SOURCE:
https://www.eastendbeacon.com/whale-sightings-are-up/
By Beth Young483 - April 3, 2025
While researchers along the East Coast have been documenting an “unusual whale mortality event” since 2016, there is a lot of good news to be told. Whale biologists have seen an unprecedented number of whales feeding in the waters off of Montauk in recent years.
Researchers from the Coastal Education and Research Society of Long Island (CRESLI) and the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society (AMCS) shared their recent experiences at a March 19 Zoom forum, “Whale Tales and Real Facts,” organized by Citizens Campaign for the Environment.
CRESLI leads educational whale watching excursions out of Montauk, where they see a preponderance of humpbacks, and AMCS responds to whale strandings on Long Island.
CRESLI Biologist and Vice President Marianne McNamara said that in 2024 her organization saw the most whales on their cruises in the 20 years they’ve been gathering observational data off the Montauk shore, and “they’re feeding on every trip.”
“Things are absolutely changing in our waters… This is a population that is recovering,” she said. “This highlights the significance and importance of the New York Bight as a habitat and feeding area for species.”
But whales’ success in this region has come with added dangers. In 2000 to 2006, whale sightings were more prevalent off the coast of New England, but in recent years they’ve been concentrated closer to New York City, following their sources of food.
This redistribution of living whales has coincided with an increase in whale strandings on the Long Island coastline.
In 2019, the Port Authority reopened a new Bayonne Bridge with a higher clearance between Staten Island and New Jersey to accommodate huge cargo ships of the “New Panamax” classification, and by 2022, after longshore workers’ strikes on the West Coast and in the midst of a huge amount of imports as people stayed at home shopping during Covid, New York became the busiest port in the United States, said Ms. McNamara
“The whales are literally playing in traffic,” she said.
She pointed out that many of these ships are 1,000 feet long, with their engines in the back, which creates an “acoustic void” at the front of the ship that makes it impossible for whales to hear them coming.
Rob DiGiovanni of AMCS said his organization responded to 114 whale strandings between 2017 and 2024. Twenty-three of those whales were alive, and the organization was able to necropsies on 78 of them. Of those necropsies, 45 causes of death were suspected to be due to human interaction, 32 of which were suspected vessel strikes.
Entanglement in fishing gear is another documented “human interaction” cause of death.
Mr. DiGiovanni said an infectious disease has been affecting minke whales — AMCS responded to seven minke whale strandings during that time, and he said six of them are believed to be due to infectious disease.
Citizens Campaign for the Environment Executive Director Adrienne Esposito says her group, which has been active in promoting offshore wind, held the forum to dispel myths that wind farms are responsible for killing whales.
“This unusual whale mortality event started in 2016, way before exploration of bottomlands for offshore wind,” she said. “There are a lot of myths out there. We need to understand what is happening, so we can really craft policies to protect and save whales. What gets us the truth are facts and science.”
Ms. McNamara said CRESLI has collected a database of individual humpback whales over the two decades it has been observing them off the Long Island coast.
They’re able to do this by photographing breaching whales’ tail flukes. Each whale has different pigmentation and scarring on the underside of its tail, and the ridges, or ‘humps’ on the trailing edge of the tail “are unique for every whale,” she said. “It acts like a human fingerprint.”
That has enabled CRESLI to create a Montauk catalogue of whales, which they share with other researchers who use the same method of whale identification in the Gulf of Maine, New York City and the mid-Atlantic region.
In 2023, CRESLI documented 47 unique humpback whales, a record, off of Montauk but in 2024, they had to “reset the entire axis” of their graph, documenting 122 whales.
Although the number of trips they run each year varies due to weather and other factors, they still documented a third more whales per hour than in 2023.
More than 90 percent of the individual whales photographed on the Montauk trips had also been seen in the Gulf of Maine or the New York Bight, and “many are repeats — they’ve been to our waters before and returned,” she said.
The abundance of food is a big factor in whales’ decisions to stay here. Ms. McNamara said the number of sand eels off of Montauk this year was “extremely high,” an anecdote shared by the Viking Fleet of charter fishing boats.
“More humpbacks came and remained this year (2024) than any year since photo identification began in 2009,” she said.
Humpbacks found here are part of what’s known as the West Indies breeding stock, she said, which was taken off the endangered species list in 2016.
“They’re still a ‘protected’ species, but their numbers are increasing,” she said. ”We do know that the whales are recovering.”
Arthur Kopelman, President and co-founder of CRESLI, said there has also been a “tremendous increase” in the population of Atlantic menhaden, known locally as bunker fish, since 2016.
“Our Viking Fleet colleagues said they rarely saw bunker out of Montauk before that,” he said. “We’re finding lots of juvenile humpbacks near shore feeding on menhaden, while older ones are offshore.”
“Near shore is where the boats are, and where people are going really fast sometimes” he added. “They will occasionally disturb or hit whales.”
“Captains don’t want to hit a whale, but they often don’t see them,” added Ms. McNamara. “In turbid water, the bunker are moving, and the whales are moving with them. They can pop up and you can’t necessarily predict that. I’ve seen video of a boat fishing and a whale bumped into it, and it was no fault of the boat owner.”
Mr. DiGiovanni said it’s important to remember, if you encounter marine mammals in local waters, to stay at least 100 yards away from large whales, and at least 50 yards away from dolphins, porpoises, seals and sea lions.
Mr. Kopelman added that the most crucial thing is to slow down.
“Right whales can’t move faster than four knots, but humpbacks can,” he said. “But (by slowing down) you can give them time to get away.
To participate in CRESLI’s whale watches, which run from June through mid-September, visit vikingfleet.com/whale-watching