Whales on a comeback in Chile

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It’s a whale of a tale on today’s front of The Times.

About 22 years after an international whale-hunting moratorium went into effect, some whales appear to be making a comeback off Chile’s coast, where a proliferation of islands, fiords, peninsulas and straits creates tens of thousands of miles of shoreline, Patrick McDonnell reports.

In recent years, researchers combing remote crannies of this elongated coast have confirmed the presence of two seasonally resident populations of whales, including 100 to 150 humpbacks in the glacier-rimmed Strait of Magellan, McDonnell said.

‘The likelihood is that they were not completely hunted out, and these are remnant populations,’ says Bruce Mate, who heads the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University and who worked to tag Chilean blue whales and track them via satellite. ‘It just wasn’t commercially viable to hunt till the very last whale.’

Liliana Nieto del Rio also captures the story in a lovely photo gallery.

-- Francisco Vara-Orta