An Ode to Right Whale #5120
North Atlantic right whale #5120 skims the surface alone in Massachusetts Bay on April 19, 2021. (New England Aquarium Right Whale Catalog/Center for Coastal Studies, taken under NOAA Permit 19315-01)
June 15, 2024 | story by Sophia Abolfathi
A child is born
Just ten miles east of the shores of coastal Georgia’s Wassaw National Wildlife Refuge, where rowdy crowds of loons and endangered piping plovers brace against eye-watering January winds, an aerial lens hovers a few yards above the surface of the sea. As researchers from the Clearwater Marine Aquarium watch attentively through the camera’s point of view, a large, gray being swims inches below the water, her back skimming the salty air.
There are her calluses: The long oval that starts near the snout and breaks at the center of the head. The T-shape that tapers towards the back. Her white chin and small scar on the right tip of the tail. The large mammal exhales through her V-shaped blowhole, spraying seawater up towards the alien aircraft.
This is Squilla, or North Atlantic right whale #3720. For the first time in 14 years, she is not alone.
A second, smaller body appears from beneath her. At just over 10 feet long, this young whale is a fraction of her mother’s size. Squilla barrel-rolls on to her back and offers her sleek, black underside to the skies. The calf swims to meet her underbelly and is cradled by mother’s fins. They lie vulnerably still in the water, the observing humans captivated by the life-sustaining embrace. Squilla’s first calf is identified as right whale #5120. It is January 2021, and she is days or even hours old.
In the evening, the mother-and-calf pair are spotted again by researchers from the Georgia Department of Natural Resources almost 75 miles south near Fernandina Beach, Florida. They will continue to roll, play and nurse in the warm Southeast waters through the winter and into the early spring. In a year’s time, this young calf should break from her mother’s side and begin her turbulent adolescence. Until then, the pair will first set forth on their over 1,000-mile journey to Southeast Canada, where they will greet extended family, exchange travel stories and feed on zooplankton until summer’s end.
Miracle
Squilla (#3720) cradling her calf (#5120) off the coast of Georgia on January 19, 2021. (New England Aquarium Right Whale Catalog/Clearwater Marine Aquarium Research Institute, taken under NOAA permit #20556)
The North Atlantic right whale, Eubalena glacialis, is one of the world’s most endangered whale species. Capable of growing up to 52 feet long and 70 tons, these colossal cetaceans (the group of marine mammals that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises) spend their lives hugging North America’s eastern shorelines. In summer and early fall, they feed, play and mate in cool New England and Canadian waters. Then, in winter and early spring, calving females such as Squilla migrate to shallower, warmer waters off South Carolina, Georgia and Florida to birth their young.
As expectant mothers follow their ancestral paths down the Atlantic continental shelf, loyal whale-watchers race down in almost perfect parallel — whether by radio-signaled survey, photo catalog or car. The New England Aquarium keeps close tabs on the annual patterns of these surprisingly slippery giants with a numbering convention that honors family trees (#5120 shares the last two digits of her mother, #3720). The North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium, composed of wildlife specialists, citizen scientists and sea captains, holds an annual naming contest based on the leviathans’ unique calluses. Squilla was named after the Squilla mantis shrimp; her head callus resembles its shape.
A massive national collaborative of federal and state agencies, citizen projects, scientific institutions and environmental NGOs helps make the North Atlantic right whale one of the most well-studied species in the world.
Yet all that attention is not saving the right whale. Scientists estimate that fewer than 350 individuals survive. The species needs to bring at least 40 calves into the world each year to maintain a stable population. But the birth rate has been consistently under that number since 2007 — with no births recorded in 2018. Adult female whales, of which 70 remain, are birthing calves much later and much less frequently than normal. Adult right whales are declining unnaturally fast, too, — with 123 dead or seriously injured adults recorded since 2017.
So, the birth of right whale #5120 is momentous not just for the first-time mother but for the whale-inclined humans on the shore. In her first year of life, #5120 is spotted 21 times by sharp-eyed biplanes, drones and binoculars from Florida to Canada. And countless more times from those not stationed to watch but stepping out on beachside condo balconies or heading back to land from a dawn fishing trip, unsure if they saw the textured crown of a right whale’s head or a break in the waves.
