The New England Aquarium in Boston just said that its survey team sighted a gray whale off the southern New England coast last week. The gray whale species has been extinct in the Atlantic for more than 200 years. The Aquarium’s survey team was flying 30 miles south of Nantucket when they saw the whale. They said it repeatedly dove and then resurfaced, appearing to be feeding. The team’s plane circled for 45 minutes, as the scientists took pictures. They later reviewed the images and confirmed that they had indeed seen a gray whale. “I didn’t want to say out…

You think whales are big now? You should have been here 39 million years ago. That’s when a 200-ton whale, the Perucetus, swam the coastal areas of the world, with its flexible body moving slowly in waves from head to toe. Paleontologists found a fossil of the giant whale in Peru and they say it is probably the heaviest animal that ever lived. In fact, it is two or three times heavier than the blue whale, the largest whale today. “This is a weird and stupendous fossil, for sure,” Nicholas Pyenson, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian, told The New York…

Spurred by the growth of offshore wind farms, the Federal Government is trying to offer more protection for endangered North Atlantic right whales. Indeed, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) just announced a draft of their strategy to protect the whales. They want to better understand the effects of offshore wind farms on the whales and their habitat, and they started a public review and comment period that ends on Dec. 4. Amanda Lefton, BOEM director, said the agency “is deeply committed to ensuring responsible offshore wind energy development while protecting…

A new system of high-tech offshore buoys is designed to warn ship captains when whales are swimming nearby. The trouble is, some captains pay attention to it, and some don’t. Four whales have been killed by collisions with boats so far this year near San Francisco Bay. The number is probably higher; dead whales often sink to the ocean floor. Last week, an organization called Whale Safe launched a whale-detection system of buoys in known whale feeding areas outside the bay. The system uses a buoy with a microphone 280 feet underwater to listen for whales. It then relays that…

Humpback whales, it turns out, are creating individual songs and then sharing them with other whales. A new study says the songs can pass from one whale population to another, and even from the Pacific to the Atlantic. “Half the globe is now vocally connected for whales,” said Ellen Garland, a marine biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and the author of the study, “and that’s insane.” Her study was just published in the Royal Society Open Science journal. Her eight-year study found that whales off Australia pass songs to whales in French Polynesia who pass them…

A humpback whale breached and landed on the bow of a boat off Plymouth, Massachusetts, on Sunday. Chad Hunter, the Plymouth harbormaster, said the incident occurred around 10 a.m. off White Horse Beach. The bow of the boat had some damage, but it was able to return to the boat ramp under its own power. No one was injured. “The boat was in the right place at the wrong time,” Hunter told NBC10 Boston. “This could have been much worse for all involved.” (You can see the station’s pictures above.) The harbormaster actually had crews monitoring the area after a…

Here’s an incredible video of a curious southern right whale seeming to play with a woman on a standup paddleboard in Puerto Madryn, in northern Patagonia, Argentina. At one point, the whale pushes the board forward gently, and then swims under it to see what’s happening. Maximiliano Jonas, who filmed it, says “These whales surely love paddleboards. Every time they spot one floating on the water they get all excited and approach it but not in an intimidating way.” This is the middle of the whales’ migrating season in Argentina. Marcos Grosso, Puerto Madryn’s tourism secretary, said that 1,600 whales…