how much of this evolutionary history was amphibious before they fully submerged in the ocean.

Paleontologists in Egypt now have a better idea of what happened during this critical period of whale evolution. In a study published Thursday in Communications Biology, they unearthed fossilized remains of a miniature whale species that lived 41 million years ago. This extinct family, the basilosaurids, represents one of the earliest whale species to become fully aquatic. Though, if you saw one swimming in today’s seas, you might initially mistake it for a large fish. The newfound whale was only 8.2 feet long—12 times smaller than today’s blue whale.

[Related: This giant sea cow-like whale may have been the heaviest creature to ever live on Earth]

The study authors named the mini whale Tutcetus rayanensis, after the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun—a fitting name for a family of whales known as the “king of ancient seas,” says Hesham Sallam, an Egyptian paleontologist at The American University in Cairo and senior author of the study. The fossilized whale, like King Tut, died very young.

How the vertebrate and skull bones are fused suggests the whale was close to adulthood but did not reach it. It’s likely this whale specimen died before adulthood, though it was already sexually mature. The fossil remains show it was old enough to have adult molars but too young to have permanent premolars. Meanwhile, its enamel, the outer layer of its teeth, was very smooth, indicating it fed on fish, octopus, or other soft prey. Both are common features in mammals with shorter life cycles. According to Sallam, the teeth patterns also told them how this whale spent all of its time in the ocean, rather than an amphibious lifestyle like they previously envisioned for whale ancestors of this time.

The transition from a semiaquatic lifestyle to a fully aquatic one, as the basilosaurids did, is an area where more fossil data is needed to understand how these creatures evolved, says Ryan Bebej, an associate professor of biology at Calvin University in Michigan, who was not involved in the study. “Given its geologic age and phylogenetic position, Tutcetus is an important data point in helping us understand the earliest fully aquatic cetaceans.”

But why were these aquatic creatures dwarves compared to other basilosaurids? Basilosaurids around this time period were 13 to 59 feet in length. In contrast, this ancient whale was approximately 8 feet long and weighed around 412 pounds, making it “the smallest whale ever,” Sallam says. Today’s smallest whale, the dwarf sperm whale, grows just a little longer, at up to 9 feet. 

Its little stature was likely an evolutionary response from a global warming event called the Lutetian thermal maximum. Forty-two million years ago, temperatures in the South Atlantic ocean rose by about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Because smaller bodies lose heat more quickly than larger bodies, the mini size of these whales probably helped them survive. Sallam says this biological trait—prioritizing a tiny shape—is still seen today in animals living in warmer climates.

We don’t know how big (or small) this ancient whale would have grown to as an adult. But its bones provide valuable information on the evolution of aquatic creatures As they adapted to life in the water, cetaceans diversified in a variety of ways, and this little king of the ancient seas is just one regal example.

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It’s hard to deny that whales are some of the most charismatic megafauna on our planet. The blue whale, specifically, with its massive size, friendly demeanor, and devastating backstory is one that has captured imaginations for decades. But there may be a new contender for the largest animal to live on earth—or at least there was one around 40 million years ago.

An international team of scientists recently uncovered some giant bones in a fossil-filled coastal desert Peru, namely 13 vertebrae, four ribs and a hip bone. These fossils lead them to a discovery of a sea-dwelling mammal that would’ve weighed up to 340 metric tons. Blue whales have gotten to around 190 metric tons at their heaviest, and the most massive dinosaur, the supersized sauropod Argentinosaurus, was estimated to weigh around 76 tons. 

[Related: Millions of years ago, marine reptiles may have used Nevada as a birthing ground.]

Despite their incredible size, the newly-named Perucetus colossus was likely not a fighter, similar to some of the world’s other favorite sea mammals. 

“Because of its heavy skeleton and, most likely, its very voluminous body, this animal was certainly a slow swimmer. This appears to me, at this stage of our knowledge, as a kind of peaceful giant, a bit like a super-sized manatee. It must have been a very impressive animal, but maybe not so scary,” paleontologist Olivier Lambert of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels told Reuters. Lambert and his colleagues published their findings August 2 in Nature. 

The chilled-out attitude of the Perucetus was likely not the only thing they had in common with today’s manatees. Its dense, vast skeleton was even estimated to be twice as heavy as a blue whale’s at 5 to 8 tons, even though length-wise, the blue whale still had them beat. 

“It took several men to shift them [the fossils] into the middle of the floor in the museum for me to do some 3D scanning,” author Rebecca Bennion from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels told the BBC. “The team that drilled into the center of some of these vertebrae to work out the bone density—the bone was so dense, it broke the drill on the first attempt.”

This characteristic doesn’t exist in today’s cetaceans (the family including whales, dolphins and porpoises), but it does appear in sirenians. One author especially noted the Steller’s sea cow, which was discovered in the 1700s only to go extinct within three decades of its discovery due to overhunting. 

[Related: These now-extinct whales were kind of like manatees.]

Like manatees, the Perucetus also appears to have had front limbs. Strangely enough, the animal also possessed vestigial back limbs, a possible evolutionary hangover from when whales evolved from land-based, dog-sized mammals 50 million years ago. 

One looming question about the Perucetus is how it ate—the researchers unfortunately didn’t find it’s skull, so the authors have multiple hypotheses: it may have scavenged, ate sea grass, or even scooped up shellfish and worms from the mud floor like today’s gray whales. 

Nevertheless, just finding a creature that could’ve been this size opens a whole new can of worms for paleontologists to uncover. 

“The extreme skeletal mass of Perucetus suggests that evolution can generate organisms with characteristics that go beyond our imagination,” study author and Italian paleontologist Giovanni Bianucci told CNN. And that is a massive deal. 

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This article was originally featured on High Country News.

It’s a crisp fall evening in Grand Teton National Park. A mournful, groaning call cuts through the dusky blue light: a male elk, bugling. The sound ricochets across the grassy meadow. A minute later, another bull answers from somewhere in the shadows.

Bugles are the telltale sound of elk during mating season. Now, new research finds that male elk’s bugles sound slightly different depending on where they live. Other studies have shown that whale, bat and bird calls have regional dialects, too, but a team led by Jennifer Clarke, a behavioral ecologist at the Center for Wildlife Studies and a professor at the University of La Verne in California, is the first to identify such differences in any species of ungulate. 

Hearing elk bugle in Rocky Mountain National Park decades ago inspired Clarke to investigate the sound. “My graduate students and I started delving into the library and could find nothing on elk communication, period,” she said. That surprised her: “Thousands of people go to national parks to hear them bugle, and we don’t know what we’re listening to.”

Her research, published earlier this year in the Journal of Mammalogy, dug into the unique symphony created by different elk herds. While most people can detect human dialects — a honey-thick Southern drawl versus a nasal New England accent—differences in regional elk bugles are almost imperceptible to human ears. But by using spectrograms, a visual representation of sound frequencies, researchers can see the details of each region’s signature bugles. “It’s like handwriting,” Clarke said. “You can recognize Bill’s handwriting from George’s handwriting.”

Pennsylvania’s elk herds were translocated from the West in the early 1900s, and today they have longer tonal whistles and quieter bugles than elk in Colorado. Meanwhile, bugles change frequency from low to high tones more sharply in Wyoming than they do in Pennsylvania or Colorado.

Clarke isn’t sure why the dialects vary. She initially hypothesized that calls would differ based on the way sound travels in Pennsylvania’s dense forests compared to Colorado and Wyoming’s more open landscapes, but her data didn’t support that theory. Clarke hopes to find out whether genetic variation — which is more limited in Pennsylvania’s herd — might explain differences in bugles, and whether those differences are learned by young males listening to older bulls.

“It’s not as though a song or vocal learning is ‘all environmental’ or ‘all genetic’. It’s an interplay between both.” 

Clarke’s research adds a small piece to the larger puzzle of animal communication, said Daniel Blumstein, a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study. “It’s not as though a song or vocal learning is ‘all environmental’ or ‘all genetic,’” he said. “It’s an interplay between both.” Blumstein, a marmot communication researcher, added that the mechanisms behind these vocal variations deserve more study.

These unanswered questions are part of the larger field of bioacoustics, which blends biology and acoustics to deepen our understanding of the noises that surround us in nature. Bioacoustics can sometimes be used as a conservation tool to monitor animal behavior, and other studies are shedding light on how it affects animal evolution, disease transfer, cognition and culture.

Elk are not the only species with regional dialects. In the United States, eastern and western hermit thrushes sing different song structures, and the white-crowned sparrow’s song helps ornithologists identify where it was born. Crested gibbons and Campbell’s monkeys also have localized dialects in their songs and calls, as does the rock hyrax, a mammal that looks like a rodent but is actually related to elephants.

Similar differences exist underwater, where whale songs have unique phrases that vary by location. Sperm whales in the Caribbean have clicking patterns in their calls that differ from those of their Pacific Ocean counterparts. Orcas in Puget Sound use distinctive clicks and whistles within their own pods, while also using universal sounds to communicate with orcas in other pods.

Clarke also studies the vocalizations of ptarmigan, flying foxes and Tasmanian devils. Her next research project will shed light on how bison mothers lead their herds and communicate with their calves. “They’re the heart of the herd,” she said. “What are they talking about?”   

Kylie Mohr is an editorial fellow for High Country News writing from Montana. Email her at kylie.mohr@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy. 

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Since the 1960s, the oxygen level in the world’s oceans has dropped by about 2 percent. While that may not sound like a lot, the continuous decline in oxygen content of oceanic and coastal waters, called deoxygenation, can alter marine ecosystems and biodiversity. This is largely happening due to global warming and nutrient runoff.

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from anthropogenic activities like deforestation and fossil fuel use trap the sun’s heat, warming the planet and heating up the ocean. Oxygen becomes less soluble at higher temperatures, which means warm water holds less oxygen than cold water. Eutrophication due to excess inputs of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus from agriculture or wastewater also stimulates algal blooms, resulting in oxygen depletion when they decompose.

[Related: Scientists say the ocean is changing color—and it’s probably our fault.]

Deoxygenation affects living resources and disrupts natural biogeochemical processes, says Nancy Rabalais, professor and chair in oceanography and wetland studies at Louisiana State University who researches coastal eutrophication and hypoxic environments. Oxygen concentrations play a role in the rates of breakdown of organic matter and the cycling of different elements in the environment. For instance, deoxygenation may enhance phosphorus recycling, reduce nitrogen losses, and initially enhance the availability of iron, all of which can alter the productivity of coastal and ocean ecosystems.

Loss of oxygen content also has significant impacts on marine microbes and animals. Deoxygenation can alter their abundance and diversity, reduce the quality and quantity of suitable habitats for them, and interfere with reproduction. The oxygen decline doesn’t have to be major to potentially cause ecosystem-wide changes. In oxygen minimum zones that may already be close to physiological thresholds, even small oxygen declines can have drastic impacts.

When oceans lose oxygen, marine organisms become stressed and need to adapt—if they can—to survive. Species that are especially sensitive to oxygenation changes, like tuna and sharks, are being driven to shallower habitats as oxygen-deficient zones expand, says Anya Hess, PhD candidate at Rutgers University who studies ocean oxygenation. Deoxygenation also threatens the ocean’s food provisioning ecosystem services for humans, potentially leading to reduced catches for fisheries and the collapse of regional stocks. 

Although new research suggests deoxygenation may eventually reverse, it might not happen until the far future. In a recent study published in Nature, Hess and her co-authors looked to the Miocene warm period about 16 to 14 million years ago when temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were higher than today to study a “possible example of how oceans behave during sustained warm periods,” she says.

Their results show that the eastern tropical Pacific—a major oxygen-deficient or “dead” zone that has been losing oxygen as the climate warms—was well oxygenated at that time, which suggests that deoxygenation could reverse on long timeframes as the climate continues to warm.

[Related: A deep sea mining zone in the remote Pacific is also a goldmine of unique species.]

Climate models from a 2018 study published in Global Biogeochemical Cycles predict oxygen concentration may start increasing and oxygen-starved regions in the ocean can begin shrinking by 2150 through 2300 due to decreasing tropical export production—the nutrient supply from the ocean interior—combined with increased ocean ventilation or the transport of surface waters into the interior. But marine ecosystems are already facing various impacts today—and rebounding is hard because deoxygenation can reconfigure food webs and organisms that can’t avoid low oxygen levels can become lethargic or die.

“I don’t think we should wait around to see whether deoxygenation will reverse as the climate continues to warm,” says Hess. “We know that rising temperatures are causing ocean deoxygenation, so if we want to stop it we know what we need to do—reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Policymakers can also establish long-term monitoring programs around the world to study oxygen measurements, which will help identify patterns and predict biological responses. All in all, deoxygenation trends may eventually reverse in the future, but taking the steps to mitigate climate change and control nutrient runoff will benefit humans and marine ecosystems today.

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Some people may be picky eaters, but as a species we are not. Birds, bugs, whales, snails, we’ll eat them all. Yet our reliance on wild animals goes far beyond just feeding ourselves. From agricultural feed to medicine to the pet trade, modern society exploits wild animals in a way that surpasses even the most voracious, unfussy wild predator. Now, for the first time, researchers have attempted to capture the full picture of how we use wild vertebrates, including how many, and for what purposes. The research showcases just how broad our collective influence on wild animals is.

Previously, scientists have tallied how much more biomass humans take out of the wild than other predators. But biomass is only a sliver of the total picture, and researchers wanted a fuller understanding of how human predatory behavior affects biodiversity. Analyzing data compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, researchers have now found that humans kill, collect, or otherwise use about 15,000 vertebrate species. That’s about one-third of all vertebrate species on Earth, and it’s a breadth that’s up to 300 times more than the next top predator in any ecosystem.

The predators that give us the biggest run for our money, says Rob Cooke, an ecological modeler at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and a coauthor of the study, are owls, which hunt a notably diverse array of prey. The Eurasian eagle owl, for instance, is one of the largest and most widely distributed owls in the world. Not a picky eater, this owl will hunt up to 379 different species. According to the researchers’ calculations, humans take 469 species across an equivalent geographical range.

Yet according to Chris Darimont, a conservation scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and a coauthor of the study, the biggest shock isn’t how many species we affect but why we take them. The “ta-da result,” he says, “is that we remove, or essentially prey on, more species of animals for non-food reasons than for food reasons.” And the biggest non-food use, the scientists found, is as pets and pet food. “That’s where things have gone off the rails,” he says.

There is some nuance to this broad trend. When it comes to marine and freshwater species, our main take is for human consumption. For terrestrial animals, however, it depends on what kind of animal is being targeted. Mammals are mostly taken to become people food, while birds, reptiles, and amphibians are mainly trapped to live in captivity as pets. In all, almost 75 percent of the land species humans take enter the pet trade, which is almost double the number of species we take to eat.

The problem is especially acute for tropical birds, and the loss of these species can have rippling ecological consequences. The helmeted hornbill, a bird native to Southeast Asia, for example, is captured mainly for the pet trade or for its beak to be used as medicine or to be carved like ivory. With their massive bills, these birds are one of the few species that can crack open some of the largest, hardest nuts in the forests where they live. Their disappearance limits seed dispersal and the spread of trees around the forest.

Another big difference between humans’ influence on wild animals and that of other predators is that we tend to favor rare and exotic species in a way other animals do not. Most predators target common species since they are easier to find and catch. Humans, however, tend to covet the novel. “The more rare it is,” says Cooke, “the more that drives up the price, and therefore it can spiral and go into this extinction vortex.”

That humans target the largest and flashiest animals, Cooke says, threatens not only their unique biological diversity and beauty, but also the roles they play in their ecosystems. Of the species humans prey on, almost 40 percent are threatened. The researchers suggest industrialized societies can look to Indigenous stewardship models for ways to more sustainably manage and live with wildlife.

Andrea Reid, a citizen of the Nisg̱a’a Nation and an Indigenous fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia, notes that people have been fishing for millennia. “But the choices that shape industrial fishing,” she says, like how people consume fish that were caught far away from their own homes, “are what contribute to these observed high levels of impact on fish species.”

If we want wild species—fish and beyond—to survive, Reid says, we need to reframe our relationship with them, perhaps from predator to steward.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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A new species of early odontocete—or toothed whale—is giving us a closer look into what some of the earliest ancestors of present-day dolphins may have looked like. In a study published June 23 in the journal PeerJ Life and Environment, paleontologists describe a new species called Olympicetus thalassodon that is helping scientists understand the early history and eventual diversification of odontocetes.

[Related: Toothed whales turned their vocal fry into a hunting superpower.]

Toothed whales include porpoises, dolphins, sperm whales, orca whales, and, as their name would suggest, they all have some kind of teeth within their jaws. Unlike baleen whales (humpbacks, North Atlantic right whales, etc.) that use their baleen, a filtering system in their mouths primarily made out of bristly keratin plates, to filter feed large amounts of food, odontocetes typically only feed on one fish, squid, or other invertebrates at a time. They are also highly social and most, if not all, toothed whales use echolocation to find their way around the ocean and locate their next meal. 

Odontocetes first evolved during the Oligocene Epoch (about 33.7 million to 23.8 million years ago) and the fossils of Olympicetus thalassodon were found in a geologic formation in the Northwest US that dates back to between 26.5–30.5 million years. 

“Olympicetus thalassodon and its close relatives show a combination of features that truly sets them apart from any other group of toothed whales. Some of these characteristics, like the multi-cusped teeth, symmetric skulls, and forward position of the nostrils makes them look more like an intermediate between archaic whales and the dolphins we are more familiar with,” study co-author and paleontologist from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County Jorge Velez-Juarbe said in a statement. 

Olympicetus thalassodon was not alone in the water, and paleontologists found the remains of two other closely related odontocetes nearby and the specimens described in the same study. The specimens were unearthed in the Pysht Formation, an exposed layer of rock along the coast of Washington State’s rugged Olympic Peninsula.

The study found that Olympicetus and its close kin belonged to a family called Simocetidae. This group is only known to have swam in the waters of the North Pacific, and is one of the earliest diverging groups of toothed whales on the whale family tree. Simocetids were part of an unusual group of animals represented by fossils found in the Pysht Formation. Some of these strange Pysht fauna include an extinct group of penguin-like flightless birds called plotopterids, early seal and walrus relatives called desmostylians, and even extinct toothed baleen whales.

[Related: Millions of years ago, marine reptiles may have used Nevada as a birthing ground.]

Based on differences in body size, teeth, and other body structures related to feeding, simocetids may have acquired prey differently and had varying prey preferences. 

“The teeth of Olympicetus are truly weird, they are what we refer to as heterodont, meaning that they show differences along the toothrow,” said Velez-Juarbe. “This stands out against the teeth of more advanced odontocetes whose teeth are simpler and tend to look nearly the same.”

However, some additional aspects of their biology has yet to be uncovered, including whether or not they could echolocate like their living relatives. Their skulls do indicate the potential presence of a melon, which is an important echolocation-related structure. Additionally, a 2019 study suggested that neonatal whales found in the Pysht Formation couldn’t hear ultrasonic sounds, and future study into the ear bones of subadult and adult individuals could test if this ability changed as they aged.  

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Orcas may be one of the ocean’s top predators, but they’ve rarely shown aggression against humans or watercraft in the past. But since 2020, orca pods have increasingly targeted sailboats off the Iberian Peninsula in Western Europe. In one instance, three of the black and white whales destroyed a vessel’s rudder, causing it to sink before it reached port. The Spanish coast guard called in a helicopter and sea cruiser to rescue the sailors.

The sea-mammal strikes have left scientists, sailors and social media users contemplating what’s changed in the last few years to cause this shift in behavior. Some experts suspect that one of the older female orcas involved, named White Gladis, had previously been hit by a ship or entrapped during illegal fishing. Questions arose. Are the whales attacking the boats to avenge White Gladis? Or are they simply defending themselves against more possible harm? Maybe they’re just playing with the sailboats? If the attacks were vengeful or defensive, does that mean orcas, and animals in general, can share their traumas with their social groups?

[Related: A baby orca sparks a glimmer of hope for an endangered group of whales]

Wild orcas don’t attack humans or approach boats. The subpopulation off the Iberian coast is considered critically endangered with only up to 50 adults, according to a 2019 estimate from the International Union for Conservation of Nature. But authorities worry that the number of attacks means they will continue. The Atlantic Orca Working group told The New York Times that since 2020, orcas were documented swimming at or reacting to vessels about 500 times in the seas around Morocco, Portugal, and Spain. They caused physical damage to the watercraft in about a fifth of those incidents.

Whether the attacks were motivated by vengeance, defense, or play is up for debate. David Diamond, a psychology professor at the University of South Florida, who studies how stress affects the brain in humans and animals, says it’s important to remember that we never know what an animal is thinking. “We interpret what they’re thinking from their behavior.”

Some scientists who study orcas suggested the strikes were playful given the species’ mischievous nature. Diamond, on the other hand, believes the animals are capable of retribution. He often shows videos of orcas in class and notes how they have a mammalian brain that is functionally similar to humans. “I can actually see the killer whale taking a proactive approach to say, this thing on the surface caused me harm so I want to get all my hunting party together and attack it,” he explains.

Linking the orca attacks to post-traumatic stress disorder, though, could be taking it too far. While White Gladis might have had a negative experience with a boat, it’s unlikely that she suffers from PTSD as some have speculated. The condition is unique to humans as it is diagnosed through self reports and not any physical test, Diamond says. More importantly, its symptoms go deeper than just remembering a harrowing experience and being fearful of it. “It changes [a person’s] personality; it changes their life,” he says. “So we don’t want to trivialize PTSD by saying, this orca had a terrible experience, therefore it has PTSD. Most people have terrible experiences in their lives and don’t develop PTSD.”

Even if animals don’t fit the clinical definition of PTSD patients, they could remember traumatic experiences or develop PTSD-like effects. In one study, Diamond’s team put lab rats in a box with cats, their natural predator. It triggered a part of the rodents’ brains known to be connected to the fear of death. Many weeks later, researchers put the rats back in the box in a different room without similar scents or cats. The subjects showed tremendous unease with the box itself, Diamond says. In another experiment, he paired a different set of rats and cats in boxes multiple times, and then sent the rodents to live with an unfamiliar rat afterward to simulate an unstable social life. They started to produce PTSD-like effects with changes in their physiology and behavior.

[Related on PopSci+: Can captive parrots have PTSD?]

And what about their roommates, or in the orcas’ case, their pod mates? It’s unlikely that animals can rehash all the details of a traumatic event to their acquaintances, but they might still be able to tip them off to the source of the trauma—and the subsequent dangers. About 16 years ago, John Marzluff, a professor of wildlife science at the University of Washington, captured American crows using nets to tag them with colored leg bands, so he could follow their behavior over their lifetimes. Now, many crows in the same neck of the woods show hostile behavior to humans. A lot of the birds that weren’t tagged “respond to us like we caught them,” Marzluff says. “So they are learning that we’re dangerous from others that either experienced it or saw the initial capture.”

Crows don’t just use group interactions to warn each other: They might take advantage of their numbers to engage with the threat. When the corvids see something they think is dangerous, they let out a harsh, scolding sound. Other crows hear it and then join in. “So it’s not like they’re telling one another, ‘Hey, there’s this guy who comes around once a year, watch out for him,’” Marzluff says. “It’s like, ‘I see this thing, which I’ve heard or known to be dangerous, come in here and learn about it with me. So from the orca example, it seems like they might be doing similar things.”

In another example, elephant mothers in Gorongosa National Park who survived hunters during Mozambique’s civil war sometimes enlist their kin and clans to chase away humans who come near them. It’s a defensive action, according to Liana Zanette, a biology professor at the University of Western Ontario, who researches predator-prey interactions. “These females lived during this time of this brutality by humans,” she says. “And so now whenever they see a human, they recognize it as a significant threat.”

While we may never fully never know why animals act the way they do, one thing is certain: Our presence makes a difference. Whether it’s an orca in the Strait of Gibraltar or a bird in your backyard, Marzluff says that we should know that animals are paying attention to what we do. “They do take information about our activities and use it in their behavior later,” he says. “We’re not just this static part of their environment. We’re an active species that they take seriously and respond to.”

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In an environment without light, or where sight is otherwise useless, some creatures have learned to thrive by sound. They rely on calls, clicks, and twitters to create a kind of map of their surroundings or pinpoint prey. That ability is called echolocation, and a simple way to understand how it works is to crack open the word itself. 

What is echolocation?

Imagine an echo that locates things. The sound hits an object and bounces back, relaying information about a target’s whereabouts or cues for navigation. When Harvard University zoologist Donald Griffin coined the word “echolocation” in the journal Science in 1944, he was describing how bats rely on sounds to “fly through the total darkness of caves without striking the walls or the jutting stalactites.”

In the decades since, scientists have identified many other animals that use echolocation, aka biosonar. For example, at least 16 species of birds echolocate, including swiftlets and nocturnal oilbirds, which roost deep in South America’s caves. Laura Kloepper, an expert in animal acoustics at the University of New Hampshire, calls this shared ability an example of convergent evolution, in which “you have two unrelated species evolve the same adaptive strategy.” 

How does echolocation work?

To find fish in deep waters, or avoid crashing in the inky night, whales and bats produce loud ultrasonic sounds at frequencies all the way up to 200 kilohertz. That is way beyond human hearing (most adults can’t perceive pitches above 17 kilohertz). 

[Related on PopSci+: 5 sounds not meant for the human ear]

Why do specialized echolocators use ultrasonic sound? “High-frequency sounds give really fine spatial resolution,” Kloepper explains. Hertz is a measure of the distance between each acoustic wave: The higher the hertz, the tighter the wave, and the smaller the detail captured by the vibration of energy in the air. If you were to echolocate in a room, a big, low-frequency wave might simply reflect off a wall, Kloepper says, while an echo from a higher-frequency sound could tell you where the doorway or even the knob was.

Echoes, if you know how to interpret them, are rich in information. As Kloepper explains it, when an animal with the ability hears a reflection, it examines that sound against an “internalized template” of the call it sent out. That comparison of echo versus signal can yield the distance to a target, the direction it might be traveling in, and even its material make-up.

Ultrasonic calls give another bats boost, too—they rely on next-level frequencies to find mates. Many species of moths hunted by bats have evolved ears attuned to these frequencies as a means of survival.

[Related: How fast is supersonic flight?]

To make ultrasound, a bat vibrates a specialized organ in its throat called a larynx. It’s not too different from how the human voice box works, except the bat produces a much higher frequency sound. Certain bat species then release the sound from their mouths, while others screech from the snout, using an elaborate nasal structure nicknamed a nose-leaf. 

Whales

Dolphins, orcas, and other toothed whales echolocate for the same reasons as bats do: to chase down tasty prey and navigate through darkness. But these aquatic mammals emit ultrasound in a completely different way. Inside whale heads, often close to their blowholes, sit lip-like flaps. When the animals push air across the flaps, the appendages vibrate, producing clicks. “It’s just like if you inflate a balloon and let all the air out of that balloon. It makes a pbbft noise,” Kloepper says. 

The curves of dolphin skulls propel that noise into fatty structures at the front of their heads, called melons. These, in turn, efficiently transmit vibrations in seawater. The waves bounce off prey or other objects, but the whales don’t rely on external ears to hear the echo (their ear canals are plugged up with wax). Instead, the vibrations are channeled via their jawbones, where sound is received by fat-filled cavities so thin that light can pass through them. The cavities are near the whales’ inner ears, which sense the echoing clicks. The process can reveal all sorts of details: where a fish is, where it’s going, and how fast it’s swimming.

Shrews

Shrews have sensitive whiskers but poor eyesight. To supplement their senses as they explore their forest and grassy meadow habitats, they might use a coarse form of echolocation, which Sophie von Merten, a mammalogist at the University of Lisbon in Portugal, calls “echo-orientation” or “echo-navigation.” This ability could “give them a hint that there is an obstacle coming,” she says, such as a fallen branch detected by the shrews’ twitters. Their bird-like sounds are faint, but audible to humans. 

The extent of shrew echo-navigation isn’t entirely clear. In a 2020 “experiment, von Merten and a colleague found that, when shrews are introduced to new environments, the wee mammals twitter more frequently. Von Merten says it’s likely they are sensing the unfamiliar location by these vocalizations, but another interpretation could be that the captive animals are stressed. That’s a hypothesis she doesn’t find very convincing, though her ongoing research will measure shrew stress, too.

Could there be other undiscovered creatures out there that echolocate? “I think it’s very likely,” Kloepper says. She adds that it’s hard to tell which animals beyond mammals and birds display the behavior, given “just how little we know about vocalizations of many cryptic species.”

Humans

Unlike bats, people aren’t born with the innate power of echolocation—but we can still make it work. In his original 1944 paper, Griffin discussed a, such as captains listening for echoes of ship horns against cliff faces, or those who are blind following the taps of their canes. 

The post How echolocation lets bats, dolphins, and even people navigate by sound appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Onboard the Song of the Whale, spotting a cetacean comes with perks. “There is always a competition,” says Niall MacAllister, the boat’s skipper. Whoever sees the first whale, or the most whales, might be treated to a pint the next time the sailboat docks. Not that the people on this specially designed research vessel need extra motivation to watch for whales.

Since being built in 2004, the extra-quiet Song of the Whale and its crew have studied whales in western Europe, the Mediterranean, Greenland, and elsewhere. Right now, they’re off the coast of Massachusetts, where they’ve been trying to ensure a future for the North Atlantic right whale, a species in dire danger of extinction. That effort recently had them searching the water for a chemical clue they think might help predict the whales’ movements—and hopefully protect them from danger.

North Atlantic right whales have been called the “urban whale” because they live mostly along the bustling east coast of North America. Once nearly eradicated by whalers, the species bounced back to around 500 by the year 2010. But ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear continued to plague the whales, and they encountered further trouble in the past decade when the warming ocean pushed their prey northward. Following their food, the whales suddenly showed up in large numbers in Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence.

“There weren’t any protections, and there wasn’t an expectation that they were going to be there. And it resulted in some pretty tragic deaths,” says Kathleen Collins, the marine campaign manager for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).

As the whales had even more run-ins with ships, ropes, and other human hazards, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) declared an unusual mortality event starting in 2017. Today, there are thought to be fewer than 340 of the animals alive, with under 70 breeding females.

With the clock ticking, IFAW sent the Song of the Whale on a mission to follow the North Atlantic right whales up North America’s east coast. It’s a bid to learn what they can about the whales’ movements—including how to anticipate where they’ll be ahead of time.

In some ways, we know these whales intimately. Researchers can identify every living North Atlantic right whale by sight, and they maintain a catalog of the whales’ biographies. In other ways, though, the whales’ affairs are a mystery.

“One of the leading questions that we have in the larger scientific community is, Where are these right whales right now, and where are they going?” Collins says. “They’re notoriously hard to track.”

To protect them, it would be helpful to understand not just where the whales are now, but where they’re headed next. Scientists at NOAA’s Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary have put their hopes in the chemical dimethyl sulfide (DMS).

The molecule is made by phytoplankton, microscopic ocean algae. Its importance in understanding ocean food chains became apparent in the 1990s when Gabrielle Nevitt, a sensory ecologist at the University of California, Davis, was studying how certain Antarctic seabirds find krill to eat. The birds don’t seek out the fishy smell of the krill themselves, she found. Instead, the seabirds follow DMS. “They would track it like a little bloodhound,” Nevitt says.

Why follow DMS? The chemical tells seabirds that their prey are nearby having a meal of their own. DMS comes out of the tiny algae when krill or any other of the ocean’s miniature animals, called zooplankton, are eating them. “So as zooplankton crunch on phytoplankton, this DMS gas is just released into the water,” says David Wiley, a marine ecologist and research coordinator at Stellwagen.

Some fish also follow the smell of DMS to find food in coral reefs. Given the importance of DMS for various predators, Wiley and others wondered if right whales might be using the same cue.

Right whales are baleen whales, which means they fuel their massive bodies with minute crustaceans that they filter from gulps of seawater. We know what they eat, says Wiley, but “we don’t really know how whales find their food.”

Using a device that repeatedly tests the concentration of DMS in the water, Wiley and his colleagues have shown that higher concentrations of DMS correspond to denser patches of zooplankton. It’s not proof that whales, like birds and fish, follow the trail of DMS to find food. However, it shows that following that trail would work.

That’s why, this spring, Wiley joined the crew of the Song of the Whale to continue studying whether North Atlantic right whales are following the scent of DMS. As in his previous research, Wiley sampled the water for DMS. The team also recorded the locations of whales and, if they could, embarked on a smaller inflatable boat to sample the water closer to the animals.

Wiley says his preliminary data from this and other recent experiments shows that right whales—as well as another species called sei whales—are more likely to turn up in areas with higher DMS, suggesting they sniff the chemical out. “So far, all the data point to yes,” he says.

The crucial step will be to put this hypothesis into action. Now that Wiley and his colleagues have a strong suspicion that North Atlantic right whales are following DMS to find food, they hope their studies will reveal a specific threshold of DMS that predicts where the whales might soon come to feed.

If they can determine that, scientists could use sensing buoys or even satellite observations to gauge DMS concentrations in the ocean and warn local authorities, which could call for vessels to slow down or take other measures to limit the hazards to whales.

Such a system could someday join other ways scientists are trying to predict where whales will be, such as a project that tracks blue whales by modeling their movements based on environmental conditions, or one that finds humpbacks by looking for congregations of seabirds.

Nevitt, who discovered DMS sensing in seabirds, says working with DMS and getting timely, ecologically relevant measurements can be tricky. When it comes to following whales’ food, she says, “there might be less subtle indicators that are easier to measure.”

Whether it’s by following DMS or something else, efforts to predict North Atlantic right whales’ movements could help keep the teetering species alive so that future generations can spot them, too—perks or no.

“I’m optimistic that right whales, if left alone, can do fine,” Wiley says. “We just have to find ways to leave them alone.”

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In Dick Ogg’s 25 years of commercial fishing, he’s had a few close encounters with whales—mostly while pulling Dungeness crab pots off the ocean floor. “I’ve had whales right next to me,” within about five meters, says Ogg. “They follow me, they watch, they’re curious. And then they go on about their business.”

Ogg is fortunate his interactions have been so leisurely. For nearly a decade, California’s whales and crabbers have been locked in a persistent struggle. From 1985 to 2014, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported an average of 10 whales were entangled in fishing gear each year along the west coast of the United States. But between 2015 and 2017, that number jumped to 47 entanglements per year. Since 2015, most of the identifiable gear found on entangled whales has been from crab pots. For crabbers, efforts to protect whales from entanglement often hit their bottom line.

The Dungeness crab fishery is one of California’s largest and most lucrative; until recently, it was considered one of the most sustainable fisheries in the state. In recent years, managers have sought a balance between protecting whales and ensuring crabbers’ livelihoods. But as climate change transforms the northeast Pacific and whales are increasingly at risk of being entangled in crabbers’ lines, that delicate balance is beginning to unravel.

The 2015 crabbing season was a catastrophe for both crabbers and whales. A marine heatwave nurtured a bloom of toxic algae that pushed anchovies close to shore, and the whales followed. That year, NOAA recorded 48 entangled whales along the US west coast—nearly five times the historical average. The algae also rendered the crabs inedible, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) delayed the start of the fishing season by several months. The federal government declared the failed season a fishery disaster.

In 2017, the environmental nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity sued the CDFW over the spate of entanglements, prompting the department to set up a rapid risk assessment and mitigation program that closes portions of the Dungeness crab fishery when whales are nearby. The new approach has decreased entanglements, but it’s come at a high price for commercial fishers.

The CDFW has a handful of other tools they can use to protect whales, such as shortening the crabbing season and limiting the number of traps crabbers can drop. But according to a recent study, the only measure that could have effectively protected whales during the heatwave—shortening the crabbing season—is the one that would have hampered crabbers the most. And even then, these strong restrictions would have only reduced entanglements by around 50 percent.

If a similar marine heatwave hits again, entanglements could spike, too, says Jameal Samhouri, a NOAA ecologist and author of the paper. “It’s going to be really hard to resolve these trade-offs,” he says. “There may be some hard choices to make between whether we as a society want to push forward conservation matters or allow the fishery.”

Every year since the CDFW set up its mitigation program, the fishery has faced closures. Since 2015, the crabbing season has only opened on time once. Though the heatwave is gone, a boom of anchovy has kept whales close to shore.

For Ogg, the most difficult part of the season is waiting to go fish and not having any income. “It’s been really, really tough for a lot of guys,” he says. Another recent study calculates that in 2019 and 2020, whale-related delays cost California Dungeness fishers US $24-million—about the same as they lost during the heatwave in 2015.

Smaller boats, the study showed, were most severely impacted by the closures. It’s a trend Melissa Mahoney, executive director of Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust, has seen firsthand. While a large boat might set hundreds of crab pots in a day, smaller vessels can’t make up for a shortened season. “I just don’t know how long a lot of these fishermen can survive,” Mahoney says.

With climate change, marine heatwaves are now 20 times more frequent than they were in preindustrial times. As the Earth grows warmer, heatwaves that would have occurred every 100 years or so could happen once a decade or even once a year. In this hotter world, balancing the needs of both crabbers and whales will only grow more difficult.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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Over half a century since she was captured in the Pacific Ocean near Puget Sound, Lolita the Orca may return to her home waters. Lolita, also known by her Lummi name Tokita or Toki, was captured in Penn Cove off the coast of Washington State in 1970 when she was roughly 4 years old. She is believed to be the oldest orca in captivity.

The Miami Seaquarium in Florida announced its plans to move Lolita home at a press conference with nonprofit group Friends of Lolita and philanthropist and owner of the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts, Jim Irsay, on March 30. The move comes after growing pressure from animal rights groups, lawsuits from groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and anger and possible lawsuits from the Lummi Nation.

[Related: A baby orca sparks a glimmer of hope for an endangered group of whales.]

Irsay did not say how much the relocation would cost, only citing a “big number.” 

“I’m excited about being part of Lolita’s journey,” Irsay told reporters, according to NPR. “Ever since I was a little kid I’ve loved whales, just loved whales because [of] the power, the greatness of them and how gentle they are. She’s lived this long to have this opportunity and my only mission … is to help this whale to get free.”

While this is welcome news, many obstacles remain, particularly the logistics of transporting the ailing 7,000 pound whale from Florida up to Washington State, as well as preparing the 57-year-old to live back in the wild after living in captivity for over 50 years. 

According to the Miami Herald, the goal is to place Lolita back in the sea and reunite her with her family, the L pod of southern resident orcas. This unique group of orcas spend the summer and autumn months in Puget Sound and were added to the endangered species list in 2005. Their population has “fluctuated considerably” since the 1970s, with pods “reduced during 1965-75 because of captures for marine parks,” according to NOAA Fisheries. 