Troubled waters
North Atlantic right whale #5120 spotted in the Gulf of St. Lawrence on July 18, 2021. (New England Aquarium Right Whale Catalog/Gina Lonati, University of New Brunswick, DFO SARA Permit #DFO-GLF-QUE-MAR-2021-04)
Sometime between July 2021 and January 2022, Squilla and #5120 separate. Just a few days after the yearling’s first birthday, she is found in New York waters while her mother is sighted in Cape Cod Bay. Now alone, in over 10,000 miles of icy North Atlantic terrain, young right whales have to get up to speed fast, relying on a first year of lessons with mom to remember how to forage and feed.
Instead of teeth, right whales have baleen. Like tightly wound piano strings under the hood of a Steinway, baleens are plates of dense, long and thin bristles that sieve tiny prey. Right whales forage on tiny, fatty creatures called copepods and other zooplankton that appear as wispy, white specks in seawater and filter easily through baleen plates.
Before she is considered an adult, right whale #5120 has another 40 feet and several thousand pounds to gain. She will navigate back to the feeding grounds Squilla showed her, but she will also have to make her own decisions when things turn out differently than she expects.
Erin Meyer-Gutbrod didn’t grow up as a “whale girl.” She studied physics in Notre Dame, had a brief stint as a zookeeper and then found herself going back to school to work in a “system that matters.” Now, she has a doctorate in ocean resources and ecosystems and is the principal investigator at the University of South Carolina’s Conservation Oceanography Lab. In her 2023 paper published in the Journal of Limnology and Oceanography, Meyer-Gutbrod and colleagues tracked three decades of right whale sightings to find out how the warming ocean is changing where and what right whales eat.
A right whale’s preferred Sunday dinner is Calanus finmarchius. Vast, cloudy blooms of this small copepod used to proliferate in the icy waters of Cape Cod Bay, the Gulf of Maine and the Bay of Fundy. In the 2010s, researchers began to notice that right whales were increasingly spending time in previously unfrequented areas such as the Gulf of St. Lawrence near Newfoundland. Those 60,000 square miles are high-yielding fishing grounds for numerous popular seafoods, including snow crab, lobster and herring.
To confirm the observations, Meyer-Gutbrod and her team pooled data from right whale sightings and Calanus population levels between 1990 and 2019. Then, they modeled how right whale sightings and their prey changed over space and time. The observations were correct. In the 2010s, right whales stopped feeding in the Gulf of Maine in summer and fall. Many of them started feeding in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
It isn’t that C. finmarchius abundance has increased in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Instead, Meyer-Gutbrod says, warming waters in the Gulf of Maine and Cape Cod Bay correspond with their declining C. finmarchius populations. That might be driving right whales away from those traditional feeding grounds, causing them to search different waters and even begin feeding on new Calanus species like Calanus hyperboreus and Calanus glacialis in places like the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
The implications are multifold. For the female whales that successfully find new food in the Gulf — navigating a noisy, complex labyrinth of fishing gear and large vessels — calving rates are increasing with a consistent food supply. But those waters can be treacherous for whales when their large bodies become entangled in the noose of a fishing rope or battered by the faceless hull of a ship. In fact, these meetings can be fatal: Between 2003 and 2018, 88.4% of determinable right whale deaths were caused by one or the other.
During the summer and fall months, Canada maintains several mandatory and voluntary slow zones in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where ships over 43 feet long must slow down to 10 knots (10 nautical miles) or less. Whale Safe North America, a web-based tracker based at the University of California Santa Barbara, found that ships’ compliance rate with slow zones was a paltry 45% between January 2023 and January 2024. It gets worse.
Food is essential to survival, but some whales aren’t getting enough. If you’re a huge whale, “it already takes a lot of food to maintain your body,” Meyer-Gutbrod says. “Reproduction and nursing is extremely costly.”
Newly independent young whales like #5120 follow the paths their mothers set out for them, but rapidly changing waters and shifting prey populations are confusing. Some whales stay in protected traditional feeding grounds where their primary prey is declining. Others attempt to forage elsewhere but don’t find enough to eat. A lucky few northbound travelers may find blooms of their second-choice prey — but they face risks of serious injury or death in the poorly protected waters.
