Whales are more prone to run into ships in the Bering Strait due to an abundance of the transporters occupying the area Discovery News reported Wednesday.
Scientists believe the influx might harm the whales or cause them to perish Discovery News reported.
"It's not particularly surprising to those of us who work up in the Arctic," Kate Stafford an oceanographer at the University of Washington told Discovery News. "The Arctic seas are changing. We are seeing and hearing more species, farther north, more often. And that's a trend that is going to continue, Stafford told Discovery News.
"They are becoming more friendly to sub-Arctic species, and we don't know how that will impact Arctic whales," Stafford told Discovery News. "Will they be competitors for food? Will they be competitors for habitat? Will they be competitors for acoustic space, for instance these humpbacks yapping all the time in the same frequency band that bowheads use to communicate? We just don't know," Stafford told Discovery News.
Scientists monitored the sounds of beluga bowhead whales, humpbacks, minkes, fins, and orcas with microphones in the strait Discovery News reported. The geography is near Asia, Russia, North America and Alaska according to the Merriam Webster definition.
Humpbacks sounds were detected well towards the end of fall, while Oceanographers watched fin and minkes from July until September Discovery News reported.
"The question is, are these whale populations recovering and so they're reoccupying former habitat, or are they actually invading the Arctic because they can, because there is less seasonal sea ice?" Stafford told Discovery News.
"Marine mammals rely primarily on sound to navigate, to find food and to find mates. Sound is their modality. If we increase the ambient sound level, it has the potential to reduce the communication range of cetaceans and all marine mammals" Stafford told Discovery News.