“If she is healthy enough to be transported, the issue is her skill set,” Miami-Dade Commissioner Raquel Regalado, who has been an advocate for Lolita and improvements at Seaquarium, told the Herald. “She doesn’t know how to catch or hunt. We’re not really sure if she can communicate with other whales because she’s been alone. Now we kind of have to retrain her.” 

The team will likely borrow methods used to move Keiko, the orca from the 1993 movie Free Willy. Keiko was moved from a tank at a marine park in Mexico to an aquarium in Oregon, and then on a US Air Force cargo plane to a sea pen in Iceland. Keiko eventually swam to Norway and lived in the ocean for five years. He died of pneumonia in 2003.

[Related: California Bans Captivity, Breeding Of Orcas.]

MS Leisure, who owns the Miami Seaquarium, announced in March 2022 that Lolita, who had fallen ill, would no longer be put on display for shows in the whale stadium. In June 2022, an assessment from two veterinarians not affiliated with the seaquarium found that Lolita’s condition had improved. 

She now lives in an 80-foot-long by 35-foot-wide by 20-foot-deep tank, which inspectors from the US Department of Agriculture have closed to visitors until the stands and tank are repaired.

Some animal rights activists hailed the decision as a long time coming and hope other marine parks follow suit. 

“If Lolita is finally returned to her home waters, there will be cheers from around the world, including from PETA, which has pursued several lawsuits on Lolita’s behalf and battered the Seaquarium with protests demanding her freedom for years,” the PETA Foundation’s vice president and general counsel for animal law Jared Goodman, said in a statement.  “If the Seaquarium agrees to move her, it’ll offer her long-awaited relief after five miserable decades in a cramped tank and send a clear signal to other parks that the days of confining highly intelligent, far-ranging marine mammals to dismal prisons are done and dusted.”

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Along the eastern coast of North America, North Atlantic right whales and boats navigate the same waters, which can get dicey for both. Fully grown, the whales can top out at more than 50 feet and weigh 140,000 pounds. A midsize, 58-foot-long pleasure yacht weighs about 80,000 pounds and can cost more than $1 million. “No mariner wants to collide with a whale,” said retired Coast Guard officer Greg Reilly. “For obvious reasons.”

Still, the North Atlantic right whale is particularly vulnerable to boat strikes. Since 2017, the large whales have been increasingly found dead off the eastern United States and Canada, often after getting hit by a vessel. In response, in 2017, NOAA Fisheries declared an Unusual Mortality Event for the species, which under the Marine Mammal Protection Act “demands immediate response.”

The whales kept dying. By 2021, only an estimated 340 remained. The next year, NOAA Fisheries proposed changes to speed limits that are meant to reduce boat-whale collisions. The proposal would implement a mandatory speed limit of 10 knots in places where whales are spotted, and, for the first time, impose speed restrictions on many recreational and commercial fishing boats.

There is strong science documenting the plight of the right whales and the connection between boat speed and deadly collisions. But opposition from industry groups and fishing advocates, as well as potential difficulties with implementation and enforcement, may stall the new rules — if they get approved at all.

According to Kathleen Collins, marine campaign manager at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, a global nonprofit, pushback from the recreational boating sector has already slowed attempts to lower the speed limit. In December, several nonprofits filed emergency petitions with NOAA Fisheries and the Department of Commerce to enact new speed limits as a placeholder until the full rules could be approved, but in mid-January 2023, the Biden administration rejected the request.

The petitions didn’t fail because of a “lack of scientific understanding of right whales,” Collins said, but because industry groups lobbied lawmakers, primarily out of concerns for their members’ livelihoods. Mike Leonard, vice president of government affairs for the American Sportfishing Association — a trade organization representing sportfishing manufacturers, retailers, wholesalers, and media — confirmed via email that the group shared concerns about the proposed speed rules with members of Congress.

Another group opposing the proposed rules is the Recreational Fishing Alliance, which published a letter against the amendments, and encouraged its members to leave public comments. The RFA’s website says it is a “grassroots political action organization” meant to protect the rights of recreational fishers; however, its board is made up of boating and fishing industry executives, and it was founded by Bill and Bob Healey, who founded the yacht manufacturer Viking Yacht Company. The current RFA chairman is Bob Healey Jr., the current chairman of Viking Group. The RFA did not respond to an emailed request for comment, and several calls to the group went unanswered.

NOAA Fisheries told Undark a decision on the proposed changes is forthcoming in 2023. In an email, spokesperson Katie Wagner wrote that the agency is “prioritizing efforts to develop effective, long-term North Atlantic right whale vessel strike reduction measures.”

Any whale can be the victim of a vessel strike, but North Atlantic right whales are especially vulnerable because they tend to spend time near the coast and at the water’s surface. Hunted to near extinction in the late 1800s by whalers who called them the “right” whales to kill for being such easy targets, the population didn’t recover after whaling was banned in 1971.

By 1972, the species was listed for protection in the U.S. under the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act, with enforcement falling under NOAA Fisheries.

Gregory Silber worked as the national coordinator of recovery activities for large whales at NOAA Fisheries from 1997 to 2017, following a five-and-a-half year stint with the Marine Mammal Commission, an independent government agency created by the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972. “About 80 to 90 percent of my time was spent on North Atlantic right whales,” Silber said, “because of their dire situation.” Right whales are most at risk from entanglement in commercial fishing gear and from being struck by boats. Because of the powerful fishing lobby and the complexity of the entanglement issue, Silber said, he felt his best bet was to focus on vessel strikes.

The first paper to raise the possibility that speed may influence boat-whale collisions published in 2001. The researchers scoured the historical record to detail 58 documented cases of ships hitting great whales. They found that the most lethal and severe collisions tended to occur when the ship was moving 14 knots or faster, and that more often than not, the whale was not spotted beforehand. How exactly speed played a role wasn’t clear, Silber said, but the paper inspired him to look into the issue himself.

In 2005, Silber and a colleague, Richard Pace, analyzed data from more recent whale-ship collisions. The duo found that the probability of a strike killing or seriously maiming a whale increased dramatically with speed — a 50 percent risk at 10.5 knots jumped to a 90 percent risk at 17 knots. And boats traversing North Atlantic right whale territory tended to travel between 10 and 20 knots. Silber had seen enough: It was time to set speed limits.

Off the coast of the southeastern U.S., where vessel strikes are the greatest threat to North Atlantic right whales (entanglement is the bigger issue in the north, due to lobster fishing), the International Fund for Animal Welfare and other organizations educate the maritime community and local governments about right whales in an effort to get boaters to slow down. In 2008, NOAA Fisheries successfully enacted mandatory speed limits of 10 knots in so-called seasonal management areas, where boats must slow down at certain times of the year, and voluntary slow-downs in dynamic management areas, which are created by NOAA Fisheries where three or more right whales have been spotted and last for 15 days.

But compliance can be low. In a 2021 report, the nonprofit Oceana analyzed vessel speed data from 2017 to 2020 and found only about 10 percent of boats stayed within the limit in mandatory zones and 15 percent did so in voluntary zones. These rules apply only to boats at least 65 feet in length, which are mainly shipping vessels. According to NOAA Fisheries, the 2008 rule served as a model for other nations, like Canada, to implement rules of their own. Spain, New Zealand, and Panama have also enacted either mandatory or voluntary speed limits.

Even with low compliance, studies have consistently found that speed limits help protect whales. A 2006 study expanded on the original 2005 analysis, confirming that strikes at faster speeds are deadlier; a 2013 study by Silber and Paul Conn, a NOAA researcher, estimated that the 2008 speed rule reduced right whale mortality risk from ship strikes by 80 to 90 percent (research suggests that even though many boats weren’t following the speed limit, they still may have slowed down enough to help improve the whale’s chances); similarly, a 2018 analysis of a voluntary speed rule in Canada’s St. Lawrence Estuary found that it resulted in boats going slower and an up to 40 percent reduction in risk of lethal strikes with fin whales; and a 2020 study using computer simulations of boats hitting whales indicated that, while lower speeds are safer, even a collision at the 10 knot speed limit could probably still do serious harm. These simulations also suggested that boats of all sizes — not just those bigger than 65 feet — could kill right whales.

In 2010, Silber took his efforts to prove that speed kills to their logical end. Along with Jonathan Slutsky, of the Naval Surface Warfare Center, and Shannon Bettridge, of NOAA Fisheries, Silber put a model whale made of thermoplastic resin in a basin of water the size of almost seven Olympic swimming pools. They then rammed this half-meter-long scale replica of a North Atlantic right whale with a model container ship from various angles and speeds while an accelerometer stuffed inside recorded the force of impact. The hits were worse at faster speeds, but with a ship that large, the forces resulting from a collision could be deadly even at a slow pace. “It became clear right off the bat,” Silber recalls Slutsky telling him, “that whale is toast at any speed.”

Critics of the proposed speed limit amendment cite safety concerns such as being unable to outrun inclement weather, though mariners would be allowed to break the speed limit in such cases, as they are under the original rule. But the primary worry, according to Leonard from the American Sportfishing Association, comes down to the economic impact. NOAA estimates the total annual cost of the changes to be about $46 million, with more than a third affecting the shipping industry. At least some of the remainder would fall on the recreational and sportfishing industry, many members of which left public comments warning that including their boats in the speed rules will negatively affect their livelihoods (the new rules would affect any boat 35 feet and up).

One commenter, a charter boat operator in North Carolina, wrote that “the speed limit would effectively double” their travel time and that “my customers are paying to fish, and catch fish, not just for an extended boat ride.” Leonard said that while the ASA has worked with NOAA Fisheries on fishing regulations in the past, there was no such collaboration on the new speed rules. “It was a very stark contrast,” he said.

In an email from Wagner, NOAA Fisheries told Undark “we engage our partners, including the fishing and shipping industries, as we develop regulations and management plans” and pointed to the public comment period.

A report by the consulting firm Southwick Associates commissioned by the American Sportfishing Association says NOAA Fisheries underestimated the economic impact and number of vessels the new rules would affect, while overestimating the risk of a boat-whale strike. The report does not dispute the relationship between vessel speed and collision severity or the perilous status of right whales.

Silber told Undark that when he pitched the initial 2008 rule up the chain of command, he was asked point-blank by the George W. Bush-appointed head of NOAA what the economic impact would be to consumers. After a “full-blown economic analysis,” he said, he came back with an answer: prices would go up by 6 cents for every dollar. Silber, now retired, supports the attempts by NOAA Fisheries to update the initial speed rules that he helped craft, but cautioned in his own public comments that the proposed changes will be difficult to implement and enforce. While previous reports have suggested a decision could come as early as June 2023, Silber guesses that there will be delays and modifications to the final rule.

Greg Reilly, the retired Coast Guard officer, now works for the International Fund for Animal Welfare to try to convince mariners to slow their boats. “It’s pretty well-recognized that nobody wants to go out and harm a right whale,” he said

“All of our research right now,” he later added, “indicates that the way to prevent whale strikes is slower speeds.”

Darren Incorvaia is a journalist who writes about animals and the natural world. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Scientific American, and Science News, among other publications. He holds a Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior from Michigan State University.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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You absolutely know vocal fry when you hear it. From Britney Spears’ chart-topping 90s hit Baby, One More Time, to Kim Kardashian’s immediately recognizable voiceovers, this low, nasal way of speaking or singing is pretty much everywhere in pop culture. 

It’s even found in the deepest depths of the ocean. A study published March 2 in the journal Science found that toothed whales have evolved an air-driven nasal source of sound that operates at different vocal registers.

[Related: Noise pollution messes with beluga whales’ travel plans.]

Like humans, toothed whales (sperm whales, orcas, belugas, etc,) have at least three vocal registers. The vocal fry register produces the lowest tones, the chest register produces a normal speaking voice, and the falsetto register produces higher frequencies.

“During vocal fry, the vocal folds are only open for a very short time, and therefore it takes very little breathing air to use this register,” said study co-author Coen Elemans, voice scientist at the University of Southern Denmark, in a statement.

Some toothed whales can dive over 6,000 feet deep to catch fish. While hunting in these deep and murky waters, they use short, powerful, ultrasonic echolocation clicks to find, follow, and catch their prey. They can produce up to 700 clicks per second and it works like sonar to use sound to locate objects.

When whales are over 3,000 feet deep, their lungs collapse to avoid compression sickness. The remaining air is held in the nasal passages inside of the skull, which provides small but sufficient airspace for the whales to produce echolocating sound. 

While echolocating, they pressurize air in their nose and let it pass structures called phonic lips. These lips vibrate the same way that human vocal folds do and their acceleration creates sound waves that travel through the skull and up to the front of the head. Toothed whales make a wide variety of sounds for complex social communication in addition to echolocation. 

[Related: A baby orca sparks a glimmer of hope for an endangered group of whales.]

“And this air-economy makes it especially ideal for echolocation. During deep dives, all air is compressed to a tiny fraction of the volume on the surface,” co-author Peter Madsen, a whale biologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, said in a statement. “Thus vocal fry allows whales access to the richest food niches on earth; the deep ocean.”

Previously, scientists believed that toothed whales used their larynx to make sounds like other mammals, but around the late-1980s, it became clear that they actually use their noses to produce sound. For this study, the team used endoscopes to see what is going on inside their noses and found that toothed whales have evolved an air-driven sound production system in their nose. The techniques used for this study took almost a decade to develop, including filming how the phonic lips vibrated.

“While vocal fry may be controversial in humans and may be perceived as everything from annoying to authoritative, it doubtlessly made toothed whales an evolutionary success story,” Elemans said.

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The humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) along Australia’s eastern coast might be giving up singing their signature songs to find a mate. As the competition for females has increased, a new study theorizes that instead of crooning their love songs, the male whales are switching to fighting each other and are possibly staying quiet for their own survival. 

Humpback whale songs have been studied for more than half a century, following the development of better underwater microphones in the 1970s that allowed scientists to record them. Only male humpbacks are known to make these elaborate sounds. It is believed that this allows them to attract mates and assert their dominance among other whales. 

[Related: Boat noise is driving humpback whale moms into deep, dangerous water.]

The population of whales surveyed for the new study, published February 16 in the journal Communications Biology, is a conservation success story. Only about 200 whales were in the area in the 1960s and they have since come back from the brink of extinction. They have been able to survive and thrive primarily due to commercial whaling largely stopping in 1986. 

The team used data from 1997 to 2015, when the humpback whale population in eastern Australia exploded from roughly 3,700 whales to 27,000. As the population of whales increased, competition for mates also grew.

“In 1997, a singing male whale was almost twice as likely to be seen trying to breed with a female when compared to a non-singing male. But by 2015 it had flipped, with non-singing males almost five times more likely to be recorded trying to breed than singing males,” said study co-author and marine biologist Rebecca Dunlop from The University of Queensland’s School of Biological Sciences, in a statement. “It’s quite a big change in behavior so humans aren’t the only ones subject to big social changes when it comes to mating rituals.”

According to Dunlop, if the competition for a mate is fierce, the last thing a male would want to do is let another male know that a female is in the area by singing. It could attract unwanted competition and be risky. 

“With humpbacks, physical aggression tends to express itself as ramming, charging, and trying to head slap each other. This runs the risk of physical injury, so males must weigh up the costs and benefits of each tactic,” said Dunlop. 

In an interview with the Associated Press, Simon Ingram, a marine biologist from University of Plymouth said who was not involved with this study said, “Such a big increase in animals over the time they were studying gave them a unique opportunity to get insights about changes in behavior. Clearly singing became incredibly valuable when their numbers were very low.”

[Related: A rare humpback whale ‘megapod’ was spotted snacking off the Australian coast.]

The humpbacks in eastern Australia have rebounded close to pre-whaling levels and have even been taken off of the threatened species list. The team can continue to track how the whales’ social behavior changes with their increased numbers.

“Singing was the dominant mating tactic in 1997, but within the space of seven years this has turned around,” said Dunlop. “It will be fascinating to see how whale mating behavior continues to be shaped in the future.”

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Orca whales are among the world’s most recognizable whales, with their round Oreo-cookie colored bodies, acrobatics, and apex ocean predator status. Many populations of orcas–aka killer whales–are also in trouble, and not just due to decades of captivity.

The unique and endangered Southern Resident killer whales (SRKW) that live off of the northwest coast of North America specialize in eating Chinook salmon, a particularly large, fatty, and nutritious Pacific salmon. The whales have become endangered for multiple reasons including reduced salmon availability, chemical pollution, and noise pollution. 

[Related: A baby orca sparks a glimmer of hope for an endangered group of whales.]

“They’re starving all the time because there’s just not enough fish out there,” Deborah Giles, the Science and Research Director for the Washington-based group Wild Orca, told PopSci last year.

Only 73 of these orca whales are left, a critically low number since they do not interbreed with other orca populations.  

While their tight knit familiar bonds are remarkable–they’re even known to instinctually push around deceased calves–their parenting tactics may also be hurting them, particularly when it comes to raising male offspring. A study published February 8 in the journal Current Biology found that raising sons is so exhausting that it leaves whale mothers less likely to produce more offspring. 

The study found that each living son cut an orca mother’s annual likelihood of producing a calf that survives to one year old in half. This effect continued as the sons grew older, which suggests that the sons are a lifelong burden on their mothers. 

“Our previous research has shown that sons have a higher chance of survival if their mother is around,” said Michael Weiss, a co-author from the Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour at the University of Exeter, in a statement. “In this study, we wanted to find out if this help comes at a price.”

Orca mothers are known from previous research to provide their female offspring with less support than their male offspring, especially after daughters reach adulthood. 

The team looked at data from 1982 to 2021 on 40 SRKW females. Male and female SRKWs stay in the group they were born into, with each led by an experienced female matriarch. They come from one of three pods–J Pod, K Pod, and L Pod. One headline grabbing matriarch was Granny (officially named J2), a possibly 103 year-old orca who died in 2016.

While feeding, mothers commonly bite salmon in two pieces, eating one half themselves and giving the other half to their sons. While they also feed young daughters, this tends to stop when they reach reproductive age in their early teens, but continues for adult males.  

[Related: Granny, the world’s oldest known orca, is likely dead.]

According to the team, this strategy of sacrificing their future reproduction to keep their sons alive found in this study is highly unusual in nature and may even be unique to this population and species.

It’s possible that mother’s gain an “indirect fitness” benefit where helping their sons survive and reproduce improves the changes of genes passing along to future generations. 

This strategy has been effective in the past, as mothers pouring effort into their sons’ survival would be beneficial since male offspring can mate with multiple females and create many grand offspring. But this strategy may cause problems for the future viability of endangered whales. 

“For this population that’s living on a knife’s edge, the potential for population recovery is going to be limited by the number of females and those females’ reproductive output,” said co-author Darren Croft, an animal behavior specialist from the University of Exeter, in a statement. “A strategy of females reducing reproduction to increase the survival of male offspring may therefore have negative impacts on this population’s recovery.”

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Deep in the stone at the Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park (BISP) in Nevada’s Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, many 50-foot-long ichthyosaur (Shonisaurus popularis) specimens lay petrified and frozen in time. This order of extinct marine reptiles (and Nevada’s state fossil) looked like a chunky dolphin and lived during the late Triassic age, roughly 237-227 million years ago.

New research also suggests that the predator may have performed similar migrations to modern whales. Today’s blue and humpback whales make annual migrations thousands of miles across oceans to breed and give birth in regions where predators are scarce. Many of these whales gather together year after year along the same stretches of coastline.

[Related: These ancient, swimming reptiles may have been the biggest animals of all time.]

Shonisaurus may have done something very similar. An international team of researchers published their findings Monday in the journal Current Biology, explaining how at least 37 of these marine reptiles died in the same location—a question that has stumped paleontologists for more than 50 years.

“We present evidence that these ichthyosaurs died here in large numbers because they were migrating to this area to give birth for many generations across hundreds of thousands of years,” said co-author and Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History curator Nicholas Pyenson, in a statement. “That means this type of behavior we observe today in whales has been around for more than 200 million years.”

Some paleontologists have proposed that BISP’s ichthyosaurs died in a mass stranding event similar to the ones seen in whales today, or that a harmful algal bloom may have poisoned the animals. But these hypotheses do not have strong scientific evidence supporting them.

To try to solve this prehistoric puzzle, the team combined 3D scanning and geochemistry and combed through archival materials, photographs, maps, and field notes, for shreds of evidence.

Within BISP is a barn-like building that researchers call Quarry 2, which houses partial skeletons from an estimated seven individual ichthyosaurs that all appear to have died around the same time. 

“When I first visited the site in 2014, my first thought was that the best way to study it would be to create a full-color, high-resolution 3D model,” lead author Neil Kelley, an assistant professor of geology at Vanderbilt University, said in a statement. “A 3D model would allow us to study the way these large fossils were arranged in relation to one another without losing the ability to go bone by bone.”

The team then collaborated with Jon Blundell, a Smithsonian Digitization Program Office’s 3D Program team member, and Holly Little, informatics manager in the museum’s Department of Paleobiology. Little and Blundell used digital cameras and a spherical laser scanner to take hundreds of photographs and millions of point measurements. These were then stitched together using specialized software to create a 3D model of the fossil bed while the paleontologists on the team physically measured the bones.

“Our study combines both the geological and biological facets of paleontology to solve this mystery,” co-author Randall Irmis, a paleontology professor at the University of Utah and the chief curator of the Natural History Museum of Utah’s Department of Geology & Geophysics, said in a statement. “For example, we examined the chemical make-up of the rocks surrounding the fossils to determine whether environmental conditions resulted in so many Shonisaurus in one setting. Once we determined it did not, we were able to focus on the possible biological reasons.”

Geochemical tests in the rock didn’t reveal any signs that these ichthyosaurs died due to a major environmental event like a harmful algal bloom that would have also disturbed the ecosystem. They expanded their search beyond Quarry 2 to the surrounding geology and fossils that scientists had previously excavated from the area. 

[Related: This whale fossil could reveal evidence of a 15-million-year-old megalodon attack.]

The geologic evidence showed that when the ichthyosaurs died, their bones sank to the bottom of the sea over time instead of collecting along the shoreline, which would have suggested stranding. The area’s mudstone and limestone were also full of large adult Shonisaurus specimens but not as many specimens of other marine vertebrates.

“There are so many large, adult skeletons from this one species at this site and almost nothing else,” said Pyenson. “There are virtually no remains of things like fish or other marine reptiles for these ichthyosaurs to feed on, and there are also no juvenile Shonisaurus skeletons.”

After ruling out the algae and stranding hypotheses, the team found a key clue in tiny ichthyosaur remains among some of the new fossils collected at the park and hiding within older museum collections. Micro-CT x-ray scans and a comparison of the bones and teeth showed that the small bones were embryonic and newborn Shonisaurus.

“Once it became clear that there was nothing for them to eat here, and there were large adult Shonisaurus along with embryos and newborns but no juveniles, we started to seriously consider whether this might have been a birthing ground,” said Kelley.

Additional analysis revealed that the ages of the many fossil beds of BISP were actually separated by at least hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions of years.

“Finding these different spots with the same species spread across geologic time with the same demographic pattern tells us that this was a preferred habitat that these large oceangoing predators returned to for generations,” said Pyenson. “This is a clear ecological signal, we argue, that this was a place that Shonisaurus used to give birth, very similar to today’s whales. Now we have evidence that this sort of behavior is 230 million years old.”

The next step for this research is to look into other ichthyosaur and Shonisaurus sites in North America with these new findings in mind. It will help scientists recreate this ancient world by looking for other breeding sites or places with greater diversity of other species that could have provided rich feeding grounds for this extinct apex predator. 

“One of the exciting things about this new work is that we discovered new specimens of Shonisaurus popularis that have really well-preserved skull material,” Irmis said. “Combined with some of the skeletons that were collected back in the 1950s and 1960s that are at the Nevada State Museum in Las Vegas, it’s likely we’ll eventually have enough fossil material to finally accurately reconstruct what a Shonisaurus skeleton looked like.”

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This article was originally published on Undark.

When Roswell Schaeffer Sr. was 8 years old, his father decided it was about time he started learning to hunt beluga whales. Schaeffer was an Iñupiaq kid growing up in Kotzebue, a small city in northwest Alaska, where a healthy store of beluga meat was part of making it through the winter. Each summer, thousands of these small white whales migrated to Kotzebue Sound, and hunts were an annual tradition. Whale skin and blubber, or muktuk, was prized, not only as a form of sustenance and a trading commodity, but also because of the spiritual value of sharing the catch with the community.

Now, nearly seven decades later, Schaeffer is one of only a few hunters who still spends the late weeks of spring, just after the ice has melted, on Kotzebue Sound, waiting for belugas to arrive. Many people have switched to hunting bearded seals, partly out of necessity: There simply aren’t enough belugas to sustain the community anymore.

In the 1980s, Kotzebue Sound’s beluga population began to dwindle, from thousands to hundreds, and then to the dozens or fewer that visit the region now. Kotzebue is not alone. Although some stocks are healthy, beluga numbers have fallen off in around a half-dozen regions over the last 50 years. Decades ago, hunting, commercial whaling, and other influences pushed the whales toward the brink. Now, even after hunting has ceased in some places, stresses such as climate change, increased ship traffic, and chemical pollutants are a gathering storm that threatens to finish the job.

But some scientists think that understanding the way the whales respond to these stresses could end up being as important as understanding the stresses themselves. Belugas, like chimpanzees, birds, humans, and many other animals, create cultures by passing knowledge and customs from one generation to the next. With climate change and other human activities reshaping the world at an alarming rate, belugas will likely have to rely on innovative cultural practices to adapt — genetic adaptation is simply too slow to keep up.

Cultural practices can become rote, however, and just like humans, other animals can hold onto traditions long after they’ve stopped making sense. One key question, according to Greg O’Corry-Crowe, a behavioral ecologist at Florida Atlantic University, is: Will culture carry the whales through?

“When the change is so seismic, maybe, and so rapid, you’re trying to look for the innovators and the pioneers among the social conservatives,” O’Corry-Crowe said. At the same time, Indigenous people like Schaeffer are facing their own quandary. Continuing to hunt belugas may hurt the whales’ chance of rebounding, but if Indigenous groups give up the practice, they could lose knowledge that’s helped sustain them in the Arctic for thousands of years.

Philosophers and scientists have long suggested that animals can learn. But even in the early 2000s, scientists debated the idea that animals accumulate knowledge over generations. One animal that helped popularize that notion is the killer whale.

Toward the end of the 20th century, scientists realized that killer whales living off the west coast of North America, between Puget Sound and Vancouver, had separated into communities with unique ways and customs. Vocalizations differed, for example. “It’s like some people speak English, some people speak French,” said Hal Whitehead, a biologist who specializes in social structures at Dalhousie University. Pods from the southern end of the range practiced a greeting ceremony, lining up opposite each other and bobbing their heads; those from the north did not. The northern whales, on the other hand, liked to rub their bodies against beaches, presumably to remove dead skin.

Some cultural practices, like which language whales speak, may not have much impact on survival. But others, like techniques for finding food, can be critical. When killer whales go through lean times, scientists can see long-term knowledge at play: Killer whales move in pods, and when food gets scarce, the oldest females move to the front. They’re likely using knowledge from times when conditions were similar — possibly decades earlier — to show younger whales where to find prey. “It’s called the grandmother hypothesis,” said Sam Ellis, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Exeter. He and his colleagues have shown that killer whales with living grandmothers are more likely to survive than those without.

Cultural adaptations have also helped species like belugas and killer whales survive, said O’Corry-Crowe, and behaviors can develop much faster than genes can be revamped. To cope with warming waters, belugas could learn to move to regions that are still cold enough for their bodies (as long as such regions still exist). Otherwise, they may need to evolve to dissipate heat more efficiently — a process that would take at least a few generations and likely much longer. When resources are patchy, “it’s important to remember where they are, and to pass that knowledge on,” he said. But old practices can pose a problem if they don’t allow the group to adapt to new circumstances. When the world changes quickly, “suddenly, you’re let down,” Ellis said.

Whitehead uses the belugas of Hudson Bay, in northern Canada, as an example. At least three populations of belugas migrate to Hudson Bay in the summer, and Whitehead focuses on two: One that goes to the eastern side and one to the western side. Which side a whale goes to is a matter of family tradition that baby belugas learn from their mothers. Decades ago, commercial whalers overharvested the eastern population. Yet new generations of eastern belugas kept following their mothers to that more dangerous side of the bay. The eastern population became dangerously depleted while the western whales thrived.

Over the last few years, the quick pace of environmental change has sparked a string of scientific publications emphasizing the importance of animal culture for conservation. Some conservation groups have begun considering cultural traits as worthy of conservation as genetic signatures. The idea, O’Corry-Crowe said, is that maintaining diversity of animal knowledge optimizes opportunities for animals to figure out how to address new challenges, just as maintaining genetic diversity maximizes their opportunities to evolve new physical characteristics.

When a pocket of animals with specialized knowledge is lost, “it’s not like it’s immediately replaced. And so you start to blink out unique cultures,” he said. “And that is a loss of adaptive potential going forward.”

The belugas of Cook Inlet, Alaska, are among those that are in danger of blinking out. That’s why, one sunny afternoon in September 2022, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries biologist Verena Gill climbed into a roughly 7-foot-tall beluga costume, adorned with a scarf bearing the name Betty. Hiking up Betty’s tail, Gill waddled to the side of Seward Highway in Anchorage, Alaska, where she waved her flippers at passing motorists to generate support for the whales.

Cook Inlet reaches in from Alaska’s southern coast like an arm terminating in two talons that wrap around Anchorage, and it’s been a key area in the push to save belugas. Unlike some populations, Cook Inlet’s belugas do not undergo a widespread migration. Rather, they stay in the inlet, where they comprise a genetically distinct population. Over-harvesting — from commercial, sport, and subsistence hunting — almost certainly precipitated the decline of Cook Inlet’s belugas, from more than a thousand to around 279 that live there today.

In the early 2000s, the plight of the whales spurred action: The area’s Indigenous groups gave up hunting in 2005. And yet, the whales’ numbers continue to slowly drop. In 2008, the Cook Inlet belugas were listed as endangered. A multitude of threats, including noise pollution, chemical pollution, climate change, and prey declines, have likely swamped any benefit of curtailing hunting, and protections extended to the whales by the Endangered Species Act have not been sufficient. “It’s sort-of death by a thousand cuts,” said Gill.

Betty Beluga comes out once a year to help. Locals do, too: For one day each September, Gill and other NOAA Fisheries scientists, volunteers from partner organizations, and members of the public descend on 14 sites in and around Anchorage to see how many belugas they can find. The data they generate could inform research on long-term trends, but the event mostly serves to engage the public in the beluga recovery effort.

The Seward Highway turnoff, called Windy Corner, was the last of five monitoring locations that Gill visited during this year’s beluga count. Passing drivers honked and waved as Gill wrapped up a long string of photo ops with kids, social media appearances — including a livestream from inside the Betty Beluga suit — and mimicking the caws, squeaks, and whistles belugas use to communicate for a local TV news story. The popularity of this event, and other outreach efforts, are part of what gives Gill hope that Cook Inlet’s belugas will recover. When the population was listed as endangered, local stakeholders got angsty about how the listing would affect the area, according to Gill. “It just seemed like a lot of anger and worry, and there wasn’t a love for belugas like there is now,” she recalled. Fourteen years later, many of these same groups partner with NOAA Fisheries in beluga recovery efforts.

But so far, love hasn’t been enough to save the belugas. Worse still, scientists have been unable to pinpoint a particular threat that’s causing them to keep declining, which Gill said makes her “a little despondent.”

She wonders if cultural fragmentation is a missing piece in the puzzle. Cook Inlet’s extreme tides can easily trap belugas on mudflats if the whales don’t know exactly when and where the water level is going to drop. “Maybe this knowledge is not getting passed on,” she said. There’s some evidence she may be right: Jill Seymour, the Cook Inlet beluga recovery coordinator for NOAA Fisheries, pointed out that belugas are now occupying a smaller portion of Cook Inlet than they once did. Seymour thinks this could mean the whales have lost knowledge of how to use other portions, whereas Gill thinks this may be the remaining whales’ attempt to stick together and rebuild a social group.

Belugas are following a similar trend off the coast of Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago, said conservation marine biologist Kit Kovacs. Genetics show that Svalbard belugas used to mix with those from the southern Barents Sea, which lies between Svalbard and Scandinavia. But these days, Svalbard’s belugas stick close to the archipelago. One explanation is that when elders in the Svalbard beluga community died, migration routes went with them. “When you lose those matriarchal animals and patriarchal animals, with knowledge of where to go and how to do business, you’re just stuck with whatever knowledge is left,” Kovacs said.

There are some signs that belugas are inventing new cultural practices, and perhaps this mindset will help them survive. When O’Corry-Crowe and his colleagues conduct wide genetic surveys, they sometimes come across whales outside their normal range “and go, wait now, who the heck are these guys?” It seems the whales are exploring. Similarly, Kovacs thinks Svalbard’s belugas might be varying their diets as melting glaciers make their favorite Arctic cod harder to catch.

In Anchorage, the beluga count volunteers were packing up at Windy Corner when a pod of about a half dozen belugas emerged offshore from the eastern edge of the turnoff. As they surfaced for air and then descended again, they appeared to roll through the water like oversized porcelain bowling balls. “They’re not feeding, they’re just travelling,” Gill said. A few minutes later, they were gone.

The continued decline of Cook Inlet’s belugas angers some Indigenous people, who feel that others in the area have not reciprocated the sacrifice they made when they gave up hunting. According to Justin Trenton, the environmental coordinator for the Native Village of Tyonek and a member of the Tebughna Tribe, elders in his community “believe that we’re the only ones that have actually stopped completely affecting them.” After almost 20 years without hunting belugas, everyone who remembers how is starting to age. Trenton worries that the knowledge will be lost.

Up the coast from Anchorage, Kotzebue’s hunters, like Roswell Schaeffer Sr., now face a similar dilemma: Should they also stop hunting belugas? A recent genetic study authored by O’Corry-Crowe and his colleagues shows that a genetically distinct population of belugas lived in Kotzebue Sound before their numbers declined. The authors wrote that the remnants of this group deserve legal protections. Roderick Hobbs, a NOAA Fisheries marine biologist who worked with Cook Inlet belugas before he retired, said he agrees.

In 2016, Indigenous members of the Alaska Beluga Whale Committee — a group of tribal delegates, scientists, government officials, and others — drafted a plan aimed at encouraging belugas to return to Kotzebue. The plan calls for limiting hunting during the early part of the summer, for example, when remnants of the original Kotzebue stock are most likely to visit nearby waters. It permits more leniency during the late summer, when belugas from the healthy Beaufort Sea stock are known to migrate past. “I think it was an outstanding approach,” said Kathryn Frost, a founding non-Indigenous member of the committee and an author on the recent genetic study. But right now the plan is voluntary, she added, and “how you get people to follow the plan is a completely different issue.”

Percy Ballot Sr., a subsistence hunter from Buckland, Alaska, and one of the plan’s architects, said he and many hunters in his area are abiding by the guidelines, even though they limit hunting opportunities that were few to begin with. Beluga hunts from years past — with their collaborative spirit and the joyous feasts that followed — are some of Ballot’s most cherished memories, but, nevertheless he’s stopped hunting belugas. “You gotta walk the talk, I guess is probably the best way to put it.”

Not everyone thinks giving up hunting is worth the slim chance that belugas will return. If Kotzebue’s belugas were genetically isolated from neighboring populations — as Cook Inlet’s belugas are — then “it would be a clear cut story,” said Alex Whiting, the environmental program director for the Native Village of Kotzebue and an author on the recent genetic study. But genetic analysis suggests that the remnants of the original Kotzebue belugas have hybridized with other stocks. Because of their slow generation time, rebuilding Kotzebue’s belugas could take decades if not longer, and the resulting population would likely differ from the original stock that scientists set out to save. “If you’re asking people to sacrifice a part of that cultural identity for some unknown benefit — some theorized benefit — I mean, it’s a pretty hard sell,” Whiting said.

In Schaeffer’s eyes, changes in the natural world are making the decision for his tribe. As opportunities to hunt belugas become scarce, young people are losing interest and so their infrequent attempts are clumsy at best. “They get out in a boat, make a lot of noise, and that’s about it,” he said. It’s a change that he said, “bothers the hell out of me. Because the knowledge is being lost — and rapidly.”

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Beluga whales are incredibly sensitive to noise. Social animals that live in the Arctic, belugas use their keen sense of hearing to communicate over long distances, find prey, and elude crafty predators like killer whales. But all is not quiet on the Arctic front. As the Arctic warms and the ice melts, ship traffic is on the rise, suffusing these once-tranquil waters with the throbbing thrum of propellers and engines.

Scientists have known since the 1980s that beluga whales’ sharp senses can pick up boat noise from up to 80 kilometers away. But this noise is much more than a nuisance—it can divert belugas away from feeding, nursing, or resting grounds, cause stress, and interfere with their ability to hear each other and perceive important information about their environments, like how deep the water is or where to locate prey. In a new study, scientists led by Morgan Martin, a zoologist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, reveal in unprecedented detail how belugas will flee, dive, and otherwise rush to escape the distressing din.

In 2018, a group of scientists with Fisheries and Oceans Canada got permission from the Inuvialuit Game Council to tag eight male beluga whales with GPS trackers and time-depth monitors, which log where a beluga is in the water column every second. When Martin was handed the data set, she was excited to find that the loggers yielded “unbelievably cool, precise, beautiful tracks” as the whales swam around the eastern Beaufort Sea. “We could see exactly what depth they were diving to and how long they were down there,” she says.

By looking at these 3D whale tracks side by side with ships’ locations, which were broadcast by the vessels’ onboard automatic identification system transponders, Martin and her colleagues modeled and mapped the recorded encounters between belugas and ships. They also created animations of each interaction.

The belugas’ most common reaction to a loud noise, they found, was to abruptly change direction. Sometimes the whale would circle back once the ship had passed to continue on its journey.

In other cases, a beluga confronted with a noisy ship would make a sharp V-shaped dive, descending and ascending quickly rather than staying submerged as it typically would when foraging. Other times, the whales would dive just below the surface and hightail it away from the noise. If a beluga was already swimming away from a ship, it wouldn’t change its heading, but the study shows that the whale would swim faster than average when a ship was within its hearing range.

Valeria Vergara, a marine mammal scientist at the Raincoast Conservation Foundation who wasn’t involved in the research, says the study’s findings reaffirm just how sensitive belugas are to noise.

Sound is the main way many marine animals communicate and understand their environments. When a noisy boat goes by, Vergara says, the sound completely shuts down or masks belugas’ vocalizations and can lead to chronic stress. Not only that, but swimming an extra 50 kilometers off course to avoid the noise uses up energy that is especially precious in the freezing Arctic.

