GNN has reported several times over the last three years about large baleen whales returning to waters in which they haven’t been sighted for decades.
Now again, news from Argentina shows that the benefits of the 1946 International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling are still compounding, with sei whales returning to the South American nation’s coastal waters for the first time in nearly a decade.
Overhunting during the 1920s and 1930s led these massive blue-grey giants to abandon their ancestral waters in Argentina.
“After nearly a century of being hunted to near extinction, sei whale populations are now bouncing back and returning to their former habitats,” said Mariano Coscarella, a biologist and marine ecosystem researcher at Argentina’s CONICET scientific agency, who added that the whales “reproduce every two or three years, so it nearly took 100 years for their population to reach a level where people could notice their presence.”
The third largest whale in the world, the sei can grow up to 64 feet (20 meters) in length and weigh up to 31 tons (28 tonnes). It’s also among the fastest whales in the world, and is certainly the fastest for its size group. It can swim 31 mph over short distances.
Despite being recognized on the IUCN Red List as Endangered, there are estimated to be 50,000 sei whales in a global population that is trending up.
Apart from sei whales and Argentina, a recent survey in the Seychelles sighted 10 groups of at least a few blue whales, the first such observations since 1966.
Back in March, a New England Aquarium aerial survey team sighted a gray whale off the New England coast last week, a species that has been extinct in the Atlantic for more than 200 years.
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The largest animal on Earth, the blue whale, is returning to coastal Californian waters in numbers not seen since before the whaling industry, GNN reported in 2023 based on a 2014 survey.
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And down in Antarctica, where many different whale species come to feed and breed, recent surveys have found the Southern Ocean is once again becoming a Sarengetti for whales, with an estimated 8,000 Southern fin whales found between 2018 and 2019.
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