Karen Weintraub

One of the few things known about the Nordmann’s greenshank is that it is one of the most endangered shorebirds on earth. No one had studied the bird in depth since 1976, and its nesting habitat remained a mystery.

But this summer, an American graduate student and Russian ornithologists spotted a pair of Nordmann’s greenshanks in a larch forest near a coastal bog in far eastern Russia. They shot video of one in a nest, measured and photographed four eggs and tagged seven adult birds, a few which have been spotted again as they migrated south across Asia.

“The moment of discovery — it was pure joy,” said Philipp Maleko, a graduate student at the University of Florida, who tracked the birds for nearly two months this summer, wading through the bog and forest to spot the nest. In addition to fighting off hordes of mosquitoes, the research team traveled with an armed guard to ward off bears and wolves.

Their research marked the first in-depth investigation in decades of the Nordmann’s greenshank (Tringa guttifer), a pigeon-size bird named for a 19th-century Finnish biologist and parasitologist.

The population of Nordmann’s greenshanks has been crashing in recent decades, as a result of hunting and wetland reclamation in coastal Asia. No more than 2,000 of the birds, also called the spotted greenshank, are believed to be left in the wild, said Jonathan Slaght, the Russia and Northeast Asia coordinator for the Wildlife Conservation Society, which helped lead the research effort.

The most endangered migratory shorebird is the spoon-billed sandpiper, Slaght said. In Southeast Asia, where both species spend their winters, hunters often kill the birds to sell for food. Local conservation groups have been paying a few hundred dollars each to the hunters so they can afford fishing nets and stop killing shorebirds. “They don’t want to be hunting birds, it’s just all they can do,” Slaght said.

This summer’s expedition captured the first video footage of Nordmann’s greenshanks and the first photos of an adult sitting on a nest. “I shared these images with some people in Southeast Asia and they couldn’t articulate their emotions,” Slaght said.

“It’s one of these mythical things,” he said, “that you know probably exists but no one’s ever seen.”

The Wildlife Conservation Society and the East Asian-Australasian Flyway Partnership sponsored the majority of this summer’s research.

Maleko, also a research assistant at the Florida Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, said he hopes the investigation serves as a pilot project for research aimed at supporting the species’ survival. There remains a lot to learn, including the bird’s migratory paths, its food sources and the threats it faces during migration, breeding and overwintering.

The team placed colored identification tags on the seven adults and eight chicks they caught — for about 20 minutes each — and three of the adults were later seen in early August in the mud flats of Shanghai, roughly 1,800 miles to the south. The birds are expected to travel another 1,800 miles to Thailand and Malaysia for the winter, and return to Russia next spring.

Maleko arrived in far southeastern Russia in mid-May and spent several weeks with two Russian colleagues tracking the birds along Shchastya Bay, a coastal lagoon in the southwestern corner of the Sea of Okhotsk. Around noon on June 17, Maleko, along with Konstantin Maslovksii, a Russian ornithologist, and their bear guard, Alexei Kalchenko, noticed a bird resting on a sandbar and found a nest nearby. The birds returned to the nest as soon as the men finished investigating and moved away.

Maleko said the greenshanks are “elegant and majestic birds,” catching fish with their giant bills and carefully guarding their chicks. “If I was a bird, I’d like to be a Nordmann’s greenshank for sure,” he said.

A native of Russia who grew up in California, Maleko said he had long wanted to conduct research in this region. He was also drawn to the Nordmann’s greenshank. “These imperiled birds called out to me,” he said.

“I don’t know what else I’d rather be doing,” he said, “than working with these birds and trying to save them in this dangerous time of ours.”

This article originally appeared in

(Trilobites)

A Rare Greenshank Is Spotted in Russia

Salvatore Cerchio stunned the small world of whale science in 2015 when he found examples of a new species in the wild for the first time. Now, he’s mapped the habitat of that species, called Omura’s whale after Hideo Omura, a prominent Japanese whale biologist.

The surprise in the new study, published in Frontiers in Marine Science, is that Omura’s whales, though little seen, are widespread across the tropical world.

Cerchio, a researcher with the New England Aquarium in Boston, found a population off the northwest coast of Madagascar, where he works, and compiled reports of sightings from Japan, Australia, Brazil and off the coasts of Indonesia, among others. In total, from photographs, audio recordings, museums and documents, he identified 161 accounts of Omura’s whales in 95 locales.

Scientists said the finding is a reminder of how little we actually know about what goes on in the world’s oceans.

“To me, this is a beautiful example of how much we didn’t know and how much we can know,” said Christopher W. Clark, a retired senior scientist at Cornell University, who was not involved in the research.

Technological innovation in recording devices, advances in genetic analysis — and simply knowing what to look for — seem to have led to the new insights.