“When we’re talking about [noise pollution in] really important habitats like feeding grounds or covering grounds or nursery areas, then you have a problem,” she says.

“Underwater noise,” says Martin, “is one of the most pervasive forms of pollution.” But unlike an oil spill, which can linger for years or more, noise pollution, she says, is “a form of pollution that’s completely, absolutely eradicable if you just remove the source of it.”

To help beluga whales, she says, ships need to be made quieter. More than that, she adds, policymakers need to consider setting up marine protected areas and quiet sanctuaries in key beluga habitat.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine, and is republished here with permission.

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For University of Michigan paleontologist Philip Gingerich, a day’s work is all about uncovering the mysteries of the past. “Life in the past was often different from what we see living on earth today,” Gingerich tells Popular Science. “There are a lot of strange and unexpected animals represented by fossils, and there are a lot of interesting mysteries and surprises in the geological past still to be discovered.”

Gingerich is the co-author of a study published yesterday in the journal PLoS One that describes the discovery and analysis of the skeletal remains of Pachycetus paulsonii, Pachycetus wardii, and Antaecetus aithai, ancient whales from a new whale genus called Antaecetus. These whales lived during the middle Eocene era (roughly 40 million years ago) in present-day Europe, North America, and Africa. Early in the Eocene, India began its collision with the rest of the Asian continent, forming the Himalayan Mountains. Most of Earth’s continents were still shifting around into their present day positions. It was also when the fossil record gives us the first evidence of two marine mammal groups: cetaceans (whales, porpoises, and dolphins) and sirenians (manatees and dugongs). The genus Basilosaurus aka the “King Lizard” is a more well-known Eocene era whale.

[Related: This whale fossil could reveal evidence of a 15-million-year-old megalodon attack.]

“The catalyst was co-author Samir Zouhri’s acquisition of the Moroccan skull and partial skeleton of Antaecetus, illustrated in the paper, which we were able to follow up by further excavation to recover more of the same skeleton.  We knew about the species before, based on a limited number of distinctive vertebrae, but the skull was not known before and we didn’t have this much of the skeleton before,” says Gingerich.

The study ties together multiple poorly known and incomplete fossils collected since the early 1870s, from Germany, Ukraine, and other locations in Europe and northern Africa. From these ancient skeletal remains, the team hypothesizes that these whales were slow swimmers similar to manatees (or sireneans) and lived in shallow coastal seas.

[Related: 3D models show the megalodon was faster, fiercer than we ever thought.]

Gingerich and the team were surprised by two major things in the study. “The small size of the skull and delicacy of the teeth for an animal with such large and densely mineralized vertebrae,” he says. “Another thing that surprised us as authors was the wide geographic distribution of Antaecetus and its close relative Pachycetus, which are now known across North Africa, Europe, and eastern North America.”

Antaecetus was also possibly an ambush predator due to the density in its back bones, or vertebrae, which would have provided it with the strength and inertia needed to overcome a prey and deflect predators. They were not likely a target of later predators due to their size and dense skeleton, but the team believes that younger animals may have been more vulnerable to other large archaeocete whales that lived in the same areas.

“The skull and teeth are relatively small and delicate for a fully aquatic ‘archaeocete’ or archaic Eocene whale, especially one with such large vertebrae and such a large body,” says Gingerich.  “This points to a diet of something relatively soft and easy to ambush and chew, possibly octopus, squid, or cuttlefish.”

Antaecetus shows that just because an animal isn’t fast does not mean that it can’t be fierce.

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Bigger than even the largest dinosaurs, blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus) are mysterious and elusive—surviving mainly on tiny crustaceans called krill and leaving many unanswered questions about their ecology and biology. They are found all over the world, except the Arctic Ocean, and their movements are based on two main events: time to breed and time to feast on their favorite crustaceans. In the eastern Pacific Ocean, these whales spend their winters off the coast of Mexico and Central America, and then can travel up to 30 miles per day on their migration north towards California in the summer.

Beyond their incredible size and speed, the blue whale also makes some pretty unique noises. The creature’s unique calls, however, might just be spilling one of their most hidden secrets. in the journal Ecology Letters, a team of researchers used a directional hydrophones in MBARI’s underwater observatory (kind of an underwater scientific podcast studio that records the sounds of the Pacific) to listen for blue whale vocalizations. The team used these sounds to track the blue whales’ movements, and learned that they respond to changes in the wind to forage for food.

“The blue whale gives us such phenomenally useful, clear information for understanding them,” John Ryan, lead biological oceanographer at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and lead author of this study, tells Popular Science. “I feel like the blue whale is collaborating with us to help us understand them by putting sound into the ocean that is so effective for research that can help us understand and protect them.”

[Related: World’s largest shipping company reroutes ships to protect world’s largest animals.]

During the spring and summer, upwelling occurs in the Pacific Ocean off California’s central coast. This weather phenomenon is when wind pushes the top layer of water further out to sea, while the colder water below rises to the surface. Tiny phytoplankton rises along with the cooler, nutrient-rich water, jumpstarting the food web in Monterey Bay. According to the study, when these seasonal winds create an upwelling event, blue whales seek out the plumes of cooler water, where krill are most abundant using the winds and upwelling as their guide. The whales move offshore closer to shipping lanes when the upwelling stops and the plumes of food go away. They basically use the wind as a partner to find food.

The team used directional hydrophones and instruments to identify the direction the sounds are coming from. “Beyond the hydrophone is the accelerometer that measures water velocity, and particle motion. From that, we can go beyond saying ‘that was a blue whale’ to ‘that was a blue whale, and the sound came from over there,'” Ryan says.

To help corroborate that it was actually a blue whale making noise, researchers from Stanford University placed temporary suction cup trackers on the whales. The team then matched the recordings and the whales’ position using GPS. With confidence in the acoustic methods established, the research team examined two years of acoustic tracking of the regional blue whale population.

[Related: Biologists vastly underestimated how much whales eat and poop.]

Previous research had already found that swarms of anchovies and krill (called forage species) reacted to coastal upwelling by swarming the plumes. Using these insights, the team combined krill movement data with the acoustic tracks of foraging blue whales. “When coastal upwelling was strongest, anchovies and krill formed dense swarms within upwelling plumes. Now, we’ve learned that blue whales track these dynamic plumes, where abundant food resources are available,” Ryan says.

The research shows that blue whales can recognize when the wind is changing their habitat and then find places where upwelling aggregates krill. It is crucial that these 165 ton animals find dense groups of krill to survive, since they can eat up to 2 million metric tons of krill per year. The whales closely track the upwelling process to maximize their snack time.

Blue whales are still considered endangered, and their proximity to shipping lanes and vessel strikes remains a threat to their recovery. A 2019 study shows that blue whales are particularly vulnerable to ship strikes, since they do not perform any lateral movements to get out of the way, but instead dive down not realizing that how deep ships sink into the water. Research like this will help scientists understand where the blue whales and the food they are tracking are and help enact better conservation efforts, like speed restrictions for vessels.

“The surprise was, how much time they spent offshore in habitat that is translated by shipping lanes, which represents a primary threat to their survival and recovery as an endangered species,” Ryan says. “We need to take this technology to other regions, because we’ve tried it in one area where we happen to have a listening range.”

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A black rope had rubbed the whale’s flesh raw and white, making it easier for marine mammal rescuers to see the months-old humpback entangled in fishing gear off Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Using a nine-meter pole tipped with a sharp hook, rescuers from the Center for Coastal Studies (CCS) cut away the tangled gear—one of several similar rescue operations the team conducts each year.

The vast majority of the team’s rescue attempts are a success. But to Bob Lynch, CCS’s rescue operations manager, their efforts are a band-aid fix. There are many whales they can’t get to, he says. Beyond that, while disentanglement can save a whale, it can’t save the species, says Lynch. “What we’re doing is not a solution to the problem whatsoever.” Preventing whales from getting entangled in the first place will have a larger impact on their protection.

Vessel strikes and entanglement in fishing gear are the leading causes of human-caused mortality for humpbacks and other baleen whales. Over the past several years, scientists and conservation managers around the world have tried all sorts of things to prevent entanglements, including testing ropeless gear, increasing marine litter cleanup efforts, and implementing seasonal closures of areas that whales frequent. But off the Massachusetts coast, research led by Tammy Silva, a marine ecologist at the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary (SBNMS), hints at another way to find whales and hopefully prevent their entanglement. Key to the approach is the overlap of habitat use between humpback whales and one kind of seabird—the brown-washed great shearwater.

North of Cape Cod Bay, in the choppy waters off the SBNMS, great shearwaters often gather in the hundreds. Through tracking studies, Silva and her colleagues have shown that a congregation of great shearwaters can signal that a pod of humpback whales is swimming below. Both species are preparing for an offshore feast—the whales ascend from the deep to capture sand lance, a silver eel-like fish. Shearwaters lie in wait to pick from what the whales miss.

While it’s possible to track whales directly using satellite tags, the approach can be expensive, and the tags have a short life span. Catching and tagging seabirds, says Dave Wiley, SBNMS’s research coordinator, is also much easier than tagging a humpback whale.

Tracking shearwaters starts with getting birds in hand, Silva explains. Because great shearwaters spend the bulk of their lives on the open ocean, traveling to land only to breed, researchers have to capture them at sea. So, each year since 2012, the team has choreographed what Silva describes as an alien abduction.

Launching in a small inflatable boat from their mother ship, a 15-meter vessel in the Gulf of Maine, three or four team members set out after a raft of shearwaters. One team member tosses chopped mackerel and squid to lure birds in, while the others use long handheld nets to scoop the birds into the boat. Working quickly to minimize stress on the animals, they place each bird in a cat carrier to relax.

After they’ve caught several birds, they head back to the mother ship. There, the scientists collect samples to gauge each bird’s health and diet, and stitch a small solar-powered satellite tag to the skin between its wings.

Tagging and tracking 58 birds over five years has revealed the significant overlap between where and when great shearwaters and humpback whales meet en masse. Now, Silva and her colleagues hope to use this data to save humpbacks from life-threatening entanglements.

Identifying overlaps in known persistent hotspots, like SBNMS, means that now they can look farther offshore. “Take Georges Bank,” says Wiley, “no one’s going to Georges Bank to look for humpback whales.” But if enough shearwaters show up in the area between Cape Cod and Nova Scotia during a particular time frame, there’s a good chance that humpbacks are in the area, too.

There’s still a lot of work left in developing their real-time bird-based system for predicting the presence of humpback whales. But the team hopes that, in the future, detecting an aggregation of tagged birds could trigger action from marine management teams. Fishermen could be required to move gear, and boaters could be asked to steer clear of the area.

It’s a lot like how a phone or smartwatch can track its owner’s location through a constant update of information. “It’s really an extension of our everyday lives,” says Silva, “taking in real-time data and applying that to conservation.”

Maintaining the long-term data collection from shearwaters is central to both Wiley and Silva’s hopes for the future of the project—as highly mobile species, seabirds are a top indicator of ocean patterns and can help answer key questions about the health of marine life, including whales. To protect humpbacks, we have to change our approach, Silva says. “Ultimately, coexistence is what we’re after.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine, and is republished here with permission.

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About 15 million years before the blockbuster hit “Jaws” snapped up the attention of generations of movie goers, the mightly megalodon (Otodus megalodon) stalked the Earth’s oceans. The ancestor of modern-day sharks could eat prey the size of an orca whale in only about five bites. The largest specimens reached between 58 and 72 feet long and had teeth that are almost three times the size of a modern-day great white.

Now, a team of researchers in southern Maryland have unearthed fossil evidence of a possible bottoms-up megalodon attack on a whale. The fossils were found close together in southern Maryland’s Calvert Cliffs, by Mike Ellwood, a Calvert Marine Museum volunteer and fossil collector. They date back to the Miocene Epoch (about 23 million to 5.3 million years ago), when Maryland was covered in a warm and shallow coastal sea with big plumes of sea algae and succulent aquatic plants that supported turtles, crustaceans, and marine mammals.

In an interview with Live Science, Stephen J. Godfrey, a curator of paleontology at the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons, Maryland and lead author of the study said “in terms of the fossils we’ve seen on Calvert Cliffs, this kind of injury is exceedingly rare. The injury was so nasty, so clearly the result of serious trauma, that I wanted to know the backstory.”

[Related: 3D models show the megalodon was faster, fiercer than we ever thought.]

The study, published last month in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica, details their examination of two fossils from the whale’s fractured vertebrae and one megalodon tooth. They used CT scans and other medical imaging techniques at a local hospital to get a closer look inside the ancient remains.

One of the vertebrae shows evidence of a compression fracture. The study proposes that the whale’s backbone must have been forcefully bent into such a tight curve, that pressure from the vertebra right next to it smashed into one another to sustain this kind of injury.

“We only have circumstantial evidence, but it’s damning circumstantial evidence,” Godfrey told Live Science. “This is how we see the story unfolding. Although there are limitations to what we can claim, and we want the evidence to speak for itself.”

Another possible cause of this kind of injury to the backbone could be that the whale ingested a toxic algae that caused it convulse so violently that it broke its own back. The authors, however, argue that a megalodon attack is the most likely cause due to the magnitude of the injury to the spinal column bones.

The team also examined a megalodon tooth that was uncovered alongside vertebrae fossil. The tip of the tooth broke off, which could occur after it struck something hard like a bone. It also could have fallen out while swimming or feeding on an already dead or injured whale’s remains. But the team isn’t ruling out the possibility that a megalodon lost its tooth while ramming its jaws into a whale.

[Related: Megalodons liked to snack on sperm whale snouts.]

The teeth of extinct sharks are a common discovery in Calvert County Maryland and they come from a wide variety of shark species, according to the Maryland Geological Survey. Citizen scientists and paleontologists alike have uncovered teeth from Galeocerdo contortus and Galeocerdo triqueter (similar to modern day tiger sharks), Sphyrma prisca (a relative of the hammer head shark), and Odontaspis elegans (the Sand Shark). It’s thought that this area was a whale and dolphin calving ground, which potentially made the smaller whales easier targets for hungry megalodons.

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Weighing in up to 330,000 pounds and 110 feet long, the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) is bigger than even the largest dinosaurs, despite subsisting on a tiny organism called krill (in huge quantities). They’re the largest animal on Earth currently, and one of the largest animals to have ever lived on our planet in all of history. Still, the magnificent creatures have been on the endangered species list since 1970. They remain at risk due to vessel strikes, risk of entanglement, and a steep decline in their main food source, krill, which can be linked back to ocean acidification and climate change.

In an effort to protect a unique population of these endangered gentle giants from the threat of vessel strikes, the largest shipping and logistics conglomerate in the world, Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), has rerouted their shipping lanes near the coast of Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean. The blue whales here aren’t migratory and have distinct vocalizations. The vessels will now travel about 15 nautical miles (roughly 17 miles) to the south of the previous shipping route.

“MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company has taken a major step to help protect blue whales and other cetaceans living and feeding in the waters off the coast of Sri Lanka by modifying navigation guidance in line with the advice of scientists and other key actors in the maritime sector,” MSC said in a statement provided to Insider.

[Related: Whale ‘roadkill’ is on the rise off California. A new detection system could help.]

The move comes in response to a request from the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and OceanCare. According to the IFAW, Sri Lankan blue whales are in these waters year round. Current international shipping lanes off Dondra Head bring vessels right through the area with the most whales and whale watching activity.

“By ensuring these small changes, MSC is making a significant difference for these endangered whales. Whales often die as a result of collisions and this population is at risk. Ship strikes are both a conservation and a welfare problem, and even one whale death is one too many,” said Sharon Livermore, Director of Marine Conservation at IFAW, in a press release.

This voluntary rerouting from MSC does not impact other shipping carriers in the area (like Hapag-Lloyd or Maersk), but environmental advocates hope that this could lead to a chain reaction of permanent changes to the official shipping lane that would impact all container ships. According to the IFWA, research shows that adjusting the shipping lane would reduce the risk of a ship striking a whale by 95 percent.

“Re-routeing is the key hope to turn the tide for blue whales off Sri Lanka. It also demonstrates to the Sri Lankan government that now is the time to take appropriate action and move the shipping lane out of blue whale habitat for all merchant vessels,” said Nicolas Entrup, Director International Relations at OceanCare, in a press release.

[Related: Whale-monitoring robots are oceanic eavesdroppers with a mission.]

While commercial whaling is banned worldwide, blue whales were on the brink of extinction as recently as the 1960s. The ban on whaling helped the population rebound, but populations are still lower than pre-whaling numbers. It’s estimated that there may have been about 200,000 to 300,000 whales in the Southern Hemisphere before commercial whaling, compared to 2,300 in 1998. Populations are rising at about 7 percent per year.

Vessel strikes are a major issue for a number of whale species, not just blue whales. The critically endangered North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) is especially suffering—NOAA Fisheries has documented four lethal (death and serious injury) right whale vessel strike events in US waters over the past two and a half years.

There are fewer than 350 right whales in the wild and they are not reproducing fast enough to maintain their numbers. In July, NOAA Fisheries announced proposed changes to vessel speed rules to, “further reduce the likelihood of mortalities and serious injuries to endangered right whales from vessel collisions.” The proposed changes would broaden the spatial boundaries and timing of seasonal speed restriction areas along the eastern coast of the United states and expand the mandatory speed restrictions of 10 knots or less to include most vessels 35–65 feet in length.

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It’s lobster season right now in New England, but this year it might be more of an event for endangered whales than for foodies.

The North Atlantic right whale (NARW) has been migrating over 1,000 miles from Florida to calve and Canada to feed for thousands of years. Razor toothed predators like great white sharks or orca attacks haven’t been their biggest threat over all that time. Instead, it’s been human activity from commercial whaling (now banned), vessel strikes, and certain types of fishing. There are currently fewer than 340 NARWs remaining and the population has dwindled by 28 percent over the past 10 years.

In an effort to try and save these whales, Monterey Bay Aquarium’s sustainability guide Seafood Watch has placed American lobster caught by pot and gillnet on a “red list” of seafood to avoid due to the threat lobstering poses to this critically endangered cetacean. Some other red listed seafood include European anchovies, wild-caught cod from both the US and abroad, and Atlantic rock crab.

In a press release, Seafood Watch stated that it reviewed all available data on the issue and gathered input from scientific, government, industry, and conservation experts and through a public comment period. “After reviewing all available scientific data, as well as existing legal requirements and regulations, Seafood Watch determined that current Canadian and US management measures do not go far enough to mitigate entanglement risks and promote recovery of the North Atlantic right whale. As a result, Seafood Watch assigned a red rating to those fisheries using pots, traps, and gillnets.

[Related: Post-pandemic seafood could be more sustainable. Here’s how tech is driving the change.]

Seafood Watch also cited a US court decision from June which determined that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) violated the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act by “failing to quickly reduce impacts to the North Atlantic right whale.”

In addition to being struck by ships, entanglement in fishing gear used to catch crab, lobster, and other species is hurting NARW populations. According to NOAA, their migration route is littered with more than 1 million vertical lines from pots and traps, 622,000 of which in US waters. The ropes from fishing gear can become embedded in a whale’s skin, weighing it down and preventing it from swimming or feeding properly. In 2020, there were 53 large whale entanglements confirmed in the US and more than 80 percent of NARWs have been entangled in fishing gear at least once.

The Maine lobster industry is worth an estimated $752 million and this new designation has raised concern from the state and fishing industry. “Seafood Watch is misleading consumers and businesses with this designation,” said Governor Janet Mills in a press release. “Generations of Maine lobstermen have worked hard to protect the sustainability of the lobster fishery, and they have taken unprecedented steps to protect right whales—efforts that the Federal government and now Seafood Watch have failed to recognize. No right whale death has been attributed to Maine gear, and there has not been a right whale entanglement attributed to Maine lobster gear in eighteen years.”

[Related: Whale-monitoring robots are oceanic eavesdroppers with a mission.]

In an interview with the Portland Press Herald, executive director of the Maine Lobsterman’s Association said, “Lobster is one of the most sustainable fisheries in the world due to the effective stewardship practices handed down through generations of lobstermen. These include strict protections for both the lobster resource and right whales.” The association has been involved in protections since the late-1990’s.

Some conservationists and scientists praised the decision. “For every North Atlantic right whale calf that is born, three right whales are estimated to die,” senior scientist and Veterinarian in the Biology Department at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Michael Moore tells PopSci. “Thus, recovery of the species will require not only minimal mortality but also increased reproductive health.”

“The Seafood Watch listing has significant potential benefit,” Moore adds, “even in areas where whale densities are relatively low.”

But this doesn’t mean customers have to give up their lobster-filled favorite foods. “Consumers should seek low risk of entanglement for their trap caught seafood,” he says, “such as areas only open to on-demand fishing (aka Ropeless), where entanglement risk is minimized, while still enabling trap fishing.”

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Since they were first recorded by Irish scientist John Tyndall in 1859, scientists have observed how greenhouse gases (GHG) like carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide and act like a giant blanket around the Earth. Like a greenhouse does for plants, these gasses trap heat and warm the planet. In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Mauna Loa Baseline Observatory measured the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at an astounding 421 parts per million, a range not seen on Earth in millions of years.

This drastic change to the chemistry in the atmosphere has lead to major consequences to our land and seas and it will only worsen as the climate continues to change. A study published on August 22 in the journal Nature Climate Change found that if greenhouse gases continue to be emitted at their current rate, nearly 90 percent of all marine species could face extinction by the end of this century. The most impacted groups would be the ocean’s top predators (particularly tuna and shark, since they are hunted by humans for food), areas with large amounts of biodiversity, and coastal fisheries of low-income nations, according to the study.

The international team of researchers created a new scorecard called the Climate Risk Index for Biodiversity (CRIB). They used it to examine about 25,000 species of marine life, including animals, plants, protozoa, and bacteria.

[Related: Climate change is making the ocean lose its memory. Here’s what that means.]

“We created a ‘climate scorecard’ for each species and ecosystem that tells us which will be winners or losers under climate change,” says Daniel Boyce, the study’s lead author and a research associate at Dalhousie University, in a press release. “It allows us to understand when, where and how they will be affected, as well as how reducing emissions can mitigate climate risk.”

In a blog post for CarbonBrief, Boyce explains that the framework uses data from analyzing how a species’ innate characteristics like body size and temperature tolerance interact with past, present, and future climate conditions. They evaluated climate risk under two different scenarios: one where emissions continue to be high and another where emissions are sharply reduced in accord with the Paris Agreement’s goal to keep warming below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 Celsius).

According to the study, under the worst-case emissions scenario, 87 percent of marine species would be under high or critical climate risk, species were at risk across 85 percent of their distribution on average, and climate risk was heightened in coastal ecosystems and closer to the equator, disproportionally threatening tropical biodiversity hotspots and fisheries

However, if GHG emissions are curbed, there is an opportunity to course correct and prevent this mass extinction from happening. Reducing GHG emissions would limit the risk for virtually all species on Earth and help minimize disruption to 98.2 percent of the fisheries and ecosystems in the study.

[Related: These Hawaiian corals could hold the secret to surviving warming waters.]

“The benefits of emission mitigation for reducing climate risk are very clear,” said co-author Boris Worm in a press release. “Mitigation provides the most straightforward path to avoiding the worst climate impacts on oceans and people, setting the stage for global recovery under improved management and conservation.”

On August 16th, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides $369 billion to fund energy and climate projects with the goal of reducing carbon emissions by 40 percent in 2030. While climate experts have called a major step in curbing GHG emissions, the legislation also comes soon after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled to limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to regulate emissions at power plants. in West Virginia v. EPA.

“The reality is that climate change is already impacting the oceans, and even with effective climate mitigation, they will continue to change,” Boyce and co-author Derek Tittensor wrote in CarbonBrief. “Therefore, adapting to a warming climate is crucial to building resilience for both ocean species and people.”

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This summer, a baby killer whale is swimming with a local pod in the Salish Sea (the inland marine waters along Washington state and British Columbia) for the first time since 2011. The newest little whale’s birth into the K-pod, one of three family groups that make up the southern resident killer whales, is cause for celebration in a population that’s been struggling for decades.

But the calf isn’t enough on her own to ease the worries of researchers and conservation groups about the southern resident killer whales, as the genetically distinct sub-group of the species in those waterways is called. For one thing, the initial year will be the most difficult for the calf to survive. And health markers like stress hormone levels and body weight across the orca population suggest successful births are increasingly a rarity.

“[The new calf] is so miraculous,” Deborah Giles, the Science and Research Director for the Washington-based  group Wild Orca, says. “But we know from past decades these females were able to give birth every three years, and that’s just not the case now.”

[Related: Drones revealed the intricate social lives of these killer whales]

In 2017, Giles’ team found that 69 percent of southern resident female whales’ pregnancies haven’t been brought to term in recent years. Chronically stressed and undernourished, this killer whale population has shrunk from 89 individuals when they were federally listed as endangered in 2005 to only 74 today.

The killer whales face the same range of threats they did 17 years ago: noise and potential collision with boats, chemical pollutants, and a lack of prey. Of all those, most worrying to researchers today is the shortage of the orca’s main food source, Chinook salmon. 

These killer whales co-evolved with the Chinook, which are also an endangered species. They can and do eat other types of fish, but the Salish Sea’s largest, fattiest fish has always made up the majority of their diet. 

As the number and size of salmon returning to spawn in Washington and British Columbia’s rivers have dwindled over the years thanks to overfishing, rising water temperatures, dam obstructions, and habitat destruction, among other things, the killer whales have struggled to find enough prey to survive.

“They’re starving all the time because there’s just not enough fish out there,” says Giles.

Another recent study of the southern resident killer whales by researchers at the University of British Columbia identified the same issue. Comparing salmon availability over the decades to what they know of the whale’s movements and health, they determined that for six of the last 40 years, the marine mammals weren’t getting enough to eat. 

That means that any effort to protect the endangered southern resident killer whales will have to involve protecting the endangered Chinook salmon. “The single most promising effort toward promoting a positive trajectory for southern resident killer whale recovery are salmon and river restoration initiatives throughout the whales’ entire range,” says Shari Tarantino, executive director of the Washington-based nonprofit Orca Conservancy.

[Related: The secret to saving salmon is lodged in their ears]

The state put new regulations in place for this summer requiring whale watching boats keep a nautical half mile away from the orcas, following news that a number of them were pregnant, but potentially unhealthy. While these additional restrictions should benefit the whales, Giles from Wild Orca says they won’t do enough on their own to help them recover long-term. “We have spent a lot of time looking at vessel effects to limit the impact of vessels on these animals. Now, we need to be looking at policies focusing on fisheries management,” she says. 

Tarantino, from the Orca Conservancy, agrees. “While we support mitigation efforts, the emergency regulations in Washington State continue to fall short on what the southern resident killer whale population needs,” she adds. 

And it’s about more than just the orcas. Killer whales are at the top of the food chain, and, as Tarantino points out, “When an apex predator is failing, it means the entire ecosystem beneath it is also failing, which ultimately will affect the human population.”

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In 2018, a multidisciplinary Antarctic expedition to study, among other things, the impacts of climate change on krill populations uncovered a heartening surprise about one of the crustacean’s prime predators: fin whales. Helicopters dispatched from aboard the research ship spied 100 groups of the cetaceans, while on-deck observers spotted groups of 50 and 70 near Elephant Island—about 550 miles southeast of Cape Horn. A return trip in 2019 revealed even larger gatherings of up to 150 in the same location. 

The findings, published this week in the journal Scientific Reports, signal the whales’ return to their historic feeding grounds, and hint that the species—Earth’s second largest behind blue whales—are on the rebound after whalers hunted it to the brink. Similarly, the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List‘s most-recent assessment of fin whale populations in 2018 moved the species’s status from Endangered to Vulnerable.

Seeing this volume of whales in the Southern Ocean has been unheard of for decades. Before a 1982 ban on commercial whaling, some 725,000 of the animals were killed for commercial purposes, knocking their totals down to less than two percent of their pre-whaling abundance. Today, the IUCN estimates their total population around 100,000. 

Though this most-recent survey offers a small window onto the current count, the researchers’ estimates on the species abundance in the area are a hopeful sign. Their observations and calculations indicate that as many as 3,618 fin whales could be in the deneset area around Elephant Island alone. “Even if we still don’t know the total number of fin whales in the Antarctic, due to the lack of simultaneous observations, this could be a good sign that, nearly 50 years after the ban on commercial whaling, the fin whale population in the Antarctic is rebounding,” Bettina Meyer, a biologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in German and co-author of the survey told Science Daily. 

This latest survey confirms a trend lead author Helena Herr has been seeing in the region for nearly a decade. A 2013 trip to study minke whales led the ecologist from the Australian Marine Mammal Center to an unexpected gathering of fin whales as well, she recalled to The New York Times, and other research groups published similar findings in the past 12 years. But it was a 2016 sampling near Elephant Island that, according to this most-recent Scientific Reports paper, convinced Herr and her colleagues to do a more in-depth study. 

Having fin whales feed in their historic haunts again could have benefits to the entire ecosystem. When the cetaceans munch on krill, they release iron as a waste product. Higher iron levels in the water can spur the growth of phytoplankton, which pull in carbon dioxide from the air. Marine scientists call this process the “whale pump.”

Though the fins’ rebound story is a strong sign that conservation efforts can work, whaling is far from the only stressor across whale populations. The animals face regular run-ins with both commercial and recreational boats, and can sometimes get entangled in fishing gear. Meanwhile, systemic issues like ocean noise and temperature shifts can mess with their movements and feeding patterns. 

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Ancient megalodon sharks may have snacked on sperm whale snouts, according to new analysis of the marine mammals’ fossilized skulls. An international team of researchers described signs of this “focalized foraging”—aka deliberate munching—in 7-million-year-old whale bones in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 

Both modern and fossilized sperm whales sport distinctive “supercranial basins” (read: giant noggins) that take up around a third of its body length, which can reach around 60 feet. These massive heads house their incredibly complex sound-production organs, which enable them to make louder noises than any other animal on the planet. But most of the supercranial basin is filled with an extremely fatty substance called spermaceti. 

In the new study, which analyzed various sperm whale specimens held at the Natural History Museum in Lima, paleontologists found bite mark clusters that corresponded with the fattiest nasal regions. 

“Many sharks were using these sperm whales as a fat repository,” lead study author Aldo Benites-Palomino, a doctoral candidate at the Paleontological Museum of the University of Zurich in Switzerland, told Live Science. “In a single specimen, I think that we have at least five or six species of sharks all biting the same region—which is insane.” 

[Related: How great white sharks probably hastened the demise of megalodon]

Unlike baleen whales that feed on tiny organisms, sperm whales are toothy predators that munch on fish and other marine critters. But Benites-Palomino and colleagues posit that their fatty schnozzes would have provided a much more appealing food source than the more docile, but slim marine mammals that swam in the oceans at the time. Plus, it’s likely that sperm whale noses only got nibbled on once the behemoths died of other causes.

“Our findings indicate that all of these were post-mortem events,” Benites-Palomino told Newsweek. “The carcasses were floating for days until all the fat was ingested by sharks, not being able to float any more.”

The research team found an assortment of bite marks that match multiple species of hungry sharks, but it’s no surprise that megalodon is the nose-biter making the most headlines. Otodus megalodon, which went extinct some 3 million years ago, is one of the only other carnivores in history to have rivaled sperm whales in size. Scientists are still figuring out how the ancient beasts lived and died, and Hollywood remains obsessed with the notion that they might still lurk in the deep. 

In June, an unrelated study published in Science Advances suggested that megalodon might have been at the very top of the food chain—hunting other large predators and perhaps even engaging in cannibalism. But their status as apex predator is still up for debate, as other researchers have concluded that megalodon was likely on the same level of the food chain as ancient great white sharks. In fact, competition between them may have helped drive meg to extinction. 

While this latest study gives us just a small taste of the intriguing megalodon’s diet, it does serve as a reminder that even the most aggressive predators are generally not above grabbing some fast food in the form of a whale carcass. 

“More than actually answering questions, I think this is making me have more inquiries around all of these discoveries,” Benites-Palomino told Live Science.

With creatures as mysterious and fascinating as giant-headed sperm whales and long-lost mega sharks on the menu, it’s no surprise that researchers are hungry to learn more.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Every year between January and April, humpback whale mothers and their calves can often be seen in Hawai‘i’s warm waters. The adult whales flock to Hawai‘i from Alaska and British Columbia to breed and rear their young. To keep their calves safe, humpback whale mothers usually prefer to stick closer to shore. This lets them avoid sharks, the potentially lethal advances of male humpbacks, and other threats. But as a new study shows, humpback whales’ habitat is being pinched between increasing inshore vessel traffic and the dangers of deeper water.

During the winters of 2005 and 2006, Adam Pack, a whale researcher at the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo, and his colleagues observed the humpback whales off western Maui from a vantage point atop a nearby hill as part of a separate research project. They noted the positions of mother-calf pods and pods without calves (which mostly included lone whales or courting pairs), as well as the locations of whale watching vessels and other craft.

Years later, after more was known about humpback habitat preferences, Pack was interested in revisiting and analyzing this data set. He had expected to see similar behavior to that documented in previous research—that the mother-calf pairs would remain closer to shore than whales without calves. “What we found was the direct opposite, which was confusing, and also kind of interesting from a scientific point of view,” says Pack. For the 161 mother-calf pods Pack and his colleagues observed, the researchers noticed that the whales started the day near the shore and, as the day crept on, moved into significantly deeper waters.

Pack says the whales’ daily commute is likely the consequence of them avoiding non–whale watching vessels such as fishing boats or recreational watercraft. The researchers draw a distinction between whale watching tour boats and other boats because, based on their analysis, the whales’ shift to deeper water was related to the density of non–whale watching boats, which increased during the course of the day. Whale watching boats, they say, were much fewer in number and didn’t have the same effect. The finding deviates from previous research in which vessels were absent.

Pack says that boats can be very noisy, which interferes with whales’ communications and disturbs the mother-calf pods. The study suggests mother-calf pods are being edged into deeper water during the day by boats, and at night, after the boat pressure has let up, are swimming back inshore.

“One of the remarkable things about [adult] humpback whales is that they don’t feed while they’re in their tropical breeding grounds,” explains Alison Craig, a marine mammal researcher at Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland, and one of the study’s coauthors. It is vital for nursing mothers to conserve their energy during this fasting period, she says. “If exposure to too much inshore vessel traffic causes females with calves to head into deeper waters, they’ll be more likely to encounter harassment from males, and this in turn will cause them to use more energy.”

Joe Mobley, a whale researcher at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa who was not involved with the study, says it was good that Pack and his team were able to highlight this problem.

“I think the largest problem these animals face is climate change,” says Mobley. “But in the meantime, we control the things that we can control.” It would be relatively feasible, Mobley says, to enact vessel-traffic policies to reduce stress for the humpbacks.

Before considering any policy changes, however, Pack says it would be important to conduct this research in other areas around Hawai‘i to have a better understanding of how pervasive the problem is. He’d also want to conduct the survey again since the data he collected was from 12 years ago and vessel traffic has only increased since then.

Humpback whales were nearly wiped out by commercial whaling that continued into the mid-20th century, and the population that visits Maui “is still very fragile,” Pack says. “It is extremely important to continue to monitor their preferred breeding grounds.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine, and is republished here with permission.

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About 20 miles offshore from Martha’s Vineyard, a yellow robotic buoy is bobbing in place on the water. Like most data-collection buoys, this moored robot is eavesdropping on the world under the waves. But unlike most buoys, which function like floating weather stations, this one from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) is listening for whales in the area in real-time. Just this week, it detected the presence of a sei whale and a fin whale. 

That buoy is one out of the many robots deployed by WHOI off of the East Coast and West Coast of the US. These buoys are autonomous platforms tuned into the melodies of a range of different whales: sei whales, fin whales, blue whales, humpback whales, but most notably, right whales, which are critically endangered. 

Right whales play a vital role in the ocean food web. Like other filter feeders, they eat zooplankton and tiny crustaceans, then recycle and redistribute nutrients like iron back into the ocean as they poop. Whales also act as valuable carbon stores, and when they die and sink, their corpses transform into pop-up habitats for critters on the ocean floor. But right whale numbers have been dwindling again since around 2010, despite a slight uptick in population in the early 2000s after commercial whaling laws were revised in the late 1900s. Currently, it’s estimated that there are only 360 of the animals left. The most common causes of right whale deaths are entanglement in fishing gear and ship strikes, though it’s suspected that climate change may also become a threat. Other human activities in the ocean that can affect their behaviors include loud, unusual noises such as construction or sonar. 

However, some scientists think that using sea-faring robots to detect the presence of whales could help humans navigate more carefully around them. In March, WHOI announced that it was collaborating with a French shipping company to figure out how to incorporate information from the robots into their business operations.

Mark Baumgartner, a marine ecologist at WHOI whose lab operates these buoys, along with robotic gliders that can move across the sea to scope out where whales are, says that they’re also working with wind energy companies, NOAA, the US Navy, state agencies, and Canadian researchers on ways to use these tools to reduce the risk of harms to the animals. 

On the West Coast, these buoys help monitor the activity of these large marine mammals as part of the Whale Safe system that maps whale and ship movement off the coast of California.

[Related: Whale ‘roadkill’ is on the rise off California. A new detection system could help.]

How the robots work

Researchers from WHOI are currently employing 7 buoys and 4 gliders to help with this issue. Both the buoys and the gliders share the same basic instruments and software. More specifically, the software is one written by Baumgartner for identifying whale sounds and creating “pitch tracks” that get sent to researchers in his lab. 

The software is conceptually simple and is best explained with an analogy. “Imagine you’re sitting down and you’re playing something on the piano and there’s a magic box on the piano that listens to what you’re playing and spits out the back sheet music of everything you’ve played,” Baumgartner says. “You can take that sheet music to a musician and the musician can read the notes on the sheet music and say you were playing ‘Mary had a Little Lamb.’ The musician didn’t have to hear what you were playing. They just have to read the notes.” 

This system works similarly. In essence, it identifies sounds and creates compact representations of sound from a spectrogram, or “pitch tracks,” which are analogous to notes on a piece of sheet music. Then, it compares those to pitch tracks within an existing library of whale calls. The robots will forward the audio clips that contain whale sounds, according to their analysis, to a dedicated server ashore. The human analysts back at the lab listen to these clips and make the final call on if whales were detected or not as well as put in notes about the features of sound and the species that made it. 

“A lot of whale sounds are distinctive by species. North Atlantic right whales will make different sounds than a fin whale,” Baumgartner says. “The pitch tracks for each of the species are distinctive.”

[Related: Birders behold: Cornell’s Merlin app is now a one-stop shop for bird identification]

The hardware components of the listening system include a computer inside each glider and buoy and an underwater microphone. These robots also have particle motion sensors that can help them get a bearing on which direction the sound is coming from. The computers send the data back to the lab through an iridium satellite system. After coming off the satellite, it goes through processing, and gets put on a central website that displays it publicly. The data is also shared with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. 

