Whales

In a move deemed to be a temporary end to the controversy over Low Frequency Acoustical (LFA) sonar testing and its impact on whales, the U.S. Navy announced this month that it will limit the peacetime use of the sonar.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) last month released the details of a draft recovery strategy aimed at restoring the North Pacific right whale to Canadian waters and maintaining the long term viability of the population.

In what appears to be the first global estimate of the problem of whale entanglements, scientists estimate nearly 1,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises drown every day after becoming tangled in fishing nets and other equipment.

A federal spending bill approved last month contains $750,000 to study what has been killing Puget Sound orcas, the first federal money allocated by Congress for killer whale field studies since the 1970s.

A cluster of eleven transient killer whales spent an unprecedented eight weeks in Washington State’s Hood Canal earlier this spring, gorging themselves on the local harbor seal population, then heading back to sea.

Bowing to pressure from environmentalists, Brazil's president Fernando Henrique Cardoso approved a pact last month to create the country's first whale sanctuary.

Something strange is going on in the Bering Sea, where killer whales have suddenly switched from eating big Steller sea lions to itty-bitty sea otters. The diet switch was prompted by the plummeting population of western sea lions, some scientists say. Other marine mammals such as northern fur seals are also ...

The Makah whale hunt was derailed last month when a Circuit Court of Appeals suspended federal approval, ordering a new study of environmental risks.

Gray whales keep turning up dead on the beaches along the West Coast, and scientists who study the giant, mysterious creatures are having a hard time figuring out why.

Vancouver’s world-famous aquarium has decided to end its 33-year tradition of displaying killer whales and will ship its sole surviving Orca to the United States.