By Katy Galimberti, AccuWeather staff writer
April 16, 2018, 8:41:33 AM EDT
North Atlantic whales are facing extinction, experts say, after observing no sign of newborns in the past year.
As the ocean water temperatures have risen, depleting their food supply, the whales have been migrating to cooler waters where new hazards and “nutritional stress” are taking a toll on their population size, a March study out of Cornell University said.
Whales are now venturing farther north into cooler Canadian waters where food is more plentiful, but where boats and fishing gear have proved dangerous.
In this Wednesday March 28, 2018 photo, a North Atlantic right whale feeds on the surface of Cape Cod bay off the coast of Plymouth, Mass. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)
“The fishing gear has not been specially designed to break away when whales are entangled, and there are no acoustic monitoring programs in place to force ships to slow down when whales are present,” said Charles Greene, professor of oceanography at Cornell University.
Researchers said 17 right whales died last year, totaling more than 3.5 percent of the population. Right whales refer to three types of Eubalaena whales – the North Atlantic right whale, North Pacific right whale and the Southern right whale.
“Most of the dead whales that have been examined have exhibited evidence of the blunt trauma associated with ship strikes,” Greene said.
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Right whales eat Calanus finmarchicus, a species of copepods as their main form of nutrition. Scientists have tracked whale reproduction rates in correlation with the amount of available C. finmarchicus. Whale reproduction can vary greatly, Greene said, depending on the abundance of the copepods.
Recently, the researchers grew concerned with the spread of C. finmarchicus away from the Gulf of Maine as water temperatures rose, bringing the whales with them.
These northern waters are not safe for the whales, and the added “nutritional stress” has likely led to the decline in new calves.
“This elevated mortality in the population paints a bleak picture for this highly endangered species’ future,” he said.
Exposing the Big Game 
Reblogged this on The Extinction Chronicles.
Just think of what this planet will be like within another decade.
I try not to…
I shudder to think! But that doesn’t mean that those of us who want to save what’s left of the planet’s biodiversity aren’t going to go down swinging. 🙂
Both political parties are utterly clueless. Obama and Salazar came to Nantucket Sound with the intention of plunking in a 300+ turbine wind farm in the whale feeding grounds – as an example, there are only less than 500 of right whales in the entire world, I believe, and they come up with young. There have been no calves this year according to reports. That small area is of no use to the Federal government, and will never be safe from it until it is made a marine sanctuary.
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2018/04/15/researchers-work-to-free-whale-with-jaw-wrapped-in-fishing-line-for-years.html
I apologize for some of the idiotic comments on the Fox article, but the story doesn’t seem to be on anyone else’s radar except for a few local news stories.
And where are the environmental impact studies for offshore wind? Here’s an article from last May about how devastating noise from the installation and use of these things can harm marine life. It’s not just oil drilling that harms:
“When workers construct offshore wind turbines, they use a loud pile driver to anchor the windmill to the seabed. Water magnifies sounds, so underwater the pile driver’s noise can reach levels up to 220 decibels. Putting this number into perspective, 150 decibels of sound can burst human eardrums, and 185 to 200 decibels is the range usually considered to be the threshold for causing human death.”
Just imagine the constant noise from wind farm building and expansion, Navy sonar testing, oil drilling, etc. etc.
https://patch.com/rhode-island/newport/u-k-offshore-wind-turbines-blamed-killing-family-whales