The Slocom glider can run for three to four months on a lithium-ion battery, and the buoy runs on a stack of alkaline batteries that last for a year. The moored buoy was designed at the WHOI to be very quiet so the onboard instruments can listen to ocean sounds effectively. 

Both the buoys and the gliders are capable of two-way communication. The gliders make a “phone call home” every two hours to a computer in Baumgartner’s lab in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. It sends not only pitch track data but all kinds of information about how the glider is doing, where it is, and where it thinks it’s going. The researchers can tell it to go somewhere different, or troubleshoot issues that come up onboard.

“The reason we chose different platforms to put this technology in is because sometimes you want to monitor over a relatively small area for a long period of time. Buoys are great for that,” says Baumgartner. “Autonomous vehicles are good if you want to do a much larger area.” 

As it exists today, both robots act like the flashing lights in front of an elementary school that caution cars to slow down. But Baumgartner and his team hopes that these robots could one day tell any ships or possibly fishermen to be careful when whales are around either through email, text, an alert app, government software, or perhaps some other form of communication. 

Near real-time detection

Baumgartner has been studying whales and ocean acoustics for over a decade. Back in 2005, he and his collaborators were deploying gliders with passive acoustic monitoring abilities. But soon, they realized that while collecting sounds and analyzing them months later was good for science, it wasn’t useful for conservation or management. That’s when they started shifting the system to do more real-time detections. Since 2012, they’ve cycled through two versions of the ocean-faring robots, but the software has stayed more or less the same. 

[Related: Why ocean researchers want to create a global library of undersea sounds]

In the US, NOAA has set up a program called slow zones that creates a box around areas where whales have been detected visually or acoustically. It asks mariners going through to slow down to ten knots or less or avoid the area altogether. “This program has been up for about two years. And we’ve had a lot of slow zones over the East Coast over the past winter, triggered because of our buoys and gliders,” Baumgartner says. “We know that when ships go slower, they’re less likely to hit and kill whales.”

Canada, on the other hand, has been closing off areas to fishing and imposing mandatory speed limits when whales are present. 

Without this system, the way to spot traveling whales is to survey the ocean from a plane, drone, or a ship. These methods are useful for getting a visual reading on the whales, and you can tell from photos if they’re entangled, injured, sick, or dead. But flying instruments are often hampered by weather and wind conditions. With imaging, if there are too many white caps on the ocean, it would be impossible to make out a whale. The robots, especially the moored buoy, meanwhile, can listen all the time. But only when and if whales are calling in the area.

Although this technology is helpful, especially for mitigating risks in areas where right whales aren’t very common, it can’t solve this problem alone. “These systems are just a constant reminder. But it’s not enough to let people know that they’re there. Continuing to advocate for stronger protections for right whales based on this information is really important,” says Baumgartner. “There are lots of other solutions that we need to be paying attention to.” 

Robots alone will not save the whales

Canada’s mandatory speed restrictions imposed in areas where whales are present is what Baumgartner says is the more effective approach. “That voluntary-versus-mandatory [distinction] is really important because compliance with mandatory ship speed restrictions is actually quite good. The compliance with voluntary slow downs is quite bad,” he says. 

Additionally, Baumgartner and his team are thinking about marine industries can apply the information the robots supply. One problem they’re still trying to solve is who to get this information to. Because when a ship wants to come on shore, it needs to be on time to unload, have longshoremen scheduled to be in place, and have truckers ready to receive the containers. “That’s a business problem that the captain will not solve alone. Who do you provide this information to?” says Baumgartner. “Do you provide it to the captain, do you provide it to the pilots, the company, schedulers and business planners, or to the people who arrange logistics on shore at the port, the Coast Guard so they can notify ships?” Their project with the French shipping company, CMA CGM Group, is aimed at finding an answer to that question. 

Meanwhile, offshore wind companies, which fund the operations of some of Baumgartner’s buoys, are also interested in seeing if the robots can inform construction schedules, and advise best practices for ships going back and forth to maintain wind farms.

[Related: These free-floating robots can monitor the health of our oceans]

The robots are not a holistic solution for all industries operating near whales at sea. For example, they might not be practical for preventing right whales from getting entangled in fishing gear in the US. Fisheries operate differently in Canada compared to in the US. “They fish [in Canada] with a lot less gear. They have seasons where guys fish and when the season’s over they have to gather up all the gear and go home,” he adds. “The American fishery is not like that at all, it’s a year-round fishery, so guys just don’t have the equipment to gather up their gear and bring it home.” 

In addition to robots for whales, Baumgartner and others are looking into ways that both scientists and manufacturers can innovate ropeless fishing to make it cheaper and easier for fishermen to incorporate into their businesses. That way they can still fish even when whales are there, and regulatory bodies won’t have to close off entire areas because a whale was detected nearby. 

“We’re not going to stop shipping, we’re not going to stop fishing. We have to find a way for these industries to be sustainable, to not have the impact that they’re having on the ocean today and on the animals that live in it,” Baumgartner says. “One of the potential ways to mitigate these risks that we pose to the animals is to change industrial practices when we know whales are around.” 

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Orca whales are known to be powerful predators, but the ones off the coast of Western Australia might be the most ruthless of their species.

The individuals in this region are genetically distinct from other populations around the world—and they seem to stand out with their hunting prowess as well. In a just-published analysis of three orca kills in Bremer Bay, marine biologists showed that pods will take down the biggest prey they can find: blue whales. It further supports the idea that orcas may be the only natural predators adult blue whales have.

There’s plenty of documentation of orcas attacking other giant mammals; they’ll regularly prey on young humpback whales and full-sized minke whales. But blue whales are a whole different meal—and then some. Adults can get up to 110 feet long and weigh more than 300,000 pounds, making them the most gargantuan creatures on Earth. Even newborns top the megafauna charts at an average of 23 feet and 6,000 pounds.

But that doesn’t seem to deter the Bremer Bay orcas. In three separately documented hunts from 2019 and 2021, pods of one- to two-dozen individuals were seen attacking solo blue whales, chasing and maiming them over the course of an hour. Once the much-larger prey was too exhausted to swim away, the orcas drowned it and dug in.

[Related: These killer whales go through menopause]

The predators all seemed to have a similar slaughtering strategy. They would take turns tearing at their target’s fins and head, before lining up in formation to ram it to death. In two of the cases, they even tore out the blue whale’s tongue—a meaty appendage that can weigh more than an entire elephant. As is typical in orca society, older females led the hunting parties and were responsible for the bulk of the attacks. After dealing the final blows, pod members of all ages helped push the blue whale’s massive form underwater to share the spoils. Members of other orca groups, along with seabirds, joined in to feed too.

“The killer whales we research off Bremer Bay are rewriting the textbook on what we thought we knew about this species,” Rebecca Wellard, founder of Project ORCA and co-author of the new study, said in an interview with the New York Times. But in the paper, she and her colleagues note that orcas in other areas might occasionally dine on blue whales as well. A 2016 video taken by passengers on a fishing boat off Baja California, Mexico, shows a group of male orcas consistently chomping on a blue whale. It’s unclear whether the victim survived.

Amateurs and experts alike, however, have documented the whale battles off Western Australia. Wellard and her fellow researchers supplemented recordings and testimonies from wildlife cruises with drone footage they took themselves. As a result, they’ve published the most thorough analysis of a behavior that’s surprised even the most veteran whale scientists. 

“Now, with the recovery of some blue whale populations, what we may be seeing is killer whales rediscovering a prey base that has largely been absent for the past 50 to 100 years,” Robert Pitman, a marine biologist from Oregon State University and co-author on the story, told Gizmodo. “We may also be getting a glimpse of what the ocean looked like before we emptied out most of the large creatures.”

Correction (February 1, 2022): Due to a conversion error, the maximum weight of an adult blue whale was incorrectly stated as 300 tons or 600,000 pounds. It has been updated to 150 tons of 300,000 pounds.

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When fin whales capture their food, they end up scooping a lot of water into their mouths. Scientists in Canada have discovered a small, fatty structure in these marine mammals that may explain how they are able to engulf such vast amounts of prey-filled water without choking. 

When the researchers examined deceased whales, they identified a section of the soft palate that could shift to seal the upper airway while the whale feeds. The researchers, who dubbed the structure the ‘oral plug’ in the journal Current Biology on January 20, suspect that the plug also exists in other large baleen whales.

Fin whales are found in oceans worldwide and can grow to 85 feet long. They belong to a group of large baleen whales called the rorqual family, along with several other sea giants including the blue whale and humpback whale. Rorquals use a highly unusual strategy known as lunge feeding to capture krill, fish, and squid. During lunge feeding, the whale opens its mouth while shooting towards its prey at speeds of up to about 10 feet per second, allowing it to gulp a volume of water as large as its own body. Finally, the whale closes its mouth, pushing water out through its baleen plates, and swallows the remaining prey.

How the whales protect their airways as water floods the mouth has been a mystery, however. 

“We have a lot of knowledge about that whole process of the mechanics of lunging and engulfing all that food, and that’s pretty much where the knowledge stops,” says Kelsey Gil, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and coauthor of the findings. “We don’t know what’s going on in the throat.”

To find out, she and her colleagues examined the bodies of 19 fin whales.

“When we had the mouth open in this fin whale, we saw there was this massive chunk of tissue at the back of the mouth completely plugging the pathway that the food has to take to get to the esophagus and the stomach,” Gil says.

The almost 8 inch-wide bulbous structure was composed of fat and muscle. The researchers determined that it was part of the soft palate—the little sheet of muscle along the roof of the mouth from which the uvula hangs in humans. 

The oral plug was tightly wedged in place and could not be easily pushed free. When the researchers examined the muscle fibers of the soft palate, they concluded that the only way the oral plug could move for food to pass through during swallowing would be to shift backwards and upwards, and in doing so block the entry to the nasal cavities. 

“For these whales it’s a way to save energy,” Gil says. “It’s in its relaxed position and it’s going to be in that position most of the time and it only needs to be moved for a brief amount of time to push food through.”

The process is similar to what happens when humans swallow: The uvula is pushed back and throat muscles contract so food doesn’t go up the nose. 

“Once the nasal cavities and the upper airways are protected, you have this question of how the lower airways would be protected, [such as] the lungs,” Gil says. She and her collaborators manipulated the cartilage of the larynx, or voicebox, to see how it might move during swallowing. They found that the cartilage at the top of the larynx can come together to create a seal that prevents food or water from accidentally getting into the respiratory tract.

Additionally, Gil says, a muscular sac at the bottom of the larynx known as the laryngeal sac can create another protective barrier to block off the entry to the lungs. When the whales dive down to feed at greater depths, the pressure would push the sac upwards to plug the larynx. 

Being able to engulf massive amounts of prey is one reason that rorquals have managed to grow to such epic sizes. “The oral plug is really important for lunge feeding, and thus for allowing them to get as large as they have,” Gil says.

However, not everyone is convinced by the structure. Joy Reidenberg, a comparative anatomist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York who was not involved with the research, says she has “serious reservations” about some of the evidence presented in the study. Based on what she has observed in dissections of rorquals, Reidenberg says, the rigid and floppy cartilage flaps at the top of the larynx wouldn’t fit together to make a particularly good seal in whales. 

Additionally, the motions of the larynx and mouth that make the protective seal and swallow food cannot both happen at the same time, she says. This is because both actions depend on moving the U-shaped hyoid bone, but in opposite directions.

Reidenberg also isn’t sold on the oral plug, which she doubts could move out of the way enough to allow food to pass by during swallowing. As is commonly observed in other animals, Reidenberg explains that it makes more sense for air to flow over the larynx and soft palate while food flows around the sides, like water parting around the bow of a boat. This would allow the whales to breathe and eat at the same time, she explains. It’s possible that the fatty bulge the team observed in the fin whale carcasses was actually caused by the weight of the larynx pushing down because the tongue was no longer there to hold it in place, Reidenberg says, although researchers would have to peek into a live whale’s mouth to find out for sure.

“I’m not convinced entirely that there is an oral plug, but if there is, I find that to be very interesting,” she says. “I’d love to see more evidence of that.”

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About 246 million years ago, a marine reptile roughly the length of a humpback whale patrolled the seas over present-day Nevada.

This ichthyosaur wasn’t just remarkable because of its massive size, according to scientists who recently analyzed a partial skeleton recovered from the Augusta Mountains. The new species notably lived just a few million years after the very first ichthyosaurs—which were roughly dog-sized—appeared in the fossil record. This means these swimmers supersized themselves much more quickly than whales did, according to research reported on December 24 in Science. 

“​​This fossil combined with the [other] fauna that we’re finding in Nevada is a true testament to how resilient life is, and how fast evolution can proceed if the environmental conditions are right and the opportunity is there,” says study coauthor Lars Schmitz, a paleontologist at the W.M. Keck Science Department of Claremont McKenna, Scripps, and Pitzer Colleges. “Even after a massive extinction event where the entire world is in turmoil, life can diversify really, really fast.”

Ichthyosaurs first arose 249 million years ago and hunted the world’s oceans for the next 150 million years before going extinct. Their streamlined bodies, flippers, and large eyes gave them a slightly dolphin-like appearance, Schmitz says. Indeed, ichthyosaurs shared a few similarities with cetaceans—whales, dolphins, and porpoises. Both groups evolved from land-dwelling animals that returned to the sea, developed similar body plans including powerful tails to propel themselves through the water, and in some cases grew to enormous sizes. 

The ichthyosaur fossil that Schmitz and his colleagues analyzed includes a skull more than 6 feet long, as well as parts of the right arm, spine, and shoulders. The new species, which they named Cymbospondyus youngorum, had a long snout filled with pointed teeth and a slender body.

Based on the size of its skull, the researchers estimated that C. youngorum would have reached roughly 58 feet long and weighed just under 50 tons. “This one is much larger than all the other ichthyosaurs that lived earlier and at the same time, so [it’s] essentially the first giant in the oceans,” Schmitz says. 

The remains of several other large ichthyosaurs around 33 feet in length have also been discovered near the C. youngorum specimen, he adds. Bulking up likely came with several advantages; in the oceans, larger animals tend to be efficient hunters, are protected from other predators, and can more easily regulate their body temperature.

The researchers compared C. youngorum to other ichthyosaurs of varying ages and anatomical traits, and identified two “pulses” of rapid growth early in the group’s evolutionary history. “It really helped us to understand that body size for ichthyosaurs evolved super fast,” Schmitz says.”

[Related: This ancient millipede was as big as a car]

He and his team then compared the ichthyosaur and whale family trees. They calculated that ichthyosaurs became giants within the first 3 million years of their 150-million-year history, while whales took 45 to 50 million years of their 56-million-year evolutionary history to reach approximately similar body sizes.

“Ichthyosaurs hands-down win in terms of getting to that size so early,” says Benjamin Moon, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol in England who has also studied ichthyosaur evolution.  

C. youngorum and its neighbors are all the more striking because they arrived on the scene not long after a mass extinction—one that wiped out 81 percent of all marine species around 252 million years ago. Many of the phytoplankton and algae that fuel today’s marine food chains had yet to evolve, raising the question of how the ecosystem supported such large predators.

To find out, the researchers surveyed the wealth of known fossils from C. youngorum’s Triassic ecosystem, including smaller ichthyosaurs, fish, and squid-like ammonites. The team used a computer model to investigate whether there would be enough energy to sustain C. youngorum, assuming the fossils added up to a representative picture of the ancient food chain.

Somewhat surprisingly, Schmitz says, the researchers found that the ecosystem preserved in the fossil record was “stable and well functioning” enough to support a large number of beefy marine reptiles. One clue may lie in the fact that there aren’t many fish fossils in the area. “We’re cutting out several steps in that food chain, so [there’s] more direct transfer of energy up to the top levels,” Schmitz says. 

The next step, he says, will be for researchers to explore whether body size has changed over time in similar ways among other groups of extinct and living animals that have returned to the water, including plesiosaurs and turtles. 

“It’s very neat, what they’ve done with trying to reconstruct this ecosystem,” Moon says. “That’s interesting from the point of view of saying that there’s enough food there to support these animals getting big and having diversity.”

Another question for future exploration is the extent to which other variables such as temperature might also have influenced the ichthyosaurs’ growth spurt, they say. 

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Baleen whales are among the biggest creatures ever to exist on earth. But they largely spend their lives eating tiny shrimplike creatures called krill, which they strain out of the ocean in huge mouthfuls. To power their huge bodies and planetary migrations, they need to eat millions upon millions of the bitty crustaceans.

But exactly how many? As it turns out, scientists who study whales have almost no idea how much they eat, how much they poop, and what the loss of that poop might have done to ecosystems when whaling companies killed millions of whales over the last 100 years.

“We don’t remember how the world once was, because we modified it away from those baselines,” says Nick Pyenson, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History who studies marine mammals, and coauthor of a new study in Nature that sets out to answer those questions. “Just like we have no cultural memory for passenger pigeons blotting out the sun, or the scale of American bisons. We don’t know what the oceans were like when there were many more whales.”

The sheer size of these creatures makes studying them, and their poop, a unique challenge. 

[Related: Sperm whales have a surprisingly deep—and useful—culture]

“These are enormous animals, many of which are the size of a school bus or an airplane,” says Matthew Savoca, the study’s lead author, and an ecologist at Stanford University. “They feed well below the surface where we can’t see them. You can’t hold them in captivity and feed them a measured diet. So initially what seems rather simple becomes quite challenging.”

Previous estimates, Savoca says, didn’t look at the whale directly. Instead, they took the diet of smaller mammals, like dolphins, and essentially scaled them up based on the size of whales, or estimated based on the contents of dead whales’ stomachs.

In the new study, to get a number based on firmer physical data, the team used decades of recordings from different sources: They tracked the whales with GPS tags, which allowed them to record each time a whale lunged after prey. They used drones and sonar to measure the whale’s mouths, and the size of krill swarms, which gave an estimate of how much a whale could scoop up in a gulp. 

To their surprise, they found that whales eat dramatically more than previously thought. By way of comparison, previous estimates had found that all baleen whales off the Pacific coast of North America ate 2 million metric tons of seafood every year. The new research found that instead, each species of whale probably eats 2 million metric tons, and that the total haul is three times larger, or more.

A whale-sized paradox

But that finding poses another question. Industrial whaling in the 19th and 20th century pushed many whales to the brink of extinction, with the worst impacts on the Southern Ocean, around Antarctica. Over the course of just a few decades, humans killed about 99 percent of the world’s blue whales. All those whales had to eat something. But existing populations of prey species, and krill in particular, are nowhere near large enough to support those whales, especially if they eat more than previously thought.

This question isn’t new. When whales disappeared, fisheries experts expected krill populations to boom, since they were no longer being consumed en masse. And for a brief period, populations of seals and penguins in the Southern Ocean shot up, suggesting that there was more krill around to be had. But then krill populations collapsed.

The new research suggests a resolution to the puzzle of where the krill went, known as the krill paradox. If whales eat significantly more than previously thought, then they also poop more. Whale poop is serious business: A single blue whale eats around 16 metric tons of krill a day, and ejects volcanic amounts of poop. And that poop is full of iron. Iron is rare in the Southern Ocean, and the bounty in whale poop could lead to an explosion in the growth of the tiny algaes and creatures at the bottom of the food chain. Those in turn would feed huge swarms of krill, which would feed whales.

In an accompanying essay, Victor Smetacek, a longtime marine microorganism researcher at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, says that early European sailors in the region described “the sea surface as being coloured red by swarming krill, and reported that water spouts of feeding whales stretched from horizon to horizon.” (Smetacek was not involved in the paper, but has previously written papers on the relationship between iron and whales.)

“When whales eat and poop, they’re doing it high up in the water column,” says Pyenson. “So instead of those nutrients just falling down to the sea floor and then being locked away, those nutrients are resuspended,” a process that Smetacek likens to ploughing nutrients into a field.

But take out the whales, which recycle the iron, and the whole food web falls apart.

If that’s right, it would cast whales not as a competitor to human fishing, but as the key to flourishing swarms of krill and fish. “If you let whales return all the way back to their pre-whaling levels,” says Pyenson, “Our numbers tell you that there should be the recovery of an immense amount of function for marine ecosystems.”

The implication, Smetacek believes, is that we need to kickstart the entire process of recovery with iron: seeding the Southern Ocean could prompt a “green wave” of growth that would feed a rebounding whale population.

But Maria Maldonado, who studies the movement of metals in ocean ecosystems at the University of British Columbia, thinks the research overstates the role of whales in that story. Her research has previously found that even in the 1900s, whales would have contributed just 1/1000th of the iron that microorganisms do. “These guys, the little guys, are the ones that are doing really everything,” she says.

Her 1900 estimates, she notes, are in line with those of the new paper. “It’s a very sexy story,” she says, but she doesn’t think that it shows that whales are a transformative source of iron.

Evgeny Pakhomov, an ocean ecologist at the University of British Columbia who coauthored Maldonado’s research, agreed. The timing of the decline in ocean productivity doesn’t match up with the decline of whales, he says. And there are global processes, like climate change, that dwarf the impacts of whales on krill.

[Related: How bomb detectors discovered a hidden pod of singing blue whales]

It could simply be that the loss of whales and the loss of krill happened for different reasons, and the paradox is a coincidence of timing. (Although the root cause would still be human industry.) “Nobody ever said whale poo does not matter…but other processes are much more important. …The bottom line is that if someone says that the removal of whales as natural fertilizers are responsible for decline in Southern Ocean productivity, that is totally one sided and largely incomplete.”

Savoca agrees that microorganisms almost certainly hold more iron. “I think the issue here is the whales behavior, in terms of transforming and moving that iron,” he says. Both he and Smetacek believe that iron from whale poop impacts the ecosystem differently, allowing it to hang around near the surface, rather than sinking to the ocean floor.

Where the researchers agree, however, is that whales must have done something to the ocean that we no longer see. “We don’t think that whales are big contributors to iron recycling,” says Maldonado, “but we really think they were shaping the ecosystem.” She says that over the last few decades, populations of salps—tiny jellyfish-like creatures—have proliferated, while krill have shrunk, and that may be related to whales.

That’s the key point: We know that whales were so big, and so voracious, that their wholesale destruction left a gaping hole in ecosystems they once shaped. But without knowing what shape that hole is, we won’t be able to help it heal.

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Some call whales the sentinels of the sea, as these massive, long-living creatures affect entire food chains in marine ecosystems, contribute greatly to nutrient cycles in the ocean, and house and recycle tons of carbon in their lives. Because of their important role in these carbon processes, whale survival and populations are more important than most would think in mitigating climate change. 

In analyzing 50 years of data, researchers studying southern right whale population dynamics have discovered a concerning link between these whale populations and El Niño events. In these years, whale mortality rates increase, potentially disrupting recovery from decades of whaling. This loss could cause massive ripple effects, especially as climate change makes El Niño events more intense.

“[These whales] have very critical roles in the ecosystem,” says Macarena Agrelo, the lead author on the study. “If something happened with the recovery of the whales, it is going to affect everything.”

Agrelo discovered this link while examining mortality rates of over 4,000 southern right whales off the coast of the Península Valdés in Argentina. From 1971 to 2017, the Instituto de Conservación de Ballenas and the Oceans Alliance recorded the female whales that return to breeding grounds year after year, identifying them using photos of their complex network of white markings called “whale lice.” In 1997-1998 and 2015-2016, years with El Niño events, whale mortality rates more than quadrupled from a typical one percent to above four percent. 

Previous research shows that El Niño years affect krill populations, a main food source for southern right whales. Females lose at least 25 percent of their body volume during their first phase of lactation, and are extremely vulnerable to food source changes. Agrelo and her colleagues believe this is why the mortality rate of these whales increased during El Niño years.

Argelo and her colleagues also went one step further and considered the effects of the El Niño events assuming the current rate of climate change. 

The data showed the simple link between El Niño years and whale mortality increase, so when whale mortality rates were modeled assuming climate change would continue at its current rate, making these events more intense, whale populations continue to decrease. Researchers estimate the southern right whale population was at around 35,000 whales at its peak, and if El Niño conditions remain the same as they have been the last 50 years, there is a high probability that whales will return to 85 percent of that original population. However, if El Niño events continue to increase in both strength and frequency, this probability declines to zero. 

Whale populations have been depleted over centuries due to whaling. Despite having more protections, they continue to face threats like fishing entanglement, pollution, and the effects of climate change. Because whale populations also help to reduce the effects of climate change, losing them creates a negative feedback loop—the more we lose, the worse off we are.

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Simon Millar was leading his team of marine tour guides in a training exercise off the coast of Bermagui in New South Wales, Australia, when they spotted a commotion of splashing, churning water. They quickly realized what they were witnessing was an enormous “megapod” of humpback whales. 

Millar and his crew watched the whales circle around a “bait ball,” a school of fish herded into a tight spherical shape. The humpbacks would slap their tails to keep the prey inside that sphere, and pick off the straggling fish nearer to the outside. The crew managed to capture the phenomenon on video, and commemorated their experience in an Instagram post. 

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It’s apparently only the second time such a massive aggregation of humpback whales has been spotted in Australian waters, according to Millar. 

“It was incredible,” Millar told CNN. “We saw the whales swimming all around the area. They were just everywhere. We were very lucky.”

Those who explore Australian waters know that the region is a regular travel spot for humpback whales. While exact migration schedules are variable, Australia’s Department of Agriculture, Water, and Environment says that humpbacks will generally swim from Antarctica, through Australian waters, then up north towards the sub-tropics starting around June. There they’ll mate and birth their young before making the return trip back down to Antarctic waters from September to November. 

The time of year, then, wasn’t the remarkable bit. Instead, it’s the fact that humpbacks are relatively solitary creatures. Generally they’ll travel in groups of just two to 15.

“Aggregations of whales … have seldom been reported in the literature, with ‘large’ groups often numbering in the range of 10 to 20 or less,” marine biologist Ken Findlay told TIME back in 2017, after his team of researchers found a staggering group of about 200 humpbacks in South African waters. 

Whales have been feeding a lot more in Australia in recent years, Millar also told CNN, possibly because food shortages are leading the mammals to take advantage of prey when they encounter it. “We are depleting their food source in Antarctica by overfishing.” Scarcer prey means that the whales need to search for food more often.

[Related: Humpback whales are organizing in huge numbers, and no one knows why]

Centuries of commercial whaling drastically reduced humpback whale populations—whalers have killed between 40,000 and 60,000 of them since the early 1800s. They were hunted incessantly for their meat and blubber, which could be turned into oil and used in a variety of industrial products like lamps. 

It got so bad that only an estimated 450 humpbacks were alive in the 1950s. The US government listed all humpback whales as endangered in 1970, and the International Whaling Commission issued a full moratorium on commercial whaling in the mid-1980s. Thankfully, cutting down on whaling and increasing marine protected areas have led humpback populations to rebound to nearly 80,000 today. 

Now climate change and fishing activity are the latest human-driven phenomena threatening the majestic marine giants. While nine of the 14 distinct humpback whale populations in the world are no longer considered endangered (four are still endangered and one is threatened), recent studies suggest that climate change will put pressure on these seafaring mammals by changing their prey availability. 

Human culpability is manifold: “Global fisheries deplete the very things that whales eat, like schooling fish and krill and could severely undermine their recovery,” marine scientist David Baker told CNN. Meanwhile, “climate change is also impairing recovery of some species, including critically endangered right whales in the North Atlantic.” 

At the end of the day, he added, humans are both “competing with (whales) directly for food,” and competing with whales indirectly, by changing the global climate and altering where that food is available.

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Many animals will give birth throughout their lives—sometimes to dozens of little baby creatures. However, only a few will ever age out of their prime birthing years. Only humans and four types of whales are known to experience menopause—when the body stops being able to reproduce but life continues.  

Menopause, or what scientists call the post-reproductive phase, is an evolutionary puzzle—no one knows exactly how or why it evolved. So far, leading theories are that the trait developed so older females could help raise the offspring of their younger counterparts. 

However, a study published this month in Ecology and Evolution found evidence of menopause in a genetically unique population of killer whales called Bigg’s killer whales, which are found off the coasts of Washington State and British Columbia and can grow up to 8 meters in length. Previously, it was unknown whether or not these whales experienced menopause, but many ecologists felt it was unlikely they did. 

[Related: How bomb detectors discovered a hidden pod of singing blue whales.]

Killer whales in general are one of the few mammals known to undergo menopause. They are also one of the most diverse and far-ranging species, swimming around all seven oceans. This means there are several distinct genetic populations that vary in social structure, diet, and habitat. Prior to this study, ecologists only knew of a few populations of killer whales that entered menopause, one being the resident population of North America. 

According to Mia Nielson, lead author of the study and a Ph.D. student of animal behavior at the University of Exeter, resident killer whales live in robust social groups consisting of mothers, offspring, and distant relatives. Rarely do whales leave the group—meaning post-menopausal whales can contribute to parenting their grandchildren for decades after their reproductive ability ends.

However, unlike resident killer whales, Bigg’s killer whales live in smaller social groups, usually consisting of just the mother and her offspring. With a lack of grandma whales to be found,  leading theories on the evolution of menopause don’t quite add up for this particular group of water-loving mammals. 

To determine that Bigg’s killer whales undergo menopause, Nielsen and her team analyzed data collected from both Biggs and resident populations over a 40 year period. The data kept track of individual whale’s date of birth, death, as well as a timeline of when and how often they reproduce. 

These two populations have many similarities—including residence in similar habitats, even overlapping territories off the coast of Washington state and British Columbia. The only main difference, besides social structure, between the two groups is diet—resident populations exclusively eat fish, whereas Biggs prefer to munch on fellow mammals like seals. 

[Related: Sperm whales have a surprisingly deep—and useful—culture.]

Differences aside, both populations stopped giving birth in their 30s, but still lived healthily into their 60s or even 80s, the study shows. 

This discovery was a huge surprise: The team hypothesized that even if Bigg’s killer whales undergo menopause, it would occur later in their lifetimes since the evolutionary advantage isn’t as clear for these orcas’ smaller social structures. One explanation may dive deep into the evolutionary past of killer whales—it is possible menopause evolved in an ancient common ancestor of both Bigg’s and resident killer whales. 

However, that isn’t to say there are no evolutionary benefits of menopause for these marine mammals. Another explanation is that elderly females act as ecological guides later in their life, leading the pod to the best hunting spots, teaching them the lay of the land, and leaving their wisdom to future generations. 

Additionally, older female whales can avoid the drama of competing with their family members for mates and resources as they age. “That conflict is something older females can avoid by stopping reproduction,” says Nielson. 

Nielsen hopes to conduct in-field observations using drones in the near future, which could better track relationships between whales in the same pods as well as their movements. “It is just super exciting that we now know that there’s another population of animals that have this really rare life history where they enter menopause,” says Nielsen. “It provides us with a new species where we can start to investigate why menopause has evolved.” 

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It’s a good day for whales. This afternoon, NOAA Fisheries took nine of 14 populations of humpback whales off the list of species protected by the Endangered Species Act. It’s a place that humpback whales have occupied since the Endangered Species Act was signed in 1973.

“Today’s news is a true ecological success story,” said Eileen Sobeck, assistant NOAA administrator for fisheries. “Whales, including the humpback, serve an important role in our marine environment. Separately managing humpback whale populations that are largely independent of each other allows us to tailor conservation approaches for each population.”

Four populations are still considered “endangered” and one is considered “threatened.” All five of these populations continue to enjoy the protections of the Endangered Species Act. For some of these five, they are still experiencing threats like fishing gear entanglements, energy exploration, disease, whaling, and vessel collisions.

The delisting of the nine populations won’t mean major changes for humpbacks. The Marine Mammal Protection Act still applies to all humpback whale populations, and the whales will continue to be protected from hunting and other activities. New regulations will also limit the distance at which vessels can approach humpback whales in Alaska and Hawaii, where whales are frequently spotted. But federal agencies will no longer be required to consult with the NOAA every time they engage in an activity that might affect non-endangered humpback whale populations.

The delisting of the humpback whale populations follows news over the weekend from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) that reclassified the giant panda populations as “vulnerable” instead of “endangered”. Gorillas, on the other hand, went the other way, and are now listed as “critically endangered”.

Humpback Whale Populations

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Social relationships are crucial for so many animals, from humans—for whom loneliness has been recently deemed an “epidemic”—to wasps to so-called “Resident” orcas: killer whales in the coastal North Pacific who eat fish and live in matrilineal groups. A new study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B used drone footage to take a closer look at the social dynamics in a pod of Southern Resident orcas in the Pacific Northwest.

“We know that these whales are extremely social,” says lead author Michael Weiss, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Exeter, and previous studies have shown that social relationships seem to be important for their survival. Being able to measure these relationships in fine detail—understanding who is closely tied to whom, for example—could be critical for understanding how this population will fare in the future, he says. Southern Resident orcas are currently endangered, and their preferred food source, the Chinook salmon, is declining in population. The orcas have been suffering from starvation, ocean noise, and pollution. 

During the summer of 2019, the authors launched a small drone over subgroups of a Southern Resident pod called “J,” which is made up of 22 orcas. They filmed continuously for 15 to 30 minutes at a time. Later, going back through the videos, the researchers identified how often two individuals were in the same group together. The drone footage also allowed the researchers to measure actual interactions between the whales—ones like physical contact and surfacing to breathe in unison, two behaviors that can indicate a social connection. (For example, for a lot of animals, says Weiss, touch is used to reinforce relationships, or to make up after a fight.) 

“The main question we had is, who’s actually interacting with each other in these groups—not just, who are they in a group with?” says Weiss. By looking at these up-close interplays, the researchers hoped they might learn new information about what drives these interactions, like whether orcas of the same age interact more often than those of varying ages and what role gender plays in these relationships. 

Underlying the study is a methodological question around how to best measure social relationships in animals, Weiss says. Even deeper: “How do we gain an understanding of animal societies?”

The researchers found, in line with previous studies, that the main factor driving the probability that two individuals would be in the same group together was how closely related the mammals were to each other. But there were other factors that contributed to whether the animals would actually interact (physical touch or breathing together). They found that individuals were spending more time interacting with others of the same sex and of similar age, with younger orcas and female orcas displaying the most robust social lives. 

A key factor to this study’s success was the technology the researchers used. Drones offer up “a whole new world of possibilities,” wrote Filipa Samarra, a researcher at the University of Iceland and founder of the Icelandic Orca Project, a research and conservation organization, in an email to Popular Science.  

“This is a really interesting study that shows the inner workings of the social lives of killer whales in a level of detail that we don’t usually have access to,” wrote Samarra, who was not involved in the research. 

The fact that traditional methodologies might not fully capture the full complexity of social relationships in a group, Samarra continued, suggests that “even after years of studying these whales, there is still so much to learn.”

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Pygmy blue whales are some of the largest animals on Earth. Rippling their 80-foot-long bodies through the deep ocean, they are only 20 feet shorter than their relative the Antarctic blue whale. They’re also the loudest creature on the planet—their low-frequency bellows can outroar jet engines. 

Yet, despite being the heftiest and noisiest being on the planet, blue whales are difficult to spot, due partly to their reclusive nature, but mostly to the detrimental effects of human activity.

Commercial whaling in the twentieth century brought these gentle giants to the precipice of extinction. Researchers estimate that less than one percent of the global population of blue whales, including Antarctic and pygmy, survived worldwide, and less than 0.15 percent in the Southern Hemisphere. 

Shockingly, researchers at the University of New South Wales have detected a new population of pygmy blue whales swimming around in the Indian ocean. The study, published this month in Nature, analyzed almost 20 years of audio recordings from underwater bomb detectors to distinguish and locate the pod. Previously, scientists believed only five populations of blue whales inhabited these waters: one Antarctic and four pygmy.  

Tuning in via deep sea microphones

Little is known about why whales sing. So far, it appears only males belt out a warble. Therefore, researchers hypothesize singing is a way for them to attract a mate and produce offspring. Regardless of the purpose of their soulful howls, whale songs are a cost-effective way to study cetaceans. 

“Acoustics are the easiest way to study whale populations because visual observations are super costly,” Emannuelle Leroy, a former postdoctoral fellow at the University of New South Wales and lead author of the study says. To see a whale, you need a ship, she says. But to hear a tune, you only need to listen.

Leroy and her team obtained the deep sea audiotapes from the International Data Centre of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization. The organization, which was established in 1997, places undersea microphones in offshore waters to monitor for nuclear testing. 

[Related: Sperm whales have a surprisingly deep—and useful—culture.]

These hydrophones are not only sensitive enough to pick up exploding bombs, but also the intricacies of ocean life like seismic activity and whale sounds, which are made accessible to scientists. 

The particular hydrophones studied by Leroy and her colleagues were placed at six different locations in the Indian Ocean in 2001. She ran the 20 years of recordings through an automatic detector to pick up each instance of the suspected population’s chorus, coined by the team as the “Chagos song”. 

Each whale species, from the humpback to the ultra-rare Omura, has a signature sound. For example, humpbacks whistle a mellifluous call, like the type you would hear on a relaxing playlist, Leroy says. 

“Humpback whales also change their song. They have a new hit every year to attract females, but the blue whale songs are super simple compared to that,” Leroy says. “They have this single song or vocalization that is composed in two to four parts, so it’s forming a pattern that is quite simple. And that is repeated again and again and again with a regular interval during hours.” 

Even for whales of the same species, different crews have different tunes. Leroy had to determine whether Chagos was unique enough from other pygmy blue whale songs in the area to constitute a new herd. 

After comparing the Chagos tune to other pygmy blue whale recordings and other whale species, Leroy says she firmly believes the signature melody belongs to a new population of pygmy blue whales. 

The Chagos song was picked up at five of the six hydrophone locations between 2002 and 2018. These pings provided enough information that the authors determined the pygmy pod migrates clockwise, moving East to West between June and January. Their habitat ranges from the central Indian Ocean near Sri Lanka to the Northeastern corner by Western Australia. 

Understanding the undersea composers 

While the study of bioacoustics can pinpoint and discover a new population of blue whales, there are some drawbacks. For example, microphones can’t count the number of whales in a herd. That’s because hydrophones can distinguish two or three unique songs, but anything more starts to become indiscernible. 

“If there are like four, five, or six whales singing at the same time, you can’t see anything. It starts to be like whale soup,” Leroy says. “However, we know there are a very large number of songs so we can say it’s a whole group. Yet, we have no idea if it’s 10 whales or a hundred.” 

[Related: Carcasses are the best clues we have for these mysterious whales.]

The next steps to discovering these hidden whales would be to set sail and try to observe the new population in real life. But, Leroy says there’s no future plans yet due to the high cost. 

