Rare Gray Whale Sighted South of Nantucket

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 loud what it was, because it seemed crazy,” said Oria O’Brien, who has been on aerial surveys for the past 13 years. When the whale was on a dive, she showed the pictures to Kate Laemmle, another scientist on the plane. “My brain was trying to process what I was seeing, because this animal was something that should not really exist in these waters,” Laemmle said.

Photo from New England Aquarium

The gray whale species disappeared from the Atlantic by the 18^th century, although there have been five sightings of them in the Atlantic and the Med in the past 15 years. One was seen off the coast of Florida in December; the Aquarium scientists think that’s the same one they saw last week.

Gray whales are usually found in the North Pacific, and are easy to distinguish because they don‘t have a dorsal fin but they do have mottled gray and white skin and a dorsal hump. The scientists say that climate change, particularly the warming of the Northwest Passage, linking the Atlantic and Pacific via the Arctic Ocean, may explain the whales in the Atlantic.

Gray whales migrate between feeding and breeding grounds every year. They can grow to be 49 feet long and weigh up to 41 tons. They usually live 50 or 60 years, although one female was estimated to be up to 80 years old. They once were called devil fish because of their aggressive behavior when they were hunted.