Published Mar 14, 2024 by Anna Canny Neilson is one of 75 co-authors on a new study, which finds that almost 7,000 North Pacific humpbacks went missing between 2012 and 2021 — a 20% drop-off from the peak population of more than 33,000. Researchers believe they starved to death during the record-setting marine heatwave known as “the blob.”
Naturalist Ted Cheeseman is the one who brought all the whale researchers together. He’s the founder of Happy Whale, a photo database that uses artificial intelligence to quickly identify individual whales by the unique black-and-white patterns on the underside of their tail fins, or flukes. With Happy Whale, Cheeseman set out to do a simple population count.
“But when we first saw these numbers, it turned a population study into a climate study,” Cheeseman said.
That’s because the database revealed a sharp decline in humpbacks that coincided with “the blob,” which spiked ocean temperatures from Alaska to California between 2014 and 2016, killing fish, seabirds and more than 30% of Alaska’s humpbacks.
Commercial whaling pushed humpbacks to the brink of extinction, but their populations in the North Pacific have boomed since it ended. Humpbacks were taken off the endangered species list in 2016. But around that same time, researcher Heidi Pearson was seeing the whales around Juneau get skinnier and skinnier.
Pearson, who researches at the University of Alaska Southeast, says these whales are usually more adaptable than other marine species. They can travel long distances to find food. And their diet is flexible.
“So the fact that they still declined due to what we think is lack of prey means that it must have been really bad,” she said.
She says she still believes in the resilience of humpbacks. But the study’s results make it clear that the species is feeling the pressure of warming driven by the burning of fossil fuels.
“The scale of problems that our world is facing today within the environmental realm — climate change being the biggest one — they’re only going to be solved by collaboration,” Pearson said. “No one can do it alone, in their one study site. “
|