Regardless, the discovery of a new population is exciting—it doesn’t matter if there are a dozen whales or hundreds, this finding still means whale numbers are growing. Yet, oil spills, garbage, noise pollution, boats, and overfishing all threaten these shy whales, keeping the colossal crooners classified as endangered. 

“Finding a new population of blue whales means we will be able to protect them,” Leroy says. “We will know in this area we have to be careful about the noise we make and the human activities done.” 

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In the dark waters of the benthic zone, the deepest layer of the ocean mostly populated by invertebres like sea urchins, worms, and crabs, mysterious whales hold their breath. Beaked whales as a group of species have long been elusive to humans, but new research is shedding light on the habits of these creatures, with the discovery of two new subpopulations in the Atlantic.

“I can remember when I ran the analysis, I almost started crying,” says Kerri Smith, a research fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History who studies beaked whales. “I was so excited, because it was totally new. For like an hour, I knew something that nobody ever in the entire world knew.”

Smith’s recent research looked at the remains of Sowerby’s beaked whales that were stored in museums and research centers or stranded or bycatch from fisheries. By analyzing certain chemicals within the whales’ skin, muscle, and bone tissue, researchers were able to figure out that there are two subpopulations of Sowerby’s beaked whales in the east and west Atlantic. The results were published in the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science and will likely provide the foundation for a more detailed understanding of these species, as well as shape future conservation efforts.  

Very little is known about the lives of beaked whales despite the fact that they make up more than 25 percent of extant cetaceans (the group that includes dolphins, porpoises, and whales). Unlike other animals that swim near the shore or the surface of the sea, beaked whales prefer deep, offshore waters, making them difficult to find and track. Their dark grey or black coloring and small dorsal fin make them even harder to distinguish from the ocean around them. 

There are currently 23 recognized species of beaked whales, although some have never been seen alive and are only known from stranded carcasses. But this number could easily grow or even shrink. If, say, one individual thought to just be a weird-looking version of a known species turns out to be an entirely different species through DNA analysis, as happened recently in Japan. 

Beaked whales generally spend much of their time in the deep depths of the open ocean—and we’re not really sure what they’re doing down there. We do know their bodies have evolved to spend long periods of time at these depths. The Cuvier’s beaked whale holds the mammalian records for both the deepest dive (almost two miles beneath the surface) and longest length of time holding breath (137.5 minutes). 

“They’re such large animals compared to us and we still know so little about them,” says Chris Stinson, a curatorial assistant at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum in Vancouver where he presides over the skulls and skeletons of several beaked whale species. “They’re out in the open ocean, living in a totally different world where they come up to the surface for a breath, and then spend 80 percent of their time underwater, hunting for things, using senses that we can’t even comprehend.”

Some beaked whales feast primarily on fish from the water column, while others are thought to be specialists of the squid in the deep seas, and still more love the benthic depths where they nibble on fish off the seafloor. While cetaceans as a whole are known for being social animals that live in groups, little is known about the day-to-day habits of the beaked whales.  

“Because they’re so challenging to study when they’re actually alive, almost everything we know about beaked whales comes from dead bodies,” says Smith. “It’s really hard to infer what they were doing when they were alive in terms of their social bonds or play or things like that from dead bodies.”

But there’s a lot of information that can be gained from dead bodies, as Smith’s recent research showed. 

The team looked at carbon and nitrogen in the whales’ bodies, which revealed information about where the cetaceans lived and their position in the food chain. The type of analysis they used, called stable isotope analysis, has the benefits of being fast and relatively inexpensive. This makes it an ideal application for the elusive beaked whales, as tracking and locating them can be so difficult and costly. 

By studying other elements in the future, like oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur, the technique could give more insight into the secretive whales’ habits and environment. Smith hopes to conduct genetic analysis in the future to further understand the two subpopulations of Sowerby’s beaked whales. 

Right now there are no conservation or management plans for beaked whales because we know so little about them. They are considered “data deficient” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, meaning there is not enough information available to evaluate  extinction risk based on distribution and/or population status. 

But research like Smith’s can teach us more about these elusive species’ homes and patterns of movement, which could shape future conservation strategies.     

“We literally cannot conserve what we do not know,” Smith says. “We don’t know where these animals are, we don’t really know what habitats they are using— [there’s] sort of that catch-all deep offshore shelf waters but what does that mean? Where are they? What shelfs are they using? Are there ones that need more protection than others? Until we have some answers to those questions, we can’t enact really concrete, meaningful, actionable plans.”

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Some unknown terrible person shot a defenseless pilot whale last month, leaving it to swim the Atlantic in agony for weeks before it finally beached itself on the New Jersey shore and died. Authorities are still looking for the shooter. The bullet wound caused a fulminant infection in the whale’s jaw that prevented it from eating, so it basically starved to death. This was determined during a necropsy, an autopsy for animals.

Along with sympathy for the poor creature, this debacle aroused an interesting question: How does one autopsy a whale? With four-ton meat hooks, whaling knives and bone saws, actually. Michael Moore, a veterinarian and whale biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, does it all the time.

Moore spends much of his time studying North Atlantic right whales, an endangered species whose name derives from whalers’ adage that these were the “right whales” to hunt, because they’re easy to spot and float when they die. They’re no longer hunted for their oil, but they are entangled in fishing lines and injured in ship collisions, often suffering for a great while and also succumbing to starvation. “It’s the most egregious animal welfare issue globally at this time,” in Moore’s words. But protecting them requires understanding how they died, and to do this Moore must take them apart, studying their broken bones and lobster net-tangled flukes to determine their exact causes of death.

In partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Moore deploys on-call, toting a case full of knives to examine right whales that have beached or are floating in the open ocean. Right whales are baleen whales and at least two orders of magnitude bigger than the toothed pilot whale that was shot, so in most cases, they must be examined right where they’re found — that means on the beach. They either beach themselves and die there, or they’re towed to shore once they have been located at sea.

Moore and other rubber-suited biologists work amid 120,000 pounds of slick black-and-red whale flesh, clambering over and through the carcass to find out what went wrong. Time is of the essence, because the longer they wait, the more the animal’s internal organs break down, making it difficult to determine how it died.

Moore uses a Japanese whaling hook, which is useful for pulling back sheets of blubber to get at the animal’s internal organs. He carries a bone saw — formerly his mother’s — to get through jaws and vertebrae to find the location of a fatal injury. He’s even visited indigenous Alaskan tribes to study their ancestral whale processing techniques.

The pilot whale that died was small, so it was trucked to a necropsy facility at the the Marine Mammal Stranding Center in Brigantine, N.J., down the shore north of Atlantic City. It weighed about 740 pounds when it beached, quite gaunt for an animal that should normally weigh more than a ton. Researchers knew something was seriously wrong, but they had to perform a necropsy to determine what it was.

2-Ton Hook

At WHOI’s Marine Mammal Center, where Moore is the director, researchers use a special CT scanner for examining animals’ internal structures, like the inner ears of whales and dolphins. Down the hall is an autopsy room for necropsying smaller mammals like the pilot whale.

The creatures are brought in on trucks and hoisted into the facility on chains rigged to the ceiling, attached to four-ton-rated meat hooks. They lay on negative-pressure steel tables, the same types used in human autopsy procedures, which suck out odors and pathogens as the biologists get to work. The lab also contains deep freezers for stringing up deceased animals; it harbors an overwhelming odor of chemical and organic substances. (It’s somewhat legendary at WHOI that Moore lost his sense of smell while in veterinary school, which he says enables him to get literally inside a rotting animal carcass without losing his lunch or his cool.)

The 11-foot-long pilot whale died shortly after authorities reached its side on the beach on Sept. 24. But it wasn’t until a necropsy a couple weeks later that they knew what happened. The bullet entered near its blow hole, but the wound had closed and faded a bit, suggesting it had been shot about a month prior. The .30-caliber round lodged in its jaw, causing the infection.

“This poor animal literally starved to death,” said Bob Schoelkopf, co-director of the Marine Mammal Stranding Center, in an interview with the AP. “It was wandering around and slowly starving to death because of the infection. Who would do that to an innocent animal?”

That question is now in the hands of the authorities. For biologists like Moore and Schoelkopf, necropsies can at least answer the question of how. Why, of course, is something else entirely.

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The world is ending and only the whales know. At least, that’s one explanation. Humpback whales are normally pretty solitary—scientists used to call groups of 10 to 20 “large.” Now they’re congregating in groups of 20 to 200 off the coast of South Africa. Something is definitely going on here, but so far experts are stumped.

In fact, Humpback whales aren’t supposed to be hanging out in that region in the first place. Humpbacks migrate up to tropical waters to breed, but they typically feed down south in the icy waters of Antarctica this time of year. Yet scientific expeditions keep seeing these super-pods (not to be confused with super PACs, which are equally giant but much more dangerous), which were finally compiled and published at the beginning of March in the journal PLOSone. The researchers have a few ideas about why the humpbacks are organizing, but no clear answers yet. So far the consensus seems to be: this is pretty freakin’ weird.

Most of the whales seem to be young, begging the question of whether the western coast of South Africa is like the humpback version of the local mall for tween whales. They’re just looking for a fishy Orange Julius, or perhaps a krill-based Panda Express to hang out at on a Saturday afternoon. Because it’s not like 200 whales—each weighing about 65,000 pounds—can feed just anywhere.

Congregations of whales usually indicate parts of the ocean that are especially productive. There has to be a dense concentration of prey to support that many humpbacks. And yes, the word “prey” might sound strange for a species known for singing songs and being friendly to other mammals. Lest we forget, humpback whales do hunt for their food. They’re not vegetarians. They eat everything from krill to plankton to small fish, regardless of whether they speak whale. They even have a specialized way of hunting where they gang up on schools of fish to try to eat them all at once. It’s called bubble net feeding. The humpbacks divide up, some swirling around a group of fish and some blowing air, such that the circling whales can drive their victims into a net made of bubbles. This confuses the fish, trapping them inside, until one whale sounds the call and they all rush in, mouths agape, swimming upwards through the teeming mass of fish.

Since they spend a lot of time alone, humpbacks can perform a similar maneuver on their own. And some humpbacks don’t even know how to bubble net feed. It’s not intrinsic—it’s a learned behavior. Some pods know how to do it and some don’t. Dolphins have a similar hunting pattern where they squeeze groups of fish into a small area, then take turns darting through to feed. And hey, humpbacks have been known to swim around and interact with bottlenose dolphins, so maybe there’s some big information exchange going on in the seas that we’re unaware of.

These enormous whale congregations are clearly for feeding, at least in part, but no one is really sure why there are so many of them. It seems to be a recent phenomenon unique to the last five years or so, so it could be that burgeoning whale populations are enabling these teeming masses yearning to breath free. At one point about 90 percent of the world’s humpbacks had been hunted down, but they’ve been on the rise since becoming a protected species in 1996. Maybe humpbacks were always this social, and there just weren’t enough of them for us to notice.

Or maybe they just weren’t doing it in areas where we could see them. If hundreds of whales were gathering smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, we probably wouldn’t see or hear them (even though their songs can be heard from 20 miles away). And if a whale sings in the ocean and there’s no one there to hear it, it definitely still made a sound.

Perhaps they’re trying to tell us something, Like the dolphins who do a double-backward somersault through a hoop while whistling the Star Spangled Banner, the whales may be sending us a message that we’re misinterpreting as an adorably sophisticated trick. The oceans are warming, the seas are rising, and maybe—just maybe—the whales have had enough. They’ve gathered as many young humpbacks as possible to come together and send one final message: so long, and thanks for all the krill. Or maybe they’re talking to a giant space probe. Who knows.

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Hal Whitehead, a biologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, has spent decades following sperm whales around on boats, trying to figure out their intricate social structures.

“About 20 years ago, it came to us that culture—in the sense of what they’re learning from each other—is very important for sperm whales,” Whitehead says. A new study by Whitehead, University of St. Andrews biologist Luke Rendell and retired NOAA scientist and whaling expert Tim Smith, published on March 17 in the journal Biology Letters, underscores this point.

Out in the deep ocean, sperm whales live in extremely social matrilineal family units that mingle in groups within a given clan, which are distinguished by particular dialects and behaviors. In the 18th and 19th centuries, these societies were confronted with the terrors of commercial whaling. Using data from centuries-old American whaling logbooks, the authors’ findings suggest that sperm whales in the North Pacific very quickly learned—from each other—how to fend off the whalers’ harpoons, whose successful “strike” rate dropped by an eyebrow-raising 58 percent in only a few years.

“Obviously this was extremely frustrating for the whalers, and somewhat good news for the whales,” says Whitehead.

The study was inspired in part by recent observations from historians. Bathsheba Demuth, an environmental historian at Brown University, was reading 19th century whalers’ logbooks on bowhead whales in the Bering Strait when she noticed a striking shift. After these whalers arrive, “they have several good years of killing bowhead whales in 1849, 1851, 1852.” Then, all of a sudden, “the logbooks start talking about these really dramatic changes in whale behavior.” They note that the bowheads, which had initially been docile, started using the sea ice to avoid harpoons.

In contrast with sustainable Indigenous whaling practices in the seas around the Bering Strait, Demuth notes, commercial whalers were after the whales’ oil to light consumers’ homes. Commercial whalers were, Whitehead says, “the Exxon of that era.” These interactions were both violent and intimate, Demuth says, with whalers’ recalling “looking into the eyes of whales as they are bleeding to death.”

The whalers’ accounts were very clear, she says, that “these are intelligent animals, they appear to be communicating with each other, we’re seeing this really dramatic change in behavior that is clearly learned in some sense.”

To test out whether something similar happened with sperm whales in the North Pacific, using recently digitized archives, Whitehead and coauthors noted the days when the whalers recorded whale sightings and looked at the rate at which the whalers caught the animals, finding a decline of nearly 60 percent within about two and a half years of the whalers’ arrival.

They analyzed a few alternate possibilities for why this happened: Maybe the first whalers to get there were especially effective, the first whales to die were particularly vulnerable, or whales learned from individual experience. But “what seems to have happened is that the whales, from their experience with the whalers, changed their behavior,” says Whitehead.

“And not only did they change it, but they changed it so fast that it implies they’re not only learning from their own experience, but they’re learning from the experience of other sperm whales” in other social units.

The sperm whales’ only previous predator had been orcas, against whom they defend themselves by crowding together at the water’s surface—a strategy that would have initially made them an easy target for harpoons, and, if changed, a more difficult one. The whalers’ observations from the time suggest that they may have also been escaping upwind or attacking the whaling boats. The authors’ model suggests that inexperienced or “naive” family units, if connected up with a family that had experience with whalers, learned from their more experienced group-mates how to protect themselves.

These findings are “the product, in a way, of many years of painstaking research” on sperm whales by these authors, says Daniel Palacios, an associate professor in the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, who was not involved in the study. The team “put it all together through a model that just fits the data fairly well.” While not a direct demonstration, “it’s a very clever way of assessing something like this.”

Running even simple experiments on such intelligent creatures can be hard, both Palacios and Whitehead say. For example, Palacios recalls, after two weeks of tailing sperm whales with underwater microphones during a research trip in the Galapagos Islands, “I think they finally had it with us.” It seemed like they realized they were being tracked acoustically, he says; one day, “all 25 of them went quiet,” and the researchers lost them.

These days, as Philip Hoare notes in an article about the study in The Guardian, whales’ recovery from centuries of commercial hunting (whose modern form was too devastating to outsmart) is threatened by other byproducts of human innovation, from noise pollution to climate change to the proliferation of plastics in the ocean.

One implication of these findings, says Whitehead, “is that [the sperm whales] can adapt their behavior, the behavior of a whole population, very quickly. In some ways that’s good news, as we threaten them with all kinds of new things.” But some things, like seismic air guns, are difficult to avoid. Other threats, like the dangers of eating plastic bags that resemble squid, might be hard for even these sophisticated mammals to infer.

In the future, Whitehead says, it’s important to focus efforts on preserving their cultural diversity.

“We have telephones and radio and legal systems and operas and all that stuff. But that doesn’t mean culture isn’t important for other animals,” he says. “We should see them as cultural beings, too.”

The study, says Demuth, “gives us perspective—particularly on sperm whales, that are these amazing social deep water creatures—that hopefully allows us to have a broader political imagination about how to relate to them.”

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The year is 1970. Richard Nixon is president, bell-bottoms are a hot new look, and Simon & Garfunkel is playing on everyone’s radios. But on the Oregon coast, people are only buzzing about one thing: blown-up whale bits.

Last week marked the 50th anniversary of the infamous Florence whale explosion. After the 45-foot-long carcass of a sperm whale washed up on a town beach, the Oregon Highway Division decided to blast it to smithereens with a half-ton of dynamite. Families gathered near the beach to enjoy the spectacle—only to be showered with rainstorms of flesh, blood, and bone.

“The blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds,” Paul Linnman, a journalist for the television station KATU, reported from the scene.

Today, the people of Florence take pride in the whole debacle. “It’s kind of a legend,” says Heidi Pearson, a whale expert at the University of Alaska Southeast. Back in June, the town even named a new city park after the blubbery blunder.

While methods for dealing with dead whales have improved since the ’70s, the giant mammals do explode from time to time—no pyrotechnics needed. “The risk of a spontaneous explosion is always there with a decomposing whale,” says Michael Moore, a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. When gases from the rotting body parts build up underneath the fiber-elastic blubber, it pops like a balloon. To avoid that, marine experts like Moore puncture the abdominal cavity with a knife to slowly let out the gas.

Once the whale bomb is defused it can be buried on the beach, chopped up and toted to a landfill, or dragged out to sea. The last option often takes up a lot of time and money, Moore says, and there’s always a chance the parts will float right back to the beach later.

And though it may not make the evening newscast or earn a historical landmark, the safest way to dispose of a whale, Moore says, is to compost it by spreading it over the dunes or layering it between fresh wood chips like a giant, salty lasagna.

“At the end of it you’ll end up with a clean skeleton that you can study and put in a museum,” he says. “And some good fertilizer.”

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Emma Carroll is a Rutherford Discovery Fellow at the University of Auckland. This story originally featured on The Conversation.

After close to a decade of globe-spanning effort, the genome of the southern right whale has been released this week, giving us deeper insights into the histories and recovery of whale populations across the southern hemisphere.

Up to 150,000 southern right whales were killed between 1790 and 1980. This whaling drove the global population from perhaps 100,000 to as few as 500 whales in 1920. A century on, we estimate there are 12,000 southern right whales globally. It’s a remarkable conservation success story, but one facing new challenges.

The genome represents a record of the different impacts a species has faced. With statistical models we can use genomic information to reconstruct historical population trajectories and patterns of how species interacted and diverged.

We can then link that information with historical habitat and climate patterns. This look back into the past provides insights into how species might respond to future changes. Work on penguins and polar bears has already shown this.

But we also have a new and surprising short-term perspective on the population of whales breeding in the subantarctic Auckland Islands group—Maungahuka, 280 miles south of New Zealand.

Spying on whales via satellite

Known as tohorā in New Zealand, southern right whales once wintered in the bays and inlets of the North and South Islands of Aotearoa, where they gave birth and socialised. Today, the main nursery ground for this population is Port Ross, in the subantarctic Auckland Islands.

Adult whales socialize at both the Auckland and Campbell Islands during the austral winter. Together these subantarctic islands are internationally recognized as an important marine mammal area.

In August 2020, I led a University of Auckland and Cawthron Institute expedition to the Auckland Islands. We collected small skin samples for genetic and chemical analysis and placed satellite tags on six tohorā. These tags allowed us to follow their migrations to offshore feeding grounds.

It matters where tohorā feed and how their populations recover from whaling because the species is recognised as a sentinel for climate change throughout the Southern Hemisphere. They are what we describe as “capital” breeders—they fast during the breeding season in wintering grounds like the Auckland Islands, living off fat reserves gained in offshore feeding grounds.

Females need a lot in the “bank” because their calves need a lot of energy. At 12 to 15 feet at birth, these calves can grow up to three feet a month. This investment costs the mother 25 percent of her size over the first few months of her calf’s life. It’s no surprise that calf growth depends on the mother being in good condition.

Females can only breed again once they’ve regained their fat capital. Studies in the South Atlantic show wintering grounds in Brazil and Argentina produce more calves when prey is more abundant, or environmental conditions suggest it should be.

The first step in understanding the relationship between recovery and prey in New Zealand is to identify where and on what tohorā feed. The potential feeding areas for our New Zealand population could cover roughly a third of the Southern Ocean. That’s why we turn to technologies like satellite tags to help us understand where the whales are going and how they get there.

Where tohorā go

So far, all tracked whales have migrated west; away from the historical whaling grounds to the east near the Chatham Islands. As they left the Auckland Islands, two whales visited other oceanic islands—skirting around Macquarie Island and visiting Campbell Island.

It also seems one whale (Bill or Wiremu, identified as male using genetic analysis of his skin sample) may have reached his feeding grounds, likely at the subtropical convergence. The clue is in the pattern of his tracks: rather than the continuous straight line of a whale migrating, it shows the doughnuts of a whale that has found a prey patch.

The subtropical convergence is an area of the ocean where temperature and salinity can change rapidly, and this can aggregate whale prey. Two whales we tracked offshore from the Auckland Islands in 2009 visited the subtropical convergence, but hundreds of miles to the east of Bill’s current location.

As Bill and his compatriots migrate, we’ve begun analyzing data that will tell us about the recovery of tohorā in the past decade. The most recent population size estimate we have is from 2009, when there were about 2,000 whales.

I am using genomic markers to learn about the kin relationships and, in doing so, the population’s size and growth rate. Think of it like this. Everybody has two parents and if you have a small population, say a small town, you are more likely to find those parents than if you have a big population, say a city.

This nifty statistical trick is known as the “close kin” approach to estimating population size. It relies on detailed understanding of the kin relationships of the whales—something we have only really been able to do recently using new genomic sequencing technology.

Global effort to understand climate change impacts

Globally, southern right whales in South Africa and Argentina have bred less often over the past decade, leading to a lower population growth rate in Argentina.

Concern over this slowdown in recovery has prompted researchers from around the world to work together to understand the relationship between climate change, foraging ecology and recovery of southern right whales as part of the International Whaling Commission Southern Ocean Research Partnership.

The genome helps by giving us that long view of how the whales responded to climate fluctuations in the past, while satellite tracking gives us the short view of how they are responding on a day-to-day basis. Both will help us understand the future of these amazing creatures.

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Summer is an intense time for blue whales off the coast of central California. During the daytime, the enormous marine mammals must gobble up tons of krill daily to prepare for their epic migration to warmer southerly waters. And by night the males serenade their female counterparts.

However, their singing schedule is upended when it’s time to start traveling, indicates a study published October 1 in the journal Current Biology. Scientists tracked whale movements and songs over several years, and found that whales switch from singing at night to caroling during the daytime when they begin migrating. Tracking the transition between the two song styles may help us protect these endangered animals as they move towards busy shipping lanes.

“There is a near real-time signal of what these animals are doing out in a habitat that’s historically been really difficult to observe,” says William Oestreich, a PhD candidate in biology at Stanford University and coauthor of the new study. “Potentially we could give some advance notice to folks managing these ecosystems in southern California that, hey, we’re hearing the blue whales start to migrate south, you might have a lot of them showing up here quite soon.”

Blue whales are the largest animals on the planet, and each year they undertake one of the longest migrations. After spending the summer in the Northeast Pacific, the whales travel thousands of miles to their breeding grounds off the coast of Central America.

“Packing on the calories by just feeding constantly on krill…during the summer is really critical to fueling their year-round life cycle,” Oestreich says. “It’s really important for blue whales to match the timing of their feeding season up north with the bloom of krill life that occurs here, and to head south as these krill populations are decreasing once again.”

To learn more about these behaviors, Oestreich and his colleagues planted an underwater microphone, or hydrophone, just outside Monterey Bay and recorded whale vocalizations over five years. The team also monitored the behavior of 15 singing whales over periods of days to weeks. The tags the researchers stuck on the whale’s backs included GPS trackers, pressure sensors, and accelerometers, which detect fine-scale vibrations that can reveal when a whale is singing.

Only male blue whales are known to sing, but both sexes move southward at about the same time each year. Males and females have also been spotted pairing up and feeding together shortly before the migration begins. “That gives us some confidence that the sounds that are primarily being produced by males are fairly representative of what the whole population is doing,” Oestreich says.

During the summer, the songs picked up by the hydrophone took place mostly at night. The intensity of the songs reached a peak each year between October and November. However, as winter approached and the songs dwindled, the whales switched to singing during the daytime.

The behavior of the tagged whales echoed this pattern. During the summer days, the whales dove to great depths in search of krill. Once night fell, the whales hung out near the surface and sang for hours on end. The researchers were able to track two of the whales over several weeks, and observed them suddenly stop feeding in late fall. Within a day, the whales had transitioned to singing during the day while making a beeline southward.

During the summer, blue whales spread out over vast distances while foraging. By eavesdropping on their distant neighbors at night, the whales may gather information about foraging conditions elsewhere in their range. Knowing when other whales are on the move could guide their decision about when to stop hunting for krill and start their own journey towards milder waters.

By tuning in too, we might be able to forecast when the whales will arrive in areas where they’re in particular danger of running into ships, such as the Santa Barbara Channel. “There has been a quite noticeable number of fatal collisions between ships and blue whales,” Oestreich says. “That could be one piece of the puzzle to more dynamically manage those habitats and shipping lanes in a way that allows shipping to continue, but also in a way that is safe for these whale populations.”

How blue whales time their migration could be key to their ability to respond as climate change alters their habitat and prey distribution. “One of the things we are really curious about now is trying to understand how flexible and adaptable these whales are to changes in this ecosystem,” Oestreich says. Scientists have recently observed marine heatwaves in the Northeast Pacific. While it’s not clear what this means for the krill, he says, “This is the type of rapid change that a lot of animals, blue whales included, will have to be adaptable to in order to survive.”

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Last June, five biologists living and working at the Farallon Islands National Wildlife Refuge off the coast of Northern California gazed across the ocean from a lighthouse and noticed spouts coming from blue whales in the distance. For an hour, they counted them, arriving at an astonishing number: 47. It was the largest concentration of these massive marine mammals documented in California waters in 20 years.

“They were just everywhere,” recalls Mike Johns, one of those biologists and a scientist with Point Blue Conservation Science. “We could see them from the island all the way to the horizon.”

That so many whales of various species now traverse the California coast is a remarkable comeback tale. After the industrial slaughter of whales ended in the mid-1900s, scientists estimated that nearly 99 percent of the planet’s blue whales had been completely wiped out. Humpbacks and fin whales also suffered devastating losses. Today, blue whales and other endangered species, like fin and humpbacks, are recovering, but slowly.

But while industrial whaling stopped in the late 1960s (some countries like Japan and Norway do continue commercial whaling on a small scale), these mammals are still frequently killed in collisions with large ships. Most container ships today delivering goods across the ocean are so large that even a collision with a 50-ton whale can go undetected. Ship strikes remain a leading cause of death to whales around the globe, and in some places, like California, they are on the rise.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2018 and 2019 were the worst years on record for fatal whale-ship collisions off the coast of California, with 21 whales killed. Further, scientists estimate that over 80 endangered whales are likely killed by ship strikes off the entire west coast of the United States each year. Researchers say that the true death toll is likely far larger since most whales struck by ships sink to the bottom of the ocean rather than wash ashore.

The number of ship strikes and deaths in California has alarmed wildlife officials who say that if such high numbers persist, the long-term survival of these endangered animals is in jeopardy. But there’s hope: A new project meant to reduce ship strikes and to potentially hold shipping companies accountable for driving too fast was announced on September 17 in the hope that more whales can be saved.

Called Whale Safe, the effort uses a three-pronged approach to identify when whales and ships are present in the Santa Barbara Channel, a key throughway for ships that come and go from the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, the nation’s two busiest ports by container volume.

Launched on September 16, Whale Safe is the result of a collaboration between the Benioff Ocean Initiative and several U.S. universities and oceanographic organizations, including the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the University of California Santa Barbara, and the University of Washington, among others.

“The purpose of Whale Safe is not just to detect whales, but to try to engineer change and fix this problem of ships colliding with whales,” says Douglas McCauley, a marine ecologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative, which runs the Whale Safe program.

Here’s how it works: An acoustic receiver attached to a single buoy moored in the Santa Barbara Channel constantly listens for whale vocalizations. Onboard a computer on the buoy out at sea, an automated detection algorithm harnessing the power of artificial intelligence identifies nearby vocalizing blue, humpback, and fin whales in near real-time. Results are sent from the buoy via satellite to researchers who confirm the sounds, and match them to visual sightings from scientists and whale-watching boats in the area. This information is overlaid on a statistical model developed by data scientists showing the likelihood of whales in the area based on real-time environmental conditions.

The whale identification algorithm was developed by data scientists at Texas A&M University at Galveston and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution using more than 4,500 recordings of blue and fin whale sounds taken from underwater microphones at over a dozen locations over 14 years. The resulting whale call library is matched to sounds coming from the channel, allowing the system to identify new whale calls, signaling the presence of whales in the channel.

“Whale Safe is the first of its kind in that it combines acoustic model and habitat data to give us a holistic picture of what’s going on with whale presence in the Santa Barbara Channel,” says Morgan Visalli, a Benioff Ocean Initiative (BOI) scientist and Whale Safe project lead.

The system also monitors the speed of ships through the channel, where a voluntary 10-knot (11.5 mph) speed limit for six months of the year was implemented in 2007 following the death of five blue whales found in the Santa Barbara Channel, all of which were determined to be caused by ship strikes. Studies show that lower ship speeds can reduce the number of fatal collisions by up to 80% to 90%, but according to researchers, ships in the channel frequently exceed the voluntary limit, sometimes doubling it. In 2019 more than half of the ship transits in the channel exceeded 10 knots, according to Whale Safe.

“We do hope and expect cooperation levels will come up,” says Sean Hastings, the resource protection coordinator for the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary. “It is in everyone’s interest to make these voluntary programs work.”

Getting ships to slow down is one of the project’s top goals. Since the speed limits are voluntary and so many shipping companies ignore them, the Whale Safe program aggregates data from the Automatic Identification System (AIS), a GPS tracking system that large ships use to navigate and avoid collisions. Ships are required to use the AIS by the International Maritime Organization, constantly broadcasting their identity, location, and speed. Ships passing through the 120-mile long Santa Barbara channel will have their speeds recorded and posted on the Whale Safe website.

The data identifying whether whales are present will also be provided to the shipping companies themselves. As a ship approaches the Santa Barbara channel, or if it plans to do so in the near future, the crew can access the Whale Safe website or opt to receive daily text alerts informing them if there are whales present and adjust the ship’s speed accordingly. Whether they do so or not remains an open question because the system just launched, but McCauley says he has been in conversation with several large shipping companies, and he’s optimistic that some will take advantage of the near real-time data provided by the system to inform them when it’s appropriate to slow down.

“It’s effectively a flashing light on the sign in front of schools saying ‘Slow down, kids present,’” says McCauley.

But, there are reasons why these giant vessels may not want to slow down. In general, ships are scheduled to be in port as a specific time, and missing a port time can be very expensive. Longshoremen must be paid to wait. Tugboats are reserved. Like at airports, berths are used by multiple ships, and a late ship can cause larger delays in the system. Some shipping experts say it’s just not worth the cost to miss a port time.

“Everything is money,” says Jeff Cowan, the immediate past president of the Council of American Master Mariners. “It’s a long chain and there’s a lot of money involved. Even a small change can reverberate.”

Other logistics can get in the way. “There are ships that just don’t have the ability to comply and still maintain their required schedule,” said John Berge, a vice president with the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association, a maritime industry organization.

Whale Safe also uses the AIS data to assemble shipping company “report cards,” compiling compliance with the 10-knot voluntary speed limit over time. The report cards, which issue grades from A to F, are posted publicly on the Whale Safe website in the hope that journalists, researchers, and the general public will identify—and perhaps publicly confront— poorly compliant companies to get them to slow down.

“The last thing anybody wants is a whale draped over the bow. That’s really bad for PR,” says Kipling Louttit, the executive director of the Marine Exchange of Southern California, a shipping industry group.

Currently, for the year 2020, of the 149 report cards that rate cooperation with NOAA’s voluntary speed restrictions in the Santa Barbara Channel, 37 companies have received the grade of F, meaning they comply with the voluntary speed limit less than 20 percent of the time. Most of the companies listed are headquartered in Asia, but several are American. Polar Tankers, Inc., a U.S. tanker operator along the U.S. West Coast, received an A with a cooperation rating of 95.4 percent, while Honolulu-based Matson received an F on the site. According to the data used by Whale Safe, 48 percent of Matson’s ships traveled through the channel at speeds exceeding 15 knots per hour with a cooperation rate of 16.5 percent.

In response to an email from Popular Science seeking comment on the low score, a representative for Matson stressed the company’s “core mission” of serving “just-in-time” markets in the Pacific, noting further that “our entire operational structure is built around and dependent upon timeliness and schedule reliability.”

Whale Safe’s McCauley also says there are plans to identify the customers of the most egregious violators, including large American retail corporations like Wal-Mart, who depend on international shipping to get their goods to market. However, in the last two decades, many large corporations have hired sustainability officers whose job it is to manage a company’s compliance with environmental laws and human rights all the way through the supply chain. Few corporations want to be seen dealing with irresponsible players when it comes to pressing global issues like climate change or slave labor. McCauley wants to add whales to that list.

“Not everybody knows that a leading cause of death for whales is that they’re being run over by ships and that roadkill at sea is a thing,” he says. “If we want the retail companies to take this seriously, we have to get this message out to the public, is your company whale safe or not?”

Some scientists are skeptical, however, that the Whale Safe program, as it stands now, will have much value or effect change. With just one acoustic receiver, it’s impossible to determine the number of whales vocalizing or to pinpoint their location within the channel.

“We have found that there is not always a good concordance between acoustic detections and the presence of large feeding concentrations of whales,” says John Calambokidis, a whale researcher and founder of the Cascadia Research Collective, which studies whales on the West Coast. “There can be many whales present and few calls being produced, or conversely just one whale producing lots of calls. Second, the detector just tells you there is a whale in the Santa Barbara Channel region, and not whether it actually is in or near the shipping lane.”

Other conservation organizations are not waiting for industry cooperation. The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), a conservation group behind the 2007 effort to implement the voluntary 10-knot speed limit in the channel, says it is preparing a new lawsuit under the Endangered Species Act seeking mandatory speed limits in the channel.

“The science in the last few years is showing that the problem is bigger than we thought it was even a decade ago, particularly for blue whales,” says Brian Segee, a senior attorney at the CBD. “At the end of the day, voluntary limits have resulted in a minuscule number of ships slowing down. We feel very strongly that what is needed is a mandatory speed limit, and we consider that a very small ask.”

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Across the globe, species are rapidly going extinct and ecosystems are reshuffling as the climate warms and habitat is lost. But, this week, there’s at least one bit of good biodiversity news.

In a new study published in Royal Society Open Science, the authors announced that the South Atlantic humpback whale population had recovered to almost pre whaling numbers. “We were happy to see that,” says Alex Zerbini, marine mammal ecologist at NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center. “It was a little bit unexpected for us that they had recovered so well.”

Many cetacean species were drastically reduced during the whaling boom that peaked in the early 1900s. Globally, at least 300,000 humpbacks were killed between the late 1700s and 1950s for their meat and blubber. The South Atlantic population, which winters off the coast of Brazil and migrates south to feed on krill in the South Georgia and South Sandwich islands, dropped to just 450 individuals in the 1950s—from an original estimated population of 27,000. Finally, in the mid 1980s, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) enacted a ban on commercial whaling.

Since then, officials and conservationists have monitored whale populations for signs of recovery. For the South Atlantic humpbacks, IWC scientists used aerial surveys—estimates made from a fly-over by plane—to try to grasp their numbers. In 2011, the IWC put out a report stating that that the humpbacks had recovered to 30 percent of their historic population.

But that was likely an underestimate, says Zerbini, who contributed to the old analysis. Being aquatic creatures, it can be hard to get a clear count of cetaceans. “One disadvantage of using an airplane is that it flies so fast that sometimes you’re going to miss whales,” he says. “They cannot count everybody.”

Since then, ecologists have returned on ships to count the mammals at close range. Those counts went into the equation used to estimate abundance in the recent study. With the new information, Zerbini and his team estimate the South Atlantic population is 25,000—that’s 93 percent of their pre whaling numbers. “It shows that if you manage wildlife populations properly, they can thrive even after a long period of exploitation,” says Zerbini.

Still, humpbacks face some substantial challenges. They can get tangled in fishing nets, or struck and killed by ships. Of the 14 global populations identified by U.S. officials, four are endangered and one is threatened—and all five of those live in the northern hemisphere. Currently, the National Marine Fisheries Service is proposing to protect large areas of habitat coastal waters off the coasts of Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and California to reduce these impacts. The agency is accepting comments on the proposal through December 9. Today’s humpbacks also live in an altered marine environment. The singing cetaceans spend much of their year feeding in rapidly warming Antarctic waters. One study estimated that krill, the tiny crustaceans humpbacks feed on, have had their habitat drift almost 300 miles southward as water temperatures have gone up. And there’s only so much room to go poleward, so this shift could spell a loss of the primary food source in these cold waters. Zerbini says its important to keep an eye on the ecosystem, to see how the increased numbers of humpbacks interact with other organisms, including the seals and penguins that also eat krill.

While he’s pleased with the whale’s recovery, the work is never over for Zerbini. “We need to keep watching for new threats.”

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When Ralph Chami was 14, he wanted to be an oceanographer. Instead, he got a PhD in economics, and is now the assistant director at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which works with 189 countries to promote financial stability.

But childhood dreams die hard, and nearly 40 years later, when the opportunity arose to travel to Baja California with the Great Whale Conservancy, Chami jumped at the chance to get closer to the massive creatures that caught his imagination as a kid. His job was to time blue whales breathing and humpbacks breaching—a major departure from his usual day job.

In the end, though, he came away with a project that bridges his past and present focus. At dinner with the scientists one night, he learned that whales have an intriguing quality that few people know: They can store up to 33 tons of carbon, even for hundreds or thousands of years after death. What’s more, their feeding cycle lends to the growth of phytoplankton, which helps pull carbon out of the atmosphere.

Knowing how powerful this information could be, both for counteracting climate change and conserving marine life, Chami decided to use his expertise in finance and policy to put a dollar value on the whales’ carbon capture skills. He took the per-ton price of carbon and multiplied it by the quantity that a single great whale (a total of 13 species) could store in its body. All told, he found that each whale weighed out to an average of $2 million, and that the global stock of whales rang out to more than $1 trillion. His results were published in a recent report for the IMF.

