For decades, sightings of large whales inside the New York Bight — the wedge of ocean between Long Island and the New Jersey coast — were so unusual that they made the local news. Tour boats sailed out of Sheepshead Bay for days without finding a single whale. Charter captains went whole seasons without one fluke up. And then, almost suddenly, the whales came back.
The reason was floating just beneath the surface: a small, oily, silver-sided fish called Atlantic menhaden — known to most New York fishermen as bunker. Menhaden are filter feeders that strain plankton from coastal waters, and they travel in enormous, dense schools. Almost every large predator in the western Atlantic eats them. Striped bass eat them. Bluefish, weakfish, and bluefin tuna eat them. Ospreys and bald eagles pull them off the surface. Scientists have called menhaden "the most important fish in the sea" because they convert tiny plankton into protein that fuels nearly the entire coastal food web.
— field biologist, Gotham Whale photo-ID survey
By the 2000s, decades of industrial fishing had crashed the menhaden population along the U.S. East Coast. In 2012, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission — the agency that manages the species — cut the legal catch by twenty percent. Within five years, menhaden numbers in the New York Bight more than doubled. With the bunker came the predators that depend on them, and at the top of that list were the humpback whales.
Humpback whales feed by a technique called lunge feeding. The whale accelerates upward through a school of fish with its enormous mouth wide open, engulfing tens of thousands of pounds of seawater and prey at once. As the mouth closes, the whale forces the water back out through long, curtain-like plates called baleen, which act as a filter. The fish are trapped inside; the water escapes. A single lunge can capture more than two hundred pounds of bunker — enough fuel for the whale to keep diving and feeding for hours.
By 2024, marine biologists were counting more than three hundred humpback sightings per year inside the New York Bight, with whales feeding in clear view of Long Beach, Coney Island, and the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. The pattern matched the bunker map almost exactly. Where the schools were thickest, the whales surfaced again and again. The recovery has become a textbook example of how restoring one forage species can ripple upward through every level of the food web.
But the comeback brought new dangers. As whales moved into the shipping lanes leading to New York Harbor, vessel strikes became the leading cause of humpback death in the region. Entanglement in commercial fishing gear claims more each year. And the North Atlantic right whale, a close relative of the humpback, has not recovered: fewer than three hundred and seventy animals remain on Earth, and the species passes through New York waters every winter on its long migration toward calving grounds off Florida and Georgia.
The whales of New York are, all at once, a recovery story, an ecology lesson, and a warning. The food web below them is doing the work of feeding them. The pressures we keep adding on top — ships, nets, noise — decide whether the recovery lasts.