Study: Warm water 'blob' put whales on collision course with crab-fishing lines

Author: Kate High
May 18, 2021
A humpback whale lunge feeding on anchovies
Photo Credit: Kate High

If you lived on the West Coast anytime in the past several years, you may remember news of "the Blob"—not a horror movie monster but a mass of warm water that resulted from a marine heat wave in 2014 and 2015. A new publication led by a San Francisco State University alumna shows how that ocean anomaly brought whales and Dungeness crab fishers on a collision course—the newest in a line of research from the lab of Professor of Geography & Environment Ellen Hines showing the complicated and not always successful ways humans try to share space with marine life.

Read the PHYS.org article by Kate High