“The moment I saw the number, I had a God moment,” Chami says. “I thought I made a mistake; I thought I’d divided by 0.01. So I deleted it and redid the calculations, and the number stood.”

The article is “groundbreaking,” says Heidi Pearson, a marine biologist at the University of Alaska Southeast, who’s working with Chami on this new carbon-sequestration concept. The way it breaks down a whale’s life process and ties it to cycles in the oceans and atmosphere shows just how big of a service nature can provide in balancing greenhouse gases. For whales, the benefits come in two steps.

The upshot of deadfall

All living things tote around carbon in their cells, from the tiniest plants that drift on the sea waves to the hulking creatures that lurk below. So in a way, whales sequester carbon just by existing.

They also top the charts in how much they can sequester. Nick Record, an oceanographer with the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Scientists, says that the bigger an animal is, the more efficient it is at storing carbon. That extends to the afterlife, too: When whales die in the ocean, they sink thousands of feet down, bringing a lifetime of carbon with them.

“That carbon is not going to make it back into the atmosphere for a very, very long period of time,” Pearson says.

This mechanism is pretty cut and dry, she adds, given that we have a rough idea of how much carbon comprises a whale’s body, how many whales are out there, and how much organic material a whale body can lock up over time.

The other cycle—the whale pump—is not as well known, though.

From poop to carbon vacuums

Even wonder how whales clear our their majestic, massive bowels? When they come back up for air after long foraging dive, they release a “fecal plume” of buoyant, nutrient-rich excrement.

This excrement, Pearson says, acts as fertilizer for itty-bitty phytoplankton, transporting nutrients between different layers of the ocean. The plants then take in CO2 and release O2; some sink to the bottom of the ocean like the whales, burying carbon in the detritus.

But there are still a few unanswered questions in the process, Pearson notes, from how much poop gets converted to plant life to how much phytoplankton gets gobbled up at the surface.

And while some of Chami’s measurements have been worked out on paper, they still need to be tested in the field. Currently, Pearson’s lab is investigating how much nutrient content there is in whale fecal plumes and how the carbon math works out with phytoplankton.

A cause to champion

For Chami, the goal of putting the science he gleaned from Mexico into dollars and cents is to push forward conservation. Since the 1700s, the global whale population has dropped from upwards of 4 million to 1.3 million whales. A large part of that can be pinned on human activities like fishing and pollution.

There are plenty of practices that governments can use to better protect whales—changing shipping routes and reducing fishing gear entanglement are just two examples. Even so, Chami predicts it would take another 30 years for the great whale population to double in size. Upping the motivation by showing off the mammals’ carbon capture feats may help speed up the process.

The accounting system doesn’t just have to be limited to whales, either. Chami says he’s in contact with other groups to put a “price” on salt marshes, coral reefs, and elephants to shore up conservation campaigns and give scientists a stronger voice in policy making.

In his IMF report, Chami argues that the survival of whales and their climate-resistance abilities should be mentioned in the priorities of the Paris Agreement. He plans to release a more academic study detailing how to put a carbon price on whales by the end of the year.

Until then, he’ll take pride in the message he’s spread, both to international leaders and his loved ones. A month ago, he heard his son talking about the whale conservation efforts on the phone. “I got tears in my eyes,” Chami said. “If I’ve done nothing else, I’ve gotten the respect of a 20 year old.”

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Whales belong in the ocean, right? That may be true today, but cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises) actually descended from four legged mammals that once lived on land. New research published in Current Biology reports the discovery in Peru of an entirely new species of ancestral whale that straddled land and sea, providing insight into the weird evolutionary journey of our mammalian friends.

We might think of them as smooth, two-flippered ocean swimmers that struggle to even survive the Thames, but whales originated more than 50 million years ago from artiodactyls—land-dwelling, hoofed mammals.

Initially, whales’ ancestors resembled small deer, with four toes, each one ending in a small hoof. One particular fossilized “missing link” found in India suggests that the last whale precursors took to the water in times of danger but came onto land to give birth and eat. They would spend considerable time wading in shallow water, foraging for aquatic vegetation and invertebrates, and eventually small fish and amphibians.

The oldest prehistoric whale fossils date from 53 million years ago, and were found at sites in the northern Indian Himalayas, and present day Pakistan. The fossil record tells the story of a gradual transition from wading to living most of the time in deeper water, like otters or beavers, while retaining the ability to walk on land.

An Ocean Journey

Around 42 million years ago, and still land-worthy, the newly discovered Peregocetus pacificus set off on an epic journey to the other side of the world. In the Middle Eocene era (roughly 48 to 38 million years ago), Africa and South America were half as far apart, but that is still an impressive swim for an animal less than 10 feet long that was not completely adapted to marine life.

The hind limbs of 42.6 million-year-old P. pacificus were not much shorter than its front legs, and it had tiny hooves on each toe and finger, suggesting that it was still quite capable of hoisting itself out of the water and trotting about on land. However, other features of the skeleton suggest that it was well adapted to an aquatic life. For example, its hind feet bones had ridges to which ligaments and tendons would attach, suggesting it had webbed feet. Its beaver-like tail bones bear signs that it was used as a powerful aid to swimming, though there is no evidence as to whether or not it had a tail fluke like today’s whales.

P. pacificus was carnivorous, as its sharp, scissor-like teeth demonstrate. It likely ate large bony fish, as many whales do today. P. pacificus, however, has teeth that resemble those of modern carnivores, with canines, pre-molars and molars that have complex cusps. Today’s exclusively aquatic cetaceans all have a row of many, simple, peg like teeth, and they don’t chew their prey, instead just grabbing and swallowing it whole.

Over millennia, the pelvic bones uncoupled from the spine to enable more efficient swimming, while increased time in buoyant, gravity-easing water reduced the allocation of evolutionary resources to strong, weight-bearing legs. Front limbs morphed into flippers, while increasingly vestigial hind limbs shrunk and disappeared.

Modern whales have of course long since returned to the oceans from which the first land mammals’ distant ancestors emerged. All that remains of their evolutionary foray onto land are tiny remnants of bone attached to the pelvis in some species, an anatomical echo of their ancestors’ land adventures. But who’s to say where they’ll be roaming in another 50 million years?

Jan Hoole is a Lecturer in Biology at Keele University. This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

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A family of chemicals banned more than 30 years ago is still making it difficult for killer whales around the globe to have babies.

In fact, half of the world’s orca populations could collapse over the next century from exposure to polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) pollution, according to a study published last month in the journal Science.

“I’m always just surprised to see that we’re still talking about these old contaminants and these are the ones we still find in the highest concentrations everywhere,” says Magali Houde, a researcher with the Aquatic Contaminants Research Division for the Canadian government, who was not involved in the new study.

PCB pollution is not the only issue facing orcas—underwater noise, overfishing, and a complex cocktail of other contaminants also put pressure on whale populations, says Houde. But these whales have higher concentrations of PCBs in their bodies than any other mammal species, says Jean-Pierre Desforges, a post-doctoral researcher at Aarhus University and co-author on the new study.

PCBs represent a whole suite of man-made chemicals constructed from carbon, hydrogen, and chlorine atoms. Because they are fat soluble, PCBs accumulate inside living bodies instead of flushing out with waste. Plankton and small fish store PCBs in their fat, and when larger fish and seals and seabirds eat these smaller prey, they start storing all those PCBs themselves. This process of biomagnification means apex predators like killer whales can accumulate really high levels of toxins over time.

Killer whales that live in areas with a history of manufacturing and using PCBs, like the United States, the United Kingdom, or Japan, tend to have higher levels of PCBs in their blubber, says Desforges. Diet also plays a role. Orca pods that primarily eat larger marine mammals (like seals) will have higher levels of PCBs than killer whale groups that eat primarily fish, Desforges says.

Orcas with higher PCB levels suffer from clear health effects. Without chemical interference, healthy female killer whales only produce one calf every three years or so from about age 15 to age 30 or 40, says Paul Jepson, a veterinary specialist in wildlife populations for the London Zoological Society and co-author on the study. But PCBs mess with reproductive hormones and suppress the immune system, explains Desforges, making it harder to have babies and easier to get sick. Because marine mammal milk has a very high fat content, mother killer whales also pass high doses of toxins directly to their calves.

To evaluate how this would affect the orcas on a large scale, Desforges, Jepson, and fellow authors gathered available blubber data from existing studies of 350 killer whales around the world and separated each population into groups, depending on the level of PCB exposure, from 1 milligram per kilogram of blubber to 40-plus milligrams per kilogram of blubber. They compared the exposure levels of different populations to PCB toxicity to determine estimated impacts on reproduction and immune system suppression.

Then, researchers at the University of St. Andrews put this data into a model looking at the expected population growth or decline of the different killer whale groups. The researchers consistently found groups of whales with higher PCB exposures faced steeper projected population declines. The most highly exposed pods of killer whales found around the United Kingdom, the Strait of Gibraltar, Hawaii, Brazil, Japan, and some areas of the Pacific Northwest faced population declines over the next century they bordered on complete local extinction.

Taking a step back to quantify the global population risk, the scientists then used these population trajectories to calculate the most likely annual population growth rates. Ten out of the 19 groups of whales showed little to no growth at all over the next century, meaning PCBs could seriously affect future growth in more than half of the world’s killer whale populations.

For about 50 years, PCBs made their way into paints, plastics, rubbers, dyes, pigments, carbonless copy paper, electrical equipment, and much more. By the 1970s, evidence emerged tying these chemicals to cancer and a host of other health problems in humans and animals. The United States banned the production of PCBs in 1979. Europe followed suit in 1985, and as of March 2012 at least 176 countries adopted the Stockholm Convention, which bans PCBs and 21 other hazardous chemicals.

We may not make PCBs anymore, but these chemicals stick around in the environment for years and years. Some PCBs get stirred up into the air while others dissolve in water and make their way into rivers, estuaries, and oceans, says Houde. While contamination is worse in areas that historically produced and used PCBs, small amounts of these chemicals have made their way up to the Arctic and Antarctic on wind and ocean currents.

To protect killer whales going forward, more countries need to emulate the Superfund program in the United States, says Jepson. The U.S. produced 50 percent of the 1 to 1.5 million tons of PCBs from 1929 to 1979, and yet it has much lower levels of environmental PCBs today compared to Europe, says Jepson. This is largely thanks to the active clean-up of contaminated sites to prevent more PCBs from entering the ecosystem, where it is much more difficult to address.

But we seem to be a ways away from this kind of proactive solution. The Stockholm Convention gives countries until 2025 to identify all the PCB equipment and materials they have, and until 2028 to destroy all these products. A 2016 assessment by the United Nations estimates 83 percent of the world’s PCB products are still awaiting destruction.

In the meantime, it would help to list specific killer whale populations as threatened or endangered, says Jepson. Technically, all killer whales belong to the same species, Orcinus orca. Scientists debate whether they should recategorize the whales into subspecies, says Jepson, and doing so would make it much easier to protect groups in more polluted areas. Legal protection can motivate countries to clean up their PCBs and take a more active role in protecting the whales. But scientists are a long way from resolving the subspecies debate, Jepson says.

Desforges and Jepson hope this study will help people realize the PCB problem is far from solved, and galvanize countries into action. For now, Jepson takes comfort in the fact that not all killer whale populations are in danger from PCBs.

“If we do lose 50 percent of our killer whales there is still another 50 percent that could rebuild the other populations eventually,” says Jepson. “They’re a very resilient species.”

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↑ Iain Kerr, CEO and whale biologist at Ocean Alliance

Ocean pollution, habitat loss, and collisions with ships have helped land sperm whales on the vulnerable species list. For biologists like me to track their migration and monitor their stress levels, we take samples of their blubber, which contains DNA and hormones—microscopic markers of an animal’s health. To collect the blubber, we stand on a ship’s bow and fire modified crossbow darts. The hollow projectiles hit the mammal and pop back out with a pencil-eraser-size sample.

In 2010, I was chasing whales in the Gulf of Mexico. To land a shot, you have to get within 30 or 40 feet. One day, after more than four near misses, we spotted a big animal just as the sun was going down. As we got close, its blowhole, which is akin to a nostril, sprayed all over us—and then the animal dived before we could get a sample. Enveloped in this cloud of stinky, horrible whale snot, I thought: Anything this stinky and horrible has to be productive. It turns out whale blow has some of the same molecules that flesh does. I began thinking about how to collect snot.

The solution came from my hobby: drones. We could fly one right through a cloud of whale blow. So in 2012, we started developing a drone outfitted with petri dishes. Now, I can fly SnotBot to a whale more than a mile away to grab a sample.

As told to Jessica Boddy

This article was originally published in the Fall 2018 Tiny issue of Popular Science.

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Whales that end up on the beach make headlines. But those that sink to the bottom of the ocean make new homes for sea life. The brawn, blubber, and bone of these unlucky cetaceans—some 70,000 of which perish during harrowing seasonal migrations each year—nourish a vibrant, ­constantly evolving community of creatures. Opportunistic eaters can flourish on a decaying corpse for anywhere from a decade to a century. Marine ­biologists have discovered dozens of new critters in these deep-sea ecosystems since they first encountered one in 1987. For animals at the bottom of the ocean, a whale fall is a meal ticket. But for the humans above, it’s a helpful reminder that, even in the modern era, most underwater mysteries remain unsolved. This timeline tracks what little we know about a gray whale’s decomposition, and the friends it makes along the way.

Days

Hagfish

Big Sink

Dead bodies tend to bloat—and float—in the early stages of decomposition. But as carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases dissipate, whales descend to depths of a few hundred or thousand feet. Once there, death quickly gives way to a vibrant flurry of life.

Weeks

Squat lobsters

Munch squad

Scavengers such as pinchy crabs and sharp-toothed sharks are the first to feast. They start eating shortly after the big sink, and they can munch for months on the plentiful buffet of organs, skin, and muscle. But their meat-loving mouths leave plenty behind.

Months

Bristle worm

Slime time

With little meat left, worms, snails, and other hungry organisms can take advantage of the delicious biofilms—slimy bacteria and other microorganisms—that now coat the corpse. It doesn’t look like much to our eyes, but for the right animal, the carcass is ripe for the ripping.

Years

Osedax worms

Bone yard

As more of the skeleton becomes exposed, bone-eating bacteria flock to their supper. Scientists have seen some of these tiny beings only on a whale fall, spurring biologists to deflate dead beached cetaceans, add weights, and send them deep down for study.

Decades

Clams

Gas bag

Eventually, all that remains of the great gray are nutrient-rich particles, which have leached into the soil beneath the deep-sea cemetery. As bacteria chow down, they excrete sulfurous waste, creating the perfect environment for mollusk colonies fueled by the gases.

This article was originally published in the Summer 2018 Life/Death issue of Popular Science.

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Iain Kerr was having a bad day. He and his research team had been cruising the Gulf of Mexico in a motorboat all morning chasing sperm whales, hoping to get a tissue sample to take back to their lab. But the behemoths were being frustratingly elusive. At one point, Kerr was balancing on the bow of the boat, poised to shoot a modified crossbow that’d pop out a pencil eraser-sized chunk of blubber from the whale’s side. But just as he got close enough to shoot, the whale dove—for the fifth time that day. Sperm whales dive for 45 minutes to an hour, so when they’re gone, they’re gone. After 9 hours on the boat, which costs around $2,000 a day to rent, and no data to show for it, Kerr worried he was piddling away funding and donor money. “It felt like I was standing in a cold shower ripping up one hundred dollar bills,” says Kerr, a biologist who runs the nonprofit research organization Ocean Alliance. That’s when two things hit him: a billowing mass of whale mucus, and an epiphany. “I was sitting there fuming, and this cloud of snot enveloped me,” Kerr says. The whale snot “was stinky and horrible”, he says, “but as a biologist, anything that’s stinky and horrible is probably productive. I wondered if we could collect and study snot.”

His stinky, horrible hunch was right. Whale snot, it turns out, is packed with DNA, viruses, hormones, and microbes—all incredibly useful things to a variety of scientists. With DNA, geneticists could tell if an animal is native to the area or just passing through, epidemiologists could track the spread of infectious diseases, and biologists could analyze hormones to see if an animal is stressed to the point of infertility.

The only hurdle was figuring out how to get a bucket full of whale snot. But Kerr had an idea: As a hobby, he builds and flies remote control aircraft. Could a similar technology scoop up whale boogies middair?

So goes the origin story of SnotBot: a hexacopter drone covered in petri dishes that collects snot for science. Over the next few years, Kerr’s group, Ocean Alliance developed the bot with help from students at Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, with the idea that it could make whale science easier for the researchers and less invasive for the whales.

Typically, marine biologists employ the same techniques that failed Kerr: A motorboat equipped with long sticks and modified crossbows to collect whale biopsies. But Kerr hopes these flying research robots will soon change that. They’re part of a larger trend going on in the field in which scientists are employing drones to capture data that previously proved difficult to gather.

Drones are clearly having their moment of fame. Farmers are using temperature-sensing drones to monitor crops. Meteorologists and climate scientists are sending drones to track storms and hurricanes, and fast-food chains are even experimenting with ones that deliver pizza. But the technology has also proved useful for studying elusive animals in remote locations, whether that’s orangutans in the trees of Indonesia or whales in the middle of the ocean.

And they might be doing more than accessing hard-to-reach places. “Tech like SnotBot are a catalyst for the democratization of science,” says Kerr. Renting research vessels for a remote location can cost nearly $20,000 for an entire trip. Drones can often eliminate the need for such a ship altogether. A complete SnotBot package, including cameras, runs about $4,500 — and can be used over and over.

Before the robot can take to the skies as a standard research tool, it needs to prove its worth. It’s still unclear whether whale mucus can provide consistent measurements of hormones and DNA that are needed to study the monstrous animal.

Whale blow is a diffuse matrix, and it’s heavily contaminated with seawater,” says Liz Burgess, a marine biologist at the New England Aquarium in Boston. That’s fine for simply detecting which molecules are present in a snot cloud, but consistently getting a precise concentration of a stress hormone? Forget it. “It’s definitely not that easy.”

Burgess studies whale blow too, but grabs it the old fashioned way: with a 30 foot pole. She says using drones and traditional methods together might eventually be an ideal situation.

Ocean Alliance is developing other drones besides SnotBot, like FLIRBot, which can detect infrared light. Researchers could measure whales’ body temperatures just by looking down their blowholes. They also have EarBot in the works; it lands on the water, powers off, and listens for whale calls.

There’s no doubt drones have a place in science. Even the federal government is getting in on the act. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) collaborates with a drone project that passively listens for whales. The bot, called Saildrone, monitors several whale populations—including the North Pacific right whale, a species with only 30 living individuals left.

“It’s really important to monitor these animals in any way we can,” says Jessica Crance, a biologist at NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center and lead acoustics researcher for Saildrone. Passive acoustics, Crance says, seems to be the best way to do that.

Saildrone is 23 feet long and 15 feet high. It’s been deployed in the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, and in the Bering Sea where North Pacific right whales live. The drone is motorless and relies on a combination of battery and solar power to turn its sails and navigate. Researchers simply input coordinates and the drone will get there.

These bots are especially helpful for species like the North Pacific right whale, which are hard to spot because they seldom come to the surface. Saildrones can silently sit on the waves, listen for the whales to start talking, and then track them. And because they can stay at sea for many months, Crance hopes to use them to plot migration routes. That could be crucial data for species conservation; if researchers find that a swath of waters in the whales’ migration route has been uncharacteristically warm, for example, or has less food available, they might be able to pinpoint why so much of the population has died off.

But this project, too, still has hurdles to clear. Researchers are still working on making the sound recordings clear enough to identify distinct species vocalizing beneath the waves.

“The dream would be to have these recordings be clean enough to monitor for any species in the Bering Sea,” Crance says. “If we get there, we could use this as a real-time tool—if we heard a right whale vocalizing, we could alert and divert any vessels nearby.” She adds that the tech is being used to study other animals besides whales, too, like fur seals and various fish species; using multiple Saildrones and technology akin to sonar, researchers can triangulate the positions of these animals as they migrate and shift habitats.

Drone tech isn’t always a magic wand for making research affordable and easy, however. Megan Ferguson, a marine ecologist for NOAA, looked into using ScanEagle, an aircraft-like drone that’s been used by the military, as a replacement for manned aircraft to count whale populations from the skies. Her 2015 study found that the two methods estimated the same number of whales, but using ScanEagle required far more labor and resources.

“It took an analyst seven hours to analyze one hour of flight from ScanEagle,” says Ferguson. “It’s a huge investment in time and labor.”

But that could change with the help of artificial intelligence. Ferguson says machine learning could eventually teach drones to look for whales all by themselves instead of relying on a human analyst to scrutinize all of the collected data.

Kerr agrees. “It’s actually quite difficult to fly the drone and be at the right place behind the blowhole when it blows. And, forgive my modesty, I’m not a bad pilot,” he says. But with machine learning, a drone can learn how to stay in position in windy conditions and adapt to whale behavior—essentially fly itself.

So will drones—artificially intelligent ones or not—ever be able to replace the human hand out at sea?

“There are aspects where a drone could be useful. They obtain photos easily and they don’t interrupt whale behavior,” Crance says. “But it’s important to remember there are things where you just need a human on a vessel,” like those tissue biopsies collected via crossbow.

Still, drones seem poised to make whale science much less invasive, and show scientists whales in a new light. “Having looked down at whales with drones after 30 years of studying them, and seeing behavior and activity that you could only imagine from the boat,” Kerr says. “I can’t go back to studying whales without a drone. I just can’t do it.”

This piece has been updated to reflect the fact that Saildrone is 23 feet long and 15 feet high, not seven feet long and seven feet high. We regret the error.

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Gray, blue, big, bigger: baleen whales put the mega in “megafauna.” In a new study published on April 4 in the journal Science Advances, researchers discuss the whole-genome sequencing of several of these mammoth species, including the blue whale—the largest animal alive. They found that these marine mammals are related in surprising ways, which could suggest that the most traditional view of evolution isn’t quite right.

Six of the species the researchers studied, including the humpback, fin, sei, minke and blue whale, are part of a family known as rorquals—they’re the baleen whales that have pleated throats, allowing them to gulp huge mouthfuls of seawater that they strain for food using baleen plates. Another baleen whale species, the gray whale, is currently separated into its own taxonomic family. But by sequencing the genomes of these species and applying a new form of scrutiny known as evolutionary network analysis, the researchers were able to demonstrate that the gray whale is also a rorqual, and that it’s closely related to fin and humpback whales: more closely, in fact, than those whales are to other rorquals.

These findings provide further support for the thesis that “Evolution is much more complicated than Darwin had envisioned,” says study lead author and evolutionary geneticist Axel Janke, who is affiliated with the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Center as well as Goethe University. Janke made headlines a few years ago when genetic analysis led him and colleagues to argue that there were actually four species of giraffe, not just one. Researchers in his lab are still trying to figure out how and why the giraffes speciated.

Charles Darwin posited that evolution can be represented by a tree, with each species as one of the branches. He thought that speciation happened when creatures were forced to adapt by geographic separation; slightly different habitats favored slightly different adaptations, and a great physical divide would keep populations from mixing. Over time, different ecological influences would mold each group into something new. In the case of giraffes, Janke’s group theorized that some obstacle in their evolutionary history—say, a river that turned uncrossable as water levels rose—sparked their division into four species. In the absence of proof one way or the other, that’s still possible.

But in the case of the whales, who share the oceans of the world, evidence for a process called sympatric speciation—where a progenitor species can create new offshoots in the same geographic space—is much clearer. Evolutionary network analysis takes the tree metaphor and turns it into a complex web, which acknowledges the different kinds of familial connections shown by whole-genome sequencing. Comparing the whole genomes of rorquals shows that genetics is much more fluid than the Darwinian “tree” model, Janke says.

Darwin wasn’t wrong, per se: he worked with the tools available to him, primarily observation. But modern biologists have other tools that have enabled them to see different, subtler distinctions than those of appearance and behavior that Darwin, and generations of biologists since, have relied on.

“Gene flow and hybridization is more common than biologists usually think,” Janke says. Analysis of the rorquals’ genes shows that they’ve interbred in different ways at various times in their evolutionary history. This doesn’t make much sense if you rely only on Darwin’s model, where branches of the family tree never touch again after they separate. But many of these whales share the same vast oceans, and have speciated in spite of their ability to continue intermingling.

These results show that whole genome sequencing might be especially important for marine life, because it shows how misunderstood the genetic relationships between different kinds of marine creatures can be. In the case of the gray whale, the reason it speciated seems to have been finding a new ecological niche. Gray whales are bottom feeders who suck up sediment and food from the sea floor rather than taking big gulps higher up, like the other rorquals in the study. Filling that niche drove the whale to evolve differently, either losing the unnecessary pleats in its throat or failing to develop them in the first place. Their unique looks and behavior led biologists to believe they weren’t part of the same family as rorquals, which got them their own branch on the traditional evolutionary family tree. A more complex web, however, shows that they’re still intimately connected with rorquals on a genetic level.

The exact catalysts for speciation among these whales could be things like behavior, food, or breeding time, Janke says, “but this is not well known and understood.” Further study is required, he says, but very few cetacean genomes have been sequenced.

In addition to bringing about a family reunion of sorts, the research also kicked up a hopeful fact about the rorquals, including the gray whale. It shows that the almost worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling, put in place by the International Whaling Commission in the early 1980s, saved enough of them to stabilize the population. “We found rorquals are [genetically] diverse,” Janke says. That genetic diversity produces a species-wide resilience that has allowed them to weather changing seas.

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The tiny nematode known as Caenorhabditis elegans lives its entire life in about three weeks. The worm’s fleeting existence is just a fraction of the time allotted to centipedes or rats. These animals are in turn left in the dust by a horde of other creatures, from badgers to lions to chimpanzees. Even more impressive is the bowhead whale, whose 200-year life span is the longest of any mammal.

There are a few extreme outliers, animals whose lives stretch well beyond their closest relatives. One quahog clam reached 500 years of age—a life span that is about 8500 times longer than that of the humble nematode, says Matt Kaeberlein, a molecular biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. The ancient clam could have fit on a dinner plate. Generally speaking, though, large animals like whales and elephants live a great deal longer than smaller ones like mice.

But how do they do it?

“My guess is there’s not going to be one answer,” Kaeberlein says. There seem to be a wide range of strategies that animals use to protect their DNA and tissues from the ravages of aging and outlive their peers. Scientists are determined to discover what they are in order to stave off age-related maladies like cancer, dementia, and heart disease in people.

The good news is we already have a pretty good idea why large animals often live longer than small ones. It has to do with the fact that tiny animals are more likely to be gobbled up by predators. These animals tend to have babies early and age quickly. “If you’re a mouse, there’s no selection pressure really there to solve problems relating to cancer or older age, because in all probability you’re dead by then, you never get to that stage,” says Kevin Healy, a macroecologist at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

Bulky animals can afford to take a long time to grow up and reproduce. “If you’re an elephant, you’re not going to get eaten by a hyena, for instance, so being big has intrinsic advantages,” says João Pedro de Magalhães, a biologist who studies aging at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom. So when an animal has a low risk of being killed by outside circumstances like food shortages or predators, it has a chance to evolve a longer life span.

Some groups of animals live a lot longer than their body size alone would suggest, including many birds and bats. Healy and his colleagues have examined how different lifestyles like flying or burrowing might explain why this is. They found that the ability to fly was key to whether an animal would have a long life span. “It’s kind of like being really, really big,” Healy says. “If you fly you can evade your predators, you can move to new areas quite easily, if there’s a drought in one area you can move somewhere else.”

Animals that burrow far out of reach of predators might also have an advantage. However, there aren’t that many species that live underground, Healy says. The most noteworthy specimen—the naked mole rat, which can live over 30 years and barely seems to age or get cancer—might also have evolved its super-long life span for other reasons.

The naked mole rat behaves more like ants or termites than a typical rodent, Healy says. They live in colonies of workers presided over by a single queen who births all the pups. “They’re protecting the queen, so that no predators get near the queen, if there’s a food shortage it’s the queen that gets the food first, and so basically creating an environment that’s really protective and allows them to live much longer,” he says.

Primates tend to enjoy lengthy lives too, de Magalhães says. Chimpanzees live about twice as long as you’d expect based on their body size. And going by size alone, human beings ought to have a maximum life span of about 27 years. But the oldest person we know of lived to more than four times that; a French woman, Jeanne Louise Calment was 122 years and 164 days old when she died in 1997.

Comparing chimps to people isn’t entirely fair, de Magalhães says. Our maximum possible life span is probably skewed because we have access to medicine and by the fact that there are just so many more of us than other primates. Still, part of our ridiculously long life spans comes from our superior intellect; skills like being able to build and use tools probably gave us a survival edge, allowing us to evolve longer life spans over time.

“The evolutionary perspective of why larger animals live longer is well understood,” de Magalhães says. “What are the mechanistic bases of that? I think that’s less clear.”

Live fast, die young?

Scientists used to think that the main reason big animals live so much longer than smaller ones is that they have slower metabolisms.

“When you’re tiny like a mouse you have a lot of surface area per unit of volume and that means you’re radiating heat like crazy,” says Richard Miller, a biogerontologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. A big animal like an elephant needs to burn relatively less of its energy to stay warm. This means that animals with long life spans will also tend to have low metabolic rates. Scientists assumed that this put less wear and tear on their cells.

But metabolism is actually a red herring, Miller says. “Kangaroos and opossums have really low metabolism, and so if this idea were correct you’d expect them to have really long life spans. But in fact, they have really short life spans.” And birds and bats have high metabolisms, yet often live even longer than their body size would predict.

De Magalhães and his colleagues have examined whether there is any connection between life span and metabolic rate across mammals and birds. After they accounted for body size, the correlation vanished.

However, it is possible that metabolic rate plays a role in longevity for cold-blooded animals, whose body temperature depends on their environment. Some of the longest-lived creatures live in cold waters. These include the olm, a cave-dwelling salamander that may reach ages of 100 years; the orange roughy, a deep-sea fish, can live 150 years; and the Greenland shark, which lives to the ripe old age of 400 years. “Their metabolic rate is very low because, just like a furnace, if you turn up the heat we burn more energy,” Healy says.

What’s more, cold-blooded animals like nematodes and flies live longer when they are raised in colder temperatures, de Magalhães says. It’s possible that their cells accumulate damage more slowly under these conditions. It’s harder to test whether this might also be true for mammals, since our bodies stick within a much narrower range of temperatures.

“In the case of the very long-lived clams, I think it’s almost certainly the case that cold temperature is part of the story, but it’s not all of it,” Kaeberlein says. Other clams found in the same areas live for decades instead of centuries.

Similarly, some bats have outstripped even their flying peers. Brandt’s bat can live for 40 years despite being the size of a mouse. The best an actual mouse can hope for is 3 or 4 years. A bird the same size could expect to live around 10 years, Healy says.

“While we do see bigger things living longer, flying things living longer…the variation is really, really large,” Healy says. “It isn’t a universal pattern.”

Peeking under the hood

There are a certain markers of aging that show up across the animal kingdom. As we get older, our mitochondria—the tiny power plants that make energy for our cells—don’t work as well. Proteins begin to fold into the wrong shape and can build up in plaques in diseases like Alzheimer’s. Tiny caps called telomeres that protect our DNA get shorter until the cell can’t divide anymore. Mutations build up in our DNA. These and a few other processes seem to account for much of how our cells age over time.

We don’t know how much they explain the enormous differences in longevity among animal species, Kaeberlein says. However, many of these processes do appear to work differently in animals that have particularly impressive life expectancies. There’s evidence that telomeres in some bats—which have the longest life spans of any mammal relative to their body size—do not shrink with age. And long-lived clams and naked mole rats seem to be particularly good at keeping their proteins from misfolding, Kaeberlein says.

However, naked mole rats have plenty of other talents. One is their ability to produce a unique form of a sugar called hyaluronic acid that keeps skin elastic—and also suppresses tumors. The hyaluronic acid naked mole rats produce is five times larger than the version our own cells make. “This at least might be related to the reason why naked mole rats don’t develop cancer at anywhere near the rates that we would expect them to,” Kaeberlein says. “It wasn’t one of the hallmarks of aging that everybody thought about.”

Scientists are particularly enchanted by unusual cases like the naked mole rat. However, there are also a few patterns that seem to show up across long-lived animals.

These animals may be better able to cope with mutations and DNA damage than those with short life spans. Scientists are investigating these abilities in elephants and bowhead whales. “You would expect these animals that have way more cells than we do to have high cancer rates, but if they did so they wouldn’t live so long,” de Magalhães says. “So they must have tumor-suppressing mechanisms that we lack.”

Researchers have shown that elephants have extra copies of a gene involved in tumor suppression called p53. And de Magalhães and his colleagues have found that in long-lived animals—including bats, elephants, people, and other primates—genes that help cells withstand DNA damage seem to be evolving more quickly than in short-lived animals like rats and mice.

Animals with long life spans may also have hardier cells that are more resistant to stress, Miller says. He takes skin cells from different animals and bombards them with cadmium, hydrogen peroxide, and ultraviolet light. If the cells came from a long-lived creature like a porcupine, it takes a lot more of these noxious substances to kill them than if they came from a mouse.

“If you’re growing up as a mouse and very unlikely to live for a full year before you starve to death or get eaten, having metal-resistant cells doesn’t pay off very well,” Miller says. “But if you’re an elephant or a porcupine or a bat…evolved resistance to a vast range of toxic and physical insults is a really good thing.”

He and his team are looking into how cells in long-lived animals might become less sensitive to stress. They’ve identified one enzyme called thioredoxin reductase 2 that protects the mitochondria from damage and is nearly always found in greater amounts in cells from long-lived primates, birds, and rodents. What’s more, mice with a mutation that cause them to live longer than their fellows also produce more of this enzyme.

The researchers have also zeroed in on structures called immunoproteasomes that help cells break down damaged proteins. Long-lived birds, rodents, and primates all seem to share high levels of immunoproteasomes, and their cells are better at clearing out errant proteins those from short-lived animals. “These three groups evolved separately,” Miller says. “That’s a strong sign that you cannot evolve a long-lived species without all these immunoproteasomes.”

It can pay to be small

So if big animals live longer, what’s the deal with dogs? Smaller breeds like Chihuahuas can live beyond twice as long as the towering Great Dane. About 56 percent of the variation in life span among dog breeds can be linked to differences in body size, Miller says.

And it’s not just a purebred problem—the relationship between size and life span is just as strong in mixed-breed dogs, Kaeberlein says. Nor is it confined to dogs. Even though larger species tend to live longer than small ones, taller individuals within the same species will on average have shorter life spans. “The data are pretty compelling that, on average, bigger people tend not to live as long as smaller people, bigger mice tend not to live as long as smaller mice,” Kaeberlein says.

One of the culprits may be a hormone called insulin-like growth factor 1, or IGF-1, which encourages cell growth. In mammals and invertebrates, individuals with higher levels of this hormone grow larger. There’s evidence that mice and people with more IGF-1 also have a higher risk of cancer, Kaeberlein says. Having less IGF-1, on the other hand, is associated with slower aging and a longer life expectancy in worms, flies, and mice.

“We don’t really understand how these hormones go about creating an animal that is either normal or long lived,” Miller says. However, it’s possible that tinkering with IGF-1 or other related hormones could one day extend human life spans.

Because large dogs are so much larger than small dogs, the differences in longevity are especially dramatic. But there is a silver lining. Kaeberlein and his colleagues are testing whether a drug called rapamycin—originally discovered being secreted by soil bacteria on Easter Island—can extend healthy old age. When older mice are treated with the drug, their hearts become stronger and they live up to 60 percent longer. When elderly people are given a derivative of rapamycin, their immune systems respond to flu vaccines more like those of younger people. Kaeberlein and his team have been testing the drug in pet dogs, which suffer from many of the same age-related diseases as people.

“We’re doing this in large dogs for the very reason that large dogs age faster than small dogs,” he says. “We can actually asses whether something like rapamycin can improve heart function or improve cognitive function in a pet dog in a few years, whereas in a human that might take a decade.”

The drug is thought to work by making cells think that there are few nutrients available so they go into survival mode and don’t proliferate as much. This is similar to caloric restriction, another promising anti-aging strategy.

In a small first trial, the team saw that rapamycin seems to have similar cardiovascular benefits for large dogs as those seen in mice. The researchers are now enrolling dogs in a second, longer trial that would examine heart and cognitive health more closely. Their hope is that rapamycin could eventually be used to help your pooch—and you—live longer.

It’s not easy to figure out why a particular gene or facet of an animal’s environment can help it live longer, precisely because these animals tend to grow to unwieldy sizes and stick around for a long time. “A lot of these are still hypotheses, we can’t prove them yet because we can’t make transgenic or mutant elephants or whales,” de Magalhães says. He hopes to create a mouse with genes from these animals and examine how they affected its life span, though.

All of this means that we’re still at the beginning of identifying the secrets behind why large animals and oddballs like the naked mole rat live so long. “There doesn’t seem to be a one-size-fits-all, universal solution to aging,” Healy says. “It’s more likely to be almost jury-rigged, so different mechanisms to kind of patch up all the aging processes that are going on. The more of these we can find, the more possible solutions to diseases related to aging that we can also find and perhaps implement.”

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Wikie the killer whale shouldn’t know how to say “Amy.” English isn’t exactly her first language, and the “em” sound is challenging when you’re speaking through your nose and a pair of vibrating membranes. And yet, Wikie’s trainers taught her to say it.

This isn’t just hubris on the part of some chick named Amy, and it isn’t a stunt to wow audiences or lull unwitting journalists into covering a research paper. It’s part of a completely legitimate effort to decode whatever form of language cetaceans like Wikie might use.

The problem with understanding animal language and communication—and this will seem obvious in retrospect—is that we don’t know what’s going on in animal brains. A farmer can teach his border collie to understand and follow hundreds of commands, and it can appear as if the dog comprehends what “go find the blue toy” means. But we don’t know at what level the canine understands. We just know that the dog can ultimately respond by retrieving the right toy. Researchers think dogs comprehend bits of human language more complicated than single words, but we can’t actually know how a collie processes each of those sounds. We don’t even really know what it feels like to be inside a dog’s head.

It’s the same with orcas, dolphins, and African grey parrots, except those creatures seem to grasp even more language than dogs. What’s more, they mimic.

Most animals lack the physiological structures needed to make human sounds. We have vocal cords (and unusually good control over them) and most other animals don’t. Orcas and dolphins both whistle to communicate, so human speech is a stretch. But researchers who study animal communication need to push those boundaries to understand how other creatures learn and speak. Or, as dolphin expert Diana Reiss puts it, they’re important questions to ask “if you’re interested in not just what an animal does, but what it can do.”

If all Reiss ever did was observe dolphins in the wild, she would learn a lot about dolphin behavior. But she wouldn’t be able to ask more probing questions about how dolphins can learn, and what kind of associations they make with words and sounds. In the lab, she’s able to dig deeper.

