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Seemingly healthy gray whales tend to strand themselves more often when the sun has blemishes known as sunspots or high solar radio frequency noise—two signs of a stormy atmosphere—according to a study published earlier this week (February 24) in Current Biology. The results hint at the possibility that whales have a magnetic sense and that solar weather is influencing magnetic field–based navigation.
“The study convinced me there is a relationship between solar activity and whale strandings,” Kenneth Lohmann, a biologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who did not participate in the research, tells The New York Times.
Duke University biologist Sönke Johnsen’s group teamed up with astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz of Chicago’s Adler Planetarium to gather the solar data. Johnsen’s graduate student Jesse Granger used a list of 31 years’ worth of gray whale strandings from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to ...