Whales have to be seen to be counted, and it’s “a huge challenge,” Meyer-Gutbrod laments. While about 40% of the right whale population is found in the Gulf of St. Lawrence during the summer and fall, the whereabouts of the other 60% remain a mystery to researchers. For an endangered species, that’s dangerous.
“It’s one of the mysteries that’s haunting the research community,” Meyer-Gutbrod says. At the age of 14 in 2021, Squilla should have been on her second calf. Did it take so long because she was hungry? A recent study in Royal Society Open Science finds that environmental stressors may correspond with stunted adult female right whale growth and lower calving rates.
In 2021, #5120 spends the majority of summer and fall foraging with Squilla in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Then, once they separate by January 2022, she becomes harder to find. In March, she’s in Cape Cod Bay. She’s not seen again until May, when she appears briefly in the Great South Channel east of Nantucket and then once again slips beneath the surface.
When she reappears three months later in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in August, observers notice something alarming — she has fishing rope wrapped around the base and two outstretching flukes of her wide, triangular tail. If it is not removed quickly, right whale #5120’s body will continue to grow and eventually choke around the pull of the rope. Over the next five months, she drags her woven shackles more than 900 miles south to Cape Cod Bay.
Over three days in January 2023, disentanglement crews from the Center for Coastal Studies’ Marine Animal Entanglement Response motor into Cape Cod Bay to try and relieve #5120 of her rope and trailing buoys. The first time, they find her in a group of about twenty other feeding whales in bad weather. She is difficult to keep up with, and the team gives up. On the second attempt, bad weather prevails. The team cannot get close enough to either photograph or disentangle her. #5120 slips through their fingers and leaves Cape Cod Bay wrapped in over 100 feet of rope.
She isn’t seen for another 11 months.
Meditations
Right whale #5120 skims the surface in the Gulf of St. Lawrence on July 18, 2021. (New England Aquarium Right Whale Catalog/Kelsey Howe/Canadian Whale Institute)
Martha’s Vineyard is no easy place to be in winter. Pummeling Atlantic winds eroded the western edge of the island’s Aquinnah cliffs to reveal bright red streaks over millennia. It may also reveal the once-spilled blood of a right whale.
The Wampanoag, an Indigenous tribe that has lived on Martha’s Vineyard (Noepe in Wampanoag) and the western tip of Gay Head (Aquinnah) for at least the last 10,000 years, revere the red-stained walls for its connection to Moshup, the supernatural creator of Martha’s Vineyard. Moshup would fling whales at the cliffs for his supper — and when he was feeling generous, for the Wampanoag.
Bettina Washington, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), is the daughter of a former chief. She is also a lifelong resident of Martha’s Vineyard. The right whales, Washington explains, are like relatives — cousins, brothers and sisters of the Wampanoag today. Washington’s great-grandparents used to say that their grandparents “could walk between the island and the mainland on the backs of whales, they were so plentiful.”
Whaling — the practice of hunting and killing whales for blubber to turn to oil, bones to corsets, and meat to eat — is today prohibited internationally (save for Japan, Norway and Iceland). But it was vigorous for half a millennium. Evidence of right whale hunting in North America by Canadian Basque and Indigenous Americans comes as early as the 1500s. Compared to other cetaceans, right whales are smaller, slower and feed on the surface. Their high blubber content also means they float when killed — all factors that, for the next century’s arrival of Europeans in the New England colonies, made the species the “right” whale to take.
By the time New England immigrants began hunting right whales for large-scale profit, it is estimated that the species was already massively depleted. Nonetheless, intense commercial whaling carried on through the 1600s and 1700s from Newfoundland to Florida. By the mid-18th century, population numbers were so tragically low that business came to a halt, and the right whale industry effectively dissolved. By and large, the right whale was forgotten, surviving on potentially dozens of individuals.
The Wampanoag continued to hunt right whales up until the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act banned the take. Today, the tribe still maintains rights to drift whales, or whales that turn up near or on shore after death. They harvest and memorialize specific components of the animals, such as the bone, oil or baleen, and bury the remains on tribal land. Since the 1973 Endangered Species Act, the North Atlantic right whale has been listed as critically endangered.
“They keep saying it’s critically endangered,” Washington says. “It’s beyond that point.”
