Canadian whale biologist Shane Gero and his team have become the first people to document the birth of a sperm whale. Gero, lead biologist for Project CETI and a scientist in residence for Carleton University, was off the coast of the eastern Caribbean island of Dominica searching for a family of sperm whales when he and his team witnessed the event. They started the day with the aim to record videos of the whales with overheard drones and audio using underwater hydrophones, then use advanced machine learning to decode and translate the whale’s ping-like communication. 

After an hour of observing the family of whales all grouped up, Gero says he and his team were caught by surprise when a sudden gush of blood was followed by the appearance of “these beautiful, tiny, little floppy flukes of the new baby who had just been born.” It was an experience he describes as surreal.

At first, the researchers feared the calf was stillborn because it was so floppy, but after a few minutes realised the newborn — a female — was breathing, kicking and moving. “To have [the whales] all writhing around like spinning spaghetti around your fork so elegantly and gracefully in the ocean was pretty unbelievable,” said Gero on the CBC radio show Quirks and Quarks. 

Small worries

A big study has found that a whole lot of the world’s animals are getting smaller. The paper, published in Science, which reviewed 60 years of data comprising 5,000 ecosystems, recorded significant changes in 4,300 unique species. The findings are a big deal because healthy ecosystems are generally structured by size, with apex predators eating smaller animals, which, in turn, prey on smaller animals and so on down the line. If certain animals are getting smaller, the effects are felt all along the food chain.

Little brown bats in parts of the Yukon are one of the animals that are definitely shrinking, according to scientists there. Climate change means southwestern Yukon is experiencing rainier summers, and all those raindrops make it more difficult for the bats to use their echolocation to catch flying insects. That leads to smaller bats, which don’t survive as well. And fewer surviving bats is creating big problems in the boreal forest, where little brown bats play a key role in eating the insects that prey on young trees. As the bats decline, so, too, does the health of the entire forest system. Forests in the Yukon and southern Northwest Territories are regarded as particularly vulnerable because they have less biodiversity than southern forests.

Flying high

Global warming is making migration even tougher as birds, already flying thousands of kilometres, now have to brave changing temperatures, changing humidity, wildfire smoke and changing altitudes. New research from Western University’s Advanced Facility for Avian Research has shown that some songbirds adjust their breathing patterns during migration to bring more oxygen to their flight muscles with each breath, thus allowing them to fly at much higher altitudes (where oxygen availability is limited) during long-distance flights — as much as 4,000 metres (approximately half the cruising altitude of a commercial jet) above sea level. But not all birds will be capable of flying at higher and higher altitudes to avoid major shifts in temperature and weather conditions because of climate change.

The Journal of Experimental Biology published this study, which saw researchers put various songbirds through their paces in a wind tunnel that can simulate different altitudes and conditions. The concern is that, as climate change heats up the Earth, not all birds will thrive at the higher altitudes that they will need to fly at to stay cool. Researchers plan to investigate the migrations strategies of more warblers and thrushes this fall.

Long in the tooth