A Whale Chorus Reveals How Climate Change May Be Shifting Migration
Voice of America
TOKYO - Eerie wails, explosive trumpets and ghostly moans. The sounds from the underwater recorders had a story to tell, even without a single intelligible word: the whales had stayed put.
The recordings gathered during the 2018-2019 winter in the freezing cold Arctic waters off Canada proved that a population of bowhead whales had skipped their usual migration south. Scientists believe this behavior -- never previously detected -- could be driven by the effects of climate change and be a potential harbinger of shifting dynamics across the region's ecosystem. Ordinarily, the approximately 20,000 bowheads that make up the Bering-Chukchi-Beaufort (BCB) population around Canada have a fairly predictable migration pattern spanning 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles).
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