Richard Rowlett's
Each
winter, the entire Eastern Pacific (or California) population of gray whales
migrates from its primary feeding grounds in the Arctic to the lagoons and
near-shore areas of Baja California, Mexico to breed, bear and nurse their
young, and cavort before returning to the Arctic. The northbound migration
is composed of two distinct pulses of whales. The first is composed of
adults and juveniles, and the second is made up almost entirely of cows with
their three month old calves. Since the spring of 1994, scientists from
the Southwest Fisheries Science Center have been monitoring this northbound
migration of cows and calves from Piedras
Blancas,
a point of land just north of San Simeon, California and just south of the Big
Sur coast. This site is ideal for counting these whales because these
animals generally pass within 200 m of the point and often stop to nurse their
young in the lee of the rocky point. Counts of northbound cows and calves
have revealed surprising variability in calf production for this population.
It appears that the number of calves born each year is related to environmental
conditions in the Arctic that limit prey populations and/or the availability of
prey to reproductive females. We have hypothesized that the timing of the
melt of sea ice in the Arctic may control access to primary feeding grounds for
newly pregnant females and thus impact the probability that existing pregnancies
will be carried to term. Chief Scientist,
Wayne Perryman (Above
information is from background
details
org. chart).
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