New York’s Other Singing Whales

Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll hear about some supersized swimmers who sing underwater and who, it turns out, can be found all year in the New York area. We’ll also get details on Nassau County’s ban on sports teams with transgender athletes.

Some New Yorkers spend all year in town, and some spend time elsewhere — maybe Florida in the winter or the Hamptons in the summer.

Fin whales are year-rounders. Or, more precisely, they are swimming off New York all year long, according to a paper in the journal Scientific Reports.

The six scientists who wrote the paper reached that conclusion because fin whales sing. The scientists recorded the whales belting out their songs underwater, using an underwater microphone attached to a buoy in the Atlantic Ocean several miles offshore.

“It is truly remarkable that the second largest animal to have ever lived on this earth is here off our coast year-round,” said Howard Rosenbaum, the director of the Ocean Giants Program for the Wildlife Conservation Society and one of the authors of the paper. Fin whales, which are endangered, can grow to be 80 feet long.