Some New Yorkers spend all year in town, and some spend time elsewhere — maybe Florida in the winter or the Hamptons in the summer.
Fin whales are year-rounders. Or, more precisely, they are swimming off New York all year long, according to a paper in the journal Scientific Reports.
The six scientists who wrote the paper reached that conclusion because fin whales sing. The scientists recorded the whales belting out their songs underwater, using an underwater microphone attached to a buoy in the Atlantic Ocean several miles offshore.
“It is truly remarkable that the second largest animal to have ever lived on this earth is here off our coast year-round,” said Howard Rosenbaum, the director of the Ocean Giants Program for the Wildlife Conservation Society and one of the authors of the paper. Fin whales, which are endangered, can grow to be 80 feet long.
Rosenbaum and the other scientists were not picking up high Cs on the high seas. Fin whales sing at extremely low frequencies — and very repetitively. Their monotonous songs have a range as varied as Johnny One Note’s.
It is the male fin whales that sing, Rosenbaum said, and they are soloists. They rarely go in for what he called “chorusing.” Humpback whales, by contrast, sing in groups. “You can count the number of singers sometimes,” Rosenbaum said.
The scientists heard fin whales singing during every month of the year. Their archive of recordings covers 653 days from 2017 to 2020 in the New York Bight, the triangular section of the Atlantic that stretches from Cape May in New Jersey to Montauk, at the eastern end of Long Island.
The recording device picked up the most singing in late fall and early winter, with somewhat less in late winter and early spring. The singing was merely sporadic in the summer.
The scientists detected different types of songs. Love songs — or songs signaling “breeding behavior,” as Rosenbaum described them — had short intervals between the notes and were heard in late fall and early winter. In songs in the spring, the microphone picked up longer intervals between the notes, an indication that the whales were foraging.
But differences in songs indicated that New York may not be a full-time home to all the fin whales that the scientists heard.
Some of the fin whales could have been on their way to a distant destination, and others more or less regular residents of the New York Bight — the scientists do not know. But Rosenbaum said the songs appeared to come from different types of fin whales, which could eventually help regulators and businesses tailor their practices to the specific subpopulations in the waters off New York.
“People in the wider metropolitan area have gotten excited lately about whales and dolphins,” Rosenbaum said. “If you’re going whale watching from Brooklyn or somewhere in New Jersey, you’re often seeing humpbacks or bottlenose dolphins. Most people, when they think about the waters off New York and New Jersey, they don’t think about the second largest whale being out there.”
But they are. “I’ve seen them as close as a mile offshore and as far as 60 to 80 miles out,” he said. “In the summer, we were 65 miles offshore. But once in August and once in November, where we were a mile or two off the beach, I could see people walking along the beach — and we were with a fin whale.”
Weather
Prepare for rain, with temperatures in the high 40s. The evening will be partly cloudy, with temperatures falling to the mid-30s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until March 24 (Purim).
Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive and a Republican, signed an executive order barring girls’ and women’s teams that include transgender athletes from using county facilities. It was the latest effort in a nationwide push to limit transgender athletes from competing.
The order, which did not require the approval of the County Legislature, took effect immediately. It was not immediately clear whether Blakeman’s action was legal under the state’s human rights law.
His office said the ban would affect thousands of teams across all levels. Last year, the Big East Conference, which has 11 member universities, held its swimming championship in Nassau County. The Big East did not respond to a request for comment on the ban.
The reaction was immediate. Bobby Hodgson, the director of L.G.B.T.Q. Rights Litigation at the New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement that Blakeman’s order was illegal and that the organization would “consider all options to stop it.”
Jami Taylor, a political science professor at the University of Toledo and an expert on L.G.B.T. politics, told my colleague Claire Fahy that Blakeman had ignored both state law and a Supreme Court ruling, a 1977 case that allowed Renée Richards to compete in the women’s draw at the U.S. Open. Richards, now 89, was one of the first openly transgender athletes in professional sports.
Assemblywoman Gina Sillitti, a Democrat who represents parts of Nassau County, said that Blakeman had issued the order to score political points. Blakeman was elected in 2021 after campaigning against mask mandates, which had angered some suburban parents and businesses during the pandemic. He also focused on crime and bail reform.
Blakeman, who signed the order at a news conference, referred to transgender girls who competed on women’s teams outside New York, saying that he wanted to “get ahead of the curve here in Nassau County.” The order does not restrict transgender boys and men from competing on boys’ and men’s teams.
When he was asked how many transgender athletes compete in Nassau County, he said he did not know. He also said, without citing a source, that fewer than 1 percent of the county’s residents identify as transgender and that he was not sure how many, if any, competed at county facilities.
Juli Grey-Owens, the executive director of Gender Equality New York, a group that took part in a protest outside the building where Blakeman’s news conference took place, said there were about 17,000 transgender people in Nassau and Suffolk Counties, which have a combined population of about 2.9 million.
She said the question was how many transgender athletes were even involved in local women’s and girls’ sports.
“Every time that question is asked, they come back with no answer,” she said, referring to proponents of bans like Blakeman’s, “because they have a solution looking for a problem.”
METROPOLITAN diary
At the corner
Dear Diary:
As I got to the corner at 59th Street and First Avenue, a man and a woman were standing there talking. They were disagreeing about whether they should cross the street.
The man was arguing that no cars were coming, and the street was empty, so they should go.
That would be jaywalking, the woman replied in a shocked tone.
