Prior to the Blob, the yearly average was 10. In a paper published last January in the journal Nature Communications, Santora, Forney, and coauthors reported that 53 whales had been tangled up in fishing gear along the West Coast in 2015, 55 in 2016. In ocean models, Santora could see a narrow band of cool water - the “lifeblood of the ecosystem” - steering whales into a maze of crab pots and slack ropes. Up the coast in Santa Cruz, Forney’s colleague at NOAA, an oceanographer named Jarrod Santora, began connecting the Blob to a sudden spike in entanglements.
Humpback whales typically bypass the Dungeness crab fishing season along the California coast, but the habitat shift put them in direct contact with commercial fishing gear. In the warmer water beyond the continental shelf break, whales weren’t finding the krill usually abundant, so they turned their sights on anchovies - closer to shore, closer to human impact. The powerful humpback whales weren’t immune to the change. For three years, the Blob disrupted animal migrations and shifted habitats. It grew, and grew, until Washington State Climatologist Nicholas Bond called it the “Blob” - a name that stuck as the 1,000-square-mile warm water mass reminded scientists of the mysterious, corrosive entity out of a B horror flick. In 2013, a marine heatwave formed in the North Pacific. THE ANSWER, IN SHORT, was climate change. But that didn’t fully explain why these whales were suddenly huddled just beyond the surf zone, at a time of year when they were usually absent. It made sense that more whales might overwinter in Monterey Bay if foraging competition had increased along the coast. Going by NOAA’s estimates, Forney has seen humpback whales off the West Coast double since she moved to Moss Landing in 1999. Under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, populations have recovered. Sixty years ago, North Pacific whales had been decimated by a century of commercial whaling. “The real new management challenge in this century is developing the new toolset to deal with increased climate variability.”įorney had her theories. “We understood that something was different,” she says. It was the same story the following winter, and then again in 2016. But as the winter moved closer to spring, she was concerned to see whales close to shore so early in the year. A marine ecologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Forney had moved to Moss Landing to be closer to whales and the other marine mammals she studies. Throughout the winter of 2014, each day she counted numerous small mist clouds shooting up from Monterey Bay, marking where humpback whales breach the surface to expel air from their blowholes. FROM THE SECOND FLOOR of her house in Moss Landing, California, Karin Forney could tell something was different in the ocean.
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