The North Atlantic populations are found off eastern Canada and West Greenland and around Svalbard and Spitsbergen in the Barents Sea off the northern coasts of Norway and Russia. There are four known populations, two in the Northern Pacific and two in the North Atlantic. There have been no further sightings of this bowhead whale, or any other bowhead whales, in the Gulf of Maine region since 2017. As expected, the whale was feeding on calanoid copepods, a type of zooplankton and the main prey for a number of baleen whale species. Researchers collected zooplankton to determine what the bowhead was feeding on during the various sightings. “While the feeding and behavior of the bowhead observed in the Gulf of Maine has been typical of that species, the fact that it occurred so far south of its range in three different years and that the bowhead interacted with North Atlantic right whales, and in particular sei whales, made these sightings very unusual.” “Our sightings of a bowhead whale on in the Great South Channel co-feeding with a sei whale is the only known sighting of that nature,” said Duley. Bowhead Feeding with Sei Whale Rareīowhead, sei, and right whales feeding together. The last sightings to date, in the spring of 2017, were made in the Great South Channel and the Gulf of Maine near Jeffreys Ledge in the vicinity of several fin whales and a humpback whale. Two years later, in April and May 2014, the same whale was sighted in Cape Cod Bay and in the Great South Channel east of Cape Cod, feeding either alone or with right whales and sei whales. The same bowhead, confirmed by photographs, was also observed on four days in August 2012, alone and feeding in the Bay of Fundy. The first sighting of the lone bowhead occurred in March 2012 off Chatham, Massachusetts as the bowhead socialized with a group of four right whales. In addition, the acoustic recorders that were in place when the different sightings occurred in Cape Cod Bay and on the shelf break in the Gulf of Maine did not collect any identifiable bowhead sounds,” said Duley, who is also a member of the Center’s aerial and shipboard whale survey teams. “Unfortunately, we were not able to collect a genetic sample to learn more about this whale. Their numbers were reduced by commercial whaling but have been increasing in recent years. Sightings around Cape Codīowhead whales generally live in Arctic waters around 54° North latitude, migrating north into the high Arctic in the summer months and to lower latitudes of the Arctic in the winter. The confirmed sightings reported in the recent paper are the southernmost for a bowhead whale in the western North Atlantic Ocean. Unique marks and minor entanglement scarring allowed experienced whale researchers to identify this individual animal. The lone bowhead, estimated to be a sub-adult about 10 meters (33 feet) in length, was sighted 13 different times during 2012, 20 in four locations in the Gulf of Maine between roughly 41° and 44° N latitude, far south of its present-day range. He and fellow researchers were intrigued and wrote about the bowhead encounters in an article published recently in the Journal of Cetacean Research and Management. “We don’t know where this particular whale came from or why, and why it returned to the same areas over several years although the availability of food may be a reason,” said Peter Duley, a marine mammal scientist at NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Map showing bowhead sightings in the Gulf of Maine in 2012, 20.

Bowhead whale