By Joe Roman
Wildlife Conservation Magazine, June 2000
Winner of the Bowdoin Prize for Essay in Natural Sciences, Harvard University
Chosen as Notable Science and Nature Writing in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2000
The late-summer sun was rising over Nova Scotia when we shut down the boat. In the surrounding waters, a deep basin in the Bay of Fundy known as the Groove, about a third of the entire population of right whales in the North Atlantic was feeding. The northern right whale was known to Yankee whalers as the black whale, and as we drifted toward the concentration, the broad backs and wide tails looked slick as freshly paved asphalt.
As we readied cameras and clipboards, a whale erupted 200 yards off the bow, its large head streaked with mud. Patches of mottled gray skin surrounded its blowholes, ruts lined its back, and white scars, like scrapes along a bump in the road, edged the flukes, the right whale’s dark notched tail. Up close, the black whale brought to mind a street in outer Queens.
We photographed the whale for later identification and recorded the water depth (538 feet) and latitude and longitude (44°44’ north, 66°24’ west). Just beyond, another whale rose; a red polypropylene line, pulled tight from the mouth like a rein, stood out against dark skin. The rope extended over the blowholes and trailed far behind the flukes.
“That’s 2660,” called out Amy Knowlton, research scientist from the New England Aquarium’s Right Whale Research Project. Whale 2660 was a three-year-old female, expected to add another 10 feet to her 35-foot frame in the next five years. But with a 300-foot gill net wrapped around her body, the fishing lines could dig into the entangled whale as she matured, like a wire lashed around a growing tree. On the marine radio, Knowlton called Chris Slay, a researcher on a nearby vessel, and they decided to attach a radio-telemetry tag to relocate the whale once a disentanglement team was organized.
As we approached in the Nereid, our 29-foot research vessel, the whale turned away and let out a resounding blow. A ghostly mist hovered above. “Flukes!” called out Knowlton, and we watched the tail stretch high above the horizon, the sleek opposite of a blow. The fluke shuddered, a black velvet curtain in the slightest breeze, and slipped from sight. In its wake was a fluke print, a slick the size of a swimming pool, where dozens of salps, barrel-shaped plankton, spun at the surface like a broken string of pearls.
* * *
The year 1999 didn’t start off well for the North Atlantic right whale, the most endangered of large whales, with a population declining below 300. Only three newborns were seen in the calving grounds off Florida, where just a few winters ago we could find 20. This might have been the result of bad weather–right whale cows, living on short rations after El Niño-related storms, may have aborted or reabsorbed their fetuses–or it could have been from disease or widespread marine pollutants.
The spring was no better. In April, one of the population’s most fertile mothers, Staccato, with six offspring to her name, was found floating in Cape Cod Bay. Her lower mandible and some vertebrae had been broken. A necropsy indicated that she had lived for about a week after being hit by a ship. And at least seven whales became entangled in fishing gear in the first half of 1999. Four of them were seen in the Bay of Fundy: Besides the juvenile 2660, whale 1158, at least 20 years old, had a line wrapped around her body attached to a high flyer, a buoy with a bright red flag used to locate nets. Worst of all, whale 2030, a nine-year-old, had a line digging deep into her skin and blubber. In June, a two-year-old juvenile was freed from 300 feet of line. All of these are females, vital to the future of right whales in the North Atlantic.
A population equal to the number of passengers on a fully booked trans-Atlantic flight can’t sustain such losses for long. Using models based on data from the Right Whale Consortium, a group of researchers dedicated to preserving the species, senior scientist Hal Caswell of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts analyzed the viability of the population. He and his colleagues projected that if the decline in survival is not reversed, North Atlantic right whales could be extinct within 200 years.
This slow-swimming coastal whale, good for 80 barrels of oil and a 1000 pounds of baleen, has not fared well in recent centuries. After harpooning every whale they could find off the European coast, Basque whalers crossed the ocean in the 16th century and set up stations in Labrador and Newfoundland. At 50 tons, right whales weren’t quite worth their weight in gold–a barrel of oil, essential for lighting and lubrication, sold for the equivalent of $3000 in modern currency–but their value was high enough to draw whalers to treeless lands where sun-blotting hordes of mosquitoes and black flies awaited. Although 400 years have passed since the black smoke lifted from the try works, iron pots used to render blubber, the soil in Red Bay, Labrador, is still slick with whale oil.
