Rising vessel traffic fuels humpback mortalities in New York waters

October 3, 2025 –Escalating vessel flow in New York waters has coincided with an alarming spike in humpback whale mortalities, underscoring a mounting hazard.

The waterways surrounding New York City are extraordinarily crowded. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ) is the largest container port on the East Coast and the third largest in the United States, accounting for 13.5% of the country’s market share. In 2024, it handled nearly 9 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs), a sharp climb from under 5.8 million a decade earlier. Just a few months ago, in May, the joint-venture port district was the nation’s most occupied cargo gateway.

A 2024 study headed by Lesley Thorne, the dean of research at Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, pointed to post-pandemic shifts in trade routes favoring the East to the West Coast and new transits along coastal routes adjacent to PANYNJ as the driving factors behind this surge.

Read the full article at The Washington Post