North Atlantic right whales got their name because they were considered to be the “right” one to harpoon and harvest. By the 1930s, so many had been killed that the federal government banned further hunting of the giants. Their numbers briefly and slightly rose, then stabilized. But for nearly a decade, these whales, which have been on the Endangered Species List since 1970, have been on the decline again. Today, marine biologists put their numbers at between 400 and 420, with only around 100 of them being sexually mature females. And since April 2017, 26 right whales have been lost, 4% of their total population. So far this year, six more have died, all of them far short of the 80 to 100 years they are known to live.
The only good news this year is that seven calves have been born. Last year, none was, and in all of 2017, just five were. But those are still very small numbers, and conservationists fear that extinction is just around the corner. Right whales, they believe, may all be gone by midcentury or sooner. Regina Asmutis-Silvia, executive director of Whale and Dolphin Conservation North America, and an expert on the species, told Ed Yong at The Atlantic: “Honestly, I don’t have the words, It’s devastating. There’s now more people working on right whales than there are right whales left.”
Most recently, on June 20, a 40-year-old right whale named Punctuation for the scars on its back was found dead in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Yong wrote late last month:
It had been a galling month for the many people who care about North Atlantic right whales. Wolverine, a 9-year-old male named after the three propeller scars on his tail, was found dead in the same waters on June 4. The body of Comet, a 34-year-old grandfather named after the long scar on his flank, was discovered dead on Tuesday night, alongside an unnamed 11-year-old female, who was just about to become sexually mature. A fifth whale, an unnamed 16-year-old female found near Anticosti Island, in Quebec, was confirmed dead yesterday. A sixth was spotted off the Gaspé Peninsula, also in Quebec, on a surveillance flight today. That’s more than 1 percent of the estimated total population, dead in less than a month.
What’s killing them? A large proportion are dying from collisions with ships, particularly propellers or entanglements in fishing lines. Those deaths can be grim, painful, and take a long time: A study of the 17 killed in 2017 found that six had had their skulls fractured, three had their spines broken, and six had their tails lacerated by propellers. Entangled ropes can maim flippers, tails, heads, and the baleen plates used to filter krill and other food.
But while the clash of nature and industry is often the immediate cause of these fatal encounters, there’s an underlying problem: climate change.
In the shipping lanes of U.S. territorial waters for the past 10 years, a 10-knot speed limit on ships has vastly reduced collisions with whales. Cheap “ropeless” technological solutions are available to diminish the entanglement problem typically associated with the lines strung from buoys and attached to snow-crab and lobster traps on the sea floor.
However, as the ocean has warmed, right whales have moved from their customary hunting areas such as the waters off Cape Cod, where their movements are well-known and regulators can protect them. The whales now migrate further north each year into Canadian waters outside U.S. control. When the fifth dead whale was discovered this year, Canada finally reduced the speed of large vessels in certain areas to 10 knots.
But some of the dead whales had collisions with ships going a lot faster than that limit in international waters where neither the United States nor Canada has authority to set speed limits or enact other controls on shipping.