Clark, an expert in whale acoustics, said that for decades researchers simply dropped the equivalent of a cassette recorder off the side of a boat, recorded for as long as the tape lasted and then pulled it back up. Today’s more sophisticated devices allow researchers to position recorders at the bottom of the sea for six to 12 months at a time. The devices also can detect a wider range of tones, enabling them to hear the low notes of Omura’s whales for the first time.

Clark said he plans to go back into his own recordings to search for the animal’s signature sounds.

“I know there are places that I’ve recorded Omura’s whales in the last nine months,” he said.

They sing at such a low frequency, Cerchio said, that when he was diving in their habitat, he felt rather than heard their distinct, rhythmic patterns of song, and typically had to speed up the recordings to actually hear them.

Cerchio said many whale experts and amateurs thought they had seen Bryde’s whales, a slightly larger species of baleen whale, when they were really watching Omura’s whales. It’s like the difference between coyotes and wolves, if you didn’t know they were two species, he said.

Japanese researchers first identified Omura’s whales in 2003, based on a 1998 stranding in Japan and tissue from eight animals killed during Japanese scientific whaling operations in the 1970s. The Omura’s whales have relatively small bodies, distinct genetics and unusually shaped skulls, leading researchers to conclude that the new species had split off from its genetic cousins 17 million years earlier.

Omura’s whales are baleen whales, meaning they are filter feeders, and they can be identified by their asymmetric coloration. The right side of their jaws are white, with a swirling, smoky splash of light coloration and four bisecting dark stripes on the right side of their heads, and their backs are decorated with asymmetrical chevrons. They favor tropical environments more than than most whales and don’t migrate, Cerchio said.

After publishing his 2015 paper, in which he described more than 40 whales seen in the wild and expanded their range beyond the Indo-Pacific, Cerchio said people sent him pictures of similar-looking whales.

“Little by little it became clear that there were a lot more out there that could be researched and tallied,” he said.

At the urging of Bob Brownell, the paper’s senior author, Cerchio counted images he received, those he’d stumbled across on the internet, as well as sound recordings and historical sightings dating to a 1955 magazine article from Hong Kong University that misidentified an Omura’s whale as an immature fin whale.

Bob Pitman, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who was not involved in this research, said he was surprised to learn the scope of the species’ habitat.

“I think most of us whale scientists expected that it would have a small, relatively localized population,” he wrote.

As Pitman noted, “if new whales are still being described, it means we are probably also losing species of animals that we never even knew existed.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/science/omuras-whales-habitat.html" id="1208e443-b68c-39af-a258-f6ed0c6b4b64">The New York Times</a>.

An Elusive Whale Is Found All Around the World

We tend to appreciate penguins for their cuteness. But to the natural world, it’s their poop that matters.

According to research, published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, penguin and elephant seal excrement fosters biodiversity across Antarctica.

Despite the cold, dry weather, the nitrogen in the animals’ waste provides nutrients that are otherwise unavailable in this stark setting, said Stef Bokhorst, the paper’s lead author and a polar ecologist with the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

“If you put more poo in the system, the Antarctic wildlife like that,” he said.

Because it’s so consistently cold, Antarctica is challenging to study, and it’s been difficult to predict patterns of biodiversity. But Bokhorst and his colleagues managed to find a direct connection between areas of biodiversity — filled with lichens, mosses, microscopic animals and small creatures — and the nitrogen left behind when penguins and elephant seals defecate.

The larger the penguin colony, the further its footprint spread, the study showed.

The team looked at nitrogen because its various isotopes made it relatively easy to trace it from the sea to mosses and lichen that grow on land, and to the animals that feed on them. The penguins and elephant seals were the conduits ferrying that nitrogen from water to land, the study showed.

“We know that nutrient content of your food has a big impact on abundance and diversity of consumers, but for whatever reasons, no one’s looked at that in such a cold place as the Antarctic,” Bokhorst said.

The continent, he said, is the “ideal experimental lab,” for studying how nutrients relate to an ecosystem’s biodiversity because its food web is relatively simple. In a more habitable place, there are so many interacting factors that it’s often difficult to figure out what’s driving what — whether predation or more nutrients are leading to changes, for instance, Bokhorst said. In the new study, it was not hard to trace the path of the nitrogen from penguin and elephant seal to lichen and moss and then to mites and worms.

Bokhorst is now studying invasive species in the Arctic and Antarctic, mostly spread, he said, by the boots of tourists hoping to catch a glimpse of penguins. Waste from penguin colonies then nourishes those invasive species, which consist mostly of grasses. “These animals could be like invasion engineers,” allowing the grasses to spread further, Bokhorst said.

One bit of good news from his research: Although Bokhorst and his colleagues have looked for more than 15 years, they have yet to see any negative effects from climate change in the areas they’ve studied. Penguins may shift their feeding grounds to keep up with the food supply, but “the vegetation seems to be able to cope with a couple of degrees of warming,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/science/penguin-poop-antarctica.html" id="c65625d7-39f3-36e4-a490-f3b4f078e312">The New York Times</a>.

