UCMP’s David Lindberg and the Smithsonian’s Nicholas Pyenson determined how many gray whales could be supported by the ocean through periods of global cooling and warming. Their results, published in the latest edition of PLoS ONE, show that in the past 120,000 years gray whales survived periods when their feeding grounds were greatly-reduced due to glaciation. The authors propose that gray whales were able to survive the lean times by diversifying their feeding habits, a behavior that has been observed in modern gray whale populations.
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