Wild grey seal eating a large Atlantic salmon after first peeling back the skin using its teeth and claws. Robert Harris, Author provided If you’ve ever seen seals frolicking in the water, you know they are agile swimmers, with perfectly adapted paddle-like limbs. But if you think those flippers are just […]
Evolution is too complicated to plot out like a family tree. A gray whale. NOAA Fisheries/Merrill Gosho Gray, blue, big, bigger: baleen whales put the mega in “megafauna.” In a new study published on April 4 in the journal Science Advances, researchers discuss the whole-genome sequencing of several of these mammoth species, including […]
Fin whales. Credit: Florian Schulz For the first time, scientists of the German Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Center, Goethe University and the University of Lund in Sweden have deciphered the complete genome of the blue whale and three other rorquals. These insights now allow tracking the evolutionary history of […]
Bowhead whales are predominantly found in cold Arctic waters SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Beneath the Arctic sea ice, in the blanket of January’s polar night, bowhead whales most prefer to sing. While the songs of humpback whales have long received the most attention, it turns out that their baleen cousins could […]
Experts analysed thousands of photographs and sightings of bottlenose dolphins DANIEL MURPHY The first resident pod of bottlenose dolphins has been discovered off the south-west coast of England. Experts used thousands of sightings and photos to identify a group of 28 individuals living year-round off the coasts of Cornwall, Devon […]
Image captionThe orcas come to the fjords around Kvaløya to feast on herring Europe’s killer whales wowed in the BBC’s Blue Planet II series but these animals face extinction. Chris Gibson travelled to the small Norwegian island of Kvaløya where the orcas retain a strong foothold. But for how much longer? It […]
humpback whale HALIFAX, CANADA—In the fall of 1990, a few humpback whales showed up off the coast of western South Africa where they had rarely been seen before. Over the next couple years, a few more showed up, then a few more. Today, nearly 200 of the giant ocean mammals mill […]
In November 2013, a four-year-old captive beluga whale moved to a new home. She had been living in a facility with other belugas. But in her new pool, the Koktebel dolphinarium in Crimea, her only companions were dolphins. The whale adapted quickly: she started imitating the unique whistles of the dolphins, and stopped […]
Leaping bottlenose dolphins. Kate Sprogis/MUCRU Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus) are a regular sight in the waters around Australia, including the Bunbury area in Western Australia where they attract tourists. The dolphin population here, about 180km south of Perth, has been studied quite intensively since 2007 by the Murdoch University Cetacean […]
Fishermen working with a cooperative dolphin to enhance their catch. Photo Credit: Carolina Stratico When the mullet migrate northward, the fishermen in Laguna, Brazil are waiting. They rise early and take their places in line, waist-deep in the water, tarrafa—a kind of circular throwing net—in hand. Without a word, the dolphins arrive, herding schools […]