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On this March photo, a right whale from the North Atlantic feeds off the coast of Massachusetts. A new black whale Calf from the North Atlantic has just been spotted – and this is the first calf seen for more than a year.
Michael Dwyer / AP
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Michael Dwyer / AP
In this March photo, a right whale from the North Atlantic feeds off the coast of Massachusetts. A new black whale Calf from the North Atlantic has just been spotted – and this is the first calf seen for more than a year.
Michael Dwyer / AP
There is today a happy corner of the internet that celebrates the first North Atlantic right whale calf sighting of the season. The news is a big problem, considering the fact that the North Atlantic right whale is seriously threatened, that its total population is about 450 people and that no calf has been seen last season.
"The weather outside can be awful, but Coastwise Consulting's endangered species observers were working hard onboard the Baypost dredge Today, they spotted the first Atlantic Right Whale Calf in the 2018-2019 season! " The Fish and Wildlife Research Institute of the Commission for the Conservation of Florida Wildlife and Flora has written in a Facebook publication. According to the post, whales have been spotted moving northward near the entrance to the St. Johns River off the coast of Florida. The researchers had spotted the mother off Georgia a few days earlier.
Barb Zoodsma, who has been working for over 20 years on Right Whales with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told Molly Samuel of WABE that last season was the first season without a calf that she had never seen it, but it was not necessarily output issue considering the status of the right whale population. Zoodsma told Samuel of WABE that there were only 94 female breeding whales in February. "You do not have to be Einstein to understand that it's a bad situation," she said.
In addition to the lack of births, the Right Whale population has experienced a disturbing number of deaths. A technical memorandum issued by NOAA in September indicated that in August, 19 right whales died in 2017 and 2018. Only 5 calves were born during that same period.
According to the same NOAA report, "an encounter with fishing gear is the most common cause of documented whale injury and death in recent years". NOAA could determine the cause of 10 deaths among the 19 whale deaths recorded. Of these, five were caused by collisions with ships and five by entanglement in fishing gear.
A study cited by NOAA showed that nearly 85% of right whales were entangled in fishing gear. For 59% of right whales, it happened twice. And the number of entanglements has tended to increase.
The NOAA memorandum states that straight whales, like other large whales, live for a long time and can breed several times during a lifetime. This makes them resilient. But the note also highlights the obvious fact that if a species fails to replace its deaths with new births over time, it will struggle to recover a declining population.
Research – or rather the absence of reproduction – is a major concern for researchers. And for reproduction, healthy mothers are needed. According to NOAA, right whales now have greater distances to travel from their feeding grounds, which have moved further north, to areas off the coast of Florida and Georgia, where they are found. their calving grounds. In October, Murray Carpenter reported for NPR that more and more right whales are seen in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, north of the traditional whale feeding grounds in the Bay of Fundy.
It should be noted that the distance between the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of St. Lawrence is important: all of Nova Scotia is between the two bodies of water. This change in location increases the "energy cost" of whale migration southward, according to the NOAA report, and could help reduce the birth rate of whales.
Nick Record, a computer scientist ecologist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Marine Science in Maine, suspects that the change in migration patterns is related to the plankton consumed by right whales. Record told Carpenter that climate change had altered currents in whale feeding waters, making this plankton less easily accessible.
But let's get back to the good news, which there is. Julie Albert, coordinator of the direct line of sighting of the right whale for the line of assistance to marine resources, told the Daytona Beach News-Journal that five of the first six whales sighted this season were probably pregnant females. "It's very encouraging," she says.
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