Just before noon on a Sunday in October, passengers settled onto the upper deck of the American Princess, a 95-foot cruising vessel that departed from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, into the Atlantic Ocean in search of whales.
They did not have to wait long to find one. After rounding Breezy Point, Queens, the captain cut the engine and the sightseers rushed to the port side as the glassy-gray ridge of a humpback’s dorsal fin broke the surface of the waves.
The crew had encountered the 29-foot, 12,700-pound female three days earlier and saw more than a dozen shallow scars running along her back.
Two weeks later, the same whale washed up on a sandbar off Long Beach Island, N.J., and died the next day. Officials with the Marine Mammal Stranding Center, an animal rescue service based in New Jersey, determined that a ship’s propeller had wounded her in August. A necropsy found that she was severely underweight and had signs of kidney disease, the facility said.
After being hunted into near-oblivion, whale populations have slowly rebounded across the Atlantic since the passage of several protective measures, including an international moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986. Researchers have recently observed more whales lingering off New York Harbor to feast on sand lances, Atlantic menhaden and other tiny fish instead of continuing to their traditional feeding grounds in the Gulf of Maine.
They are far from alone on New York’s aquatic interstate. Traffic from container ships, tankers and fishing vessels has become more congested since the coronavirus pandemic, which has led to collisions and entanglements contributing to whale strandings in New York and New Jersey. Efforts to slow down smaller crafts have stalled, and federal laws protecting marine mammals are being weakened.
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