Seeking Life in Antarctica? Look for the Penguins' Outhouse

All serious butterfly collectors remember their first gynandromorph: a butterfly with a color and pattern that are distinctly male on one wing and female on the other.

Seeing one sparks wonder and curiosity. For biologist Nipam H. Patel, the sighting offered a possible answer to a question he had been pondering for years: During embryonic and larval development, how do cells know where to stop and where to go?

He was sure that the delicate black outlines between male and female regions appearing on one wing — but not the other — identified a key facet of animal development.

“It immediately struck me that this was telling me something interesting about how the wing was being made,” said Patel, a biologist who now heads the Marine Biological Laboratory, a research institute in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, affiliated with the University of Chicago.

The patterning on the gynandromorph’s wing shows that the body uses signaling centers to control where cells go during development and what tissues they become in creatures as diverse as butterflies and people, Patel said.

Gynandromorph butterflies and other half-male, half-female creatures, particularly birds, have fascinated both scientists and amateurs for centuries. The latest sensation was a half-red, half-taupe cardinal that became a regular visitor in the backyard of Shirley and Jeffrey Caldwell in Erie, Pennsylvania. Although the bird would have to be tested to confirm that it is a gynandromorph, its color division strongly suggests that it is, scientists say.

Split-sex creatures are not as unusual as they may seem when one discovery goes viral, as the cardinal’s did. It extends beyond birds and butterflies to other insects and crustaceans, like lobsters and crabs.

Scientists say these instances of split-sex animals and insects could offer clues to why some human diseases strike one sex more than the other.

Researchers thought they had figured out the genetics of birds and bees, but gynandromorphs suggest that there is more to learn, said Jennifer Marshall Graves, a distinguished professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

Mammals have X and Y chromosomes, birds and insects have Z and W, and some reptiles can change their sex depending on temperature, or a combination of temperature and sex chromosomes, she said.

It was believed that the sex of a bird was determined by a protein made by the DMRT1 gene, which would reach all the cells of the bird through the bloodstream, Graves said. But for two sides of the bird to share the same bloodstream but not the same sex, there must be more to the story.

Hormones cannot be the sole drivers of sex either, but they most likely play some role, said Arthur Arnold, a distinguished research professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. In a paper published in 2003 in PNAS, Arnold showed that in gynandromorphic zebra finches, brain cells on the female side were more masculine than comparable cells in a typical female.

How gynandromorphs are born at all still remains a mystery. For birds, the most likely explanation is that a female makes an unusual double-nucleus egg cell, one with a Z chromosome and one with a W chromosome, and each is fertilized by a Z sperm, making some cells ZZ and others ZW in the same individual, Arnold said.

“Although this happens regularly, it’s very rare,” he added. Gene editing is tricky in birds, so it has not been possible to experimentally induce this phenomenon in birds, so it’s not well understood, he said.

The same process is very unlikely to happen in mammals, he said. Female mammals naturally have two of the same sex chromosomes, and the instant a mammalian egg and sperm fuse, “dramatic changes prevent the entry of a second sperm.”

Gynandromorphs occur naturally, usually resulting from a random genetic error, Patel said. The phenomenon can be inherited — with some flies and moths passing unstable sex chromosomes down to their offspring, he said. But it is also possible that stress can cause the unusual sex split.

It is impossible to track an entire population to understand what percentage have unusual sex chromosomes, Patel said. In the lab, scientists have used radiation to create gynandromorph flies, he said, but it is difficult to sort out the potential causes — including environmental harm — in a wild population.

Why cells of opposite sex end up on opposite sides of these gynandromorphs remains unclear, Arnold said. “I don’t have a good explanation,” he said.

Although many of the birds studied have been roughly 50 percent male on one side and 50 percent female on the other, a 2010 study in chickens showed that the cells were not that evenly distributed.

Animals can also develop as mosaics, with some cells genetically different from others. Some of Patel’s butterflies, for instance, show male coloration and patterns on parts of a wing, rather than the entire side.

Arnold said his own research on sex genes has implications for treating a variety of human diseases that seem to vary by gender. His UCLA collaborator, Rhonda Voskuhl, has found, for instance, that in multiple sclerosis, a genetically female mouse with two X chromosomes fares worse than a mouse with an X and a Y, even if they have the same hormones. Understanding why females fare worse could help explain and treat MS in people, where there is also a gender difference, with women accounting for three times as many cases as men.

Obesity, metabolic syndrome, autoimmune disease, Alzheimer’s, even aging differs by sex, Arnold noted. Twenty years ago, he said, scientists did not think that sex chromosomes played any role in causing sex differences in these diseases. “But now we know it makes a difference in mice, so we can say: Where does it make a difference in humans?” he said.

