<
https://hakaimagazine.com/news/humpbacks-rebound-in-20th-century-whaling-hotspot/>
"In November 1904, Norwegian explorer Carl Anton Larsen landed in South
Georgia. It was his second visit to the remote island, roughly 1,800 kilometers
east of the tip of South America, where the waters of the South Atlantic Ocean
boasted huge numbers of whales—and he’d returned with a whaling ship and crew
to catch them.
Just a few weeks after establishing a camp in Cumberland Bay, a deep,
two-pronged fjord in the rugged island, Larsen’s men killed their first
humpback. So many whales foraged in the bay that the mariners didn’t need to
venture to the open ocean. By mid-April 1905, they’d killed 91 whales—67 of
them humpbacks.
What followed was grisly and swift. South Georgia became a whaling epicenter.
Within 12 years, whalers stationed on the island had slaughtered 24,000
humpbacks. “The whalers absolutely exterminated them,” says Jennifer Jackson, a
marine ecologist and whale biologist with the British Antarctic Survey.
By the 1920s, humpbacks were scarce, so the industry began targeting blue
whales and then fin and sei whales. Finally, in 1966, whaling ceased on the
island, in part because so few animals were left. For nearly half a century
afterward, humpbacks were rarely spotted in the area.
But starting about a decade ago, humpbacks began to show up again—and their
numbers have kept growing. According to a recent study led by Jackson, the
species has recovered to near pre-whaling levels in Cumberland Bay. “Now we’re
seeing what looks like restoration,” she says. “That’s pretty exciting.”
During a survey in January 2019, Jackson and her team counted 17 humpbacks in
the bay—the same number that were killed there in the first month of 1905.
“Whales, particularly humpbacks, are capable of amazing feats of recovery,”
says study coauthor Emma Carroll, a molecular ecologist who studies whales at
New Zealand’s University of Auckland. “I think it’s just an amazing example of
how conservation can work.”"
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-malaria-vaccine-reforestation-china-poverty-india/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
