Endangered right whale birth rate booming thanks to NE Aquarium and Irving Oil partnership

The New England Aquarium’s Right Whale Research Team is crediting a 10-year partnership with Irving Oil for the birthing boom.

Once thought to be possibly extinct, there are now just over 400 North Atlantic right whales. “This is actually the first time that right whales have produced up to their potential since we’ve been monitoring them in 30 years,” said Moira Brown, a senior right whale researcher at the Aquarium and the Canadian Whale Institute.

Since 1998, Irving Oil has annually contributed critical operating funds to support the Aquarium’s fieldwork to track right whales in their summer and autumn feeding waters in the Bay of Fundy near the U.S. border.

The Aquarium’s right whale research work began about 30 years ago – with the last 10 years being some of the most successful and productive with Irving Oil as a key supporter.

Brown says the first 10 years were spent figuring out how many right whales there were and where they went.

In the 1980s and 90s there was an average of a dozen whales born annually however in 1998 there were only five. In 1999 there were four, and only one calf was recorded in 2000.

In 2001 a record 31 births was recorded and ever since then an average of 20 calves annually has been documented. Brown says increased plankton supplies could have contributed to the rebound, but she says there’s another reason as well. “We figured out what was compromising their recovery: primarily ship strikes and entanglements, and in the last 10 years, we worked with marine industries, corporations, and government officials in Canada and in the US to figure out what we could do to reduce the impact of human activities, find solutions to promote recovery, and implement the solutions.”

In 2003, Canadian and international shipping officials agreed to move shipping lanes in the Bay of Fundy about four nautical miles east in an effort to reduce the risk of ship strikes. The move came after Irving Oil officials worked closely with Brown analyzing years’ worth of data to accurately document the concentrations of whales. The next step was to find a way to amicably move the shipping lanes.

This relatively small shift in lanes is now credited with reducing the risk of accidental collisions between right whales and ships by as much as 90 per cent in the Bay of Fundy.

In 2008, the Canadian government also implemented an area to be avoided on the Roseway Basin, about 30 nautical miles south of Nova Scotia, to protect whales from ships in that area from June to December each year.

Another significant action to protect the whales came last December when a new federal ship strike rule went into effect to require ships to slow down to 10 knots along the Atlantic coastline. That also took years of intense lobbying by whale protection groups including the New England Aquarium’s Right Whale Team to achieve that milestone.

The New England Aquarium’s Right Whale Research program is the longest running and most comprehensive right whale research and conservation initiative in the world.

In addition to maintaining the North Atlantic Right Whale Catalog with nearly 500,000 photos dating back to 1935, the team is investigating and working with Canadian and American government officials to find solutions to reduce ship strikes and fishing gear entanglements, which can harm and kill right whales.

Brown says all of the research done in the Bay of Fundy is funded by grants and donations and although many of the funders have changed over the years, Irving has been a consistent annual supporter for 10 years. “They contribute to the research by contributing via funding, they contribute to conservation by the stewardship work we did to relocate the shipping lanes, and they fund our education team to go out to give talks on whales to school groups in New England and New Brunswick.” “For the next 10 years, we will continue monitoring right whales to find out if we were right and tweak recovery measures to maximize the potential for the population to grow,” Brown said. “The whales are doing their part with more than 20 calves per year since 2001, double the calving rate observed in the 1980s and 1990s, and with 39 calves so far this year to help us celebrate 30 years of right whale research,” she said.

Right whale facts

Adult North Atlantic right whales average 17 m in length

Longevity is unknown but estimated at 70 years

Females are usually nine years old before they birth one calf

Calves are born between December and March in off southeastern United States. By late March they migrate north to the Gulf of Maine and beyond.

There are generally three years between babies

A right whale's milk is so rich that newborns can gain 900 kg in a little more than a month.

In the summer and fall, right whales are found in the lower Bay of Fundy, east of Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick, and on the western Scotian Shelf in the vicinity of Roseway Basin between Browns and Baccaro Banks, south of Nova Scotia.

www.rightwhale.ca

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