Flying along the Massachusetts coast, researchers conducting aerial surveys spotted something they never expected: a gray whale diving and surfacing in a place the species has not been seen for more than two hundred years.
The March 1 discovery was so unlikely that at first, the scientists with the New England Aquarium assumed they were seeing one of the area’s critically endangered right whales, which they regularly monitor. But upon circling back for a closer look, photographs revealed the animal’s mottled gray color and distinctive narrow, triangular head shape.
“My head was spinning a little and I thought I knew what it was, but I wanted independent confirmation,” says Orla O’Brien, associate research scientist with the aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life. When O’Brien showed the images to colleague Kate Laemmle, she said, “’Oh my God, it’s a gray whale.” (Read about a gray whale that swam halfway across the world.)
“We started getting giddy and saying to each other, this is insane,” O’Brien recalls.
The gray whale seen on March 1 is likely the same animal recorded off Miami in December 2023.
The researchers’ astonishment is well founded; while gray whales were once plentiful in the Atlantic, they have been extinct since the late 1700s, wiped out largely by whaling. On the Pacific coast, whales bounced back due to legal protections, and the U.S. removed them from the endangered species list in 1994.
Though scientists have reported a handful of gray whale sightings outside of the Pacific in the past 15 years, most took place in the Mediterranean and off southern Africa.
The only other Atlantic Ocean sighting occurred in December 2023, when fishermen reported seeing a gray whale off Miami. Comparing photographs of that whale with the new one confirmed they’re the same animal, which appears healthy and well fed.
Almost immediately, questions began to arise. How did the whale—whose sex is still unknown—get there, so far off its natural migration route between Baja California and Alaska? And perhaps most importantly: Could this sighting herald the eventual return of gray whales to the Atlantic after their centuries-long absence?
Polar opposites
The answer to the first question is relatively easy: Melting Arctic ice allowed the gray whale to navigate through the Northwest Passage, which connects the Atlantic with the Pacific through Canada.
“They’re going all the way up to the Arctic to feed already, so they’re quite close to these newly ice-free areas that would allow them to pass through,” says Joshua Stewart, an assistant professor at Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute who wasn’t involved in the new discovery.
But this new ice-free landscape is ultimately not a boon for the whales, whose prey, mostly tiny crustaceans, are dying due to a series of effects from warmer waters. (Read how sea life is suffering in the thinning Arctic.)
Since 2019, this disappearance in prey has killed between 25 and 50 percent of gray whales living in the eastern Pacific, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. Many of those that survived are emaciated, and Stewart suggests “this one gray whale just happened to start looking for food in the other direction.”
Complicating matters, once the Arctic summer ends and gray whales—which can reach up to 40 tons—try to return home, they’ll find the passage iced up, with nowhere to go. That is what probably happened in the fall of 2023, forcing this now-famous gray whale south to the Florida area.
“I don’t see this as positive,” says Regina Guazzo, a researcher with the Whale Acoustic Reconnaissance Project at the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific in San Diego.
“Ice melting will impact the Arctic food chain that the whales depend on, and the additional freshwater could mess up the global ocean circulation patterns. This could have huge impacts on weather, temperature, and food supply.” (Learn how the Arctic is heating up.)
A long homecoming
As for whether the whales are recolonizing the Atlantic, “it’s almost definitely going to happen,” Stewart says. “But it’s going to take a lot of trial and error on the part of the whales.”
Not only do the whales need to find new food sources, but they must establish a breeding area and have a population large enough to reproduce, he says. (See an incredible photo of a gray whale swimming close to California beachgoers.)
“So we’re talking about stuff that happens on evolutionary time scales, hundreds or even thousands of years.”
To illustrate the problem, Stewart points to another group, western Pacific gray whales, which once migrated along Russia, Korea, Japan, and China, but were considered extinct by the 1970s. The discovery in the 1990s of a small population of the whales off Russia’s Sakhalin Island raised hopes for a rebound, but the intervening 35 years have seen little change, and the animals still number fewer than a hundred.
“It’s not something that we will witness with our eyes in real time,” Stewart says, “but it’s cool to see what may be the start of it.”
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