Category: bowhead whales

Sometimes one gets behind on genuinely fascinating news with marginal for now, but potentially sizeable, importance. A week or so ago came a small splash about Atlantic and Pacific bowhead whales that traverse the Arctic coast of North America and Greenland. Researchers from Greenland, the University of Washington, and Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game tracked a few and found something surprising. In Biology Letters, pub. by the UK's Royal Society, they reported that in the summer of 2010 two male bowheads that had been affixed with radio tracking devices, and were from Atlantic and Pacific populations presumably isolated from one another in recent millenniums by unbroken Arctic Sea Ice, managed to follow the Northwest Passages from...