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Abstract
During winter months, humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) frequent the coastal waters of Virginia near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. Located within the Bay is Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest naval military installation, and the Port of Virginia, the sixth busiest container port in the United States. These large seaports, combined with the presence of recreational boaters, commercial fishing vessels, and sport-fishing boats, result in a constant heavy flow of vessel traffic through the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and adjacent areas. From December 2015 to February 2017, 35 satellite tags were deployed on humpback whales to gain a better understanding on the occurrence, movements, site-fidelity, and overall behavior of this species within this high-traffic region. The tags transmitted data for an average of 13.7 days (range 2.7–43.8 days). Location data showed that at some point during tag deployment, nearly all whales occurred within, or in close proximity to, the shipping channels located in the study area. Approximately one quarter of all filtered and modeled locations occurred within the shipping channels. Hierarchical state-space modeling results suggest that humpback whales spend considerable time (82.0%) engaged in foraging behavior at or near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. Of the 106 humpback whales photo-identified during this research, nine individuals (8.5%) had evidence of propeller strikes. One whale that had previously been tagged and tracked within shipping channels, was found dead on a local beach; a fatality resulting from a vessel strike. The findings from this study demonstrate that a substantial number of humpback whales frequent high-traffic areas near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, increasing the likelihood of injurious vessel interactions that can result in mortalities.
Highlights
The humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) is a cosmopolitan species that undergoes long-distance seasonal migrations between high-latitude feeding grounds and low-latitude breeding and calving grounds
Most tags were deployed at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay with 16 of the deployments occurring in shipping channels, one deployment occurring inside the Bay, and one deployment occurring south of the primary study area near the North Carolina border (Figure 4)
Fin whale sightings occurred at the mouth of the Bay and slightly to the south, with half occurring within the shipping channels inside the Seasonal Management Area (SMA) and half occurring just outside of shipping channels and the SMA (Figure 3)
Summary
The humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) is a cosmopolitan species that undergoes long-distance seasonal migrations between high-latitude feeding grounds and low-latitude breeding and calving grounds. Many regional populations, having recovered from decades of commercial whaling (e.g., Stevick et al, 2003), were recently downgraded from “Endangered” to “Threatened” status under the United States Endangered Species Act (ESA) and some populations have been removed entirely from ESA listing (Federal Register, 2016). They are listed as ‘least concern’ under the IUCN (Cooke, 2018). An unknown portion of the population does not migrate to Caribbean waters, but instead uses the coastal waters between New Jersey and North Carolina as a supplemental winter feeding ground (Swingle et al, 1993; Barco et al, 2002). Wiley et al (1995) hypothesized that it could be an adaptive strategy for juvenile humpback whales to remain in the MidAtlantic region during winter months rather than migrating to breeding areas
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