After Basque whaling declined, right whale populations may have partially recovered. But in the 18th and 19th centuries, baleen, or whalebone, became especially prized by Yankee whalers. Resembling a long black comb descending from the upper jaw, baleen is used by right whales to strain plankton from the sea. Its strength and flexibility made this material ideal for umbrella ribs, fishing rods, and made possible an hourglass figure for any woman who could afford a corset. Now replaced by steel, fiberglass, and the Wonderbra, baleen was so valuable in the 19th century that the sale of the whalebone from a single adult could cover the expenses of an entire cruise.
Because of this long-lasting value, the North Atlantic right whale is now one of the rarest mammals on earth. Populations of the southern right whale appear to be recovering off South Africa and Argentina, yet the northern right whale is absent from most of its former range; the Bay of Biscay, the English Channel, the coasts of Iceland, Labrador, and Newfoundland have been emptied of right whales. Though they’ve been protected by international agreement since 1935, at midcentury some scientists thought the right whale extinct in the North Atlantic. After more than six decades of protection, sightings of these cetaceans are still unusual–unless you know where to look.
Even when she’s not on the bow of the Nereid, Amy Knowlton knows where to find these whales, whether they’re skim feeding off Cape Cod in spring or nursing their young off Jacksonville, Florida, in midwinter. Knowlton, a lean, tawny-haired New Englander in her late thirties, has been studying right whales since 1983. She now focuses her effort on reducing ship strikes. With container ships, aircraft carriers, and nuclear submarines all plying the local waters, there’s no place like the busy shipping lanes off northeast Florida for losing one’s illusions about the idyllic life of the right whale. Since 1970, at least 16 individuals have been killed on the East Coast, the inadvertent consequence of our desire for foreign cars and national defense. As Scott Kraus, who started the Right Whale Research Project in 1980, told me, “It’s almost like the whales woke up one day and all hell had broken loose.” Even in the relatively pristine Bay of Fundy, the summer feeding grounds are cleaved by a shipping channel. Knowlton has been meeting with executives from Irving Oil, a company based in New Brunswick, to discuss rerouting ships around this critical area.
Knowlton doesn’t just know where to find these whales, she knows most of them by sight. Right whales are distinguished by scars and callosity patterns on the bonnet, their hourglass-shaped upper jaw. A callosity is an archipelago of roughened skin covered with thousands of white cyamids, or whale lice, like a drift of deep-packed snow. In more prosaic terms, a typical pattern looks as if a giant bird had crapped across the right whale’s head. Though callosities may not be pretty, each one is unique. When a whale surfaces beside the Nereid, Knowlton and her colleagues Philip Hamilton and Marilyn Marx often astound the crew with their ability to recognize a whale they haven’t seen in years.
For most of us, however, the Right Whale Catalog is essential to identification. Spanning the years 1935 to 1998, this directory is a collection of line drawings and photographs–cetacean mug shots–including left and right profiles, distinctive scars, and flukes of every known right whale. Most of the photographs are from surveys in the 1980s and ‘90s.
The lone image from 1935 first appeared in the New York Herald Tribune. After encountering a cow-calf pair off Brunswick, Georgia, a fishing crew harpooned and shot the calf, then fired at the frantic mom. Six hours later, the calf was subdued, and the mother, injured but alive, swam off alone. Right whales were uncommon enough at the time to make the hunt newsworthy. Half a century later, the mother’s photograph came to the attention of Hamilton and Kraus, and with the pro bono help of a private investigator, they tracked down the original image. The biologists matched it to 1045, a 50-foot female seen off Cape Cod in the 1980s. Though she lost her calf, 1045 survived the bullet wounds and 50 years at sea. The calf was the last right whale legally hunted in American waters.
