By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
The piss-poor Telegraph strikes again!
Centuries of hunting, habitat loss and persecution have left the UK and Ireland among the world’s most nature-depleted nations. But although we’ve lost our bears and wolves, great auks and Irish elks, the British Isles remain remarkably rich in whales and dolphins. Indeed, around a quarter of all known marine cetacean species occur in our waters. So when news broke from Cornwall recently of a humpback whale trapped in fishing gear, it highlighted that these massive beasts are closer to home than we might think.
The idea of ocean giants around our shores may be surprising, but the Cornish humpback was by no means an isolated sighting. “They’re spotted in Britain in increasing numbers,” says Hannah Wilson of Marine Discovery, a boat trip operator that assisted in freeing the Easter individual. “We’re getting a lot more dolphins too as climate change impacts food distribution, bringing the animals closer inshore. Humpbacks have rebounded since the end of commercial whaling, so it’s likely that we’ll see more of them as they repopulate their range.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/climate-change-more-whales-british-waters/
Why the DT thinks humpbacks are coming here because of global warming is a mystery.
According to Wikipedia, the blighters range all the way from the Arctic to the Mediterranean and beyond. So the idea that they are coming to British waters now because it is slightly warmer is thoroughly absurd – which I suppose is par for the course for the Telegraph.
If whales are now becoming more common, it is because we stopped hunting them years ago.
And the fact that whale watching is now a tourist industry must mean that more sightings get recorded.