Right Whales
On the brink, on the rebound
By Douglas H. Chadwick
They dive 600 feet, brushing their heads along the seafloor with raised, wartlike patches of skin, sometimes swimming upside down, big as sunken galleons,
hot-blooded and holding their breath in cold and utter darkness while the greatest tides on Earth surge by. Then they open their cavernous maws to let the
currents sweep food straight in. This is one way North Atlantic right whales feed in the Bay of Fundy between Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Or
so the experts suspect, having watched the 40- to 80-ton animals surface with mud on their crowns. Mind you, they say, that could result from another
activity—one nobody can imagine yet.
Science calls these animals Eubalaena glacialis, "good, or true, whale of the ice." Heavy irony is embedded in the common name, right whale, given by
whalers who declared them the right whales to kill. Favoring shallow coastal waters, they passed close to ports, swam slowly, and often lingered on the
surface. Such traits made them easy to harpoon, and they tended to conveniently float after they died, thanks to their exceptionally thick blubber layer,
which whalers rendered into oil. The first of the great whales to be hunted commercially, E. glacialis lit the lamps of the Old World from the Dark Ages
through the Renaissance. By the 16th century Europeans had exhausted the eastern North Atlantic population and turned to North America's coast. There
whalers set up stations in Labrador and took 25,000 to 40,000 related bowhead whales along with an unknown number of rights (records seldom
distinguished between these two similar looking titans).
By the time New Englanders got into the right-whale-killing business, they were chasing leftovers. The Yankees hunted down another 5,000 or so, partly
because whales became even more prized for their baleen than for oil. Hundreds of strips of this tough yet flexible material, each six to nine feet long and
finely fringed, drape from the upper jaw. They form a colossal sieve that allows the giants to strain tiny crustaceans from the water for food—a billion fleasize copepods a day to supply the minimum 400,000 calories an adult whale needs (the ratio of a whale's body mass to its prey's is 50 billion to one).
Society, however, thought baleen was best used for corset stays, stiffeners in fashionable gowns, umbrella ribs, and (consider: "I'm going to whale on you!")
horsewhips.
As the 20th century began, the number of whales left in this species was possibly in the low dozens. Commercial harpooning wasn't banned until 1935.
Their recovery since then might be compared to that of a human victim of a vicious assault: painfully slow progress, offset by relapses, with the ultimate
outcome very uncertain.
About 350 to 400 North Atlantic right whales exist today. The survivors migrate along North America's East Coast between feeding grounds in the Gulf of
Maine and wintering sites farther south—roughly 1,400 miles one way for pregnant females that journey to traditional calving areas off Georgia and
Florida. They travel through an intensely urban stretch of ocean.
A research team from Boston's New England Aquarium spends the summer stationed in Lubec, Maine, studying the whales that gather to feed and socialize
in the Bay of Fundy and nearby Roseway Basin, off Nova Scotia's southern tip. The scientists, who have built an archive of around 390,000 photographs,
can recognize nearly every whale in the population by its unique callosity pattern (those wartlike patches on their heads), along with scars and other
irregularities, and, increasingly, DNA samples.
One of their favorites is #2223, first seen in these waters in 1992. It was a baby, and so fond of cavorting around boats that they named it Calvin after the
mischief-loving cartoon kid. That same year a fisherman reported a calf circling its dying mother, and when the team recovered the carcass of the female,
they identified her as #1223—Delilah, Calvin's mom. Her corpse revealed tissues crushed by a powerful collision, probably with one of the cargo carriers
plying the shipping channel that used to run straight through the bay's center, where the whales concentrate. The eight-month-old calf 's prospects looked
grim, for it should have been nursing Delilah's rich, warm milk for several more months.
In July 1993 researchers poring over fresh photos from the bay found images that looked like a match for Calvin's baby pictures. Yes! The orphan had
somehow made it alone. DNA from a skin sample taken in 1994 showed that curious, hardy Calvin was in fact a girl whale. The following year brought the
first report of her entering a surface-active group, or SAG, in which both sexes mingle with splashing, shoving, rolling, stroking signs of courtship. Though6/9/13 National Geographic Magazine- NGM.com
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she wouldn't mature sexually until about ten years of age, subadults her age appear drawn to the excitement of SAGs and get to practice behavior that may
soon influence their breeding success. Fertile adult females are the most valuable segment of the population. They number fewer than a hundred. Calvin
seemed on the verge of adding one more to their ranks.
For three years running, the researchers gauged the young female's blubber thickness with ultrasound. It's a tricky operation. "One whale's reaction jolted
the skiff hard enough to send me flying overboard," Amy Knowlton of the research team recalled. Nevertheless, the researchers found Calvin growing
pleasingly plump, a prime measure of health. On New Year's Eve of 1999, she was recorded for the first time in the Georgia Bight, an expanse of shallow
coastal waters off Georgia and Florida, where right whales give birth.
