Greetings from my winter off-Cape worlds of northern Connecticut and New Hampshire. I’m beginning to get excited about returning to Provincetown Harbor for our soon-to-start fishing season. While I sharpen my hooks and repair the reels, I keep an ear cocked for news about our coastline and all its magnificent creatures.
Last week, a news release from the New England Aquarium got my attention, and I wondered if it got yours. Hard as this is to believe, the aquarium’s aerial survey team observed a gray whale right here off our coast. Gray whales have been considered extinct in the Atlantic Ocean for more than 200 years; they were hunted nearly to extinction in the 18th century, and there is no longer a breeding population here. We think of them as Pacific animals now.
Researchers were flying 30 miles south of Nantucket on March 3 when they observed an unusual whale on the surface. The whale kept diving and resurfacing, which told them it was feeding. The aerial survey plane stayed in the area taking photos so they could study in detail what they were seeing. When the images confirmed that it was indeed a gray whale, Orla O’Brien, an aquarium researcher who has been working on aerial surveys since 2011, said, “I didn’t want to say out loud what it was, because it seemed crazy.”
O’Brien showed the photos to research technician Kate Laemmle, who agreed it was a gray whale. “My brain was trying to process what I was seeing, because this animal was something that should not really exist in these waters,” Laemmle said in the aquarium’s account of the discovery. “We were laughing because of how wild and exciting this was, to see an animal that disappeared from the Atlantic hundreds of years ago.”
Gray whales are primarily found in the North Pacific now, but they are known for their long migrations from the waters north of Alaska in the Bering and Chukchi seas to southern California and Mexico, where they spend winters. They are easily differentiated from other whales, according to the aquarium, by their lack of a dorsal fin (they have a hump instead) and rough gray and white skin.
The appearance of this whale is not the first in our time, however. In the past 15 years, there have been five sightings of gray whales in the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. One was off the coast of Florida in December 2023; scientists think the whale just seen off Nantucket is the same one.
If you spend time on the water the way I do you must be asking yourself how these whales are getting here. Scientists believe that most likely they’re navigating the Northwest Passage, which connects the Atlantic and Pacific through the Arctic Ocean in Canada. That route has been uncharacteristically ice-free in recent summer months, the aquarium explained.
In other words, this is a climate change story, friends. For centuries, normal levels of sea ice have limited the migration range of gray whales. Heavy ice would typically block the Arctic route. But now, with the passage open, this is evidence whales can travel through it in the summer and from there expand their travels to other parts of the globe.
While it’s clearly been a thrill for scientists to see these animals reappear in waters where they were once abundant and then nearly eradicated, it’s an event that has to give us pause. I see it as one more example of the way the marine world just keeps turning upside-down and sideways.
The scientists offer one way of looking at it that’s a positive, at least potentially. Orla O’Brien, who spotted the whale from the air for the New England Aquarium, put it this way: “These sightings of gray whales in the Atlantic serve as a reminder of how quickly marine species respond to climate change, given the chance.”
