Thus far this year, there hasn’t been a decline in gray whales but this is the scrawniest they have been since malnourishment and disease claimed a third of

their population in 1999 and 2000, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Scientists suspect the same thing may be happening now that triggered the die-off then: rapid warming of Arctic waters where the whales feed.

Whales depend on fat-rich crustaceans to gain enough weight for their long southerly migration. As Arctic ice recedes, there are fewer crustaceans on the floor of the Bering Sea.

In the hunt for food, some gray whales are extending their 5,000-mile northerly migration beyond the Bering Strait into the Chukchi and Beaufort seas north of Alaska, said Steven Swartz of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

“They need to find new places to feed, because the ocean is changing on them,”

Swartz said. “I hope we are watching a transition rather than a serious problem.”

Source: http://www.physorg.com

LOS MAITENES, Chile (Reuters) - Chilean teenagers on a field trip have found what experts say could be a treasure trove of fossils from whales which died millions of years ago.

Teenagers from a school in Concon, a town on the Pacific coast, found the fossils last month in the hills near the village of Los Maitenes, nearly four miles from the sea and 100 miles from the capital Santiago.

They found fossilized jawbones, backbones and ribs of four whales which scientists say likely died 5 million years ago.

Chilean teenagers find trove of whale fossils  A general view of the area where students found fossils in Los Maitenes town, about 160 km (99 miles)

northwest of Santiago, June 26, 2007. In the Town of Los Maitenes, in the central coast of Chile, a group of secondary students discovered some fossil

remains of what could be a prehistoric whale cemetery during a workshop of paleontology.

When it comes to catching squid, which have a keen sense of smell, very good eyesight, and can squirt dark ink to hide their escape, humans could learn a lot from whales, but whales aren’t talking.

The numbers of squid that are eaten by sperm whales far exceed those harvested by men for food on a worldwide basis,” said squid-expert Roger Hanlon of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

But how whales manage to find and devour skiddish squid remains a mystery. One hypothesis, proposed more than 20 years ago, speculated the whales used powerful ultrasound shrieks to knock their squid prey senseless before gulping them down. Like bats and dolphins, some whales use ultrasonic clicks to find prey and navigate.

A new study by Hanlon and his colleagues reveals squid cannot be paralyzed by whale ultrasound. In fact, they are not even aware they are being targeted. The team’s findings are detailed in the July 7 issue of the journal Biology Letters.

The researchers played recorded ultrasound whale clicks to several long-finned squid ‘’Loligo pealeii'’ swimming in a water tank. This species of squid grows to about a foot long and is commonly found off the coast of the northeastern United States.

The ultrasound clicks were broadcast at up to 226 decibels, which is about the most intense whale echolocation click a squid would be exposed to in the wild. Not only were the squid not knocked senseless, they did not react at all to the ultrasound bursts, and actually swam in front of the speaker as if nothing were happening.

“That’s like a Bose commercial where you’re sitting there and your hair is straight back because the sound is blasting out,” Hanlon said. “That to us was a stunning result. We did the experiment several times over because we could hardly believe it ourselves.”

So if whales don’t use sound waves to knock out squid, how do they catch them?

“Why can’t ‘’squids'’ see some aspects of this big whale heading down on them at a zillion miles an hour? That’s a big mystery,”