To the delight of local whale watchers, humpback and fin whales have returned to waters off Montauk where they had been largely absent for several years.

“That was a big one!” exclaimed Dylan Kay, 8, of Ridgewood, N.J., as a fin whale surfaced less than a hundred feet from the bow of the 140-foot long Viking Starship.

Tuesday, Kay and 78 other passengers from Long Island, New York City and beyond peered out excitedly over the boat’s railing as it rode the gently rolling swells southeast of Montauk Point. Despite occasional bouts of seasickness, the sight of the mammoth mammals’ gleaming flanks had most riders rushing from one side of the boat to the other.

Lured by food

Researchers suspect food – including an abundance of herring – may have lured the cetaceans back to local waters. In recent months, dozens of whales, dolphins and porpoises have been spotted just a dozen miles offshore, including some individual humpback whales that normally frequent New England waters.

“The feeding areas off here have been extraordinarily productive,” said Artie Kopelman, an adjunct associate marine sciences professor at Dowling College and president of the Coastal Research and Education Society of Long Island, which organizes the whale watch trips from Montauk.

Tuesday, volunteers from Kopelman’s group scanned the ocean for signs of whales, such as the far-off blast of water from a blow hole, then jotted down the location, water temperature and ocean depth where they were seen.

“It’s like a puff of smoke,” said Phil Austin, 55, a volunteer from Ridge who has been on nearly 40 whale-watching trips. “The higher it goes, and the wider it goes, helps you define what kind of whale it is.”

Fin whales – which grow up to 75 feet long, making them the second-largest whale species – are the most abundant type in Long Island waters. But observers this year have seen a number of smaller minke whales, and dozens of humpbacks on their way up to the Gulf of Maine.

“A mix of our resident animals have been spending at least some of their year down there,” said Mason Weinrich, executive director and chief scientist at the Whale Center of New England in Gloucester, Mass. “That indicates to me that there is food there . . . any animal is going to make a decision based on prey, how much they can get in one place versus somewhere else.”

Lots of fin whales

No humpbacks were spotted Tuesday. But after a slow start, fin whales showed up one by one as the boat moved east into deeper water. By midafternoon, Kopelman and the crew counted 15 fin whales – including a mother and her calf – four minke whales, and even a small shark of undetermined species.

It was a decent tally, but paltry compared with 1987, when Kopelman said they counted 200 fin whales on one trip. But as the sightings off Long Island dropped, so did the number of passengers. The Viking Fleet, which operates the boats, stopped running local cruises in 2002, although it continued offering three-day trips to watch humpback whales out in the Great South Channel, at the southern tip of the Gulf of Maine.

This summer Viking and Kopelman’s group restarted the six-hour tours after fishermen reported a resurgence of fin and humpback whales in Long Island waters. “As long as the whales show up, it’s good for our whale-watching business, said Capt. Carl Forsberg.

Their return electrified passenger Binnie Pasquier of Northport. “To think that we live on this congested little island, and then out here there is this natural beauty,” said Pasquier, 55, who left the house at 5:30 a.m. to make sure she didn’t miss the boat. “There’s such a thrill that it’s right here.” By Jennifer Smith,

Environmentalists have warned that an oil slick caused by an accident on a rig in the Timor Sea is threatening wildlife in Australian waters.

Oil has been flowing from the West Atlas platform for three weeks. Safety authorities have been using chemicals to try to break up the spill but warn it could be at least two more weeks before the leak is plugged.

Up to 400 barrels of oil per day have been pouring into the Timor Sea to Australia’s north. An emergency rig has arrived from Singapore to repair the damage and aircraft and boats have been dousing the slick with dispersants.

Fragile environment

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority has said that this has helped to contain the spread of oil, the bulk of which remains around the drilling platform thanks, in part, to benign weather conditions.

Officials have stated that the slick is about 170km (100 miles) from the Australian coast. Environmental groups believe the contamination poses a significant threat to wildlife and is heading towards land.

Piers Verstegen, from the Conservation Council of Western Australia, says the spill – off the north coast of the Kimberley region where whales congregate – is an ecological disaster.

“Humpback whales, an endangered species, go to that area and that region to calf and give birth and this oil spill is happening just off the Kimberley coast,” Mr Verstegen said.

“The oil, as far as we are aware, is travelling towards the Kimberley coastline but it is definitely affecting areas that are used by these whales and dolphins.”

Fishermen have reported seeing endangered flatback turtles covered in oil. There have also been claims that fish and sea-snakes have been poisoned.

Conservationists believe that, in its rush to exploit abundant natural resources, Australia risks inflicting irreparable damage on its fragile environment. By Phil Mercer, BBC News.

A small group of light-mantled sooty albatrosses has set a new breeding record. The birds have created a colony on King George Island, one of the South Shetland Islands located in Antarctica.

This new breeding colony is the southernmost breeding location of any albatross species ever recorded. Researchers spotted two confirmed nests on the island, one containing eggs and the other nestlings, and three more possible nests.

The light-mantled sooty albatross (Phoebetria palpebrata) is a medium-sized albatross that has a circumpolar distribution around the Southern Ocean.

It is the most abundant albatross in Antarctic waters and is known to range further south than other albatross species, often flying as far south as the border of the Antarctic pack ice during long-distance foraging trips.

However, it was only thought to nest on sub-Antarctic islands, lying at latitudes between 46 and 53 degrees South.

That was until Simeon Lisovski and Hans-Ulrich Peter of the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, in Germany and colleagues Karel Weidinger and Vaclav Pavel of Palacky University in Olomouc, Czech Republic discovered a new breeding colony of the birds at Fildes Peninsula on King George Island, at a latitude of 62 degrees and 12 minutes South.

In the summer season spanning 2008 and 2009, a research group led by Dr Peter saw light-mantled sooty albatrosses landing on a large 140m-high flat-topped rocky outcrop on the island.

“On Christmas day I got an unexpected call via the radio that two colleagues could observe some light-mantled sooty albatrosses landing on a very small jutty at the scarp of the rock,” says Lisovski.

So Lisovski, Weidinger and Pavel kept observing the birds, until in February this year they discovered adults at two nests. They also saw three more sitting adults, suggesting three further nests, though they couldn’t climb the rocky outcrop to confirm this.

The new breeding colony is some 1,520km away from the nearest known breeding colony of light-mantled sooty albatrosses, which is on the island of South Georgia, the team reports in the journal Polar Biology.

It is unclear why the birds are breeding so far south. Climate change could be creating warmer and more benign conditions for the birds, the researchers speculate, though it is not yet clear whether this is the case.

Whatever the cause, the birds are likely to have a much smaller breeding window in the Antarctic. Light-mantled sooty albatross chicks need 70 days to hatch and another 70 to become independent.

So even if they start nesting early in November, when there is no snow, the chicks will not be ready to fly until April, leaving them vulnerable to extreme weather events. By Matt Walker, Earth News