Scientists worry that warming seas may be harming the endangered right whale

By Peter Brannen
30 April 2012 Provincetown, Mass. – Normally for a few days in spring, beachgoers on this hook of land stretching into Cape Cod Bay witness one of the rarest scenes in the animal kingdom: dozens of surface-skimming North Atlantic right whales, lumbering just a few hundred yards from shore. But that rite of spring was upended this year. The critically endangered animals, which usually arrive in late March or early April to graze on shrimplike plankton, began arriving before Christmas, as water temperatures hovered several degrees above normal, dispersing only recently. “It’s a confluence of remarkable things. We’ve got extraordinarily rare animals, nearly extinct, acting very unusually,” said Charles “Stormy” Mayo, director of the right whale habitat studies program at the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies. Before arriving early in Cape Cod waters, one of their main feeding grounds, right whales had a difficult winter off Florida and Georgia, where they gave birth to fewer calves. Scientists are reluctant to draw a straight line between warmer water and changes in whale behavior, but some feel that they’re seeing more than coincidences. Water temperatures in and around Cape Cod Bay were more than 3.5 degrees above average this winter, although scientists say this is probably a short-term anomaly that can’t be directly attributed to climate change. “To me or you 3.5 degrees isn’t a big difference, but in an ocean system it means different oceanography, different currents and different biological processes,” Mayo said. He suspects this could be driving changes in the distribution and timing of plankton blooms, in turn influencing the whales’ odd behavior. […] “It was a terrible year for right whale calves,” says Tony LaCasse, a spokesman for the New England Aquarium, a leader in right whale research. Female right whales venture as far south as Florida to give birth, and the past decade has witnessed an encouraging uptick in calving numbers, with a yearly average of 20 and a high of 39 born in 2009. But this winter, aerial survey teams in Florida and Georgia have counted only six new calves, including one that likely died, apparently from malnutrition. According to scientists, the disappointing numbers could be linked to changes in the animals’ northern feeding grounds brought on by water that is warmer but also less salty because of melting Arctic sea ice. Right whales, which can weigh as much as 70 tons, consume 2,200 to 5,500 pounds of tiny crustaceans, or copepods, a day. Females do not get pregnant if they are underfed, and with good reason: They can lose up to 30,000 pounds on the journey from Canada to their southern calving grounds, and once a mother gives birth, she must feed nursing calves, which can put on several hundred pounds a day. Time spent feeding can be crucial in ensuring an animal’s reproductive success. Amy Knowlton, a research scientist at the New England Aquarium, was part of a team that studied the animals in the Bay of Fundy in the summer of 2010. “The few right whales that were there were [moving quickly and] diving and showing up a half-mile away, suggesting that they were looking [for] but weren’t finding food,” she said. The whales normally make long dives and come up in generally the same area. Sperm whales were also observed swimming in the bay that summer, according to Knowlton, which was unusual. In more than 30 years of research in the bay, she said, sperm whales had been spotted only once, and for no longer than a day. In 2010, a large group was there for close to two months. The strange summer in the Bay of Fundy in 2010 was accompanied by warmer water; researchers think that the right whale’s favorite plankton, a type of copepod called Calanus, was not as plentiful, while the preferred prey of sperm whales, squid, flourished. These observations track with data from the late 1990s, when current shifts in the Bay of Fundy resulted in a huge drop-off in copepods and, subsequently, some of the worst calving years for right whales on record. […] The right whales that Knowlton has seen this spring in Cape Cod Bay show signs of malnourishment. “We saw a female looking extremely thin,” she said. “She’s a reproductive female who had a calf in 2010, and now she’s just not looking well. The animals aren’t looking as good as we might hope. Their condition and their nutritional fitness has declined.” […]