Melting ice in Arctic linked to bowhead whales holding off annual migration
Researchers in Canada find that population did not make the 6,000km roundtrip in 2018-2019
As the ice melts at pace in the Arctic, the mining and shipping industry has carved itself an opportunity out of the crisis. Meanwhile, the marine ecosystem is left to coping with the heat, noise, pollution and the cascade of other changes that come with the upheaval of the environment.
Now researchers have found a whale species that typically migrates away from solid sea ice each autumn and returns every summer to feast on tiny crustaceans did not make the 6,000km (3,700-mile) roundtrip in 2018-2019.
Bowhead whales are one of the few species that reside almost exclusively in Arctic and subarctic waters, thriving within a narrow temperature preference window, generally between ?0.5C (32.9F) and 2C. There are now four different stocks of these whales swimming along in the Arctic — one of the biggest stocks migrate annually from the northern Bering Sea, through the Chukchi Sea in the spring, to the Beaufort Sea where they spend much of the summer before returning again to the Bering Sea in the autumn to weather out the winter.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/21/melting-ice-in-arctic-linked-to-bowhead-whales-holding-off-annual-migration
