The other singing whales in New York

Good morning. It is Friday. Today we’ll hear about some super-sized swimmers that sing underwater and which, it turns out, can be found in the New York area year-round. We also get details on Nassau County’s ban on sports teams featuring transgender athletes.

Some New Yorkers spend the year in the city, and others spend time elsewhere – perhaps Florida in the winter or the Hamptons in the summer.

Fin whales live all year round. Or rather, they swim off the coast of New York year-round, according to an article in the magazine Scientific reports.

The six scientists who wrote the article came to that conclusion because fin whales sing. The scientists recorded the whales screaming their songs underwater using an underwater microphone attached to a buoy in the Atlantic Ocean several kilometers offshore.

“It is truly remarkable that the second largest animal to ever live on Earth is here off our coast all year round,” he said Howard Rosenbaum, the director of the Ocean Giants program for the Association for Nature Conservation and one of the authors of the article. Fin whales, which are endangered, can grow up to 25 meters in length.

Rosenbaum and the other scientists did not pick up high Cs on the high seas. Fin whales sing at extremely low frequencies – and very repetitively. Their monotonous songs have as varied a range as Johnny One Notes.

It’s the male fin whales that sing, Rosenbaum said, and they are soloists. They rarely do what he called “choruses.” Humpback whales, on the other hand, sing in groups. “You can sometimes count the number of singers,” Rosenbaum said.

The scientists heard fin whales singing during every month of the year. Their archive of recordings spans 653 days from 2017 to 2020 in the New York Bight, the triangular part of the Atlantic Ocean that stretches from Cape May, New Jersey, to Montauk, on the eastern side of Long Island.

The recording device recorded most singing in late fall and early winter, and slightly less in late winter and early spring. In the summer the singing was sporadic.

The scientists discovered different types of songs. Love songs—or songs that signal “breeding behavior,” as Rosenbaum described them—had short intervals between notes and were heard in late fall and early winter. During spring songs, the microphone picked up longer intervals between notes, an indication that the whales were foraging.

But the differences in the songs indicated that New York may not be the permanent home for all the fin whales the scientists heard.

Some fin whales could be on their way to a distant destination, and others are more or less regular residents of the New York Bight – the scientists don’t know. But Rosenbaum said the songs appeared to come from different species of fin whales, which could ultimately help regulators and companies tailor their practices to the specific subpopulations in the waters off New York.

“People in the broader metropolitan area have gotten excited about whales and dolphins lately,” Rosenbaum said. “If you go whale watching from Brooklyn or somewhere in New Jersey, you often see humpback whales or bottlenose dolphins. When most people think of the waters around New York and New Jersey, they don’t think of the second largest whale out there.”

But they are. “I’ve seen them as close as a mile offshore and as far as 60 to 80 miles away,” he said. “In the summer we were 65 miles offshore. But once in August and once in November, when we were a few kilometers from the beach, I saw people walking along the beach – and we were with a fin whale.”

Weather

Prepare for rain, with temperatures around 40 degrees. The evening will be partly cloudy, with temperatures dropping into the mid 30s.

ALTERNATE PARKING

In effect until March 24 (Purim).

Bruce Blakeman, Nassau County Executive and a Republican, signed an executive order banning girls’ and women’s teams, including transgender athletes, from using county facilities. It was the latest attempt in a nationwide effort to restrict transgender athletes from competing.

The order, which did not require government approval Province Legislature, took effect immediately. It was not immediately clear whether Blakeman’s action was legal under state human rights law.

His office said the ban would affect thousands of teams at all levels. Last year, the Big East Conference, which has 11 affiliated universities, held its swimming championships in Nassau County. The Big East did not respond to a request for comment on the ban.

The response was immediate. Bobby Hodgson, the director of LGBTQ 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 LGBT 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 run the women’s draw. at the US 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 Blakeman gave 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 competing on women’s teams outside New York and said he wanted to “lead the way here in Nassau County.” The decision does not restrict transgender boys and men from competing on boys’ and men’s teams.

When asked how many transgender athletes compete in Nassau County, he said he didn’t know. He also said, without citing a source, that less than 1 percent of county residents identify as transgender and that he was unsure how many, if any, were competing at county facilities.

Juli Grey-Owens, executive director of Gender Equality New York, a group that participated 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 density. of approximately 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 without an 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:

When I reached the corner of 59th Street and First Avenue, a man and a woman were standing there talking. They disagreed on whether to cross the street.

The man argued that no cars were coming and the street was empty, so they should go.

That would be jaywalking, the woman replied in shock.