The purpose of teaching an animal some English words isn’t to make it speak our language. It’s more about understanding how an animal learns when confronted with something totally unfamiliar. We already know that orcas can learn orca sounds by mimicking each other. Now we’re interested in figuring out how an orca might learn a more foreign sound—like the word “Amy”—and what it can do with that new information. Can it associate the sound with a person? Can it use the sound to request Amy herself? It’s only by pushing these boundaries that scientists can begin to understand the extent of a killer whale’s intellectual capabilities.

In the study on Wikie, which was published on Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the researchers were specifically telling the 14-year-old orca to copy sounds. Experts already knew killer whales could imitate noises, because that’s how they learn from each other. Now they needed to figure out whether orcas can extend that concept of “copying” to something unfamiliar—like a human voice. The answer was a resounding “YES.” Wikie learned new words almost immediately, especially when the sounds were easy to produce. She picked up several of them on the first try.

And Wikie’s not the only one. Other animals also mimic human speech.

Escaped parrots in Florida, for example, have taught wild birds how to say curse words picked up from their former human owners. Researchers studying a beluga whale kept hearing a person singing underwater, but it turned out to just be their cetacean subject, presumably repeating bits of songs it heard the humans singing. Another beluga learned how to say “get out of the water,” which caused great confusion when divers kept thinking their colleagues were telling them to surface.

A famous Boston harbor seal named Hoover started making sounds like a drunk guy yelling because hey, it’s Boston. This was back in the ‘80s, and it seems that men would get drunk, go down to the harbor, and yell at the seals. Hoover was like a baby repeating that curse word you didn’t mean to say in front of him—he was just copying you.

And plenty of other animals don’t just mimic human sounds, they have their own meaningful “words,” too. Vervet monkeys use specific calls to notify each other of leopards, snakes, or eagles, each of which prompts a different escape response. Ground squirrels have similar alarm signals, as do prairie dogs and meerkats.

Some birds do too, though that’s distinct from something like a mating song. Both convey meaning, but the mating song is probably attractive the way we might find a man’s voice or a women’s scent appealing. It’s an interpersonal communication. An alarm call is referential, meaning it refers to something in the external world and provides information about that thing. Mating calls just provide information about the singer.

These creatures all depend on communication to survive. Orcas and dolphins just take it one step further, and humans one step further than that. But it all often starts with basic imitation.

Human babies do it. You give them a truck, say the word “truck,” and eventually they’ll start repeating it back to you. Soon they’ll repeat it to themselves while playing, or say “truck” to request the toy. Dolphins do exactly the same thing. When Reiss gave dolphins a kind of keyboard with symbols for things like “ball” that played a particular whistle sound for each item, the animals didn’t even need training to use it. They started hitting keys, and when trainers tossed in a ball at the “ball” whistle, the dolphins realized they could make that sound themselves to request the toy. They even started repeating the whistle to themselves as they played with the object.

The keyboard, Reiss says, “acted as a Rosetta Stone.” It was a little window into how dolphins learn a new term for something, and how they can incorporate that knowledge into their lives. It taught the researchers what dolphins do if they’re given control and choices. That, in turn, informs us about their overall capacity for learning and understanding.

Eventually, humans learn to fit the word “ball” into a broader language construct. Balls become a category of item with a certain shape and purpose, not just one specific round thing, and we can combine that word with others to form sentences and ideas. We’re not sure whether any other animals really do this. But that’s not to say they don’t communicate—just that we can’t yet peer into their minds.

Reiss has a great example. The dolphins she studies make a particular noise that researchers call “the thunk,” and it’s always executed by parents in the context of disciplining their kids. Reiss says they can observe the behavioral effects—it gets the young dolphins to attend to whatever the adults are doing—but that doesn’t mean researchers understand what it really means to the animals. It serves the same purpose as a human dad sternly telling his kid to quit fooling around, but we don’t know that dolphin tykes and parents undergo the same thought process we do during such an interaction.

The same is true for basically any animal communication we observe. Animals clearly send messages to each other, but we can’t get inside their heads to figure out what those messages are and how they’re received. Humans are equipped with a particular set of tools that determine how we see our world. We have eyes that see a particular range of the electromagnetic spectrum, vocal cords that produce sound waves in a set range of pitches (and ears tuned to hear them), and brains that turn those inputs into words.

Dogs, orcas, and dolphins all rely on very different cues. Dolphins and orcas echolocate. Dogs operate on smells. They literally see the world differently than we do, and we can’t assume that their communication will look anything like ours. But by teaching them bits of our own language, we can close the gap in our understanding.

Eventually—hopefully—they’ll be able to teach us a few phrases of their own.

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Until recently, narwhals have led pretty secluded lives in the Arctic. But the sea ice that has kept these tusked whales isolated from people is beginning to melt, likely bringing a boom in shipping and seismic exploration for oil and natural gas to the area.

Unfortunately, narwhals may not be equipped to handle such close encounters with humans. When these whales face hazards they aren’t used to, their bodies react in a troubling way, researchers reported today in Science. After being freed from nets or stranding, narwhals’ heart rates plummet while they also swim frantically to escape. This likely is hard on their hearts, and could deprive their brains of oxygen.

“They’re sensitive animals,” says coauthor Terrie Williams, an ecophysiologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “When it’s an unanticipated threat, I think that they just pull out all the stops.”

She and her colleagues rescued nine distressed narwhals in Greenland and fitted them with several recording devices. As the whales swam away, the team measured their heart rate, depth, and acceleration. This revealed how quickly and intensely the animals were paddling.

When mammals swim into cold water, their heart rate naturally slows as part of the dive reflex that helps them hold their breath as long as possible. But in the narwhals Williams studied, this drop was extreme. Their heart rates plunged from 60 beats per minute on the water’s surface to a mere three or four beats per minute, and sometimes stayed that way for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, the whales were stroking fast as they could to get away. The scientists calculated that these escape dives gobbled up 97 percent of their oxygen supplies. “The animals are just about maxing out what they have available to them,” Williams says.

This isn’t how they usually respond to danger. When narwhals detect killer whales on the hunt, they sink deeper below the ice sheets. “They move fairly slowly, they’re not like a high-speed orca,” Williams says. “But they can out-dive a killer whale because of their oxygen stores.”

But when tangled up in nets or handled by people, they seem to become overwhelmed. “It’s something they haven’t encountered, and they just want to get away as quickly as they can,” Williams says. These animals aren’t built for a speedy fight-or-flight response. It’s concerning that the narwhals are swimming so forcefully while they are pausing their hearts for 15 to 20 seconds at a time.

“That’s a long period of time for not being able to move blood to the brain,” Williams says. “All of these things that the cardiovascular system should be doing are being put on pause here while the animal is in this escape kind of mode.” These jobs include shuttling oxygen to the brain and moving nitrogen and heat around the body to prevent decompression sickness and overheating.

It could be dangerous for narwhals to hold their breath for so long while frightened and fleeing, experiments in other animals suggest. When scared rats are forced to swim, they sometimes go into cardiac arrest and die. “It’s a combination of stress and a dive response and an exercise response that sends so many opposing signals to the heart that, for rats, it becomes lethal,” Williams says.

Narwhals may not be the only whales to suffer when they try to dive and escape at the same time. When rescued from stranding, it’s common for whales to be disoriented. “You have to wonder if there’s something cognitively that’s gone wrong, and whether this kind of conflicting response is associated with that,” Williams says.

However, narwhals might be especially vulnerable because they are so unaccustomed to people. Williams and her colleagues worry that this will only become more of a problem as the seas get louder. They are now examining narwhals’ heart rates in noisy areas, as well as the toll the response takes on their bodies—and whether it can be deadly.

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The same phenomenon that creates the Northern Lights might also be confusing male sperm whales. In case you’ve forgotten already (really, how could you?), early 2016 brought a veritable tidal wave of beached spermaceti in the North Sea. No one could figure out why at the time, but thanks to a study in the International Journal of Astrobiology, we now have a working hypothesis: it was those gosh darned solar storms at it again.

So…what’s a solar storm?

Charged particles from the Sun are constantly flying towards the Earth and getting all mixed up in our magnetosphere, which is the magnetic field surrounding our planet. They mostly impact at the poles, where the magnetosphere has its poles and is therefore most susceptible to disruption. The collisions between particles give us an aurora (a.k.a. The Northern Lights). Sometimes the Sun spews more particles than normal during what’s called a coronal mass ejection, and when that cloud hits us, it creates a solar storm. They don’t just happen at the poles, though they are more frequent in those areas. And they happen on other planets, too.

What does this have to do with whales?

Solar storms can knock out systems that rely on the magnetic field, like GPS units and electricity grids. They can also knock out birds. Not literally—the birds stay airborne. But because some of our avian friends navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field, the disruptions caused by solar storms can pull them off-course.

Whales are similar to birds, at least in this respect. The going theory is that some species use the magnetosphere to navigate over long distances in much the same way that migrating avians do, since whales also travel quite far on a regular basis. It’s not the only way they navigate. Sperm whales use a lot of echolocation both to find their prey and to, you know, not crash into things.

Disruptions in the magnetosphere mess with that navigation system. Migratory birds seem to change altitudes in magnetically abnormal areas, and homing pigeons have more trouble finding their way. If whales use the same kind of internal navigation, they too might be running off course.

Sperm whales especially are used to quiet magnetic fields, because they live in warmer waters where the magnetosphere is calmer. The females and calves tend to stay in those climes, but young males leave their families to form bachelor pods. They travel north together, many of them bound for the Norwegian sea, where there are squids a-plenty—a delicacy in sperm whale cuisine. That area, along with the North sea, is far shallower than their normal feeding grounds, and dotted with many more land masses. It’s possible that if their internal navigation is out of whack, they could get disoriented and accidentally swim towards a shore. This wouldn’t be a problem in the open ocean, but in coastal regions it spells a beaching.

Do we know that this is how those sperm whales died?

Unfortunately, we don’t. These researchers have identified two solar storms that would align well, timing-wise, with the mass beachings we saw in 2016. But they couldn’t say for sure that this was the cause. Whale autopsies showed that the spermaceti were perfectly healthy and had recently been chowing on some squid, which implies that they were traveling south from their annual feeding fest when they got lost. Beyond that, we may never know for sure what happened.

It’s worth noting that past studies have found an association between solar storms and whale beachings, so this theory isn’t totally out of the blue.

It’s also worth noting, just as a fun fact, that sperm whales aren’t so-named because of their resemblance with sperm (though honestly, there is one). Back when the oil industry was pretty much just whaling, sailors would go out in search of sperm whales to gather the waxy oil that they store in their giant, square heads. The whales themselves seem to use their spermaceti oil to create loud clicks for use in echolocation and communication. Humans liked it because the purified oil could be burned and stayed liquid even in very cold weather. So sailors would kill a sperm whale, hack off its head, and pull it on board. There they would crack open the head to reveal the spermaceti, which with its whitish hue and semi-liquid appearance, looked to seamen like semen. So they called it spermaceti: “sperma” meaning semen in Latin, and “ceti” meaning whale. Why the sailors thought a whale’s semen was stored in its head is still a mystery.

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When Samuel Wasser and his colleagues first took to the ocean in search of whale poop, they discovered that this unusual pastime can lead to the occasional misunderstanding. One day, they were noticed by a county sheriff on the prowl for drug runners. “He came up to us and he thought he had caught us,” says Wasser, who is director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle. The team explained that the dog in their boat was sniffing for a material that most people would have little use for.

“You’re pulling my leg,” the sheriff finally said. For a time, he watched the scientists from a distance. Then he steered his boat away, and left them to their work.

That work can reveal a lot about animals that are enormous and difficult for scientists to track and study. The poop that whales leave floating in their wake is chock full of information. It carries remnants of hormones, pollutants, gut microbes, and DNA from the whale and its prey. It can reveal how stressed a whale is, or whether it’s pregnant.

“There really is no other way to learn about what I call the inner whale—to learn about their physiology,” says Rosalind Rolland, a senior scientist at the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life at the New England Aquarium in Boston.

By now, Rolland has perused hormones in the poop of five whale species, and is expanding to northern fur seals, sea lions, and West Indian manatees. She and other scientists have been scooping whale poop since 1999. Now, their hard, smelly work has begun to bear fruit. Fecal samples are offering evidence about how these marine mammals are threatened by noise or lack of food, or what parasites and toxins they’ve picked up. These observations, researchers hope, will help them figure out how to save endangered whales.

Searching for treasure

Of course, poop isn’t the only material that scientists use to examine wildlife. But drawing blood can stress an animal out, and wrangling huge whales isn’t practical. Poop, however, is there for the taking. “It’s just a huge amount of information that was never available before without having access to a whale that was either killed by whalers or stranded and died,” Rolland says.

And because collecting poop doesn’t bother the whale, scientists can harvest dung from the same animal repeatedly. “You can collect samples over and over again…without invasively harming them,” says Leigh Torres, a marine ecologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. “It’s a biological goldmine.”

This precious material looks and smells a little different depending on which whale it came from. The endangered North Atlantic right whale, which was the focus of early poop scooping efforts, happens to have very distinctive stool. It tends to be bright orange, likely due to the whales’ diet of tiny crustaceans called copepods, says Kathleen Hunt, a biologist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, who has often collaborated with Rolland. It also floats, unlike the leavings of some other species. “It’s helpful because…you can spot it more easily when it’s bobbing around,” she says. On the other hand, “It has the worst stink of any type of fecal sample I’ve ever worked with.”

But that rancid, fishy aroma is actually great news for scientists. “It’s almost like it was designed to be really obvious,” Hunt says. “Just by pure luck, we started with the very best poop.”

Besides, she doesn’t mind the stench so much anymore. “After years of dealing with right whale poops in the lab you actually do get used to the smell,” she says. “It gets so I’m merrily carrying around this little bag of whale poop…and people down the hall, around a corner are complaining to me that it smells so bad that they can’t work.”

Meanwhile, the gray whales that Torres tracks expel a reddish or brownish plume of poop. She and her colleagues have only about 30 seconds to swipe as much as possible into their fine mesh nets before it sinks. “It has an odor of the ocean,” she says. “It doesn’t smell as bad as their breath.”

Sometimes only a thimbleful of poop can be collected before the choppy water pulls it all apart, Wasser says. Poop from the orcas he studies ranges from light brown to dark green and smells of salmon. “It’s not too different in color from the water,” he says. “It is not so easy to see.”

Luckily, he has dogs to help hunt down the doo-doo. Wasser trains high-energy dogs rescued from shelters to zero in on scat from whales and other threatened and endangered animals. These dogs’ “insatiable” urge to play means they aren’t likely to get adopted, but makes them dedicated workers. They can catch a whiff of poop nearly a mile away. Once Wasser and his team have been steered to their quarry, the excited dogs are rewarded with a ball.

Unfortunately, whales do not poop on command. “You’re at the mercy of the animals’ digestive tract about when a sample will appear,” Hunt says. It takes years of waiting and scooping to collect enough poop to make any inferences about the animals.

There are other ways of getting whale excreta. Researchers are pioneering drones called SnotBots to capture vapor exhaled from the animals’ blowholes. Whale snot is available whenever you want it. But it’s also diluted by seawater, making it more difficult to analyze.

Life in the noisy seas

Poop can offer some insights about how whales are impacted by noise pollution. Whales rely on sound to navigate, hunt, and communicate, Torres says. So the louder the ocean gets thanks to ship traffic, sonar, and seismic oil and gas exploration, the harder it is for whales to conduct their normal lives.

The experience might be akin to spending all your time in a noisy nightclub, Hunt speculates. “You could still walk around, you can still eat, you can still talk to your friends—but you’re having to shout, your ears are ringing, it’s kind of exhausting.”

We know that spending prolonged time in noisy environments is stressful and unhealthy for humans. Scientists suspect that whales are similarly harmed, and have observed the animals clam up or vacate noisy areas. But it’s difficult to link noise to changes within the whales’ bodies.

“You can’t just announce to the whole eastern seaboard, ‘okay we’re all going to stop driving boats around for two weeks,’” Hunt says. “It’s very hard to study what it would be like without that ocean noise.”

She, Rolland, Wasser and their other colleagues have only had such an opportunity once, and it was not one they expected or would have hoped for. In the days following 9/11, both plane and ship traffic were disrupted. Rolland and her colleagues happened to be studying right whales that month in the Bay of Fundy, which lies northeast of the coast of Maine. “After September 11, we decided to continue our work despite what had happened,” she says. They took acoustic recordings of the bay, collected whale poop, and perused ship traffic logs.

After 9/11, boat noise plummeted—as did the amounts of stress-related hormones in the whales’ poop. The team could not find a similar drop in stress hormones in the four years that followed. The constant drone of ship noise, their work indicated, is chronically stressful for whales.

Torres is also interested in how noise pollution harms whales. She has been collecting poop from gray whales near the coast of Oregon, which are exposed to ship traffic and the natural sounds of storms and waves, for several years. Her team is also gathering poop from blue whales in New Zealand. In this area, it’s common to find ships searching for oil under the seafloor by pounding it with pulses of sound and listening for the echo.

Over time, Torres hopes to create a picture of how stress hormones normally vary. Cortisol, the hormone she and her colleagues are most interested in, can rise or fall depending on the whale, how much food it had access to, or whether it is pregnant. “Once we sort of hammer those trends out then we can add in the noise component,” she says. The team is also tracking how plump and well fed the whales are, and how noisy the seascape is over time.

Eventually, she hopes, their understanding of stress hormones could also be applied to whales that are too elusive or endangered to offer much poop.

Going hungry

Noise is not the only human-linked stressor whales must contend with. Wasser currently studies the southern resident killer whales, an endangered community that spends the summer and fall off the coasts of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon. There were about 90 of these whales in 2005, when the group was first listed as endangered. They have continued to decline since then, and now there are only 78 individuals.

There are three possible culprits behind the whales’ difficulty. They could be disturbed by vessel traffic, or they may be exposed to toxic chemicals. And then there are the Chinook salmon. The southern resident killer whales prefer this largest, fattiest of salmon. So do people—Chinook salmon are overfished, leaving scant prey for the whales. “You’ve got an endangered population of whales eating an endangered species of fish,” Wasser says. This lack of prey, Wasser’s scatological research suggests, is the chief reason that the killer whales are faring poorly.

Over the years, he and his colleagues have seen fewer calves than would be expected born to the 30 or so adult females in this population. So they’ve been giving the whales a pregnancy test—signs of the hormones progesterone and testosterone in droppings can reveal whether a whale is pregnant and how far along she is. Nearly 70 percent of the pregnancies Wasser and his crew detected ended in miscarriages or stillbirths.

If an animal is going to miscarry, this usually happens early on. But a surprisingly high number of the orcas’ pregnancies failed late in gestation. This indicates the whales were capable of conceiving, but not holding onto their pregnancies.

The reason: not enough food. Wasser and his team checked the balance of two hormones in scat from females that had successful pregnancies and those that didn’t. Thyroid hormone helps control metabolism; when food is scarce, an animal will secrete less of it. That “kind of puts the breaks on and slows things down, so you last longer until you can find food,” Wasser says. Cortisol also plays a role in nutrition. In a crisis, this hormone mobilizes glucose to give an animal energy.

The unlucky whales had relatively high amounts of cortisol compared with low amounts of thyroid hormone. These whales, the team concluded, were chronically underfed. And, as Hunt explains, “They can’t make a baby if they don’t have enough fat and blubber.” To give these killer whales a chance to thrive, we’ll also need to conserve their salmon prey.

As Hunt, Rolland, and Torres have found, stress hormones like cortisol can also be a sign that whales are disturbed by noisy surroundings. But for Wasser’s orcas, the lack of food seems to be even more important. Stress hormones in the whales’ poop ebb each year in mid-August, just when the salmon are most plentiful—and when boats are also most likely to be out, taking advantage of the nice weather.

The lack of food also may exacerbate the harms wrought by any pollutants the whales encounter. Females that miscarried late in their pregnancies also had higher concentrations in their poop of PCBs, chemicals that linger today in some building materials and other products. Many pollutants build up in an animal’s fatty tissue. “As they run out of food and burn fat, it dumps the toxins into the bloodstream,” Wasser says.

It’s all in the poop

With poop, scientists have found, one can probe many different stressors faced by whales. That means they can gather evidence of how whales suffer from the din of human noise or loss of vital prey. Rolland is also examining neurotoxins made by algae, including those responsible for red tide, and water-borne parasites such as giardia in right whale poop.

It’s important to get a handle on all these different trials, because climate change is likely to bring even more sweeping, intractable changes. Already, right whales are showing up less often in the Bay of Fundy, Hunt says. This suggests they are following their tiny crustacean prey as it is driven northward by rising sea temperatures.

“If we can still relieve the pressure on the [whales] from all of these other impacts, including the ocean noise, then they have a better chance of being able to respond nimbly to this big change of the food all moving,” she says.

This is a formidable challenge—noise pollution has risen over the past few decades, and today 90 percent of world trade is carried out by cargo ships. But boats can be made a little less loud, which would benefit their human owners as well. “A noisy engine is an inefficient engine,” Hunt says. There are other incentives, too; the Port of Vancouver has cut docking fees for quieter ships. Many of the other whales’ challenges can likewise be tackled with ingenuity and compromise, scientists hope.

A first step, though, is understanding the mark they leave behind in whale poop. That means collecting hundreds of bags of whale droppings, year after year. It’s stinky but thrilling work. “Anytime the whale poops it’s pretty exciting,” Torres says, “because I know it’s another great look into the animal’s biology.”

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It is a perfect June day. After seemingly weeks of rainy gray skies, an early morning shower has given way to sunshine. White, puffy cumulus clouds hang in the sky, still, as if doodled onto the blue background. Despite the fact that the waters along this stretch of the Atlantic ordinarily tend more towards a grim gray (it’s supposed to be that color, one reassures themselves) today the water is practically Caribbean green, tiptoeing towards turquoise. I am on a boat, a white 95-foot double decker aluminum cruising vessel zooming across the New York bight—an indentation along the Atlantic Coast which makes New York City especially prone to storm surges like those that accompanied Hurricane Sandy. But we’re not hunting storms: we’re stalking whales.

For the first time in a century, humpback whales have returned to the waters of New York harbor. And not just occasionally, either. They’re coming in enough numbers that a company can reliably trot tourists out to the ocean—within sight distance of Manhattan’s skyscrapers—to see them.

“Because of the improvement of the water quality, algae and zooplankton have multiplied, giving good food for the menhaden [a small oily forager fish beloved by whales], which have returned in numbers that the fishermen say they have not seen in their lifetimes,” Paul L. Sieswerda told PopSci. Once a curator at the New York Aquarium, Sieswerda has since founded Gotham Whales, an organization that conducts tours and monitors the presence of whales, seals, and dolphins in NYC. “Our surveys show an exponential increase in the number of whales since 2011 when we first began our studies,” he said. “Prior to that, whales were only seen intermittently.”

While Sieswerda dates the presence of whales back to 2011, 2014 was the year that whales caught the attention of many New Yorkers: one especially charismatic whale was captured on camera. A humpback seamlessly parted the water’s surface, maneuvering its forty-foot, forty-ton form so that it was floating perfectly erect. Although its tail stayed below the surface, its rostrum (or beak-like snout) and head stood proudly exposed. The incredible power and buoyancy of its pectoral fins kept it aloft in a slow and controlled motion that bore a striking visual similarity to a person treading water. Whales use this motion, called spyhopping, to get a better view of what’s on the surface—like prey, or humans gawking at them from whale watching boats. This is a marvel to behold anywhere in the world; to see it in New York City, with the Empire State building glimmering in the background, borders on the fantastical.

It’s no wonder the image went viral on social media, thrusting urban whales into the spotlight.

Once all but extinct in New York City’s waters, the whales are undeniably back. The same year that the curious humpback captured our attentions, Sieswerda counted 106 whales in the waters off New York City. In November, a whale was caught swimming near the Statue of Liberty. And it’s not just whales: dolphins and seals have also come along for the ride. It’s shocking to longtime New Yorkers, who remember when the city’s rivers and beaches were an ecological punchline.

When I spot the whales for myself, I cannot contain my enthusiasm. My whale watching companion, who hails from Massachusetts, is markedly less enthused by the three whales—two adults and one youngster—that we see on our four-hour journey. In Massachusetts, she says, the whales are more active. The ones we watch just barely skirt the surface. But as someone who grew up here—and was banned from heading to the beaches because of safety concerns—I never thought that one day my city would consider any sort of whale to be ordinary.

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“… kids of my generation knew only three things about the Hudson,” writes John Cronin in “The Riverkeepers”, a book about early efforts to clean up the Hudson. “It was the boundary between New York and New Jersey, the dark, vertical Palisades on the opposite shore got their name from an amusement park that sat atop them; and the waters of the river were too polluted for swimming.”

Cronin was born in 1950, and was one of the first generations of New Yorkers forcibly removed from the ecosystem that birthed it. It may be odd to think of New York—or any city—as part of an ecosystem, but as much as NYC has a reputation of being a concrete jungle, that’s only ever been half true. Even today, foxes roam Central Park, possums terrorize toddlers in Brooklyn, and Queens residents know to keep trash cans firmly fastened to keep out raccoons. Meanwhile, hawks make their nests atop the city’s bridges and skyscrapers. There are even some old timers who have managed to spend all of their lives foraging for pokeweed and fishing for flounder, fluke, striped bass, perch and porgy in the city’s rivers. With some exceptions, the fish are once again safe to eat these days. But when Cronin came of age, the Hudson River was a hard stop. The city’s waterways were a no-go zone.

The Hudson River (along with the city’s Bronx and East Rivers) matter because they feed the surrounding ocean: what we dump in one ends up in the other. And the Hudson isn’t just a river. It’s a tidal estuary, which loosely means that it flows both ways. The estuary feels the ocean’s pulse for 153 miles of its total 315, which means it has, on average, four tides a day. The ocean flows up, and then back down.

Back in Cronin’s youth, the color of the Hudson’s waters shifted with the whims of the car-buying public—General Motors poured its waste paint directly into the river, so you could tell what hue was popular based on the river’s current tint. Between 1947 and 1977, the year the Clean Water Act was enacted, General Electric—based upriver from New York City—dumped an estimated 1.3 million pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) into the Hudson. According to the EPA, in addition to causing cancer PCBs can have a wide range of harmful immunological, reproductive, and neurological effects.

Meanwhile, the nearby Bronx River was bluntly called an open sewer. In the early days of its clean-up, as many as 89 cars were hauled out of the city’s only freshwater river. The East River, which separates Manhattan from Brooklyn and Queens, was best known as a dumping ground for city sewage (and the bodies of mob murder victims). In the 1980’s, medical waste—including hypodermic needles that would eventually be tracked to Staten Island’s Fresh Kills Landfill—washed onto the region’s beaches.

But today, it isn’t just whales that grace New York’s waterways; humans—live ones—willingly dip themselves into the East River for any number of reasons. Each year, thousands of athletes jump in as part of the annual Hudson River triathlon, while the Manhattan Kayaking Company offers stand-up paddle board lessons for $75 dollar for 1.5 hours and basic kayak instruction at $75 dollars for two hours. In fact, city-dwellers who don’t need lessons can actually loan out kayaks for free at designated spots around the island. And even the most cynical New Yorker frequents the city’s hundreds of miles of greenways, many of which provide not just access to walking and cycling, but views of the waterfronts as well.

To what can we credit this radical shift? For starters there’s legislation, which since the 1960s has shifted to support better management of the city’s—and the nation’s—waterways. Congress Passed the Clean Air Act in 1963 and expanded it in 1970, 1977, and 1990 (air pollution can infiltrate waterways, carried over by dust, rain, or through simple gravity). And on April 22nd, 1970 (the first Earth Day) then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller signed New York’s Environmental Conservation Law, which created the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation. It provided the state with the capacity to administer and regulate the state’s environmental laws. The creation of the Environmental Protection Agency that same year did the same on a federal level. The passage of the Federal Clean Water Act in 1972, and the Federal Safe Drinking Water Act, provided the legislative framework to hold environmental polluters accountable.

Cleaner waterways have lured the fish back, while limits on commercial fishing (in part because some of the fish species are not safe for human consumption, courtesy of the PCBs that still linger in their bodies) give the whales something akin to an all-you-can-eat buffet.

But it’s important to note that although the city’s waterways are cleaner, they’re not perfect. The city is home to not one, but two aquatic superfund sites: Gowanus Canal and Newtown Creek. The city still pours some 27 billion gallons of storm water and raw sewage into many of its waterways every year, legally, due to an antiquated sewage system desperately in need of an overhaul.

“The water, however crappy it is, is our most valuable open space,” says Eymund Diegel, an Urban Planner who works with a consortium of groups to help clean up Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal. “Let’s make it accessible and clean it again, let’s buy some canoes and provide lessons for kids and get people to reconnect.” The group recently built a boathouse on the Gowanus, and plans to decorate it with circuit boards—old military electronic waste—dredged from the Canal.

Two generations ago, writes Cronin, “My parents had enjoyed a very different relationship with the river when they were young. My father learned to swim in the Hudson, one of a boatload of terror stricken St. Peter’s parish boys who were instructed by Monsignor Brown. The monsignor would tie the stout bowline around the waist of the nearest boy and throw him into the drink with the command, ‘Swim.'”

Maybe we’ll never get back to the day when the youths of New York are sent into the city’s waters during gym class. But the return of the whales is a sign that New York is finally starting to do right by its waterways—and it should encourage the city to do even better.

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It might not seem like it, but we live in a world full of giants. Blue whales are the largest animal ever to move across the planet, with the biggest measuring in at over 100 feet long and weighing hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Blue whales are part of a group called baleen whales, distinguished today by their baleen, a screen of cartilage that hangs down from the roof of their mouth in place of teeth used to filter prey out of the water. Baleen whales lost their teeth gradually, replacing them fully with baleen about 20 million years ago. We know a lot about baleen whales, which include blue whales, humpbacks, and right whales among others, but why—and when—did they grow into giants?

In a paper published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Academy B, researchers examined the fossils of over 140 baleen whales representing 13 modern species and 63 extinct species to figure out when and why they got so large.

“We’re fortunate in that baleen whales have a dense fossil record that allows us to address this question,” says co-author Nick Pyenson, curator of marine mammals at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

By looking at the fossils, Pyenson and his colleagues were able to show that up until recently, baleen whales stayed relatively small, with average lengths between 16 and 32 feet. That’s still large by land-animal standards, and researchers think that both toothed (think orcas) and baleen whales went through a growth spurt millions of years ago when their ancestos moved from the land to the sea. But around 4.5 million years ago something changed, and baleen whales began to grow dramatically. The fossil record shows that this size shift happened in several species of whales all at around the same time period, which indicates that there was probably an external factor involved in the sudden growth.

Around that same time period, Earth was going through the start of an Ice Age. Ice sheets, ice caps, and glaciers froze into place, altering the ocean currents. Pyenson and colleagues think that this was the shift that supersized the baleen whales.

The change in climate during that time period also changed the circulation of the oceans, creating areas where cold, nutrient-rich waters rose, concentrating zooplankton (tiny sea creatures that many baleen whales feed on) in biological hotspots.

While the amount of prey may have stayed the same, the distribution shifted from being spread out across the oceans to concentrated in a few spots that appeared seasonally. Suddenly, it made sense to have a larger body, capable of traveling thousands of miles to reach the marine feasts laid out in these new areas. The researchers think that smaller whales would have lacked the resources to make those long and perilous journeys, and being larger also allowed them to take advantage of the dense patches of food that were now available.

Today, Pyenson says that large baleen whales are living on a knife’s edge. Ocean acidification is starting to alter (and in some cases damage) the zooplankton that many baleen whales rely on to survive. “There may be winner and losers,” Pyenson says. Some of these sea-faring giants might perish as the world once again changes around them. Others might be able to adapt and thrive.

“Overlain on all of that is the impact of whaling,” Pyenson says, pointing out that during the time when humans aggressively hunted whales, exploiting them as a natural resource, baleen whales were generally targeted the most. ”That may have had profound ecological consequences that we don’t know yet. What happens when you lose that much biomass in an ocean? We’re still finding that out.”

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Our present-day oceans host whales like orcas that will hunt down sharks and eat their livers and more sedate baleen whales that gather in awkwardly large groups and feed on smaller fish and microscopic animals called krill.

The latter whales, also known as mysticetes, are filter feeders. They filter their food out of the water and through thick plates of baleen, similar in composition to our fingernails. The former still use teeth. But 36 million years ago, there wasn’t such dentition division.

In a paper published Thursday in Current Biology, paleontologists announce that they’ve found an ancient relative of baleen whales that still had teeth, but also appears to have fed by sucking water and prey into its mouth, then spitting the water back out. It’s not quite filter feeding, but it’s closer to that than other known methods of hunting.

At 12-13 feet long, this fossil whale was rather small (by whale standards), and lived off the coast of what is now Peru.

It had teeth, but the wear patterns on them don’t match those found on modern hunters like Orcas. Instead they had rough pitting, as if they’d accidentally eaten sand along with their meals. That would be far more likely to happen if it was sucking in food—like tasty pre-historic stingrays—near the seafloor than if it was chasing prey through the open ocean.

That evidence, combined with the distinct shape of the fossil skull, led researchers to conclude that the species Mystacodon selenensis fills in an evolutionary gap in the fossil record, marking a transition away from teeth in the baleen whale family tree.

The paleontologists also noticed that Mystacodon has another weird evolutionary feature: rear limbs that stuck out from the animal’s abdomen. This whale, like other whales, evolved from land-dwelling animals. Apparently at this point in the evolutionary process, it still held onto some biological souvenirs from its land-dwelling ancestors in the form of small, residual legs.

The next step is taking an even closer look at the fossils, examining the composition of the bones to check for evidence of the dietary shift.

“We will look inside the bone to see if we can find some changes that may be correlated with this specialized behavior,” study co-author Olivier Lambert said in a statement. “Among marine mammals, when a slow-swimming animal is living close to the sea floor, generally the bone is much more compact, and this is something we want to test with these early mysticetes.”

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On January 15, 2016, a dead humpback whale was spotted floating off the coast of Virginia Beach. Then Virginia played host to two more stranded humpbacks.

In the waters and beaches of New York, people reported four dead humpback whales, and in North Carolina, the sad total reached five. Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Maine each reported two deaths of the same species. Maryland and New Hampshire each found one. Delaware and Massachusetts found three each. By any account, 2016 was a terrible year to be a humpback whale on the east coast of the United States.

The new year is no better. So far, 15 additional dead humpback whales have shown up along the east coast, bringing the total to 41. The high number led the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to open an investigation into what is now officially classified as an unusual mortality event.

NOAA is now investigating why so many humpback whales are dying in this particular area. They’re doing necroscopies—animal autopsies—on whale carcasses that aren’t too badly decomposed, collecting environmental and population data, and generally trying to figure out why this keeps happening.

Government researchers started looking into unusual mortality events in marine mammals in 1991. Since then, there have been 63 officially designated unusual mortality events across a wide range of species, from dolphins to manatees.

Just under half of those events remain biological cold cases, with cause(s) of death still uncertain.

In cases where researchers were able to determine a cause of death, infections, biotoxins from algae, and ecological factors were the top culprits. Human causes—like ships running over whales—also played a role in some instances.

So far, 10 of the 20 dead whales that have been necropsied clearly showed signs of being hit by boat propellers. That stands out because normally, NOAA only gets an average of 1.4 reports of boats hitting whales per year. Seattle Times reports that boat traffic in the region has not increased.

Estimates put over 10,000 humpback whales in North Atlantic waters. Several populations of humpback whales (including this one) were recently removed from the endangered species list, but the species is still protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

The humpback whale isn’t the only unusual mortality event that NOAA is looking into. They currently have open cases looking into the mysterious deaths of Sea Lions and Guadeloupe Fur Seals in California, and large whales and seals in Alaska. Until we know what’s causing them, we can’t take action to avoid further disaster.

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In July 1912, a whale showed up on the shores of Bird Island Shoal near North Carolina’s Shackleford Banks. It was, by all accounts, a very strange whale. Most obviously: it had a beak. It also had a thick core that tapered down, almost dolphin like, towards the tail.

A year later, in 1913, Frederick W. True, a curator at the United States National Museum (now the Smithsonian) tasked with surveying the animal’s remains would formally describe the species and give it his name. Over the intervening century, True’s beaked whale has remained something of an enigma, but a new study published today in the journal PeerJ casts some light on this cryptic animal.

It also includes the first-ever underwater video of the species, taken in the summer of 2016:

In an era when spacecrafts let us see Pluto’s ice mountains, it might seem strange that the first video of a living True’s beaked whale calf was filmed just last year. But within Cetaceans—a group that includes whales, dolphins, and porpoises—beaked whales remain one of the most mysterious.

“Maybe in the past decade and decade and half they’ve been developing newer techniques to study beaked whales,” says Dee Allen a Research Program Officer with Marine Mammal Commission, who was not involved in this study. “But they have detailed information on some of the dive patterns of only like a handful of the beaked whale species.”

The handful of beaked whales doesn’t include True’s beaked whale, which, until this study, was so mystifying scientists didn’t even really know about its coloration. True’s beaked whale quickly loses its white markings after death, so it’s hard to identify a living True’s beaked whale if you’ve only seen a dead one. Studies like this one are important because they give us information that can’t be gained just from studying a dead animal.

“The person who shot the video didn’t know which beaked whale that was, that’s how we were contacted,” says said Natacha Aguilar de Soto, lead author on the study. Aguilar de Soto splits her time between the University of St. Andrews, Scotland and the University of La Laguna, Tenerife. “They sent us the video and asked what this animal was. We’re talking about a group of four animals 10 meters [32 feet] from the boat and they couldn’t recognize it.”

So why do these animals remain such a mystery? The difficulty lies in the fact that beaked whales, which can reach the size of an elephant, spend only about eight percent of their time at the surface. The rest of their life is spent hunkering down in the deeper reaches of the ocean, around 3,000 feet below sea level.

“Many people that spend all of their life on the sea have never seen a beaked whale,” says Aguilar de Soto. This video was recorded by a company that had taken a group of teenagers out to sea to take water samples as part of an educational activity.

Data pulled from the video, along with info from previous sightings (like photos and genetic data from strandings) help create a broader profile of the animal—including what the calves look like and the way coloration can vary.

“There’s six species [of beaked whales] that occur in the north Atlantic,” says Allen. “This is one of the species that probably has the least known about it, and most of the information is from strandings.” In total there have been maybe 50 known strandings, or roughly one every two years, since the species was first described.

