On Sunday night, a plump ringed seal pup was spotted on the ice in front of Breaker’s Bar on Nome’s Front Street. UAF Alaska Sea Grant agent Gay Sheffield was called and moved the pup to a more secluded beach. The ice had likely gone out too fast and the mother finished up the normal weaning process on the ice chunks in front of Nome.
Sixteen gray and humpback whales have been reported stranded off Washington and Oregon since April 3, the largest number in nearly two decades.
John Ahkvaluk , 56, a polar bear guard revealed that this is not a good sign for the village. It’s the first time in several years that bears come at this time of the year. “It’s a warning that they got no food out there and they came looking for it here,” he said. After the incident, Luchie Manlangit, the school principal, and I invited John Ahkvaluk to talk to the kids and to share some protocols if polar bear will come around again.
But the age-old Inugguit lifestyle is changing fast as the climate warms, disrupting long-held patterns and possibilities and forcing economic challenges as a traditional hunting culture weighs new industries such as fishing and even tourism.
Near Nome, reports of seal pups and walrus calves hauled out on beaches are piling up at an unprecedented rate.
Residents of the coastal Chumikan village reported two adult whales and one baby on Wednesday afternoon, on a shore of the Uda River that flows into the sea. Alexei Paramonov spent hours protecting the pod from wild animals and poachers and saved the baby whale from hypothermia.
Public health officials confirmed that four Nome residents had been hospitalized in early January with preliminary results pointing to poising from foodborne type E botulism from an aged beluga flipper.
Like its old-growth trees, the Northwest’s big, old chinook salmon are largely gone, a new study finds, with implications for Puget Sound’s critically endangered southern resident killer whales.
Walruses were found washed up on the beaches from Cape Espenberg to Shishmaref and further west. Samples taken from the intestines of four walrus all had moderate to high levels of saxitoxin.
NOAA and NASA satellites measured an average sea-surface temperature of 68.93 degrees Fahrenheit in the Gulf of Maine on Aug. 8, only 0.05 degrees below the all-time record high of 68.98 set in 2012. It is the epicenter of the U.S. lobster fishing industry, an important feeding ground for rare North Atlantic right whales .
Scientists are waiting for water samples analysis that could hold skin cells for possible DNA testing. . Read more at straitstimes.com.
The community of Gambell fought a distemper outbreak among its dog population this spring and managed to squash the epidemic in its early onset. Distemper is a deadly disease that can afflict dogs and wildlife alike and also has been documented in the North Atlantic to jump from dogs to marine mammals like seals.
This comes just days after other reports of about 60 dead ice seals found from Kotlik to Kotzebue and Kivalina to Point Hope.
The extraordinary sight of a 30-foot long dead humpback whale that washed up on a beach area in Anchorage.
Verified reports of deaths and circumstantial evidence animals trapped in ‘bycatch’
The appearance of walrus on the ice off Nome added some excitement to the onset of spring.
Dozens of walruses were found dead earlier this month at their seasonal haulout near Point Lay. The findings came just about a day after locals said they saw an airplane they believed to be flying inappropriately over the herd, which comes to shore each year once the sea ice recedes past the continental shelf and it becomes too deep for them to feed.
But an Icelandic whale-watching crew spotted the right whale named Mogul three times this week, leaving a research scientist wondering why the animal ventured so far.
It is the first polar bear seen in the city in more than 40 years, according to local environmentalists.
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