A better understanding of the role of sex in disease would eventually enable better treatments, he said. “That’s the kind of hope — that sex differences are not only important to understanding diseases in men and women, but also to developing a more fundamental understanding of the disease processes, so that you can manipulate them,” Arnold said.

In most cases, losing a chromosome or having an extra one is lethal, said Jeannie Lee, a geneticist and expert on the X chromosome at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.

Most people have 46 chromosomes, with 23 inherited from each parent. A few chromosomes can come with an extra copy, including chromosomes 13, 18 and 21 — which is commonly called Down syndrome. Losing any chromosome other than a second sex chromosome is always lethal to a fetus.

But the sex chromosome is the only one that people can survive with just one copy, Graves said. “Girls with a single X and no Y suffer few anomalies because the second X is largely inactive anyway. After all, males have only one X,” she said.

People with anomalous numbers of sex chromosomes, such as those with Turner Syndrome, have a range of problems from virtually no issues to infertility, heart problems and cognitive impairment. About 1 in 2,500 girls is born with Turner Syndrome. It is also possible for people to be intersex, born with reproductive or sexual anatomy that does not fit the typical definitions of female or male, which may but does not have to involve sex chromosomes, according to the Intersex Society of North America, an advocacy group.

It is not clear what mechanisms the body has to ensure that most men get only one Y and most women get two X chromosomes, said Karissa Sanbonmatsu, a structural biologist and principal investigator at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. In typical females, one X is usually — but not always — turned off, she said, and some research suggests that there is a mechanism that counts how many X chromosomes are present and generally turns off all but one of them.

The interplay between genetics and hormones is complicated, she said. “Genetics produce hormones, but then the hormones can reprogram DNA,” she said, which might explain why there is a mismatch in some people between their sex chromosomes and their sex hormones. “That’s very speculative,” Sanbonmatsu said, adding, “It’s hard to get funding to do this kind of research.”

People with androgen insensitivity syndrome, for instance, are born with XY chromosomes, but develop as female, because their cells cannot process male hormones. “So, it’s as if the testosterone doesn’t exist,” she said. They are infertile.

The more science learns about sex, “the more we find anomalies,” said Alice Dreger, a historian of sexuality.

“Nature’s dealing with conformity all the time in brutal ways and loving ways and all the rest of it,” Dreger said. “It doesn’t follow the human fantasy of everybody having to be normal. And humans don’t follow that ridiculous idea either.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/science/split-sex-gynandromorph.html" id="e272e055-ec28-3ed3-a891-2ef98bc6722d">The New York Times</a>.

Split-Sex Animals Are Unusual, Yes, but Not as Rare as You'd Think

(Science Times)

Cuvier’s beaked whales are among the most mysterious and adept mammals on Earth.

They can dive deeper and hold their breath longer than any other marine mammal. But biologists still know very little about them, because they only surface for a few minutes between most dives, taxing the patience of whale experts, as well as the ability of electronic tags to upload information, before the whales plunge again into the depths.

“When you’re looking for an animal that can hold its breath for the duration of a feature-length movie, it’s a matter of odds and time on the water,” says Greg Schorr, a researcher with the nonprofit conservation and tag development company Marine Ecology and Telemetry Research.

A new study, published Wednesday in Royal Society Open Science, is the first to look at a population of these whales that lives off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. Researchers tagged 11 Cuvier’s beaked whales for an average of a month, tracking the length and depths of their dives.

The whales dove almost continuously. They took deep dives of about a mile, swimming a half-hour down and the same back up. These were followed by several shallower dives of about 918 feet — nearly two-tenths of a mile — lasting from 15 to 20 minutes, the study found. (The deepest scuba dive on record was 1,090 feet in 2014.) The whales would spend an average of just over two minutes at the surface, before plunging again.

At night, they sometimes spent longer intervals near the surface, perhaps because they were less concerned about being spotted by predators, said Jeanne Shearer, the paper’s lead author and a doctoral student at the Duke University Marine Lab. Killer whales and large sharks are the only creatures large enough to eat the Cuvier’s, which range in length from a midsized car to a good-sized van.

Although diving capacity usually increases with size, Cuvier’s beaked whales dive longer and deeper than larger whales, and are about half the size of sperm whales, which are the second best deep-divers, Shearer said.

It’s not entirely clear how they manage to dive so deep, she said. Her team tracked a few dives of over 1.7 miles, and the longest dive ever recorded, by Schorr in a 2014 study, was just under 1.9 miles. Shearer thinks the animals are capable of going deeper — possibly to nearly 2.5 miles, but tracking devices don’t work below about 2 miles.

Diane Claridge, executive director of the Bahamas Marine Mammal Research Organisation said recent research suggests that at least part of the answer may lie in the Cuvier’s muscles. “Basically, they’re made of this muscle that can store lots of oxygen,” Claridge said. The whales have little fat, especially around their midsections, which allows them to store more nitrogen, enabling deep dives.

