The North Atlantic right whale is highly endangered, its survival as a species in doubt. There are only about 370 of these dark, bulbous baleen whales remaining. No one knows exactly how large the population once was, but most estimates place it at almost 30 times that number. Those that remain migrate up and down the Eastern Seaboard each year from their calving grounds off Florida northward in search of food.
Many species are in peril worldwide. This species of whale — first assaulted by whaling, now the collateral victim of shipping and fishing — could be functionally extinct within two decades. But many of the same communities that once grew rich on whales’ slaughter are now uniquely positioned to help save the right whale. They can advocate reducing ships’ speeds, institute new fishing practices and begin to rectify the wrongs of the whaling industry.
For much of the year, the right whales inhabit the waters off Cape Cod, Nantucket and New Bedford, Mass., near where they were once killed by early American whalers. Some of the same places that practiced the bloody trade of whaling became, over the years, cute, quaint, tourist-filled — and rich. In whaling’s early years, Nantucketers, taking after the Wampanoag natives, would hunt whales from boats launched from beaches. Only later did the sperm whale — a more valuable prize, found far offshore, requiring larger ships to hunt — take precedence, driving the whaling economy.
By the time American whaling had slowed substantially in the late 19th century, there may have been fewer than 100 right whales left. And although the population rebounded slightly until about 2011, migratory shifts (likely prompted by climate change), coupled with the fishing and shipping industries’ reluctance to act, have left them in a perilous position.
Today, the shipping that supplies American businesses and consumers — and the fisheries that stock many larders — operate everywhere the right whales swim. Americans’ desire for cheap seafood and unwillingness to pay marginally more for imported goods incentivize industry to ignore the whales’ plight.
Treating nature as nothing more than a commodity — or as a regrettable speed bump on the way to material gain — is not only immoral, but also an attitude that fundamentally cheapens humanity. It is corrosive not just to the whales and the numerous other species and ecosystems similarly endangered and destroyed, but even to our own souls.
But given the pace of the whale die-off, and the number of centuries, from early whaling in the Bay of Biscay to the present day, it has taken to reduce the North Atlantic right whale to its present sad state, now is the time to attempt to save it. The same communities that once led the slaughter now owe it to the whales — and to themselves — to lead the effort to make reparations for their past wrongs. We have, at best, a few decades.
Adapting to save the whales is possible. Slower boat speeds on the eastern continental shelf and ropeless fishing gear would almost certainly arrest the whales’ declining numbers. Both solutions are financially viable and technologically feasible. They’re also, for humans, inconvenient.
There is precedent to undertake measures to save the right whale. Their cousins in the Southern Ocean, heavily targeted by Soviet whalers as recently as the 1980s, have seen a remarkable recovery. If given a reprieve from the horrors of ship strikes and entanglements with fishing gear, it is likely the North Atlantic right whale could also recover.
But if nothing changes, the whale’s extinction is certain. “The arrow at the end of the trajectory points to zero,” Charles “Stormy” Mayo, a scientist at Provincetown’s Center for Coastal Studies, told me. “This is not complicated — it’s simple arithmetic.”
Almost the entire population of right whales have been entangled in fishing lines at some point in their lives — usually lines set for lobster traps in New England — and at least half have been entangled more than once. A typical entanglement increases the energy required to swim by a factor of 1.5, even when the ropes aren’t torturing the whales to death by ripping into their skin and blubber. (Earlier this month, two right whales were spotted entangled near Nantucket. One, a 3-year-old male, was expected to die as a result. For the other, a 13-year-old female, it was her third documented entanglement.) Many right whales are struck by ships; they inhabit, after all, one of the most trafficked stretches of ocean in the world, swimming by the channels that lead to key ports from Jacksonville, Fla., to Montreal.
Even those who are not hit are becoming chronically stressed: The calving interval for mothers has more than doubled; the whales are on average a meter shorter than they were in the 1980s. Timothy Frasier, a biology professor at St. Mary’s University, compared the stress right whales experience from entanglement and ship strikes to the lifetime harms caused by child abuse among humans.
“People oppose whaling because it’s cruel — well, this is vastly crueler than whaling,” Peter Corkeron, a right whale researcher at Australia’s Griffith University, told me. Michael Moore, scientist emeritus at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, has written that entanglements and even ship strikes — which tend to kill the whales more quickly — are often more torturous than explosive harpoons. But the legacies of the whaling industry and the whales’ current status as collateral damage are much the same.
I spent much of my life on Nantucket, the heart of American whaling — I went to high school there, began working as a journalist there, and return regularly to visit my parents. My family had no ancestors on the whale ships, though my grandfather — a longtime resident of Fairhaven, Mass., near the whaling port of New Bedford — was one of the last working artists who carve into whalebone, known as scrimshanders. To inhabit Nantucket at all is to be surrounded by whaling legacies and — through the beautiful houses built by whaling men, the public spaces constructed from their oily trade, the tourism dollars those sights bring in, the resulting sky-high home values — to profit from it.
It’s hard to escape the sense that the Nantucket community sees its whaling past not as a crime, but as glory. Whales emblazon the island’s flag, its merchandise; its school sports teams are the Whalers. The bloody, brutal decades of the whaling industry are now memorialized as kitsch. Whaling morphed into “the stuff of knickknacks, flags, stuffed animals, something that’s quaint and bloodless,” Nathaniel Philbrick, the island’s leading historian, told me.
The island’s current prosperity “was made by an absolute bloodthirsty engagement” with nature, Mr. Philbrick told me. “Even though Nantucketers now have the luxury of being removed from all that, the fact is what makes this place so interesting and attractive to many of us has to do with that horrific past.”
