How Culture Guides Belugas’ Annual Odysseys Across the Arctic

The belugas were due to arrive in droves, but Gregory O’Corry-Crowe was nervous. Just a few years into a postdoctoral biology fellowship, O’Corry-Crowe had taken this opportunity in 1998 to fly to remote Somerset Island in the Canadian Arctic with a pair of seasoned biologists. Would the whales show up?

The whales were not shy about announcing their arrival. After a few days of relatively quiet seas, they roused him in the early hours—night this far north was only a dim concept in the summer—with a “cacophony of noise” caused by their blowing, flapping and humming in the water. O’Corry-Crowe rolled out of his sleeping bag at the seaside camp to a vista of about 1,500 beluga whales.

Read more at Smithsonian Magazine.