Celebrating World Whale Day with some whaley good science
Whale, whale, whale, it’s time to celebrate World Whale Day!
What better way to celebrate our ocean friends than with some whaley good science!
Let’s dive in.
Fin whales return to ancestral feeding grounds
Industrial whaling took its toll on many species of whales. For fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus quoyi) in the Southern Hemisphere, that toll was particularly harsh. Between 1904 and 1976, over 700,000 fin whales were slaughtered by industrial whaling, taking the population down to just 1-2% of the level it was before industrial whaling kicked off.
Credit: Aqqa Rosing-Asvid/Visit Greenland/Wikimedia (CC BY 2.0)
Unsurprisingly, even when catch quotas were set to zero and (ten years later) the moratorium on whaling came into force, fin whales didn’t return to areas where they were heavily persecuted, like those historically important feeding grounds off the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Survey after survey reported no whales…until the 2000’s that is.
More and more fin whales were spotted around the Antarctic Peninsular. Then, in 2018 and 2019, researchers found something truly amazing. Fin whales were forming aggregations back in their ancestral feeding grounds. The two largest aggregations were made up of 150 individuals. Captured on film, the footage of these giant aggregations is also, as Sir David Attenborough says in the BBC nature documentary Seven Worlds, One Planet, “the largest congregation of great whales ever filmed.”
Read the open access science 👇
Herr, H., Viquerat, S., Devas, F. et al. Return of large fin whale feeding aggregations to historical whaling grounds in the Southern Ocean. Sci Rep 12, 9458 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-13798-7
Humpback whale song trending eastwards in the South Pacific
Credit: Thomas Kelley (Unsplash Licence)
Everyone loves a good tune, even male humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae)! Within a population of whales, the males normally all sing the same song, which might evolve slowly over the years.
In the South Pacific, however, things happen a little differently. Males will often completely replace their songs with ones from a neighbouring population!
Research has shown new songs spread out east, first from Eastern Australia, into French Polynesia, and even as far as Ecuador!
“This finding,” researchers write, “extends the geographical bounds of the horizontal cultural transmission of Southern Hemisphere humpback whale song and demonstrates vocal connectivity among populations that are 14 000 km apart.”
Read the open access science 👇
Schulze Josephine N., Denkinger Judith, Oña Javier, Poole M. Michael and Garland Ellen C. 2022Humpback whale song revolutions continue to spread from the central into the eastern South PacificR. Soc. open sci.9220158220158 https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.220158