Scientists with the New England Aquarium have spotted two endangered blue whales about 15 miles off the coast of southern New England, marking what they believe is the first time the species has been spotted in those waters.
The sighting of those blue whales during an aerial survey came just a day after another blue whale was seen about 170 miles further out, within the waters of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument.
Spotting a blue whale at all is extraordinarily rare, but not unprecedented within the monument. An aquarium team previously documented one there in 2020. But it was the second sighting off of Martha’s Vineyard that really excited the researchers.
“That sighting was very cool. It was really close to shore. It was like 15 miles south of Martha’s vineyard. And there was a fin whale with the two blue whales, kind of this like multi-species little group, which was really interesting,” said Orla O’Brien, a research scientist with the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life at the New England Aquarium.
“To my knowledge, I think it’s the first documented blue whale sighting by a research team in that area,” O’Brien said.
The first sighting took place on Feb. 27, when the team of scientists from the aquarium flying over the monument spotted a single blue whale near Lydonia Canyon.
Less than 24 hours later, while conducting another aerial survey, the team spotted two more blue whales 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard.
The four-seat plane was flying at an altitude of about 1500 feet and O’Brien said the flight had been uneventful until they spotted something unusual.
“We went over to check it out and we kind of were kicking ourselves because we were like, 'Oh my god, two blue whales a day after seeing another blue whale,'” O’Brien recalled.
“And that was just such a beautiful sighting because we watched the whales kind of like come up and down, like one of them would be at the surface and we’d just see it swimming. And then like the other whale would come up and we just kind of watched them for maybe 20 minutes or so and it was really, really pretty.”
Blue whales are the largest animals on earth and can grow up to 100 feet long. The two spotted by O’Brien were also with a fin whale, the world’s second largest animal, which can be 70 feet long or more.
“The fin whale looked like tiny, which was hilarious. Just kind of comparing the two sizes, like they were definitely really big whales,” O’Brien said.
The sightings come one month after the Trump administration proposed rolling back protections for the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, which is the only such monument in the Atlantic Ocean. The area is an underwater sanctuary about 130 miles southeast of Cape Cod and is home to deep-sea corals, various fish species, whales and sea turtles.
The prospect of allowing fishing again in the area, as the administration is proposing, creates an extra risk to marine mammal biodiversity, O’Brien said.
The blue whale sightings are rare because they mostly feed in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada, but O’Brien said they could be “dispersing out into the more open ocean.”
But she has another theory.
“It could be one of two things — it’s either that something good is going on in New England, in terms of like food resources, or something not so good is going on where they usually are,” she said.
Climate change could play a role it, especially the warming waters in the northwest Atlantic where food the whales rely on could be impacted.
“Blue whales feed on krill specifically. And so if there’s something affecting a good place for krill to develop, that will affect where blue whales need to go,” she said. “And part of it is about temperature, but part of is about how the temperature affects how the currents move.”
Blue whales are endangered species and scientists say little is known about the Western North Atlantic population, which may consist of only about 400-600 individuals. They are best studied in their summer feeding grounds farther north in Canadian waters.
Since blue whale sightings in the waters off the southern New England area are so rare, O’Brien and her team were clearly excited about it.
“My colleague in the plane was like, everybody needs to go buy lottery tickets because like, this is amazing,” she said. “That sighting was very cool.”
