For Alex Ootoowak, watching speckled gray narwhals migrate through the icy Arctic waters during hunting season is a treasured childhood memory.
“It felt like a never-ending, looped scene of whales swimming past you in the same direction, migrating all day, sometimes more than a day,” recalls Ootoowak, who lives in Mittimatalik (also known as Pond Inlet) in Canada’s far north.
“You’re always taught to be extra quiet and careful because they’re so sensitive,” reports DW. The world’s 80,000-plus narwhals are mostly found in northeastern Canada and Greenland.
For Ootoowak and other Inuit communities, narwhal meat has been essential to survival for at least 1,000 years. It provides important protein, iron, and vitamin C, and hunting is regulated by the government.
“This is how we stay healthy and connected to the land and our culture,” Ootoowak told DW. “It’s not something we do just for sport.”
A sharp decline in narwhal numbers
But Ootoowak hasn’t seen a migration like those of his childhood in a long time. Over the past 20 years, hunters have noticed that the whales have become skinnier and harder to catch.
By 2021, only about 2,000 remained in the area—a 90 percent drop from over 20,000 in the early 2000s. It’s unclear exactly why the whales are disappearing.
Researchers suspect climate change may be playing a role, as the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet.
“A whole host of things are changing—not just the ice, but also water temperature and species, from the bottom of the food chain all the way up,” says Kristin Westdal, a marine mammal expert with the Canadian conservation network Oceans North.
However, she notes that climate change impacts are gradual, while the narwhal population dropped over a relatively short period.
“The only thing that changed that quickly in their habitat was the volume of ship traffic.”
In 2015, a local mine run by a company called Baffinland opened a port nearby. Within two years, roughly 4 million tons of iron ore were shipped through the waters off Mittimatalik—and noise pollution increased dramatically.
Noise pollution may be driving whales away
Concerned about the impact of noise, Ootoowak and Westdal set up two listening stations in Milne Inlet, west of Mittimatalik.
Within a few years, they expanded their acoustic monitoring program by partnering with experts at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.
By lowering special microphones called hydrophones through holes in the ice and 800 meters down into the water, they have listened to the Arctic seascape
24/7—recording barking seals, clicking narwhals foraging for food, and the rumble of ship engines. Their findings suggest that ship noise is behind the drop in narwhal numbers.
A 2025 study by the monitoring team found that “narwhals appear to either move away or stop vocalizing” when vessels come within 12 to 24 miles.
The whales responded to noises below 120 decibels—quieter than a thunderclap or chainsaw—which is considered the disturbance threshold for midsized whales like the narwhal.
Hunters have also noticed behavior changes when ships are nearby. “As soon as the ship starts its engines, the whales move away or stop feeding and stop doing their deep dives,” says Ootoowak.
He notes that narwhals have learned to avoid busy shipping channels when boats are present.
Are narwhals heading to Greenland?
Ootoowak isn’t sure where the whales are going, but he has a theory. During a 2024 visit to northern Greenland, across Baffin Bay—where narwhals usually spend the summer—he spoke with local hunters who reported that new whales had started appearing in their waters, around the same time shipping increased off Mittimatalik.
“They said the narwhals were ‘foreign’—longer and skinnier, behaving very differently from their own narwhals,” Ootoowak explains. The hunters added that these whales were easier to catch and tasted different.
Outi Tervo, a senior scientist at the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, has also studied narwhals and noise pollution.
She has observed that noise from shipping and oil and gas exploration can cause narwhals to stop foraging, which matches Ootoowak’s observation of skinnier whales.
For narwhals, which rely on echolocation to communicate and hunt, hearing is as vital as sight is to humans. Sounds that interfere with echolocation deeply disrupt their behavior and put them on high alert, ready to flee, she says.
Tervo also notes that narwhals have adapted specifically to Arctic life. “They can’t swim to the Caribbean and spend the winter there.”
