On a recent aerial study off the New England coast , researcher from NOAA Fisheries made 161 heavyweight sighting in a exclusive day , a vast symmetry of which were of the rare and expose sei whale .
The flight took place on May 25 and take care the team cover an area south of Martha ’s Vineyard and SE of Nantucket . Throughout the survey , they fleck seven differentwhale speciesamong the 161 sightings .
Some of those observations may have been multiple of the same whale , but Teri Frady , top dog of research communications for the NOAA ’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center , toldAPthat the squad had reported “ a lot of whale ” .
“ It is not unusual that there are a lot of whales in the area this clip of year , ” said Frady . “ But since we do not go over every twenty-four hours , or in the same areas every time we fly , catching such a large aggregation with such a miscellany of specie on one of our flying is the exception rather than the dominion . ”
ⓘ IFLScience is not creditworthy for content shared from extraneous sites .
The sighting include humpback , fin , minke , andsperm hulk , but also a brace of orcas that came with something of a surprise – one was holding on to a Opuntia tuna . The large fish is n’t on the nose an strange snack for orcas – they might even beattacking fish boatsin lookup of it – but it ’s on the face of it uncommon to make a sighting like this .
Two metal money of endangered whale were also spotted during the survey . Of the little number of sighting was the North Atlantic right whale , at just 3 observations . It ’s estimated that only around 360 individuals stay , a figure that has n’t been help by an “ unusual mortality effect ” that only endedthis year .
The other endangered species honour was the sei whale .
Sei heavyweight are thethird - largestwhale species after blue and fin whale , with adult female turn over up to 18 meters in distance and a whopping 45,000 kilograms in weight . Through persistent commercialwhalingin the 19thand 20thcenturies , an estimated 300,000 sei whales were killed and as a upshot , the species is presently listed as endangered by theIUCN .
On this occasion , however , sei whale made up the bulk of the sighting . The team made 93 sei whale reflexion , reported to be one of the eminent concentrations they had ever witnessed during a exclusive sight flight .
It ’s not just New England with whale news this workweek , although the announcement that come from Iceland this hebdomad was rather more somber . Whaling is set to continuein its seas , with the government declaring that the state ’s last persist whaling company will be issued with a license .
