April 18, 2018 — The North Atlantic right whale was once seen as an inexhaustible natural resource. It was hunted for its oil and enriched New England. That ended one-hundred years ago, but the right whale’s numbers have never been the same. Now, the whales that are left are in direct conflict with the harvesting of another rich natural resource: lobsters.
About the time when the first crocuses start to bloom, the North Atlantic right whale comes back in numbers to feed in Cape Cod Bay, and researchers go out on the water to count them.
A research vessel from the Center for Coastal Studies is off the coast of Provincetown and coordinating with a crew in a spotter plane. There are so few whales left, the scientists can often identify individual animals. They see two: Elf and Ruffian.
When commercial whaling ended in the 1930s, there were only about 100 North Atlantic right whales left in the world. Now that people weren’t killing them on purpose, their numbers slowly climbed, topping out at about 550 in the year 2010. Then something happened. Their numbers started to drop. But why? Their relatives, the Southern right whales, are doing fine.
Michael Moore is a biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who has been examining dead whales for 30 years to figure out what happened to them. Moore says, “The two pieces that make the difference between the Southern right whale’s success and the Northern Atlantic right whale’s struggle has been vessel collisions and entanglement in fixed fishing gear.”
He says, in the southern oceans there are fewer ships and less fishing gear, and that has allowed Southern right whales to grow to a population of 15,000. There are now fewer than 450 North Atlantic right whales here off the coast of New England.