![]() ![]() Species conservation often relies on the idea of a “native range,” a somewhat amorphous concept that roughly means the area where a species normally or naturally occurs-not including any places where humans brought it. In a world where animals are already dealing with rising temperatures, hunting, fishing, and the commandeering of ever-larger chunks of their homes for agriculture and development, trying to conserve them in subpar habitat seems like a terrible idea. So are we trying to save animals in the wrong places? If our ideas about where species belong are based on relict populations that live as far from humans as possible, we risk boxing wildlife into limited, resource-poor areas. Lots of species’ contemporary ranges are likely defined not just by climate tolerance or availability of food but by distance from dangerous humans, experts told me. Sperm whales aren’t the only species for which our range maps might be all wrong. In places where the sea gets deep close to shore, like Monterey Bay, California, you could probably see them spout from the beach. But if humans managed to stop hitting them with ships or tangling them in nets and were able to make marine activities a lot quieter, there should in theory be nothing stopping sperm whales from recolonizing those coastal areas. (The study focused on the Western Indian Ocean, but the pattern is likely the same around the world, Letessier said.)Ī generation after the end of significant whaling in 1986, the ocean’s giants are still in hiding. Those remote ocean habitats, in other words, aren’t the only places where sperm whales have always lived they are the last hideouts of the whales that survived centuries of whaling that reduced their population by more than half. Letessier, the lead author of the study and a marine biologist at the Zoological Society of London, told me. “We typically go for what’s easily accessible first,” Tom B. Though sperm whales need deep water to hunt for food, they abandoned areas near the coast because that’s the first place humans hunted them out. A new study that looks at records from the heyday of “ Yankee whaling”-1792 to 1912-found that sperm whales used to hang out much closer to the coast. In Moby-Dick, published in 1851, the whaling ship Pequod chases sperm whales far from shore, days from port.īut that doesn’t mean sperm whales want to restrict themselves to the open ocean. government’s 2010 recovery plan for sperm whales characterizes their range as “generally offshore.” A 2016 study of their Australian range describes the whales as foraging in “deep offshore areas of the world’s oceans.” This understanding goes way back. Or at least, that’s what scientists have long thought. Sperm whales live in the remote open ocean. Sign up for The Weekly Planet, The Atlantic’ s newsletter about living through climate change, here. ![]()
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