In summer of 2000 Calvin was once again in the Bay of Fundy, but this time she was snarled in fishing gear. Unbreakable polyblend ropes wrapped round
her body, cut into the skin, and trailed in her wake, slowing her down. Then researchers lost sight of the young female.
Two to six right whales are found dead in a typical year, at least half of them killed by ship strikes or entanglement. Additional animals simply disappear.
Since more than three-quarters of North Atlantic right whales bear scars from encounters with fishing gear, scientists wonder: How many of those missing
are weighed down by ropes, nets, or crab and lobster pots for months or even years, the fat reserves that help keep them buoyant dwindling as they starve,
fighting harder to reach the surface for each breath, until they finally give in to pain and exhaustion and sink?
Months dragged by. Someone finally spotted Calvin in Cape Cod Bay during her hobbled journey back south. A disentanglement team from nearby
Provincetown, Massachusetts, raced for the site and made two attempts to slice away her bindings. They couldn't get them all, but when Calvin was seen
during 2001, she had worked free of the remnants.
Three years passed, and Calvin showed up occasionally—but not in her usual summer haunts. Had the trauma sent her into a downward spiral? At the end
of December 2004, near the North Carolina coast, she presented herself—with a brand new calf. Seven months later, in 2005, they were in the Bay of
Fundy, where Delilah had brought Calvin as an infant.
The corridor traveled by Calvin and the other North Atlantic right whales has grown ever more crowded with fishing activities and busy shipping lanes.
Plumes of contaminants flow from river mouths, and the underwater din of ship traffic probably makes it increasingly difficult for the whales to
communicate and keep track of one another. Though not as visible as wounds from boat prows and propeller blades or fishing gear webbed around
struggling bodies, heavy chemical and noise pollution may take a gradual toll.
During the 1980s the number of babies born annually was around 12. The total twice fell sharply in the 1990s until just a single calf appeared in 2000.
Since then, the average has risen to more than 20 calves a year. Yet this remains 30 percent below the whales' potential rate of reproduction. Why? If
scientists are to guide the species' salvation, they need more data and more answers. Fast.
One August morning in 2006, when the sea was a sheet of dimpled satin shot through with silver threads, I joined Scott Kraus, the New England Aquarium's
vice president of research, and Rosalind Rolland, a veterinarian and senior scientist with the aquarium, on an unlikely quest in the Bay of Fundy. When
leviathans rose in the distance through the sea's shimmering skin, Kraus steered the boat downwind of where they had briefly surfaced, handed me a data
sheet to log our movements, and zigzagged into the faint breeze. Rolland moved onto the bow. Beside her was Fargo, the world's premier whale-poopsniffing dog.
Fargo began to pace from starboard to port, nostrils flaring. Rolland focused on the rottweiler's tail. If it began to move, it would mean he had picked up a
scent—and he could do that a nautical mile away. Twitch … Twitch … Wag, wag. "Starboard," Rolland called to Kraus. "A little more. Nope, too far. Turn to
port. OK, he's back on it." A quarter of an hour ran by like the bay's currents. All I saw were clumps of seaweed. Suddenly, the dog sat and turned to fix
Rolland with a look. We stopped, and out of the vast ocean horizon came a single chunk of digested whale chow, bobbing along mostly submerged, ready to
sink from view or dissolve altogether within minutes.
Kraus grabbed the dip net and scooped up the fragrant blob. You'd have thought he was landing a fabulous fish. "At first, people are incredulous. Then
come the inevitable jokes. But this," said the man who has led North Atlantic right whale research for three decades, "is actually some of the best science
we've done."
With today's technology, DNA from sloughed-off intestinal cells in a dung sample can identify the individual that produced it. Residues of hormones tell
Rolland about the whale's general condition, its reproductive state—mature? pregnant? lactating?—levels of stress, and presence of parasites.
Despite its low numbers, the North Atlantic right whale may not be the rarest of all the great whales. There may be no more than a few hundred North6/9/13 National Geographic Magazine- NGM.com
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Pacific right whales, Eubalaena japonica, which were harpooned illegally by Soviet whalers as late as the 1960s. But on the other side of the Equator, the
southern right whale, Eubalaena australis, has rebounded from a few hundred in the 19th century to at least 10,000. If its cousins along North America's
East Coast are the urban whales, these giants of the Southern Hemisphere are the wild whales, and they offer a vision of what a safer future might be like for
the other two right whale species.
After feeding in plankton-laden waters around Antarctica, the various populations of E. australis migrate to wintering areas near Argentina, southern
Africa, western and southern Australia, and sub-Antarctic New Zealand. The species has been increasing at a rate of up to 7 percent annually. That's close
to the maximum possible for whales that require a full year for pregnancy, devote at least one more to nursing, and another to fatten up, and therefore can
produce an offspring only every third year.
