HALIFAX, CANADA—Among cetaceans,
gray whales are the curmudgeons: They’re often reclusive and set in their ways,
spending much of their time nosing alone along the Arctic Ocean bottom for
tasty invertebrates. But a dozen gray whales along the coast of Washington
state are showing that even loners can get social. Using special suction cup
tags with cameras and sensors—plus high-resolution satellite images from Google
Earth—marine biologists have found that a small party of whales has started
detouring 200 kilometers to feast on ghost shrimp during their annual northward
migration—and that the party is getting bigger all the time. That behavior
reveals that even gray whales can learn new tricks from their companions, the
scientists say.
Perhaps the biggest surprise was
that the
whales are spending “a lot” of time together, said John Calambokidis,
a marine mammal researcher at the Cascadia Research Collective in Olympia, here
at this week’s biennial meeting of the Society for Marine Mammalogy.
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