The Vagabond Whales
By Mary Jane Schramm
The journey had been a long, strange venture into unfamiliar waters. After highly satisfying romantic encounters in Baja’s breeding lagoons, the gray whale, Eschrichtius robustus, although thin and tired, had begun its annual trek north to feed and fatten in Arctic seas. The northbound leg stretched 6,000 miles, and the whale had not fed substantially since the previous summer. Its focus now was to find those mud-luscious patches of seafloor teeming with calorie-rich invertebrates to scoop up, sift out, and gulp down. Gray whales are a lusty race that, though hunted to near-extinction in the previous century, had rebounded to pre-whaling numbers, once legally protected. But this whale had spent months doing more food-searching than food-finding, ranging widely and exploring blindly, the prey it found barely sufficient. Melting sea ice had exposed confusing new channels and wide expanses of the Beaufort Sea, clear across northern Canada, and without its ages-old directional clues, our whale had become disoriented. Nonetheless, its biological clock demanded that it head south again. And from there, the journey just got curiouser, and curiouser.
Club Med: In May, 2010, an adult gray whale astonished scientists worldwide by appearing off Turkey, then Israel, in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. It was sighted a few days later off Barcelona, Spain, nearer to Gibraltar and the Atlantic beyond. It was the first gray whale recorded in the Atlantic in nearly 300 years. The scientific world was a-twitter with surmises: Was it, miraculously, a relict of the long-extinct Atlantic gray whale population? No, it was more likely a vagrant from one of the North Pacific populations that navigated the newly ice-free Northwest Passage. This whale should have been heading south through the Pacific Ocean, either along the Canada, US, and Mexico coastal corridor, or along Russia, Korea, and Japan, possibly to the South China Sea. Our whale simply took a wrong turn into the wrong ocean.
Med Redux: Years later, in March 2021, a thin but apparently healthy young gray whale was sighted off Morocco; chalk up No. 2 for Club Med! It made its way across the north Mediterranean along the Italian, French and Spanish coasts. Nicknamed, ‘Wally,” this lone celebrity cetacean conquered many European hearts. On May 21, the London Times of London reported a resighting off Majorca, Spain, but no more recent reports are available. See a film clip on Wally: https://youtu.be/psKq8c4bjFY
‘Sphere-hopping: Most astounding of all was the 2013 appearance of a young male gray off southwest Africa’s Namibian coast, a first-ever record for the Southern Hemisphere! Local scientists took tissue samples for DNA analysis, and working with a team of British researchers, in June 2021 released their findings: it matched genetically with the critically endangered Western North Pacific population off Russia, that may number as few as 200. It had swum halfway around the world, some 16,700 miles, a record for any marine vertebrate. It triggered a storm of theories about its itinerary: eastward across the Pacific and through Canada’s Northwest Passage; or north and westward across Russia’s Northeast Passage; or south, and either through the Panama Canal or across the Indian Ocean. See details in Biology Letter.
Encouragingly, others from the Western North Pacific group have successfully made significant detours, when in 2010 and 2011 gray whales Flex and Varvara crossed the North Pacific from Russia to migrate to Baja California. There, Varvara may have bred with her Eastern Pacific cousins.
Gray whales as sentinels of change may be responding to altered environments, seeking out new resources and habitats, but at times getting dangerously lost in the process. Others might do better, if they can clear the hurdles presented by increased shipping, entangling fisheries, and a changing ocean climate. Only time will tell. But agencies like Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary continue their work to protect whales. Find out more at https://farallones.noaa.gov.