“They’re built differently to many of the other cetaceans and even deep-diving cetaceans,” Claridge said. “It’s just unbelievable what they’re capable of doing.”

But the whales are extremely vulnerable to military sonar, which is how they first came to widespread public attention, back in the 1990s when several mass strandings were reported. Last summer about 60 animals were washed up on the coast of Scotland, Ireland and Iceland, although it’s not clear what caused the deaths.

Schorr has been tracking a population of Cuvier’s off the coast of Southern California for 13 years. Longer-term data will be needed to determine the whales’ life spans, how long it takes them to reach maturity and the structure of their populations.

To learn more about these elusive whales below the surface, the scientists said new tools are needed to examine how their heart rates and gas exchange changes as they dive toward the ocean floor looking for squid and fish to eat.

Current tags, attached with barbed darts, can stay on for up to about a month recording depth and timing of dives. They allowed the Duke researchers to record nearly 6,000 dives in the new study.

In another recent study about Cuvier’s published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, researchers connected the whales’ foraging behavior with the amount of prey available near Navy sonar testing grounds off the Southern California coast. Using an underwater robot with “echosounders,” the researchers found that the amount of squid available varied substantially across small distances.

The Navy has created some areas for beaked whales to shelter during sonar tests, but the study found that there were 10 times more squid in the Navy’s test area than in those shelter areas. Avoiding the test areas would force the whales to make many more dives a day to get enough food, the study found.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/science/beaked-whales-dive.html" id="0a1c8eea-5098-367a-a2ef-ee88605b9edd">The New York Times</a>.

Beaked Whales Are the Deepest Divers

In a rare bit of good news for North Atlantic right whales, a third newborn calf was spotted Thursday, and the breeding season isn’t half over.

Last year, no new animals were born in a population that spends its calving season along the southeastern coastline of the United States. Their numbers have declined to 411, according to a soon-to-be-released count for 2018.

“It’s a pause in the bad news,” said Philip Hamilton, who maintains the catalog of North Atlantic right whales at the New England Aquarium in Boston. “We don’t know how long the pause will be.”

Ideally, he said, he’d like to see 15 to 20 newborns before the calving season ends March 31, although he admits that seems unlikely.

The latest new mother — known as 1204 — has proved to be a super-breeder. The newborn is her ninth calf, tying her with just two other females in this population. All of 1204’s other calves came regularly, three years apart; this is the first calf she’s been seen swimming with in six years, Hamilton said.

That extra time is very concerning to researchers like Hamilton, who has studied the animals for more than three decades. Historically, gestation lasts between 12 to 14 months, and right whale mothers take roughly three years to recover from birthing a calf and nursing it for about a year. But in 2017, a year in which five calves were born, the average time for females between calves was a full decade.

That slower rate of reproduction has become worrisome, since the declining population only includes 90 to 100 females of reproductive age. It is unknown how long right whales can live, but the females do not undergo menopause and so are believed to be able to give birth well into their 60s and 70s.

This year’s other two new mothers last birthed calves three and 10 years ago, said Hamilton, a research scientist with the aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life.

The North Atlantic right whales, one of three right whale populations in the world, are also faring a bit better after a disastrous year in 2017, in which 17 animals were killed by ship strikes or entanglements in fishing gear — five in the United States and 12 in Canada. It was so out of the ordinary that the federal government declared an Unusual Mortality Event.

In response to the deaths, ships in Canadian waters have slowed and shifted their routes, but fishing gear remains a problem, Hamilton said. In 2018, three right whales died in the United States and none in Canada, through mid-October, according to federal data.

Changes in feeding patterns because of warming waters may also be affecting their fertility, Hamilton said. In the last eight years, the whales have been feeding much more in Cape Cod Bay, and less in some other habitats.

“They’re having to search new places to feed,” Hamilton said. “The increased calving interval suggests many are not getting as much food as they need in order to support a calf,” which can cost a mother one-third of her body weight.

To track North Atlantic right whale births, two teams fly over the Atlantic coastline from Savannah, Georgia, to Jacksonville, Florida, every clear-weather day from December through March.

A few weeks ago, looking out of the home they share on the coast, a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission worker noticed the first mother of the season swimming with her calf, said Jennifer Jakush, a biological scientist with the commission’s North Atlantic Right Whale Project. That was whale 3317 and she had last given birth three years ago, suggesting that at least some female whales are getting the nutrition they need, Jakush said. “That in and of itself is a good sign,” she added.

The calf born to 1204 was spotted by aircraft during its regular survey, near Amelia Island, north of Jacksonville, Jakush said. The mother hadn’t been seen earlier this season, so it’s not clear how old her calf is yet.

