Four centuries of commercial whaling eroded 11,000 years of population stability in bowhead whales
M. V. Westbury, S. C. Brown, A. A. Cabrera, H. E. Morales, J. Ma, A. Rey-Iglesia, A. S. Dyke, C. H. Scharff-Olsen, M. Scott, O. Wiig, L. Bachmann, K. M. Kovacs, C. Lydersen, S. Ferguson, F. Racimo, , E. Lorenzen
This study uses fossil data and modeling to show that commercial whaling caused genetic diversity loss in bowhead whales, threatening their resilience to future climate change.
bioRxiv · Apr 10, 2024Evolutionary Biology