Gray whales alter their calling behavior to compensate for increasing levels of noise to improve their chances of being heard by other gray whales. Hearing each other is key to whale survival. NOAA scientists Marilyn Dahlheim and Manuel Castellote found that the number of times a gray whale calls is adjusted depending on the […]
Endangered humpback whales in nine of 14 newly identified distinct population segments have recovered enough that they don’t warrant listing under the Endangered Species Act, NOAA Fisheries said Tuesday. International conservation efforts to protect and conserve whales over the past 40 years proved successful for most populations. Four of the distinct population segments are […]
About 1,000 years ago, Norse explorer Leif Ericson bumped into the New World at Newfoundland. The old world was filling up, with 300,000 people living in the Roman capital of Constantinople. Up here in Alaska, the ancestors of today’s coastal Natives were quietly having one of the more successful runs in human history. The Thule […]
Every year, gray whales migrate from their summer feeding grounds in the Arctic to their wintering grounds off Baja California in Mexico. And roughly every other year, scientists with binoculars count them as they funnel past a point on the California coast a bit south of Monterey Bay. Scientists conduct this survey to keep track […]