Calves measure about 13 to 15 feet at birth, Jakush said — roughly the size of a sedan compared to their school-bus-sized mother — and put on about 100 pounds a day early in life. Mother and baby usually spend a few weeks to a few months in the warmer waters off Florida and Georgia before heading back up to New England and points north, she said.

Calves usually stay with their mothers for nine to 12 months, at which point they’re capable of feeding and fending for themselves, Jakush said.

“Every new calf is helping the population as a whole grow and make this recovery back from almost being removed from the planet — every new calf is a contribution away from that, so we all get very excited about that,” Jakush said.

Hamilton emphasized the dangers to right whales, particularly from shipping gear. But he doesn’t want to send a message that this population is doomed, he said, noting the return to births and the decline in accidental deaths.

He said he feels “the seedling of optimism.” But that optimism “needs to be watered and cared for.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/science/right-whales-calves-endangered-species.html" id="c896ec02-fe7f-3835-a3df-c89353a192e8">The New York Times</a>.

3 Newborn Endangered Right Whales Seen After Year With No Births

Sometimes a whale just wants to change its tune.

That’s one of the things researchers have learned recently by eavesdropping on whales in several parts of the world and listening for changes in their pattern and pitch. Together, the new studies suggest that whales are not just whistling in the water, but constantly evolving a form of communication that we are only beginning to understand.

Most whales and dolphins vocalize, but dolphins and toothed whales mostly make clicking and whistling sounds. Humpbacks, and possibly bowheads, sing complex songs with repeated patterns, said Michael Noad, an associate professor in the Cetacean Ecology and Acoustics Laboratory at the University of Queensland in Australia.

Birds may broadcast their social hierarchy among song-sharing populations by allowing the dominant bird to pick the playlist and patterns. But how and why whales pass song fragments across hundreds of miles, and to thousands of animals, is far more mysterious.

The biggest question is why whales sing at all.

“The thing that always gets me out of bed in the morning is the function of the song,” Noad said. “I find humpback song fascinating from the point of view of how it’s evolved.”

The leading hypothesis is that male humpbacks — only the males sing — are trying to attract females. But they may also switch tunes when another male is nearby, apparently to assess a rival’s size and fitness, said Noad, who was the senior author of one of four new papers on whale songs.

Why the humpbacks’ musical patterns tend to be more complex than those of other whales is also a bit murky. Noad suggested that the development may be the result of “runaway selection.”

Early humpbacks with complex songs were so much more successful at mating that they gained a substantial evolutionary advantage over their brethren with simpler vocalizations. This led to some very large, sometimes very noisy animals.

Julien Bonnel, an associate scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, said the growing research also shows the importance of collecting data over many years, offering insights not only into whales but ocean conditions that affect other species.

The technology for recording whales has gotten much cheaper over the last dozen years or so, making it more accessible to researchers. And computer programs that analyze huge data sets quickly have helped interpret years of these recordings.

Tagging whales without hurting them has produced more data, Noad noted, but the tags remain on the whale only for a few hours, limiting the information that can be collected.

In one of the new studies, led by scientists at the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, researchers tracked humpbacks singing along the east and west coasts of Africa, comparing songs sung by those off the coast of Gabon to those near Madagascar.

The study, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, confirmed that the two populations interact, noting overlap in their vocalizations. The researchers recorded songs annually from 2001 to 2005 using hand-held hydrophones aboard boats.

“Male humpback whales within a population tend to sing the same song type, but it’s continuously changing and evolving over time,” said Melinda Rekdahl, the study’s first author and a marine conservation scientist with the wildlife society. “It’s thought to be one of the best examples of cultural evolution in the animal kingdom.”

Rekdahl wasn’t on the boat that collected the sound for her new study, but she knows firsthand that “it can be an amazing experience,” she said.

The sound of a nearby singer resonates through the hull of the boat. “If the singer is that close, you can hear the song getting fainter just before the whale surfaces nearby,” she recalled.

“If the singers aren’t that close,” she added, “you can often sit there for hours recording and hearing the song through your headphones but not see a whale anywhere.”

Rekdahl based her new study on data collected between 2001 and 2005, because she thought those recordings offered the best opportunity to compare song similarities between neighboring populations.

The idea of using songs to look at population mixing and connectivity is relatively new, she said, and has been proven valuable only in the past few years.

Some animals repeat sounds more than others, some sing “aberrant” tunes, and juveniles may hum jingles altogether different from the adults. Humpbacks also alter their tunes over time.

One reason might be novelty — for themselves or nearby females. “If I was swimming up with 15,000 whales and all the males were singing the same song, it would drive me crazy,” Rekdahl said. Maybe the “females are just, like, give me a new song!”

Two additional recent studies examined how the songs change, seasonally and across years.