In July 2007 Rolland, Kraus, and I joined a team bound for the Auckland Islands, 300 miles south of New Zealand through some of the planet's stormiest
latitudes, to carry out census and DNA work. As our 82-foot sailboat Evohe slipped into a protected bay amid the isles, there was nothing but sunshine
washing the deck. Then, like explorers of a bygone era, we watched natives paddle across the water to surround our vessel. Except these natives paddled
with flukes and blew spray from their heads.
Curious right whales investigated Evohe for hours while yellow-eyed penguins leaped along like skipping stones beside them. Great breaths overrode the
sounds of waves and seabird cries and the mewling of young New Zealand sea lions from rookeries ashore. More whales milled and breached for as far as we
could see. They were bigger than northern rights. More than one in ten were pinto-patterned, flashing yards of smooth white skin. A bygone era? This was
beginning to feel more like the dawn of creation. Rolland and Krause, who had never viewed a southern right before, were beside themselves.
"Omigod. That one right there is the fattest young whale I have ever seen." (When judging the condition of northern rights, the scientists pay special
attention to the area just behind the blowhole, where the chubbier animals develop a bulge of blubber. Its size has proved to be an accurate predictor of
survival.) "We don't even have a category for a whale with a fat roll that big."
"They're so clean! Not a mark on them."
Over the next three weeks, hundreds arrived in succession to give birth and nurse pale-colored infants or churn the water in SAGs and compete for mates
before heading back to the open sea. Gales blew from all directions—this was midwinter in the Southern Hemisphere—coating the hillsides with snow.
Researchers beat through the waves in a skiff to take identification photos and collect skin samples with small, hollow-tipped darts so they could define the
genetic makeup of this recovering population more closely. Glenn Dunshea, from Australia's Center for Applied Marine Mammal Science, was interested in
telomeres—DNA sequences at the tips of chromosomes that gradually shorten throughout an animal's life. By studying them in right whales, which may live
at least the better part of a century (their close cousins, bowheads, may reach two), he hopes to discover more about telomeres' role in the aging process.
Wouldn't it be humbling if a map to the legendary fountain of youth lay hidden within creatures we almost exterminated?
Kraus and Rolland roamed in a second skiff to view and photograph the whales in order to conduct detailed visual health evaluations, which they could
compare with those of troubled whale populations back home. They wore their usual happy-to-be-in-the-kingdom-of-giants glow, yet it was mixed with a
touch of sadness. As Rolland put it, "We just saw more right whale calves in two hours than people will see all year in the whole North Atlantic."
Safeguarding wildlife, even in the globe's most remote places, gets harder all the time.
The southern whales are doing fine for now, but keeping them that way will require better protection of critical wintering areas and migration routes.
Fishing gear drowns so many diving seabirds in far southern waters that several kinds of albatrosses are in desperate trouble. As fisheries and whale
populations both expand, conflicts with whales can't be far off.
As for the whales of the North Atlantic, commercial fishing and marine transport are huge, vital industries, and modifying their operations along the entire
eastern seaboard to protect a few hundred giants won't be easy or cheap. Yet scientists' models say that saving just two sexually mature females each year
from being killed would change the trend for this endangered species from either downward or level to upward.
Posed that way, the problem doesn't sound so hard to solve. A network of aerial and vessel surveys augmented by a force of volunteers who keep a sharp
eye out for these warm-blooded submarines stands ready to help.
The volunteer force includes fast-striding beachcombers, folks who gather for morning coffee and then drive from one overlook to the next, and residents
who watch from the windows of their condos. There are also the few, the proud … the vertical team. They take elevators to the tops of the tallest buildings
around and scan the ocean from a seagull's perspective.6/9/13 National Geographic Magazine- NGM.com
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Still other whale trackers take to the air. Volunteer pilot George Terwilliger flew the scientists who saw mothers and calves in the Georgia Bight in 1984;
before then no one knew where the last of the North Atlantic right whales went to give birth. Terwilliger still flies two to three times a week, piloting an Air
Cam aircraft specially designed for low-speed reconnaissance and photography.
Whether a surfacing whale is spied from shore, roof, or sky, the information is quickly phoned in via hotline to the Early Warning System, which transmits
it to military and commercial mariners. When operators of commercial vessels over 300 gross tons enter right whale habitats, they must notify a
Mandatory Ship Reporting System, which automatically provides information about recent sightings.
It's far from a perfect strategy. Ship captains don't have to slow down if they don't feel like it. The federal government recently cut funding for right whale
conservation research. But nothing seems to dampen the volunteers' enthusiasm.
