This coverage is made possible through a partnership between WABE and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
Update: This story was updated on Monday, Dec. 2 at 10:58 a.m.
The first North Atlantic right whale calf of the season has been spotted by a boater off South Carolina. Scientists are also tracking several adult whales who may give birth in the coming weeks.
Tracking North Atlantic right whales is a team effort spanning the entire U.S. Atlantic coast from Canada to Florida.
Researchers from numerous government agencies patrol the coastline in boats and planes, looking for the endangered whales. Acoustic monitoring devices track their movements under the waves.
“Our coast is so vast; the area that these whales are traveling through and along is such a huge, huge area,” said Jessica Thompson, who leads the Georgia Department of Natural Resources marine mammal program. “No one instrument for detecting these whales is perfect and 100% accurate.”
However, funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s climate law, is helping make the task a little more manageable.
Beginning last year, federal fisheries managers have used millions of dollars in funding from the law to increase underwater acoustic monitoring in the Southeast. Those monitors will be deployed again this year as the whales begin returning to the coasts of Southeastern states, where they spend the winter and give birth.
This is the time of year when Thompson and her colleagues work to identify the whales and get biopsy samples of the calves. They use genetic information from those samples to track the whales into adulthood and add to the growing genetic picture of the right whale population.
Sometimes, researchers are able to get other information too, like hormone levels, that contribute to a better understanding of right whales and their lives.
“It is always piecing together the best available methods to be able to track the species and identify them in our area,” she said.
Only about 370 right whales remain, so every new calf is critical to the species’ survival, and scientists are always looking to learn more about where the whales go, the stressors and threats they face and the animals’ overall health.
“Typically, when we are researching a species, we don’t look at individuals because the populations typically are in much greater numbers,” Thompson said.
But with so few right whales left, scientists can identify each one and often track what happens throughout their lifetimes – including when new whales grow up to have their own calves and when they have potentially fatal interactions with boats and fishing gear.
“The more we can understand about their lives and how they interact with us on a regular basis, the better we can protect them, manage our actions, to be able to move as harmoniously as possible and in their world and their ecosystem, and then also understand how that may affect other species as well,” Thompson said.
Officials hope the monitoring can provide near-real-time information on where whales are to help reduce vessel strikes – one of the leading causes of death for right whales. A proposed rule change to enhance vessel speed restrictions in hopes of protecting right whales is still pending final implementation and faces some opposition from members of Congress, including Georgia Rep. Buddy Carter.