The cold truth is that hunters have historically exploited the maternal bond in mammals to increase the take. Whalers favored cow-calf pairs not only because they could double their catch in a single effort but also because mature females were larger than males and the pairs easy to spot. When we were tracking a mother and calf off the Florida coast, it was often difficult to locate the mother in choppy seas. But the shoe-shaped head of a newborn calf, bobbing playfully above the waterline, could be seen more than a mile away. Once calves were harpooned, nursing mothers were easy to catch, since they would not abandon their injured offspring. Even after their calves were killed, many females would follow the carcass as it was towed by the whaling boat.
* * *
Two days after 2660 was radio tagged, the disentanglement team gathered at a rambling house in the hill town of Lubec, Maine. Two biologists from the Center for Coastal Studies, Stormy Mayo and Ed Lyman, flew up from their office in Provincetown, Massachusetts, equipped to remove fishing gear. They would work from an inflatable boat launched off the Nereid.
On the way out, we passed dozens of harbor porpoises, or puffing pigs, as these soft-breathing, football-shaped cetaceans are known to local fishermen. A fin whale dove half a mile to port, a sickle-shaped dorsal fin punctuating its departure as it slipped below the surface. To starboard, we passed the Bishop, then Seven Days Work, two cliff formations on the island of Grand Manan. As the Nereid rounded Swallowtail lighthouse, a call came in from Song of the Whale, a 46-foot ketch sailing for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW): 2660 was making deep dives in a dense concentration of whales.
According to the 13th-century Scandinavian text Speculum Regalae, the right whale did “not eat any food except darkness and rain that falls on the sea.” It’s no surprise that early observers didn’t notice the right whale’s preferred prey–the copepod is surprisingly small. More than a thousand of these slender crustaceans can swim in a teaspoon. In the Bay of Fundy, with its daunting 50-foot tides, copepods are densely gathered in the Groove, prompting right whales to return year after year for the rich planktonic soup. Yet there are hazards in the modern world for a filter-feeding whale. Baleen may help concentrate food, but once a fishing line is caught behind the plates, the whale has no way to remove it or the tangle of gill nets, deep-water lobster traps, and Styrofoam buoys trailing behind. It could take a decade before the gear rots away–slowing the whale down, making it more difficult to feed, to migrate, to reproduce, to live.
On the bow of a black inflatable, about a third the length of the whale he was trying to disentangle, Mayo wore blue jeans, a life jacket, and a white lacrosse helmet to protect him from errant lines. With a flying cutter, a knife that resembles a lobster claw, attached to a long wooden pole, he looked like a modern whaler–with equipment designed to free whales, not slaughter them. Working together, Mayo, Lyman, and Knowlton removed about 25 feet of trailing line from 2660. As they waited for her to surface, a report came in that whale 2030 had been spotted by the Skymaster, a support plane. First seen entangled in May 1999, 2030 had polypropylene line around her flippers and lashed three times about her body. One wrap was so tight it had dug a gash 12 inches deep into her blubber. The infected wound was covered with ravenous cyamids feeding on the exposed blubber and chafed skin. Mayo and Lyman assessed the situation: with the tight wraps, 2030 would never reach the girth she’d need for reproduction and, without direct intervention, was almost certain to die.
The crew decided to attach a floating satellite tag, about the size of a bowling ball, to her trailing gear as the sun went down. Song of the Whale followed the tag overnight, as the disentanglement crew regrouped ashore. The following morning, Mayo attached five Norwegian bumpers to 2030’s gear. He hoped the large pink buoys would slow the whale down and make her dark skin more visible in the calm sea.
As we were passing equipment between boats, a buoy rose up behind us, and then another, soon all five bumpers raced between the inflatables, and we pushed off just before 2030 surfaced off our bow. At first, it seemed that she wanted our help in removing the gear, but when the crew approached, 2030 lifted her Volkswagen-size flukes and sliced the water beside the small boat. Once she was spooked, 2030 slipped away and dove from sight each time the boat came near, pulling the buoys far below.
Imagine trying to remove a bullet from an injured bull, unanesthetized and unconvinced of your good intentions, and you’ll get an idea of just how risky disentanglement can be. But without such efforts, more whales would be lost. Fishing rigs such as drift nets, gill nets, and lobster pots kill thousands of marine mammals off New England each year, and about 60% of right whales in the North Atlantic have entanglement scars. By modifying gear and learning how to disentangle large whales, biologists could help cetaceans around the world. As Kraus told me, “When you’re a young whale, you’re going to get caught in fishing gear. But it should be like skinning your knee. You get up and get on with it.”