The most recent study collected data from sightings of True’s beaked whale made by scientists, whale watch companies and educational teams in the Azores and Canary Islands, to help build a comprehensive understanding of these animals in this region of the world. The data suggests that the region may be a “hot spot” for studying True’s beaked whales both because of the frequency of sightings and the geography of the region—which includes deep waters close to shore.

And if True’s beaked whale wasn’t already fascinating enough, it’s also worth mentioning that it’s the only only beaked whale with distribution in the northern hemisphere (including both sides of the North Atlantic) and in the Southern Hemisphere, where it goes from Brazil to South Africa to South Africa and Australia.

“And then there’s a gap in the middle,” says Aguilar de Soto. “It’s possible that really they are two species; we don’t know.”

And we won’t know unless we can find some way to study the animal more, though this study used gene analysis one some of the stranded specimens to tie True’s beaked whale to those found in the Northern Hemisphere—making it the southernmost occurrence of the species. They’re now trying to put together a new study to determine if it’s one species or two.

“The fact they were able to confirm with the genetics is important,” says Allen. “Beaked whales are so challenging to identify to the species level, because there’s so little known about so many of these species, and there’s a lot of similarities in the appearance of different species.” There’s also the fact that the way beaked whales look changes significantly as they age, and the females and the males don’t look alike.

What we know about beaked whales more broadly suggests that we need to learn as much as we can about them—and fast. Beaked whales are among the most sensitive to sonar. It’s believed sonar is what triggers their stranding. And population counts of beaked whales generally (not of True’s beaked whales) on the Pacific coast suggests that their population is declining.

“They are amazing creatures,” says Aguilar de Soto. “They are able to dive up to 3 kilometers [a bit more than 1.8 miles] in depth on a lung full of air. They are mammals like us. They breathe air, give birth to their calves under water, nurse them under water, and take care of those calves when they feed at depth. They are an incredibly example of the adaptation of marine mammals to live in deep waters, and we know so little about them.”

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Nerves are extremely delicate structures. They don’t tend to be very flexible and can get injured if they are stretched even the slightest bit too much. At the same time, nerves are needed in areas of the body that put up with a lot of lengthening and straining. Here’s an extreme example: When it opens its massive mouth to feed, the rorqual whale’s nerves stretch to more than double their resting length and back—all while making extremely sharp ‘hairpin’-like turns—without being strained or broken. But how do they get away with treating their delicate nerves like a bunch of bungee cords?

In a recent report in the journal Current Biology, researchers present a possible explanation: Whale nerve cells are coiled and coated in two different layers of waviness. A better understanding of how this works could help researchers find new ways to treat nerve damage.

Previous studies on rorqual whale nerves found that the combination of an inner and an outer layer gave them such extreme stretchiness. The inner layer coils up like a snake when the nerve is untaxed, then unravels as needed. That unraveling allows it to elongate without actually stretching. But Margo Lillie, a biologist at the University of British Columbia who studies biomechanics and lead author of the new study, noticed that the nerves also have to make super sharp, hairpin-like turns as they stretch and relax. Even a coiled nerve shouldn’t be able to handle such turns without taking a beating.

To figure it out, she turned to a micro-CT scan of a rorqual whale nerve. On the outside of the inner coils, she found flexible tissue bundles—fascicles—that stretch when the nerves turn to and fro. The inner coils have a large-scale “waviness”—like a telephone cord—that allows for incredible stretching power. But at a smaller scale, the wavy fascicles continue to provide slack to the nerve as it twists and turns. It’s waviness all the way down.

“With this second layer of waviness, it has introduced just enough slack for these sharp turns,” says Lillie. What tipped her off, she says, was what the nerves looked like when they were turning. They looked scrunched at the inner curve and stretched at the outer curve, a mechanical term known as bending strain—similar to what a pool noodle looks like when it’s forced into a curve.

This is all great for a hungry rorqual whale, but how will the research help us humans? Understanding how some animals’ nerves are able to withstand extreme bending could help us figure out better ways to treat nerve damage. When nerve damage happens, Lillie says, there’s a little gap between the two damaged nerve endings. “You want to get those two ends back together.” Figuring out what whale nerves are made of, how they work, and how they evolved could help inspire new methods and materials for reattaching damaged nerves.

In the future, Lillie says, she would like to find other animals that might also have a similar mechanism. The bullfrog, she says, would be a good place to start—its big throat stretches a lot when it expands. She also wants to study arteries and see how they, with their hollow centers filled with rushing gushes of blood, are able to move and swerve about. Do they have similar mechanisms to nerve cells, or have they evolved to work in a totally different way?

Answering all these questions, she says, will help her and other researchers better understand human nerve cells, and how to treat them when something goes wrong. “Sometimes you need a really exaggerated case to make something apparent.”

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Much like a dream deferred, a beached whale explodes. It doesn’t happen 100 percent of the time, but when the resulting smell is “one of the worst smells in the world,” according to marine biologists, it’s worth it to figure out a way to prevent a whale of an explosion.

So when over 400 pilot whales (which are, confusingly, in the dolphin family) stranded themselves on Farewell Spit in New Zealand last week, the Department of Conservation needed to take action. Most of the whales had already died by the time rescuers arrived, and even after some were pushed back out to sea, most re-stranded themselves and died on the beach. The staff started preemptively puncturing the hundreds of bloated corpses.

Exploding whales tend to make the news, often because of the tragic beaching itself—but also because it can be pretty dramatic. There are compilations on YouTube, if you want to thoroughly gross yourself out. It looks like a naturally occurring version of a Mythbusters experiment. Intestines and bodily fluids spew out, the whole carcass rocks, and a burst seam spills organs all over the ground. Back in 2014, marine biologist Andrew David Thaler provided the following account of what decomposing whale smells like—and it will haunt you all day:

The exploding whale phenomenon isn’t necessarily exclusive to whales—they’re just the biggest and most violent offenders. Decomposing bodies, whether they be whales or deer or humans, release gases because the bacteria that break down flesh produce a variety of them as they digest their dinner. Whales just seal it in better.

Their thick skin and blubber don’t allow the gases to diffuse out very well, and sometimes the expanding corpse seals up its own holes to compound the problem. Puncturing the side of the body allows the gases to leak out slowly, thus avoiding an explosion. Ironically, it’s probably human interaction with the bodies that causes them to explode in the first place. As people push on the bodies and try to move them, they can rip holes in the skin that act like stress points in a faulty structure. One spot of weakness makes the entire body more likely to explode at that site. And if it’s warm out—like it is in New Zealand right now—the gases expand, increasing the pressure.

Human corpses can also explode in warm weather, but generally not without some help. We have too many orifices and thin skin, which makes it easier for gas to escape. But plenty of people don’t want to decompose naturally outside—they want to be put into a casket. A sealed casket. With a rubber gasket designed to be impermeable. Do you see where this is going?

A rotting corpse inside a sealed gasket can explode, and according to funeral director Josh Slocum, it happens not infrequently. You just don’t hear about it, because anyone who runs a mausoleum knows that bereaved friends and family would rather not know. In a way, though, a sealed casket is kind of like the human equivalent of a whale carcass. But hey—at least we don’t smell like rotting bacon fat. It’s more like rotting meat with cheap perfume sprayed on top. Or maybe rotten eggs and feces. But not bacon fat.

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While many animals become less fertile as they age, only three species—humans, pilot whales, and killer whales—have females that regularly live well beyond their reproductive prime. These are the only species where we see grandmas acting like grandmas: they’ve long stopped producing offspring of their own, so they pivot to helping care for their children’s children.

When something is as rare as menopause, scientists start to ask why it ever happens. Previous research has suggested that something known as the “grandmother hypothesis” is at work. When grandmas do the whole grandma thing, their grandchildren are more likely to survive and thrive. It’s in their own best interest, genetically speaking, to live to a ripe, old, infertile age.

A study published Thursday in Current Biology takes this a step further: Yes, baby orcas with grandmothers are known to do better than those who only have a mother caring for them. But it might also be the case that killer whale calves that have to compete with their nieces and nephews for resources—in other words, the calves of older matriarchs who already have grown offspring and calves of their own—might not do very well.

Grandmas-long-past may have done a better job of passing their genetic material along when they stopped competing with their own daughters.

“It’s easy to think that an older female will pass on their genes better by continuing to give birth in late life,” study co-author Daniel Franks of the University of York said in a statement. “But our new work shows that if an old female killer whale reproduces her late-life offspring suffer from being out-competed by her grandchildren. This, together with her investment in helping her grandchildren, can explain the evolution of menopause.”

It would have gone something like this: at some point in the orca’s evolutionary history—probably relatively recently, since menopause is so rare even among their close relatives—resource competition meant that orcas who stopped reproducing earlier in life, through some biological quirk or another, actually had more surviving descendants than orcas who kept having babies until they died. Investing in grandchildren proved a better genetic strategy than constant baby-making, maybe because younger females are able to claim more food for their offspring than their mothers can, or simply because they have fewer children to worry over.

Over time, as these badass matriarchs spread their unique lack-of-fertility throughout the gene pool, this became the norm. Or something like that, anyway. Males have a shorter lifespan than females—they tend to die around the same age that female whales go through menopause, at which point the females live for decades more—so it’s likely that the evolution of menopause required some evolutionarily-driven lifespan lengthening, too. More grandmas means more healthy babies in a pod.

What’s fascinating about the new study is that it presents the evolution of menopause as a two way street—a tug-of-war between young females and old. It’s the result of heartwarming cooperation, yes, but also of family conflict. When females of two generations breed at the same time, according to the study, the older females’ calves are nearly twice as likely to die.

A 100-year-old orca known as “Granny”, now thought to be deceased, was indeed an exemplary grandmother: like all killer whale pods, Granny’s stayed together through the generations. Orca kids don’t move away; they just stick around and have more babies, breeding back and forth between different maternal lines in the group. By the time Granny vanished in late 2016, it had likely been half a century or more since she birthed her last calf. But her longtime grandmother status made Granny the de facto leader of her pod, and her care undoubtedly helped her descendants to survive the Pacific’s ever-dwindling supply of salmon.

The mystery of why, how, and when menopause evolved in whales isn’t yet solved, and humans are another matter entirely. But matriarchs like Granny can help biologists get closer to figuring it all out.

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We lost a lot of great people in 2016. We may also have lost one particularly great orca. The killer whale known as Granny, who may have been over a century old, is missing and presumed dead.

Granny was the matriarch of a tiny pod of orcas in the Puget Sound, just off the Northwest coast of Washington. Her official designation was “J2,” and she was spotted by researchers back in 1976. Because she was born before their study started—in fact, she was likely decades-old by that time—she’s one of the only whales that can be confidently aged as super-duper-old.

The estimation is based on the study of her family group. Because of the age of her apparent children, a 1987 study placed her birthday in 1911 (give or take about a decade). While it’s not unheard of for orcas to push 100 in the wild, most females die around age 50. In captivity, they often live only half as long as that. But Granny appears to have outlived all of her offspring, continuing to swim through the Pacific with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Granny has been spotted thousands of times in the past few decades, and in recent years was always spotted leading her pod. Orcas live in a matriarchal culture, where whales stay with their mothers even as they mature and reproduce. These family groups band together into pods with multiple mothers cooperating, but the oldest mom of the pod is almost always the leader.

Unlike humans, most animals don’t live long after their reproductive years end. After all, the point of life—from an evolutionary standpoint—is to make babies and raise them to self-sufficiency so they might make more. Granny likely hasn’t had a calf in close to half a century, but studies have found that menopausal killer whales use their knowledge and free-time to help ensure the survival of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A pod with an ancient matriarch leading the charge will have healthier, longer-living whales than one without.

But after decades of protecting her pod, Ken Balcomb of the Center for Whale Research wrote in a recent blog post, Granny seems to have vanished: he saw her at the head of her family group in October, but hasn’t spotted her since. Because the rest of her pod has been seen carrying on as usual—minus their matriarch—we should assume Granny’s incredibly long life has come to a close.

The J pod is one of three that make up the only clan of killer whales designated as endangered. There are now just 78 known individuals among the so-called southern residents. Just 24 whales will carry on Granny’s legacy in J-pod, and researchers worry that dwindling salmon—not to mention the loss of their menopausal matriarch—might spell trouble for the survivors.

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California Governor Jerry Brown just signed a law forbidding the breeding or captivity of orcas, also known as killer whales, in California. The signing of the bill makes California the first state to end breeding programs for captive Orcas.

The California Orca Protection Act, makes it illegal to “hold in captivity an orca, whether wild-caught or captive-bred, for any purpose, including, but not limited to, display, performance, or entertainment purposes” after June 1, 2017. After that date, they “may be used only for educational presentations.”

The legislation, introduced by California Assembly member Richard Bloom, also makes it illegal to:

• “Breed or impregnate any orca held in captivity in the state.”
• “Export, collect, or import the semen, other gametes, or embryos of an orca held in captivity for the purpose of artificial insemination.”
• “Export, transport, move, or sell an orca located in the state to another state or country unless otherwise authorized by federal law or if the transfer is to another facility within North America that meets standards comparable to those provided under the Animal Welfare Act.”

The bill would still allow for orcas to be rescued and rehabilitated, and orcas already in captivity that can’t be returned to the wild will be allowed to remain at places like SeaWorld, which has been under intense scrutiny since 2013, when the documentary Blackfish ignited public passions over its depiction of the treatment of orcas in SeaWorld facilities.

SeaWorld had already announced last year that it was planning on phasing out its orca show at SeaWorld San Diego by 2017. The plan is to replace the acrobatics of past shows with a more natural setting, which would presumably fall under the California law’s exception for orcas that may be held for “educational presentations.”

Under the new Act, an educational presentation “means a live, scheduled orca display in the presence of spectators that includes natural behaviors, enrichment, exercise activities, and a live narration and video content that provides science-based education to the public about orcas.”

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Everyone enjoys a good fish tale, bragging about the (usually entirely fictional) size of their catch. But bigger fish, whales and other large ocean mammals may be more likely to go extinct thanks to our predilection towards the next big catch.

In a paper published today in Science, researchers found that being big does not give an animal a better chance of survival in the modern ocean. Humans like catching or hunting the largest animals, harvesting them for food, resources, and trophies, putting populations under stress and upping their extinction risk.

“What our analysis shows is that for every factor of 10 increase in body mass, the odds of being threatened by extinction go up by a factor of 13 or so,” paleobiologist Jonathan Payne, lead author of the paper said. “The bigger you are, the more likely you are to be facing extinction.”

Payne and others analyzed 2,497 species of vertebrates and mollusks, both thriving and extinct over the past 445 million years. They focused on the last 66 million years, in particular–after the extinction of the dinosaurs, and compared past extinctions with extinctions happening today. They found that size was not a factor in past extinctions, and that previous extinctions related more closely to where animals in the ocean lived (near the coast, in deep waters, etc) than to how large they grew in those environments.

Species loss is accelerating both on land and sea, and a report issued last year found that the populations of the world’s oceans have been cut in half in the past 45 years. Population shrinkage isn’t the same as extinction, but with more and more animals disappearing from the oceans, it’s only a matter of time before more species start disappearing too, especially when faced with other threats like warming waters and ocean acidification.

But that doesn’t mean that things are hopeless.

“We can’t do much to quickly reverse the trends of ocean warming or ocean acidification, which are both real threats that must be addressed. But we can change treaties related to how we hunt and fish. Fish populations also have the potential to recover much more quickly than climate or ocean chemistry,” Payne said. “We can turn this situation around relatively quickly with appropriate management decisions at the national and international level.”

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On July 4th a momentous song was recorded that was so low in pitch that researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Cape Cod, Massachusetts had to speed up the track to listen.

It was the song of the fin whale, captured by a high-tech buoy 22 miles south of New York’s Fire Island. Then, again the buoy captured songs two days later, and now, at the end of July, there have been a total of eleven days of song, though the recording device was only placed in the ocean at the end of June.

It’s the work of the Wildlife Conservation Society‘s New York Aquarium and the Woods Hole team. The researchers plan to learn more about these gentle giants, along with the surrounding ecosystem in the New York blight, from Cape May, New Jersey to Montauk, New York. They specifically want to look into the sounds of the sea, monitoring our cetacean friends and the environment in which they live.

“By detecting whales in this area, we will get a much better understanding of how they are using the waters off New York and how to better protect them,” said Howard Rosenbaum, Director of WCS’s Ocean Giants Program and co-lead on this project, in a press release.

Fin whales, the only species to be heard so far, are common in the waters surrounding New York City, but they are endangered due to a long history of whaling, with an estimated 1,500 off of the east coast. They can grow to 70 feet long (calves can be 20 feet at birth), and they are the only mammal to have an asymmetrical color pattern, where their left jaw is black, while their right jawline is white.

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is making the data readily accessible online, without the actual records to listen to. So for your listening pleasure, hear this fin whale call, below.

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Since the 1940s, Japanese whalers have spoken of a rare whale variety, a smaller and darker version of the Baird’s beaked whale. They called the animal karasu, or raven, and said that you could only see them at the Namuro Strait between April and June.

While a group of Japanese scientists did some preliminary research into these stories of a legendary whale, a dead whale washed up on the beach of St. George Island, an Alaskan Island in the Bering Sea. The scientists that came across the corpse originally thought it was a Baird’s, but soon they started to realize that they couldn’t identify it, with its different dorsal fin and head shape, and darker coloration.

This morbid discovery was passed on to Phillip Morin of NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in California. Already on the trail of the legendary karasu, Morin and his team added these samples to their collection to compare. With their samples, also including skeletons from the Smithsonian Institution, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History and Unalaska High School in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, the team has released a study in the journal Marine Mammal Science that sets up the path to naming a new species.

“It’s just so exciting to think that in 2016 we’re still discovering things in our world—even mammals that are more than 20 feet long,” Morin said to National Geographic.

A new species?

While the whales still need to gain official recognition and naming via a formal review, the DNA sampling from the various samples — Morin and company sampled 178 different specimens — has found what seems to be a separate species. Though the karasu whale seems to live in a similar range as the Baird’s beaked whale, its DNA is much closer to that of the Arnoux’s beaked whale, which only resides in the South Pacific.

Not much is known about this possible new species of whale. There is no scientific research about the karasu in the wild. Other than in legend, none have been observed alive. They may have many similarities to other beaked whales, and scars left on the St. George’s corpse, which look like shark bites, could suggest that the species migrates to tropical, shark-rich waters.

Erich Hoyt, a coauthor on the new study and research fellow with Whale and Dolphin Conservation in the United Kingdom, believes that this possible discovery points to a need for greater conservation efforts for marine mammals.

“The implication of a new species of beaked whale is that we need to reconsider management of both species, to be sure they’re sufficiently protected, considering how rare the new one appears to be,” Hoyt said in a press release. “Discovering a new species of whale in 2016 is exciting but it also reveals how little we know and how much more work we have to do to truly understand these species.”

[via National Geographic]

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Bryde’s whales (named after the Norwegian merchant who built the first whaling stations in South Africa) reach a maximum length of over 54 feet.

That’s humongous, and should make it easy to observe them. The vastness of the ocean disagrees, and happily hides the whales in their vast tropical water range.

Until recently, Bryde’s whales had rarely been observed feeding in the wild. But a team of researchers, looking to test a waterproof drone’s observational skills on humpbacks, instead found a Bryde and calf feeding.

Look at that lunge!

Drones are providing a new way to watch whales. Drones captured whale snot, flying close enough and low enoguh without spooking the giant beasts to get it. And drones have filmed whales hunting sharks, teaching us more and more about their behaviors, from angles that were hard to get before. They’ve also filmed sharks eating whales.

The ocean is a vicious, deadly place, and one that’s never been easier to film.

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“The ship? Great God, where is the ship?,” wondered the fictional sailors crewing Captain Ahab’s mighty Pequod, right after the legendary whale Moby Dick rammed the vessel, tearing it asunder. The sudden, apocalyptic climax of Herman Melville’s iconic novel is rich with meaning, and nestled inside it is a deep, enduring scientific question: Could a sperm whale like Moby Dick actually ram a ship apart, and survive?

The answer, according to research from Olga Panagiotopoulou at the University of Queensland, is a resounding “probably.” Together with Panagiotis Spyridis, Hyab Mehari Abraha, David R. Carrier, and Todd C. Pataky, Panagiotopoulou authored the awesomely titled study “Architecture of the sperm whale forehead facilitates ramming combat.” Published this week in the open access journal, PeerJ, the paper argues “the connective tissue partitions in the junk reduce von Mises stresses across the skull and that the load-redistribution functionality of the former is insensitive to moderate variation in tissue material parameters, the thickness of the partitions, and variations in the location and angle of the applied load.”

Or, in plain English, sperm whale heads are built for ramming. And while ships may be the most poetic target for whales, the likely origin of a strong head ram goes back to something far less literary and more straightforwardly Darwinian: male competition.

Normally, ramming is easy to see in wild populations, as males compete for mates. While it’s been observed at least once in the wild, finding enough behavior to prove a consistent pattern is hard, because the sperm whale population is at most a fraction of what it once was. Part of the reason is that the population lives mostly in deep water, far from human observation. Another reason is that, in a couple centuries, human whaling culled the population from a possible peak of over 1 million sperm whales to roughly 100,000 today. A waxy substance called spermaceti found within the heads of sperm whales was used first as lamp oil and later as industrial lubricants, and their blubber was used for soap and margarine. It turns out a couple centuries of being hunted by humans makes it a little tricky for scientific observation by humans.

Instead, the researchers looked to other factors, like the differences in size between male and female sperm whales. The males are three times larger, which is usually characteristic of species that compete to have several mates. Adding weight to their hypothesis is that the biggest difference between sperm whale sexes is in head length, which suggests that large male heads are used for something unique–like fighting.

All well and good, but the head had to actually stand up to the physical stresses of ramming. So they simulated several models of rudimentary whale heads, with components representing bone, squishy spermaceti, and soft tissue partitions in the part of the whale head called the “junk”. After testing and analysis, the researchers found

It’s not just that Ahab was destined for a watery grave. It appears Moby Dick was built to send him there.

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Since most commercial whaling was halted in the 1980s, the deaths of whales have become more mysterious. With the exception of whale hunters (research or otherwise), usually people aren’t around to declare a whale’s time and cause of death. Some whale deaths, like the 337 whales stranded in Patagonia earlier this year are still a mystery. But sometimes, the true nature of a whale’s death is weirder than you could ever imagine.

In a study published earlier this month, researchers found that a pair of pilot whales off the coast of the Netherlands died after sole, a type of fish, got stuck in their blowholes, suffocating them.

The researchers think that the fish ended up in the blowholes as the whales were trying to eat the fish. Hakai Magazine notes that whales can dislocate their larynx in an attempt to regurgitate a problematic bit of food, which can allow the fish to pass more easily into the respiratory system. The researchers also think it’s possible that the fish might have been transferred to the blowhole from the digestive system when the whale sneezed or coughed. But the most dramatic notion is that the fish might have gotten stuck as it floundered around inside the whale trying to escape. Either way, instead of going down the wrong pipe, the fish went up.

Weird as it may be, death by sole is not completely unheard of. In the paper, the researchers mention that other cetaceans like porpoises have suffocated on the flat, flexible fish.

It’s a really sad story once you get past the absurdity. National Geographic reports that the whales probably lingered in unfamiliar territory to stay with an injured member of their pod. The pilot whales’ favored prey, squid, was unavailable in the North Sea, so the whales fed on the fish nearby, including their unfortunate last meal.

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Have you ever wondered how whales stay underwater for up to two hours without coming up for air? It’s because they use a highly stable protein called myoglobin, which stores oxygen for a long time, to power their muscles. Now researchers from Rice University are working with the protein in order to make synthetic blood for humans, according to a study published last week in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Because of a shortage of donated blood, and fears that it could be contaminated, scientists have been working on creating viable synthetic blood for 40 years. And though there are some versions of synthetic blood that are currently being tested in clinical trials, similar efforts in the past have proven fruitless. One of the reasons is that researchers have struggled to pack synthetic blood with the right proteins, such as hemoglobin, which carries oxygen in the blood; once removed from the red blood cells that carry it, hemoglobin often deteriorates too quickly.

Scientists at Rice University decided to investigate molecules similar to hemoglobin to find one that is more stable. One such protein is myoglobin–though it is also found in humans, myoglobin plays a much more important role for whales. When a whale takes a deep dive and waits to come up for air, myoglobin holds oxygen in its muscles so that it can be used when the whale needs it. Myoglobin is much better at holding oxygen than hemoglobin (which whales also have) because of the way that myoglobin is folded. The researchers were able to program E. coli bacteria to produce this protein in sufficient quantities to really experiment with it. Its hardiness and the ease with which scientists produce it show that myoglobin could be a good candidate to float in synthetic blood without the protection of red blood cells.

Myoglobin, of course, isn’t hemoglobin, and can’t work in human bodies the same way. But these discoveries with myoglobin are an important step in the right direction. “Myoglobin is the model system that we use to see if the methodology works, to see if the mechanisms are right, and now we can apply it to hemoglobin,” says John Olson, the paper’s senior author, in a video. If the researchers can find a stable version of hemoglobin that works as well as myoglobin, then they might be able to create synthetic blood that would work as well in patients as real human blood.

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In a settlement announced this week, the United States Navy agreed to limit activities around sensitive whale and dolphin habitats off the coast of Southern California and Hawaii.

The agreement ends two lawsuits brought against the Navy by conservation groups concerned that certain naval activities were harming marine mammals. In addition to whales and dolphins getting hit by ships or injured or killed while testing explosives, one of the major concerns of the conservation groups was the use of sonar used for navigation. Sonar uses sound waves which bounce off objects and create a map to help locate hidden objects in the water. Because sound travels extremely well underwater, these sonar pings from Navy ships can damage the hearing of whales and dolphins.

Dolphins and whales use sound to find their way through the ocean (known as echolocation) and also to communicate with each other. Their hearing is extraordinarily sensitive, and conservation groups have pushed for both governments and private companies to sharply curtail the use of loud noises like sonar and explosions in the water.

“If a whale or dolphin can’t hear, it can’t survive,” David Henkin, an attorney for Earthjustice who brought one of the lawsuits, said in a statement. “We challenged the Navy’s plan because it would have unnecessarily harmed whales, dolphins, and endangered marine mammals, with the Navy itself estimating that more than 2,000 animals would be killed or permanently injured. By agreeing to this settlement, the Navy acknowledges that it doesn’t need to train in every square inch of the ocean and that it can take reasonable steps to reduce the deadly toll of its activities.”

Though indiscriminate use of machine-made sonar can be harmful, there has been some success in harnessing the sonar of whales and dolphins to keep them away from fishing nets by attaching small devices to the nets that reflect back noise produced by whales, alerting them to the potentially deadly obstruction. The Navy itself actually has a fairly long history with marine mammals. Until recently dolphins were used regularly to search for undersea mines, however the program is being phased out over the next few years.

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Ahab would give up his peg leg for views like this. A team with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration used a drone to catch a better glimpse of migrating gray whales, capturing pictures of a mother and calf. The drone flyover was part of a long-standing research project in Baja California, Mexico, where scientists track the migrations of gray whales up north to the Arctic.

There is only so much one can tell about a whale seen through binoculars on land. The drone, a hexarotor spinning its six blades over and over, was able to film the whales from above, which let scientists look at their bodies and evaluate just how much blubber they had accumulated, and from that, what the survival odds are for mothers and calves. More blubber means better food and better chances, important information to have when making sure a once-endangered population is thriving.

Flying the drone at least 120 feet above the whales, the scientists got their pictures without disturbing the creatures. The drone carried an altimeter, so it would know at what precise height an image was taken, allowing comparison between photographs to account for different flight altitudes. There have been other studies of whales using drones (like this one centered around whale snot). Projects like that, and the research done by NOAA this spring shows drones can have a role to play in tracking marine populations.

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Don’t call it Ishmael; the remotely operated underwater vehicle is named Hercules. Used by the Nautilus Live expedition to explore the depths of the sea, Hercules is one of a pair of robots live-streaming the depths of the ocean. Yesterday, south of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico and at a depth of almost 2000 feet, Hercules (and anyone lucky enough to be watching the live stream at the time) caught something extraordinary on camera: a sperm whale.

Watch the rendezvous below:

Encounters between ROVs and sperm whales are incredibly rare, the Nautilus researchers note, particularly at such relatively shallow depths.

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When a whale dies in the ocean, its carcass sinks slowly to the seafloor, becoming a smorgasbord for many different kinds of marine creatures. One of the weirdest of these opportunistic scavengers is a group of worms known as Osedax, a genus of bone-eaters found in oceans all over the world.

Since they were first discovered in 2002 scientists have been constantly discovering new varieties of Osedax (also known as the zombie worm), including some that frequent the frigid waters of Antarctica and others that look like snot flowers.

But now, scientists uncovered evidence that Osedax have been around for a lot longer than originally thought–longer than whales and definitely longer than humans. In a new paper published this week in Biology Letters researchers found evidence that the worms were around to devour the bones of animals more than 100 million years old.

By using a CT scanner to scan fossils of a plesiosaur and sea turtle from that time period, scientists found boreholes that matched the patterns of modern Osedax worms, showing that similar creatures were around at the time the giant reptiles died.

“Our discovery shows that these bone-eating worms did not co-evolve with whales, but that they also devoured the skeletons of large marine reptiles that dominated oceans in the age of the dinosaurs,” co-author Nicholas Higgs said in a press release.

Higgs and lead author Silvia Danise think it’s possible that Osedax worms ate so many fossils that they prevented many skeletons from becoming fossilized, potentially omitting even large animals from the fossil record.

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A Virginia brewer soon plans to serve a beer made from yeast found hanging out on a 40-million-year-old whale fossil, the blog Symbiartic reports. Depending on your disposition, I imagine you’re reacting in one of two ways right now, “Yecchh!” or “Cool!”

The beer will be called Bone Dusters Paleo Ale (Hardy har har [Okay, actually, “paleo ale” is pretty good]). The yeast come from the surface of one of the oldest marine mammal fossils ever discovered in the western hemisphere. The idea for the beer came from Jason Osborne, who co-directs a nonprofit dedicated to advancing paleontology and geology. A paleo beer, Osborne thought, would be a great hook to interest non-scientists in fossils. I think many non-scientists are quite interested in fossils already, but I cannot argue against a paleo beer.

Will whale-fossil beer really taste that different from other brews? Perhaps not. The species of yeast Osborne and his brewing partners found on their fossil was the same species that commonly goes into beer, bread and even scientific studies. The yeast’s scientific name is Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The whale-fossil S. cerevisiae might have drifted over from another lab, if there was a yeast lab nearby. Scientists consider such yeast domesticated, like dogs and sheep are. Like pets and livestock, people have bred and worked such yeasts for thousands of years.

Wild Saccharomyces cerevisiae also exist, however. This 2005 study found that wild S. cerevisiae live in fruit and mushrooms and in liquid exuded from oak trees. Maybe the paleo ale’s yeast came from somewhere out there in the wild world. If so, it might be interesting. The study found that wild Saccharomyces cerevisiae have greater genetic variation than the yeasts that are associated with human breweries and human labs.

We cannot tell. Perhaps you can. Bone Dusters Paleo Ale will soon be served at the taproom of the Lost Rhino Brewing Company in Ashburn, Virginia, Symbiartic reports.

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Sometimes, whales end up where they shouldn’t. When a whale can’t be rescued and sent back to sea, it becomes at once a tragedy, an obstacle, and a potential health hazard. Craig Haims, an aquatic wildlife veterinarian with North Carolina State University, partnered with three marine mammal experts to figure out the best way to euthanize a whale.

Because whales are so large, determining the appropriate lethal injection dose is difficult. And because scavengers will eat the dead whale’s body, the wrong drug could kill the scavengers too, and then seep into the marine environment.

The solution: Euthanasia is delivered in two parts, each through custom-built needles. First, a nearly foot-long needle goes into the whale’s muscles to deliver a cocktail of painkillers and sedatives, which will calm the animal and minimize danger to the people administering the euthanasia. Once the whale is calmed, the team injects salt (in this case, potassium chloride) directly into the whale’s heart, using a needle over 3 feet long. The salt stops the heart, and because it is a salt, poses no risk to scavengers feasting upon the whale.

The findings were published in the Journal of Wildlife Diseases this month.

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There are a lot of ways to make a grilled cheese sandwich, but you probably make yours the same way your mom did. Or maybe you picked up a habit from your roommate, and how you slice diagonally instead of down the center. Whatever you do is not innate or instinctive, it’s learned–it’s a cultural tradition, however mundane. Apparently, humans (and other primates) are not alone in this. Whales have multiple cultural traditions, too.

Humpback whales mimic their fellows’ novel feeding strategies, passing them on to new generations, according to a new analysis. This may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s one of only a few examples of non-primates using this type of learning, called cultural transmission. Humpbacks are maintaining and sharing cultural traditions they have developed over time.

Whales are smart and social creatures, so there’s ongoing debate about their behavior and how it is similar or different than ours and our primate brethren.

“We can learn more about the forces that drive the evolution of culture by looking outside our own ancestral lineage and studying the occurrence of similar attributes in groups that have evolved in a radically different environment to ours, like the cetaceans,” said coauthor Will Hoppitt of Anglia Ruskin University.

Humpback Lobtailing Before Diving For Food

It’s hard to quantify behavior, however, in part because marine mammals are hard to study in their own habitats. To study their feeding habits, Jenny Allen of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and colleagues examined nearly three decades of whale call data from whale-watching boats, and watched the evolution of a new trend.

Humpbacks forage by blowing bubble nets around schools of fish and then lunging through them. But in 1980, someone saw a single humpback living in the Gulf of Maine modify this behavior to include using its tail. It was a new strategy developed after a primary food source, herring, became depleted. The whale struck the water with its fluke a few times, and then did the bubble-feeding method to feast on a different fish, called sand lances. This is now known as lobtail feeding, and in the next few years, researchers noticed more and more whales adopting it–by 2007, some 40 percent of the population was doing it.

Other cetaceans have adopted new feeding norms, too, notably Australian bottlenose dolphins. “Conching” is a method by which Indo-Pacific dolphins are trapping small fish in conch shells, bringing the shells to the surface, and then shaking them to dump the fish into their mouths. Scientists speculated that the animals learned it through cultural transmission, but this is hard to prove.

To study the humpbacks, Allen and colleagues used something called network-based diffusion analysis, a new technique used for studying influence in social sciences, to analyze how lobtail feeding spread through the whale population. The model assumes that if whales learn lobtail feeding from other whales, then whales that hang out with lobtail feeders are likely to adopt the habit. This kind of thinking is why your parents didn’t want you hanging out with kids who smoked cigarettes.

The models bear this out, the researchers say. Even accounting for factors like genetics and normal learning, lobtail feeding is a result of whales being influenced by their peers.

“Social transmission played a crucial role in the spread of lobtail feeding behavior, which has now persisted over 27 years and multiple generations,” they write. “Lobtail feeding can therefore be considered a tradition, and because humpback populations are known to also carry vocal traditions in the form of song, this population can be considered to carry multiple traditions.”

The paper is published this week in Science.

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If you think that time you biked from Philly to New York was an epic journey, this humpback whale would like a word with you. She swam from Brazil all the way to Madagascar, probably by way of the Southern Ocean–a distance of about 6,200 miles, the longest documented journey ever made by a mammal.

The whale in question, a female humpback (formally named “Whale 1363,” but which I have decided to name Forrest Gumpback in honor of her travelling spirit), was spotted just off the east coast of Brazil in 1999. The whale was identified by her unique markings on the underside of her tail, which according to Boston.com resemble a face (albeit a fairly abstract one). Forrest Gumpback was then photographed two years later off the east coast of Madagascar, in the Indian Ocean.

Though the journey occurred about ten years ago, it was only recently that the connection between the Brazilian sighting and the Malagasy (that being the demonym for Madagascar, apparently–thanks, Wikipedia) sighting was made. Unusual among marine mammals, humpback whales can be identified by these markings with a high degree of certainty, which makes them a popular species for study. Gale McCollough of the College of the Atlantic managed to catch Forrest Gumpback in slides from both expeditions.

The shortest distance between these two locations is some 6,100 miles, but it’s doubtful that Forrest Gumpback would take that route. Typically, humpback whales will travel south to the Southern Ocean to feed, then north to warmer waters to breed, so it’s much more likely that the whale traveled from Brazil down to the Southern Ocean and then back up the coast of Africa to Madagascar. That’s about 2,500 miles longer than any other documented humpback movement between breeding areas, and even more remarkable because female humpbacks are typically less adventurous than the males.

It’s not clear why Forrest Gumpback would have gone so far out of her way. The waters off the coasts of both Brazil and Madagascar are favorable breeding grounds, and there doesn’t seem to be any particular reason for the switch. Marine biologist Dr. Peter Stevick finds the exploration encouraging, as it “helps them to remain adaptable” to new environments.

Boston.com

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“It’s not as silly a question as you might think,” says Michael Moore, a marine-mammal research specialist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. “It would take some extraordinary circumstances, but any mammal can get rabies.”

Bats, coyotes, foxes and raccoons are the most common carriers of rabies but, being landlubbers, it’s highly improbable that any of them would have a chance to bite and infect a whale. One of those animals could, however, bite a seal that’s resting on a beach, and then that seal could swim off and bite a whale. Although there is absolutely no record of a rabid whale, and only one documented case of rabies in a seal—a ringed seal caught in 1980 in Svalbard, an archipelago off Norway—the scenario may soon be of greater concern. “Starting 10 years ago, coyotes began to prey on harp seals here on Cape Cod,” Moore says. “Because of that, I like for my staff to get vaccinated. There’s a very small chance that a seal will have rabies.”

Seals aren’t known to attack whales (it’s a size thing), but rabid animals behave erratically, so it could happen. Even if a rabid seal did bite a whale, it might take years for the whale to show symptoms. To become infected, the virus must travel along a nerve from the bite location to the central nervous system and brain. This is why a person bit in the face by a rabid fox will show symptoms earlier than if that person had been bitten in the foot. Rabies travels along nerves at a rate of 0.3 to 0.8 inches a day, so if a 50-foot-long whale was bit in the tail, it might take two to five years for the virus to reach the animal’s brain and manifest.

What signs should one look for to identify a rabid whale? “Well, the telltale foamy mouth would be very difficult to spot in the water,” says Gregory Bossart, the chief veterinary officer at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta. “But as with other animals, rabies would interfere with any activity that involves the central nervous system, so a whale might exhibit abnormal swimming patterns or lose the ability to swim altogether. It might also have trouble with echolocation.” Watch out, then, for zigzagging whales bumping into stuff. Another classic symptom of rabies infection is hydrophobia, which would be quite difficult for a whale to deal with. “Who knows?” Moore jokes. “Perhaps that’s why whales strand themselves on beaches.”

Try to stump us. Send your questions to fyi@popsci.com

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