Humpback whales are, for all intents and purposes, the most fêted representation of the baleen whales. Long, lean, and limber with a distinctive and sometimes eerie manner of speaking, the humpback stars in hit films of both recent vintage (1986's "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home") and contemporary homage (2026's "Whalefall"), its aura more beguiling than a classic celluloid star's and representative of the ocean's untold depths—mysteries that humans are still only just beginning to understand.
And so when a humpback whale appeared in New York Harbor Thursday morning, the city understandably went bananas. The whale took a jaunt up the Hudson, getting as far as Pier 45 in Greenwich Village, and spawning a ton of euphoric social media videos, including this one, in which the whale appears to be breaching on-rhythm to "Empire State of Mind." But the young humpback whale that showed up on city shores is so much more than a vehicle for human ogling, or even a projection of our wildest dreams: It is an indicator of the wonderful ecosystem rolling beneath the tides. According to Gotham Whale, New York's whale conservation source of record, the humpback appeared in the Upper Bay of New York Harbor, an unusual area far from its normal stomping grounds below the Verrazzano-Narrows, because it was likely tracking a school of Atlantic Menhaden—silvery coastal fish in the herring family to us, "the most important fish in the sea" to the aquatic whippersnapper who ventured towards our shores to brunch upon them.