With just 300 left, right whales are going to have to get on with it soon. Their reproductive rate is distressingly low, about 2% per year, not enough to offset mortalities. Biologists are not sure whether this rate is because of genetic or environmental factors, but it doesn’t appear to be a lack of desire. The right whale courtship group is one of the most spectacular sights in the animal kingdom.
One day, while waiting for 2030 to reappear, Chris Slay and I documented a group of surface-active whales. Some male animals compete by locking horns and others defend territories, but as A Field Guide to Whales, Porpoises, and Seals from Cape Cod to Newfoundland notes, “right whale males compete with genitalia and sperm.” Equipped with an 11-foot penis and testes bigger than washing machines, a male, in a group of up to 20 or 30 suitors, will chase down a female and stay with her for hours, vying for a chance to mate.
We watched a female swim by, belly up, her milky white undersurface reflecting the sky. The sea was calm, the air thick with the damp stench of whale. In the distance, a container ship headed inbound; at 800 feet, it looked like a football stadium rushing up the bay. Even in the best of circumstances, with ideal sighting conditions and maximum maneuverability, cumbersome merchant ships have a limited ability to avoid collisions with whales. Researchers have suggested rerouting or slowing vessels in protected areas, or installing sonic alarms on ships to act like underwater train whistles and scare off threatened whales. Three males surfaced beside the female, their heads glistening like well-polished shoes, and others approached, chugging like locomotives, from hundreds of yards away.
Caught up in our Schaulust, the desire to watch that defines many biologists, we began to drift toward the group. Slay eased the boat away. When right whales go courting, they seem oblivious to everything else; it was hard to imagine that any alarm would shake them from their efforts.
* * *
Twenty-thirty remained elusive for the rest of the season. Ashore, Lyman and Knowlton followed the satellite tag on their laptop computer. Twenty-thirty traveled south out of the bay and then returned to the Groove, where the whales had concentrated the previous week. Lyman noticed a disturbing pattern: the tag was emitting a constant signal, indicating that it was at the surface for the entire day. Ordinarily, 2030 would be making ten-minute dives to feed, causing interruptions in the transmission. Knowlton said, “Either she’s logging at the surface resting, the tag came off, or she’s dead.”
As the tides raced in and out of the Lubec Narrows, we waited for Song of the Whale to check on the tag. Although all agreed that 2030 was almost certain to die if the gill net remained, we were worried that the rescue effort might have brought on her death. The IFAW boat called in: 2030 was logging at the surface with the satellite tag attached to the line. We were relieved to hear she was alive, but why wasn’t she diving to feed?
Over the next few weeks, disentanglement efforts were successful with other whales. Kraus and Slay removed a high flyer and more than 50 feet of black polypropylene line from 1158 in late September. Mayo and crew removed 120 feet of line from 2660, and the last time she was spotted from the air, there were no lines around her body.
Twenty-thirty left the bay in mid-September, when the remnants of Hurricane Floyd slashed through the Gulf of Maine. The crew never got close enough to cut the line, so Mayo removed the bumpers, leaving the satellite tag to track her course. She headed south, rounding Cape Cod in just a few days. On September 24, the tag began emitting a constant signal about 100 miles off the coast of New Jersey. A Coast Guard helicopter reported seeing a buoy in the area, but no whale. Then on October 20, a floating whale, lashed in fishing line, was reported off Cape May, New Jersey. Whale 2030 was confirmed dead that afternoon. The polypropylene had burned deep into the bloated body, and toward the end of her life the wounds had attracted sharks.
For 2030 it was a miserable death; for the species it was another major setback. For the researchers, not a day went by that fall when we didn’t think of her. Though we will forget most of what happened that season, each of us will hold an image of 2030: her black tail sinking into the sunset, a geyser of whale breath showering the crew, the bright red line that foretold her death, just a few feet beyond the cutter’s grasp.