A grey whale was spotted off Massachuset’s coast on March 1st, but the species is supposed to be extinct in the Atlantic for 300 years.
A grey whale has been seen in the south of Nantucket, an island in the Massachusets by Scientist Orla O’Brien and a colleague. They were doing an aerial survey and they were looking for right whales, fin whales and humpbacks but something else caught their eyes. Gray whales are easily distinguished from other species because they don’t have a dorsal fin and they have certain features on their skin and dorsal hump so the scientist knew that what they were looking at was not a right whale or any other typical whale you could see in the Atlantic. The experts were not believing what they were seeing “And the next time it came up and we got better photos of the head and the whole body. It was hard to believe,” said O’Brien in an interview with CBC Radio’s Shift. There have been five other sights in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean over the last 15 years. One of them was at the coast of Florida in December 2023, scientists believe that it could be the same one O’Brien saw Friday.
The disbelief came from the fact that grey whales have been extinct since the 17th century in the Atlantic Ocean. Normally, they live in the North Pacific, near Alaska. O’Brien said their extinction in the Atlantic was due to a natural decline as well as the increase in their hunting. New England Aquarium scientists think that climate change is responsible for the Atlantic and Mediterranean sightings. They say that the Northwest Passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific above Canada has been ice-free in recent summers which would allow whales to pass through. “This whale somehow crossed from Alaska, through the Arctic, into the Atlantic Ocean,” O’Brien remarks.
The last estimate of the grey whale population was in winter 2023/2024 and they guessed about 14 530 grey whales left on Earth. The whales are threatened by oil and gas development as well as fishing and collision with cargo ships. The whales may go back up in the Pacific or maybe other grey whales could follow the south migration.