Beneath the surface
Trish Baker, 65, looks out for a right whale in Ponce Inlet, FL with members of the Marineland Right Whale Project. (Sophia Abolfathi/Atrium Magazine)
On any given day between December and March, at the ring of a phone, Jim Hain and Sara Ellis may find themselves loading a car and driving up to an hour south of their base in the coastal town of Marineland. They travel light but equipped: with binoculars, yellow data sheets and pecan rings.
Jim Hain, who has a doctorate in biological oceanography, founded the Marineland Right Whale Project in 2001. At 81 years old, Hain possesses an intoxicating obsession with right whales. It is easy to imagine him as a young, star-eyed twenty-something at the beginnings of his academic career in Rhode Island. Sara Ellis, who has a doctorate in biology, curbs her own right whale obsession only moderately better. Ellis joined the project as a senior researcher in 2020, but she and Hain’s close friendship was established long before that.
Situated on Florida’s northern Atlantic coast, 100 miles north of the John F. Kennedy Space Center and 80 miles south of the Florida-Georgia border, Marineland is a prime sighting location for calving right whale mothers in the Southeast U.S. While right whales have been found further south, by and large, the NASA launch site is about as far as they typically go to give birth.
Hain and Ellis lead a citizen science project to spot, record and report right whales during the winter calving season. By reporting their numbers to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, boaters can be immediately notified of where to steer clear, hopefully keeping Floridian waters safe for the mothers and calves.
Hain’s troops are largely snowbirds — New England retirees who mimic the right whales’ migration as they flock to their beachside condos once the thermostat starts dropping. New recruits who usually don’t have a science background are quickly lectured in Biology 101. Then, they wait.
What gives a whale away? Diving birds, whitewater spray, dolphins traveling in packs, any and all imperfections on the sea surface.
2024 has been an unusually quiet year for Florida. Marineland survey teams, on duty for a collective 8,000 hours this season, recorded a startling three sightings in the area total. It’s unusually low. This year’s whales, it seems, were keeping largely to the north of Marineland. Could this be because of too-warm waters in their traditional calving grounds? Scientists are searching for the answer.
Still, it is difficult to extinguish the light in Hain’s eyes. Pondering on the state of the right whale population, he first cites the motto of the project: “Every year and every whale is different.” As long as “people are working the problem,” Hain says, “we did what we could.”
All told, 19 calves were born in the 2023-2024 season, a remarkable year for a struggling species. In the past decade, only 2013 and 2021 have had more births per season at 20 calves each. Even so, five of this season’s calves were born and then confirmed or presumed dead just days or weeks later. One died from a propeller strike. The others, dependent on their mothers in the first year of life, went missing.
Vessel strikes inflict severe trauma either by blunt force — fracturing a whale’s skull or spine, leading to muscle contusions or blood clots — or propellers, cutting wounds into a whale’s blubber, muscle, internal organs or even bone.
Since 2008, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has managed vessel speed regulations in known right whale grounds, either where they are expected to seasonally show up, such as Cape Cod Bay in the summer, or in what the agency calls “dynamic” areas, where multiple sightings are reported near each other. Seasonal area speed limits are mandatory. Dynamic areas are voluntary. In both, vessels 65 feet and over are asked to slow down to 10 knots or less for a set period. More than eighty percent of vessels don’t.
The regulatory challenges are many. Seasonal whale habitat is changing. Sightings are difficult, irregular and not always reported immediately. Violators aren’t tracked and held accountable. Most recreational vehicles are shorter than 65 feet.
Since NOAA instituted slow-down zones in 2008, conservation groups including Defenders of Wildlife and The Humane Society of the United States have been shaking their fists in Washington. Their goals? Make all slow zones mandatory. Expand seasonal management areas to match current habitat data. Start regulating vessels 35 feet or longer.
In 2022, NOAA finally announced a proposal that included these goals. A brief hooray! — and then, the slow-grinding gears of government. Two years later, the amendment is still in review. A final decision to implement it and rewrite the 2008 policy may be made as early as this summer. Conservationists hold their breath.
Where the agency is attempting to expand vessel regulations for whales, a team of geospatial scientists and whale researchers at UC Santa Barbara is working on a solution to hold shipping companies accountable for noncompliance. Whale Safe North America, a web-based tool launched this spring, tracks the speed and distance of vessels moving through whale slow zones from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Southeast U.S. calving grounds.