In one paper, Jenny Allen, who was a doctoral student with Noad, found an unexpected pattern among humpbacks. Once their songs reach a certain level of complexity, humpbacks drop that tune entirely and pick up a new, simpler one. Her study, the first to quantify the complexity of the songs, was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

“That clear oscillating pattern was something we didn’t really expect,” said Allen, now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Queensland and a lecturer at Griffith University in Australia.

Assuming that the songs are meant to attract females, “it might be that a brand-new song is a bit sexier than continuing to sing the complicated version of the old song,” she said. But because it’s hard to memorize a whole new song, “they’re simplifying it to make it easy to learn so much new material all at once.”

Humpback songs have a lot of repeating patterns, which might make them easier to remember, just as rhymes at the end of poetry lines aid memorization, Allen said. She also found a lot of predictability in the patterns, and compared them to pop songs based on the same four chords.

In another new paper, researchers at the University of Brest in France found that the pitch of Antarctic blue whale, pygmy blue whale and fin whale vocalizations fell from 2007 to 2016 at various recording sites in the southern Indian Ocean.

Because of a whale’s anatomy, a louder call is higher in pitch, and a quieter one is lower. Essentially, the whales have gotten slightly quieter, said Emmanuelle Leroy, now a research fellow at the University of New South Wales and an author of the new research.

“Blue whales are mostly solitary, so to communicate across large distance, they need to produce really low-frequency and high-intensity calls,” she said. “The calls are really loud and will propagate over a few hundreds of kilometers.”

Her team has two hypotheses to explain the drop in pitch across years. With the populations rebounding since the end of commercial whaling, perhaps the whales don’t need their calls to carry as far to be heard by others.

Or perhaps with oceans acidifying because of climate change, the calls are naturally carrying farther, allowing the whales to reduce their volume. The team does not believe the change in pitch is tied directly to human activity.

Their research, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, also showed that the call pitch of the Antarctic blue whales varies across seasons, with pitches increasing 0.1 hertz during the spring and summer and dropping at other times.

That might be the whales’ response to the loud cleaving of icebergs in the spring and summer. These extremely loud sounds — like the cracking of ice in a glass — make it harder for the whales to hear one another, so they crank up the volume, Leroy said.

Noad thinks the overall drop in pitch could be a reflection of the aging of the population, with older whales making deeper sounds.

(Contrary to other scientists, he also believes that whales can hear human-made noises from quite a distance, in the same way that people in urban environments can hear the distant rumble of traffic even if there are no cars passing directly by.)

Humpback whales have made a “really nice comeback” since commercial whaling was largely stopped in the 1960s, Noad said. But for unknown reasons, blue and fin whales are still struggling; just a few thousand Antarctic blue whales remain.

In yet another new study related to whale song, researchers at Woods Hole found that short-finned pilot whales living off the coast of Hawaii have their own vocal dialects, suggesting that different groups are purposely avoiding one another.

Relatively little is known about this species’ behavior. The new research provides a better sense of the social ties between whale groups, which could promote understanding of their genetic diversity and evolution, as well as conservation, the researchers said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/science/whales-songs-acoustics.html" id="cd3e1378-9d47-30fa-ac8e-78bee3fa2bd0">The New York Times</a>.

The Whale Album: Why Do Humpbacks Sing?

Scientists had long speculated that a change had occurred in the whales’ sources of food. By 2017, only 411 animals were counted, down from 482 in 2010. A paper published this month in the journal Oceanography links warming in the Gulf of Maine with the life cycle of the copepod Calanus finmarchicus, a tiny shrimplike creature that forms the foundation of the right whale diet.

Although it is hard to prove cause and effect, the paper’s lead author, Nicholas Record, said the study connected “the big ocean-scale climate changes” in the North Atlantic with the water coming into the Gulf of Maine and the whale’s food resources.

“All of these pieces lined up together really well,” said Record, senior research scientist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, a nonprofit institute in Boothbay, Maine. “It was really kind of stunning.”

An influx of warm water near the ocean floor in 2010 significantly reduced the abundance of the shrimplike creature in the Gulf of Maine that summer and fall. Warmer water would have brought in fewer Calanus and also meant that more died and were eaten earlier in the season, Record said, leaving less food, “right when right whales need their last big meal before winter.”

The whales followed the Calanus populations elsewhere, including to Cape Cod Bay and to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in northern Canada. Their shift in location might have created even bigger problems for the overall population, when they might have been hungry and moved to places with heavy shipping traffic.

North Atlantic right whales live off the East Coast of the United States and Canada, heading north during warmer weather and south during the winter. Many summer off New England and points north; their calving grounds are off the coast of Florida and Georgia.

“We’ve planned all these conservation measures around areas where we have known the whales to show up at the same time each time of year,” Record said. “When they stop showing up in those areas, and start showing up where protected measures aren’t in place, that’s when the problem starts.”

