Faculty Publications
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Ocean warming linked to anthropogenic climate change is impacting the ecology of marine species around the world. In 2010, the Gulf of Maine and Scotian Shelf regions of the Northwest Atlantic underwent an unprecedented regime shift. Forced by climate-driven changes in the Gulf Stream, warm slope waters entered the region and created a less favorable foraging environment for the endangered North Atlantic right whale population. By mid-decade, right whales had shifted their late spring/summer foraging grounds from the Gulf of Maine and the western Scotian Shelf to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The population also began exhibiting unusually high mortality in 2017. Here, we report that climate-driven changes in ocean circulation have altered the foraging environment and habitat use of right whales, reducing the population’s calving rate and exposing it to greater mortality risks from ship strikes and fishing gear entanglement. The case of the North Atlantic right whale provides a cautionary tale for the management of protected species in a changing ocean.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in Oceanography, Volume 34, Issue 3, 2021, pages 22-31.
Rights
This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ((http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.
APA Citation
Meyer-Gutbrod, E., Greene, C., Davies, K., & Johns, D. (2021). Ocean Regime Shift is Driving Collapse of the North Atlantic Right Whale Population. Oceanography, 34(3), 22–31. https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2021.308