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Solar storms may cause whale strandings, study reports

Doyle Rice
USA TODAY
California gray whales like these mothers and calves are 4.3 times more likely to strand themselves during a burst of cosmic radio static from a solar flare, further evidence that they navigate by Earth's magnetic field.
  • California gray whales depend on a magnetic sense to find their way through the ocean.
  • "We know that radio noise can disrupt an animal's ability to use magnetic information."
  • "We're not trying to say this is the only cause of strandings. It's just one possible cause."

Some whale strandings may be due to solar storms and sunspots, a new study suggests.

According to the study, California gray whales depend on a magnetic sense to find their way through the ocean. This finding comes from the discovery that whales are more likely to strand on days when there are more sunspots.

"Sunspots are strongly correlated with solar storms – sudden releases of high-energy particles from the sun that modify the geomagnetic field and thus have the potential to disrupt magnetic orientation behavior," the study said. 

Gray whales were an ideal species to test the idea because they migrate 10,000 miles a year from Baja California to Alaska and back and they stay relatively close to the shore, where small navigational errors could lead to disaster, according to study lead author Jesse Granger, a graduate student in biophysics at Duke University.

Granger and her colleagues studied 186 live strandings of gray whales over a period of 31 years, and found that gray whales were more than four times more likely to strand when a lot of radio frequency noise from a solar outburst was hitting the Earth.

She suspects the issue isn't that a solar storm warps the Earth's magnetic field, though it can. It's that the radio frequency noise created by the solar outburst does something to overwhelm the whales' senses, preventing them from navigating altogether – as if turning their GPS off in the middle of the trip.

"A correlation with solar radio noise is really interesting, because we know that radio noise can disrupt an animal's ability to use magnetic information," Granger said.

"We're not trying to say this is the only cause of strandings," she said. "It's just one possible cause."

There are still many other things that could cause a whale to strand, such as naval sonar.

Granger now plans to conduct a similar analysis for several other species of whales on several other continents to see if this pattern exists on a more global scale.

The study was published Monday in the journal Current Biology

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