By Tyee Bridge.
New tools—from drones to crossbows to suction-cup cameras—are helping researchers understand bowhead whales in the Canadian Arctic.
Bowhead whales are fascinating creatures—even by whale standards. Named for their arched mouths, which happen to be the largest maws of any animal, these whales are now also believed to be the longest-living mammals. Their potential lifespan is over 200 years. That means there may be bowheads in these frigid Arctic and subarctic waters that were born about the same time as Queen Victoria.
Bowheads’ extreme environment has forced them to evolve a protective blubber layer that can be almost half a meter thick, more than any other whale species. These whales’ skulls are also uncommonly thick— so much so they can bash head first through ice sheets 20 centimeters deep.
The global bowhead population began rebounding after being decimated by the whaling industry of the 19th and 20th centuries, partly due to a relative absence of vessel traffic in their native waters. However, as the Arctic is warming—nearly four times faster than the rest of the planet—bowheads are facing new challenges. One of these involves their food: tiny creatures called zooplankton.
Sarah Fortune began researching bowhead whales in the fjords around Pangnirtung, a hamlet on Baffin Island, Nunavut, in 2013. She’s now the Canadian Wildlife Federation chair in Large Whale Conservation and an assistant professor in the Department of Oceanography at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. She has returned to Pangnirtung several times to research bowhead whale behavior and feeding.
“We want to know how climate change is affecting the quality and quantity of prey for these large whales,” says Fortune. “Large whales that feed on zooplankton can be considered, you might say, the canaries of the sea.”