Standing on the boardwalk of a gated community in Florida, binoculars at the ready, Donna McCutchan said, "Most people in this development were like
me. They had no idea whales winter here. Now everybody knows about them, and they know to call in if they spot one." McCutchan herself hadn't seen a
whale for weeks. She didn't mind waiting, she said. "I once got to watch a mother roll onto her back, and bottlenose dolphins started jumping over her.
Whales are addictive. Once you see them, you don't want them to leave. Ever."
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Archived Blogs: Southern Right Whales in the Auckland Islands
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Entry for July 21, 2007
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| Expedition vessel Evohe, amid the whales |
Ok, we finally believe we are in the subantarctic, or perhaps the subantarctic has finally arrived here. Today we enjoyed all manner of precipitation, some frozen, some hard, some wet, all of it traveling about 50 miles an hour horizontally. In this part of the world, the winds and weather circumnavigate the Antarctic unimpeded by land masses, giving rise to the historical names "roaring forties" (for the southern latitudes in the forties) and the "furious fifties" (for the comparable features of the next 10 degrees to the south). Placed as we are at about 50 degrees south, this might be the heart of wind and wild weather.
Aboard the Evohe, we don't notice it much, except for the thrumming of the wind through the taut steel rigging. Outside temperatures hover around 4 degrees Centrigrade, or 39 degrees Fahrenheit, without factoring in the windchill. However, inside the ship, "room temperature" has a different meaning. The salon has a little oil heater that keeps it a toasty 60+ degrees F. Cabins are only heated briefly during the day (to conserve fuel), and so they are running about 50 F, perhaps a little lower. But the heads (bathrooms) are ventilated, and so those little rooms run about 40 degree F. Taking a shower (a rare event) is a real test of fortitude (or perhaps peer pressure!).
But the show must go on, and all photography and science teams went to work. Brian and Mauricio tried a few different areas, and found poor visibility and moving whales, providing few opportunities for underwater photography. The biopsy team had bad karma in the morning, missing whales and experiencing equipment failures on all fronts. On Evohe, Roz and I analyzed data, since the whales were all too far away for us to work. So lunch was a bit quiet with discouragement, although these days are typical of field work, where despite years of experience and the best of gear, everything goes wrong.
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| Auckland Island trees |
In the afternoon, the sun came out, and the biopsy team went back out to try again. Brian elected to stay home, so Roz and I took their zodiac and went out to do some health assessments. Now, some days you chase the whales, and some days they chase you. We started with two pairs of right whales near the Evohe, and then moved off to the north to a couple of sheltered coves. We then encountered a subadult about 35 feet in length, who decided we were very interesting, and began following us, its head perhaps 5 feet behind our idling outboard. We drove straight for over half a kilometer with the whale close behind us the whole time, then started slowly circling in an attempt to shake it off. Instead, a second whale nearby joined the first, and pretty soon, we were playing ring around the rosy with two right whales, one with its head only feet from our stern, and the second with its head touching the tail of the first whale. We went around like this 3 or 4 times at an idle - I am sure they were wondering what we were, and I know we were wondering what they were thinking! We finally got free, and headed back to Evohe, but on the way, we were waylaid by a different subadult who decided that we were the new playtoy in the bay, and started following us around at an uncomfortably close distance. After some slow-speed evasive maneuvers, we idled back to Evohe, leading our new pet to the ship (come to think of it, maybe we were the pets). That whale stayed around Evohe for at least another hour or two while we tried to warm up.
Upon our return, the Evohe crew was scrambling around to go rescue the biopsy team, which had broken down near the entrance to Port Ross. With this strong westerly wind, a boat could easily get blown out to sea (next stop, Chile!). With fading light Steve and Murray raced off in the second zodiac to find them and bring them home. Unfortunately for the biopsy team, the wind was against the tide, so they were stalled in a rough sea near Rose Island. Fortunately, the tide was incoming, so their zodiac was carried inshore, instead of out to sea. All returned safe and sound about an hour later with grand stories of danger, valor, and high seas adventures, none of which any of us believed. Besides, they looked like drowned rats, so their credibility was a bit low to begin with.
A remarkable feature of the right whales in this bay is their curiosity. At each anchorage, the Evohe has been mobbed by whales of all ages and sizes for the first 12 hours. Even after being at anchor for several days, right whales still approach and circle the boat every day. And the whales following the zodiac (reported above) provide another example. While we see curious right whales in the North Atlantic, they are mostly calves. Here it appears that right whales have reverted to their natural state, largely out of contact with humans and civilization. And that natural state includes a lot of curiosity.
It makes one wonder about the historical whalers. We used to think those guys were daring and clever hunters, able to outguess and chase down these animals under trying conditions. But these "primal" whales suggest that the early right whalers had it easy - hunting animals like the ones that surround us would have been like shooting fish in a barrel - and this highlights one reason for the extraordinary speed with which the right whale populations were decimated.
Stormbound in the Aucklands,
Scott Kraus
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