Western Arctic bowhead whales are distributed in ice-covered waters of the Arctic and near-Arctic, generally north of 60*N and south of 75*N in the western Arctic Basin. The largest population is in the Bering Sea. The majority of the Bering Sea bowheads migrate from wintering areas in the northern Bering Sea (November to March), through the Chukchi Sea in the spring (March through June), to the Beaufort Sea where they spend much of the summer (mid-May through September) before returning to the Bering Sea in the fall (September through November) to overwinter. Most of the year, bowhead whales are closely associated with sea ice. The bowhead spring migration follows fractures in the sea ice around the coast of Alaska, generally in the shear zone between the shorefast ice and the mobile pack ice. However, during the summer, most of the population is in relatively ice-free waters in the southern Beaufort Sea. All bowheads were commercially exploited for oil and baleen in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reducing the population significantly. Today, only subsistence hunting by a few Alaska natives occurs. Bowhead whales can reach lengths of 19.8 m and weigh up to 100 metric tons.
- BRANDON, J., and P. R. WADE.
2006. A stock assessment of the Bering-Chukchi-Beaufort Seas stock of bowhead whales using Bayesian model averaging. J. Cetacean Res. Manage. 8(3):225-239.
- KOSKI, W. R., D. J. RUGH, A. E. PUNT, and D. J. ZEH.
2006. An approach to minimise bias in estimation of the length-frequency distribution of bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) from aerial photogrammetric data. J. Cetacean Res. Manage. 8:45-54.
- MOORE, S. E., and K. L. LAIDRE.
2006. Trends in sea ice cover within habitats used by bowhead whales in the western Arctic. Ecol. Appl. 16(3):932-944.
- RUGH, D., and P. WADE.
2005. Aerial photography of bowhead whales to estimate the size of the Bering-Chukchi-Beaufort population, p. 85-87. In MBC Applied Environmental Sciences, Proceedings of the tenth MMS information transfer meeting and Barrow information update meeting. Anchorage, AK, U.S. Department of the Interior, Minerals Management Service, Alaska OCS Region. (OCS Study MMS-2005-036).
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- Bowhead Whale Feeding Behavior as Evidenced in Aerial Photography
559KB Online.
- Aerial Surveys of Bowhead Whales in the Vicinity of Barrow, Alaska, August-September 2007
2.4MB Online.
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