In 2010, when marine biologist Aviad Scheinin posted a photo online of a gray whale off the coast of Israel, his fellow scientists weren’t buying it. “Nice Photoshopping,” one researcher responded. “Is this April Fools’?” another replied.
Their skepticism was understandable. The species had not been seen outside the Pacific Ocean since the 18th century, when whalers are thought to have harpooned the last Atlantic gray whale. But in 2013, another was spotted even farther afield, off the Atlantic coast of Namibia in southern Africa, where it lingered for a month before swimming off.
Until recently, the Arctic’s wall of sea ice made such polar ocean-hopping impossible. Whales need to surface every few minutes to breathe and cannot venture under frozen seas. But increasingly warmer summer temperatures are melting the ice of the Bering Strait and Northwest Passage, opening a water highway between the Pacific and the Atlantic.
If gray whales do migrate to the ocean next door, they’ll find that a lot has changed in the Atlantic since the species last plied its waters, including increased ship traffic and higher temperatures. At the same time, says biologist Elizabeth Alter of the City University of New York, these 40-ton bulldozing bottom feeders could have an oversized impact on their new home — for good and for ill.
