The Intertwined Futures of Whales and Humans

Abstract

16 IF YOU COULD somehow ask a North Atlantic right whale what she thinks the future holds, what would she say? Right whales must, in some way, think about the future in order to make survival decisions. As an ocean science community, our eyes are trained increasingly on the future as well. The twin global environmental crises of climate change and biodiversity loss have elevated the science of real-world prediction to one of urgent interest. At timescales ranging from hours to decades, society is asking ocean science for actionable predictions, projections, and forecasts, with the hope of mitigating and adapting to the changing ocean. Meeting this challenge requires more than the ability to predict ocean dynamics. For highly endangered species like the North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis), better foresight might have prepared us for the changes that recently led to a catastrophic unusual mortality event (UME). Predictable oceanographic changes in turn drove changes in right whale migration and calving, reversing what had been a recovery of the species. Now, fewer than 400 of them remain alive. For many of us working in right whale science, policy, and management, we are haunted by questions of how the UME might have been anticipated and prevented and how we might prevent something similar in the future. The oceanography itself, while crucial, is only half of the equation. As Meyer-Gutbrod et al. (2021, in this issue) detail in their analysis, the oceanographic mechanisms behind the recent changes are well understood by the oceanographic community. Warming has led to shifts in ocean currents like the Gulf Stream, which influence the source of deep-water supply to the Gulf of Maine (Neto et al., 2021). Changes in deepwater conditions alter the availability of right whales’ primary prey, Calanus finmarchicus (Record et al., 2019). Without a reliable supply of prey, foraging patterns have changed, broadening the range outside of protected areas, leading to higher mortality (Davies and Brillant, 2019) and reduced calving, and thus putting the species at significant risk of extinction (Meyer-Gutbrod et al., 2021, in this issue). PERSPECTIVE