Whale Safe North America gives public citizens, advocates and shipping personnel access to each major shipping company’s scorecard: an A through F rating determined by how many of each tracked ship’s total nautical miles traveled through a slow zone were actually at 10 knots or less.
Cool Carriers, for example, a Sweden-based shipping company that specializes in transporting perishables such as grapes, stone fruits, citrus and kiwifruits internationally, has a D rating. Cool Carriers operated nine fleets through whale slow zones this year, but only one (Ice Glacier) followed slowdown laws more than half the time.
While neglecting slow zones is a don’t-ask-don’t-tell issue for shippers, the threat of entanglement to whales is actively debated by its own offending parties. Entanglements primarily come from trap and pot lines, a method of fishing that involves sending enclosures with bait to the seafloor in hopes to catch crawling crustaceans such as lobster and snow crab. The traps are attached to each other by groundlines and then linked to a surface buoy by vertical ropes so fishmongers can easily find their pots when they return. Eighty-five percent of North Atlantic right whales have been entangled in these lines at least once in their lifetime.
When multiple trap lines are deployed in dense, numerous pods — such as those in the Gulf of St. Lawrence — large right whales are forced to navigate a maze of looming, silhouetted snares in the water. When whales are entangled by rope, typically around their flippers, flukes or mouths, constricting lines can cause harmful lesions, mutilate their baleen or restrict mobility so severely that they cannot feed sufficiently.
There are alternatives. On-demand fishing gear (sometimes inaccurately referred to as “ropeless”) don’t deploy ropes and buoys until a digital signal is received from the ship. Various types of on-demand fishing gear differ in exactly how the trap gets from the seafloor to the surface, but the idea is the same across all of them: The trap and all of its parts stay dormant until the fisherman is ready to call and retrieve it. No more free-floating ropes in the water.
But as the technology is developed, industry complaints abound: On-demand fishing gear is too expensive to be profitable; the digital app to control signaling is hard to use; hauling up traps takes minutes longer than traditional gear; and unreliable signals mean multiple traps could be deployed in the same location, or fishermen could lose their traps, or…
Like most new technology, cost, trust and knowledge barriers to entry are high. But in 2022, NOAA trials of on-demand gear in the U.S. lobster fishery resulted in ninety-one percent successful retrievals.
There is no doubt that strict slow zones and on-demand fishing gear would dramatically reduce injury and deaths among right whales. Fisheries industry interest in both is at best, cooperative, and at worst, fearful. For Ellis, the most surprising thing about a lifetime of working with whales is how the same issues conservationists were worried about in the 1990s, “we’re worried about now.”
“The whales don’t have more time,” Ellis warns.
A child is buried
Researchers from the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) perform a necropsy on right whale #5120. (Stacey Hedman/IFAW, taken under NMFS Permit #24359)
On January 28, 2024, the first dead right whale of the year is found on Joseph Sylvia State Beach in Martha’s Vineyard. It was #5120. She had turned three years old a week before.
#5120 died from chronic entanglement.
That lone juvenile, so elusive in life, is found unusually exposed on the sandbar by a meandering beachgoer. Waves lap at the tail of the still body. The next day, excavators perform a twisted form of processional as the animal’s body is dragged by tugboat back into the sea. This is the last time she will meet the Atlantic.
#5120 is towed to a shipyard, raised up on four straps and rolled onto the back of a flatbed truck. She is shuttled to dry Wampanoag forestland.
Her necropsy lasts for over one week, from her incised fluke, to her entangled fins, to her torn baleen. She was thin. Her tail was terribly lacerated. And a purple zip tie answered the 17-month question on #5120 followers’ minds — the 100-foot rope that cut into her fluke for nearly half of her lifetime was from a Maine-deployed trap pot. At 20 feet long and 11 tons, she was far from an adult.
As researchers and media eventually drift away from #5120’s resting place, members of the Wampanoag tribe file in to ease the cetacean’s journey into her afterlife. A few collect her skeleton to be cleaned, dried and repurposed for jewelry, art or storytelling. Others celebrate her spirit as her remains are lowered into a different Earth than the watery one where she began. A fellow relative is wished well on her journey beyond.
And another wish to those like her: May they travel untethered through uncertain waters.
EDITORS NOTE: Sections in “Miracle” were updated to reflect that Squilla was only cradling her calf, not nursing.
