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Biologists in Southeast Alaska are racing to examine a wave of whale carcasses to try and find what’s killing gray whales up and down the Pacific Coast. Nearly 170 have been reported triggering NOAA Fisheries to launch an investigation.
Five of the highly endangered whales have been found dead in Canadian waters over the last month. Measures have been put in place to prevent more deaths by reducing the potential for ship strikes and fishing gear entanglement.
Sea surface temperatures are 9 degrees higher than normal in some areas off Western Alaska.
Since January 1, 2019, elevated gray whale strandings have occurred along the west coast of North America from Mexico through Alaska. This event has been declared an Unusual Mortality Event (UME).
A rare whale skull discovered by an Inuit hunter in Greenland has been confirmed by a Canadian scientist to be the hybrid calf of a beluga father and a narwhal mother — otherwise known as a narluga.
A ten-year study of Chukchi Polar Bears, conducted from 2008 to 2018, found more bears than expected — and healthy ones, too. That’s despite sea ice loss in the Bering and Chukchi Seas.
NOAA is investigating what it’s calling “unusually large numbers” of seal deaths.
About 70 gray whales have been spotted dead so far this year along the West Coast from California to Alaska, the most in almost 20 years. Many of them appeared malnourished, according to NOAA officials.
Researchers are trying to determine the cause of a gray whale die-off along the West Coast, including Alaska. And they're looking at whether recent warming trends in the Arctic, and reduced sea ice, has affected their prey.
A female adult Southern resident killer whale and her three-and-a-half-year-old calf are rapidly declining in health in what appears to be a troubling situation for the creatures.
Ocean scientists are concerned about dead gray whales that have washed up on the US West Coast this year at the highest rate in almost two decades.
Scientists have identified a spike in ‘vagrant’ species of fish including damselfish, wrasse and triggerfish
"We've all known with climate change, the bears are coming ashore earlier, they're spending more time onshore, and they're becoming habituated," said Rockwell, a research associate with the American Museum of Natural History.
Dumps are often chock-full of plastic and, as a new survey shows, polar bears are ingesting a lot of it. In an analysis of the stomach contents of 51 polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea, researchers led by Raphaela Stimmelmayr, a wildlife veterinarian with Alaska’s North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management, found that 25 percent of the bears had plastic in their stomachs.
March becomes the hundredth month in a row with temperatures above normal. "It is unique and shows how fast climate change is happening in the Arctic," says climate scientist Ketil Isaksen at the Meteorological Institute (MET).
Seals and whales in the Arctic are shifting their feeding patterns as climate change alters their habitats, and the way they do so may determine whether they survive, a new study has found.
Warmer seas have led the fishery to move 300 kilometers further northeast - towards the North Pole. At the same time, cruising traffic in the outlying sea areas is increasing.
The survey started in 1971 as a review of commercially important fish like cod and halibut, but has grown into an annual scientific assessment of all sea life hauled up from the deep.
A new study has documented unexpected consequences following the decline of great white sharks from an area off South Africa. The study found that the disappearance of great whites has led to the emergence of sevengill sharks, a top predator from a different habitat. A living fossil, sevengill sharks closely resemble relatives from the Jurassic period, unique for having seven gills instead of the typical five in most other sharks.
While most wolves prefer ungulates like moose, deer and mountain goats, the Gustavus pack has displayed a preference for sea otter.
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