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The largest creature on Earth, the blue whale,
spends most of its time below the ocean waves.
So it stands to reason that these gentle giants aren’t too connected with
most things above the water, like, you know, the wind.
Except, new research out of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
finds that blue whales are actually strongly in tune
with the winds blowing around our planet.
And, as it turns out, these 150-ton creatures are
using the wind to find their next meal.
Now, blue whales aren’t like sticking a fin out of the water and
testing for the wind as a way to find food… that we know of, at least.
Rather, it’s about how the winds interact with the ocean
that the whales are relying on to tell them where to fill their giant bellies.
Coasts around the world experience a process called coastal upwelling,
where the top layer of water gets pushed offshore
by winds and cooler water rises from the depths to take its place.
In the northern hemisphere, like along the California coastline,
the process gets jumpstarted by seasonal winds that blow north to south.
Due to the spin of the Earth and the friction between the wind and the water,
the top layer of ocean gets pushed away from the land,
perpendicular to the direction the wind is blowing.
As the top layer of water moves away from the land,
the colder deep water below moves up,
bringing with it a lot of nutrients that have been hanging around in the depths.
This nutrient-rich water is liquid gold;
fertilizer for all the tiny plankton, or microscopic photosynthesizers,
that live in the surface waters.
And nutrients equal growth.
This pulse of water causes a phytoplankton population explosion,
also called a bloom.
Phytoplankton are the base of the ocean food web,
so a phytoplankton bloom is like an ocean buffet.
And in earlier research, some of these same scientists found that
small prey species, like krill and anchovies,
congregate in upwelling regions, summoned there by this buffet.
The authors of this new study hypothesized that the predators
of these prey species, like blue whales,
might also be flocking to these large patches.
And that would make sense given that otherwise,
krill tend to be pretty spread out in the ocean.
And when you eat 20 tons of food in a day,
it’s way more efficient if you can swallow a lot of it in one go.
Unfortunately, tracking blue whales to understand their behavior is tricky.
Despite their massive size, they are fast and elusive creatures
and have the entire ocean at their disposal to hide.
Researchers have found that one way to better
understand them is to listen to them.
So they installed hydrophones, or underwater microphones, on an underwater
observatory located just off the California coast in order to listen to the whales.
One of these underwater microphones is a directional microphone,
which could pinpoint the specific direction each whale call came from.
And the hydrophone data, in combination with tracking tags on some of the whales,
helped researchers determine when individual whales were moving into the area,
and where each whale was spending most of its time once it got there.
The data showed that when winds were blowing and causing an upwelling event,
blue whales head to the coasts to forage.
Upwelling regions can be massive;
those along the California coast can reach 1000 square kilometers in size,
roughly a third of the size of the state of Rhode Island.
And there’s a bunch of them.
That’s a lot of whale food.
Based on the behavior they observed through listening and tracking,
researchers believe that blue whales are relying on water temperature changes
that occur during upwelling, which is a signal that soup’s on.
It also appears that blue whales may be sharing this information
with other blue whales, although whether intentionally or not we don’t know.
Blue whale calls are so loud that they travel hundreds of kilometers underwater.
So whales don’t need to be close to each other
to catch the gist of the conversation.
Whales can be chatty Cathies,
and it may not be deliberate that they’re being overheard
Individuals that are far away from the coast may be using sounds from whales
who have already reached an upwelling region to navigate to that same spot.
But even if it’s eavesdropping, they are able to forage more efficiently
if they can reach a food patch faster, knowing exactly where to find it.
When the winds eventually change direction,
the upwelling stops and the prey become more patchy.
The whales head off elsewhere in search of their next all-you-can-eat-buffet.
Unfortunately, traveling long distances is
one of the reasons why blue whales are endangered.
Ship strikes are a major hazard for blue whales,
and when they’re trekking across entire ocean basins they are inevitably
having to cross main shipping lanes.
Or maybe it’s more fair to say that the shipping lanes cross the whale lanes.
Either way, it increases their risk of being hit.
But thanks to this new research,
there may be ways to prevent ship strikes in the future.
Researchers could use both hydrophones and wind patterns to
accurately predict when blue whales will heading to a specific location for food.
Based on all that information, ecosystem managers and authorities
could set restrictions to reduce ship speed or possibly even
reroute ships entirely during critical whale migration periods.
So hopefully one day, this research and more like it will
lead to the preservation of this iconic species.
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