In 2017, 17 right whales died, including 12 in Canada, mainly as a result of being struck by ships or caught in fishing lines; three more were stranded in 2018. Eighty-five percent of right whales have been entangled in fishing lines, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Shipping lanes and fishing locales are designed around traditional feeding grounds for the whales. But as those shifted, the whales came into more contact with boats and nets. And perhaps because the whales were undernourished, only five new calves appeared in 2017 and none in 2018, according to NOAA data. This year, seven calves have been sighted, which scientists hope signals that the whales have found new feeding waters and are sufficiently healthy to begin rebounding.

The shift in habitat has caused problems for lobstering in Cape Cod Bay, where the whales have been spending more time. Since December, whale researchers counted 267 right whales in Cape Cod Bay — roughly 60% of the known population, said Charles Mayo, a co-author on the new paper and the director of the Right Whale Ecology Program at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

While the concentration has been a great boon for whale watchers, it has put tremendous strain on the local lobster industry, and boaters are limited to speeds of 10 knots (about 12 mph) within the bay.

Massachusetts recently extended the closing of Cape Cod Bay to lobstering, but protests had forced the state to rescind the measure.

“The most draconian right whale conservation restrictions in place anywhere is right here in Massachusetts,” said Beth Casoni, executive director of the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association, at a rally May 9. “It’s frustrating to the fleet” in Cape Cod Bay, which number about 100, she added by email, “as there are thousands of fishermen fishing to the north.”

Canada, which had not seen a lot of right whales north of the Bay of Fundy, had experienced an uptick, too, in recent years.

If whales are going to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada to search for food, they are swimming as much as 700 to 800 additional miles, which means they will need to eat more to stay fully nourished, said Sean Hayes, protected species branch chief with NOAA in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, who was not involved in the new study.

Right whale sightings were uncommon in the Gulf of St. Lawrence before 2017, said Catherine Brennan, of the Ocean and Ecosystem Sciences Division of Fisheries and Oceans Canada. But about 130 individuals were identified in the gulf in 2018.

Although they congregate in the southern part of the gulf, they have been crossing major shipping lanes, which puts them at risk, according to Catherine Johnson, a biological oceanographer who was a co-author on the paper.

Canada has imposed lower boat speed limits, restricted some fishing around shipping lanes and fishing areas, and added aerial and acoustic surveillance to try to better understand where the whales are congregating, said Hilary Moors-Murphy, research scientist for the Maritimes Region whale research program at Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

With just about one-third to half of all of the whales seen in Canada in recent years, researchers are unsure where the others are.

Mayo’s staff members fly daily over Cape Cod Bay, and cross it in boats, scouring for whale activity. Now that some right whales are diving deeper to feed off a species called Pseudocalanus, they’re harder to spot, Mayo said.

To combat entanglement in fishing lines, NOAA has been working with the fishing industry and inventors to experiment with lobster pots that are not connected by rope to buoys at the surface, Hayes said.

Sound can also put whales under additional stress, he noted. When shipping off the East Coast was temporarily halted after Sept. 11, and the ocean quieted, whale stress levels dropped precipitously, according to a 2012 study led by researchers from the New England Aquarium.

The right whales in the southern Atlantic have fared much better than their northern counterparts, enjoying a habitat where it is calmer and there is less contact with fishermen’s ropes or ship traffic, according to NOAA research.

“Those animals have been recovering since the end of commercial whaling to the point that they’re giving birth to more calves every year than we have North Atlantic right whales,” Hayes said, adding that almost no adults have been known to die in those populations for at least 70 years. “It shows you what the potential of the population is.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="1b8f0105-ebf5-471d-ba71-a19a4829d948" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/science/right-whales-endangered.html">The New York Times</a>.

(Science Times): Something happened to the population of North Atlantic right whales in the past decade, as their numbers shrank and fewer calves were born.

Where did the right whales go?

<h1>Perhaps not since Captain Ahab has one man looked so long for a whale.</h1>

It’s been 14 years since Bob Pitman set out to find an unusual-looking type of killer whale. It had been officially spotted only a few times before. In 1955, a strange pod washed up on a beach north of Wellington, New Zealand. Their black-and-white coloration quickly identified them as killer whales (which are members of the dolphin family), but their snub noses, narrow, pointy fins and small patches of white near their eyes made it clear that these were not typical orcas.

Scientists thought they were perhaps the offspring of one female with genetic aberrations. Then in 2005, a team of French scientists confirmed seeing killer whales with similar characteristics off the Crozet Islands in the southern Indian Ocean.

Pitman, a marine ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has looked for those so-called Type D killer whales ever since. Unlike Herman Melville’s fictional sea captain, Pitman’s quest was aimed at answering scientific questions: Who are these orcas, how are they different from other killer whales and do they constitute a new species?

He’s finally beginning to get answers.

Karen Weintraub

Articles written by the author