A “great whale river sports band”
Migrating whales usually gap in the summers at higher wide grabbing to build energy reserves to make long migration to lower latitudes. It is still unclear why the whales migrate, but it is likely that pregnant women in particular find it cheaper to give birth and care for their young in warm, shallow, sheltered areas – perhaps to protect their descendants against predators such as killing whales. Warmer Waters also keep the whale calves warm while gradually developing their insulating layers of blubber. Some scientists think that whales can also migrate to distort their skin in the same warm, shallow waters.
Roman et al. Publicly available spatial data investigated for whaling and breeding grounds, supplemented with observations from the aircraft and ship investigations to fill in the data and then provide that data in their models for calculating nutritional transport. They concentrated on six species known to migrate seasonal migrating over long distances from higher latitudes to lower latitudes: blue whales, whales, gray whales, humpbacks and north -atlantic and southern right whales.
They discovered that whales can transport around 4,000 tons of nitrogen every year during their migrations, together with 45,000 tons of biomass – and those figures could have been three times larger in earlier eras before industrial whale -like populations were exhausted. “We call it the” Great Whale conveyor belt, “said Roman. “It can also be considered a funnel, because whales feed on large areas, but they must be in a relatively limited space to find a partner, breed and give birth. In the beginning, the calves do not have the energy to cover long distances, as the mothers can. “The study contained no effects of whales that let go of droppings or eliminated their skin, which would also contribute to the overall food flow flux.
“Because of their size, whales can do things that no other animal does. They live on a different scale, “said co-author Andrew Pershing, an oceanographer at the non-profit organization Climate Central. “Nutrients come in from the outside – and not from a river, but because of these migrating animals. It is super cool and changes how we think about ecosystems in the ocean. We don't think animals other than people have an impact on a planetary scale, but the whales really do it. “
Nature Communications, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/S41467-025-56123-2 (Over Dois).
