Narwhals Are Flourishing Despite Vulnerable Genetic Diversity

Narwhals are an Arctic-bound whale species famous for their tusks. (Credit: Mads Peter Heide Jorgenson) Narwhals, the unicorns of the sea, have survived for a million years withlow genetic diversity — a trait that usually suggests a species is close to extinction. But a recent survey found narwhals number in the hundreds of thousands, countering the assumption that lots of gene variants within a population are necessary for survival. "There's this notion that in order to survive and be resilient to changes, you need to have high genetic diversity, but then you have this species that for the past million years has had low genetic diversity and it's still around -- and is actually relatively abundant," Eline Lorenzen, a molecular ecologist and curator at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, who led the new research, said in a statement.