Yet many islanders largely ignore this part of their community’s legacy, despite the work of institutions like its Historical Association. This year, the leader of Nantucket’s largest ferry service, the Steamship Authority, went to Washington to protest proposed seasonal speed restrictions aimed at protecting right whales. More than two years earlier, an executive at another ferry company histrionically called the proposed restrictions “catastrophic.” The restrictions would not be in place during the summer tourist season and would mainly affect high-speed ferry service that is already reduced in the winter, rather than the slower ferries that carry cars and cargo. But still, the firms argue, they would be crippled by the reduction. The ferry industry notes that its captains have not noticed right whales in the waters they ply, though the whale is regularly seen nearby. But even on dedicated whale research boats on crystal-clear days, the right whale can be fiendishly hard to spot.
Leading right whale scientists are unequivocal: Speed restrictions will save whales’ lives. Currently, the U.S. government’s management of right whales is “kind of worse than nothing, because they’ve made vast amounts of money available to monitor the extinction,” Dr. Corkeron told me. A refusal to take proven measures to prevent whale death means that, in effect, the fishing, shipping and transport industries are lobbying for permission to kill the right whale. The deaths are seen as acceptable collateral, part of the cost of doing business. As Dr. Corkeron put it: “Right whales will go extinct due to our desires for rapid delivery of inexpensive consumables and lobster rolls.”
There’s something some Nantucketers think they’re doing for whales: protesting wind turbines. The first of a series of planned offshore wind projects installed its inaugural turbine in October 2023. One group, initially called Nantucket Residents Against Turbines, rebranded as ACK for Whales. (“ACK” is a nickname for Nantucket, derived from its airport code.) They argue that higher-than-usual right whale deaths since 2017 are largely caused by wind turbine development. The noise generated by surveying and turbine installation harms whales, the ACK for Whales board member Amy DiSibio argues, and, she says, can cause distress, confusion or even brain combustion. “There is a really strong correlation” between whale mortality and the onset of survey work off the U.S. East Coast, Ms. DiSibio noted. “It correlates beautifully and sadly.” The theory lacks major expert buy-in.
When I asked Dr. Moore and Dr. Corkeron about turbines’ links to whale deaths, both literally laughed at me. Dr. Mayo and the New England Aquarium’s Philip Hamilton referenced pervasive reports that accusations tying whale mortality to the turbines are linked to fossil-fuel-industry-backed propaganda, though both also noted they worry about ocean industrialization generally. (Ms. DiSibio said that ACK for Whales has not received industry funding and argued that many leading right whale scientists work for organizations that the wind industry has supported.)
It can be hard to escape the idea that the right whale is sometimes a cudgel for wind turbine opponents, not their main focus — though many are expressing genuine distress about what they see as environmentally destructive technology. “Anyone who focuses on offshore wind and doesn’t work to try to solve the problems with fishing,” Dr. Corkeron told me, “is either delusional or lying.”
In April, I boarded the Shearwater and set out into Cape Cod Bay. The water was smooth, blown glass under marching ranks of cloud. Apart from their calving grounds off the coast of Florida and Georgia, Cape Cod Bay may be the single most important spot in the right whales’ current path: In recent years, as much as 81 percent of the total population has visited.
The Shearwater is the primary research craft of the Center for Coastal Studies, a Provincetown-based scientific group that closely monitors right whales in Cape Cod Bay. Dr. Mayo, the longtime director of the center’s Right Whale Ecology Program until he stepped down earlier this year, comes from a family that has lived in Provincetown since the mid-17th century, mostly working the sea. His father, a tuna fisherman, killed what was almost certainly the last commercially taken whale in the region. In the 1930s, he harpooned a pilot whale and realized it was a mother swimming with her calf. “I could hear them talking to each other,” Dr. Mayo recalls his father telling him. “He said, ‘I’m never doing that again.’”
Not far from shore, the center’s whale-spotting team called in a sighting. The Shearwater came about, and before us we saw a small, dark mass brushing along the surface of the water. The whale was perhaps 40 feet long and likely weighed about 25 or 30 tons. We watched him skim-feeding: opening his mouth wide and ingesting zooplankton through his baleen as he grazed the surface. The right whale appears almost upside-down, the smaller upper jaw visible above the surface, the lower jaw below. From the boat, I could see the whale’s entanglement scarring. This, I learned later, was Dune, a 21-year-old male.
Soon, more whales swam into sight. One was immediately identified as Oakley from the patterns of his callosity — the distinctive barnacle-inhabited tissue on the whales’ backs. (Oakley’s look like a rifle — so, Annie Oakley.) Right whales are so rare, and so identifiable by their callosities, that many have names and, thanks to genetic research, most have known family trees, cataloged by researchers. Oakley, for instance, was born in 2001; he is the son of Mystique and Scoop.
Many researchers have favorite whales. Dr. Mayo, who says he doesn’t have a favorite, repeatedly brought up Snow Cone, a mother who became entangled after her calf was killed by a boat, bore another calf while entangled and is now presumed dead. Mr. Hamilton cited Admiral, a massive whale who would “come up from a long dive almost like a submarine.” Last seen in 2007, she’s probably dead now, too. The connections are personal. “I’ve towed several of these animals that I’ve known ashore,” Dr. Mayo told me.
Only about a fifth of North Atlantic right whales are reproductively active females. Without action, there will likely be almost none left within the next two decades, and the species will become zombielike. Humans are to blame. If we do not take action to slow shipping speeds and eliminate fishing lines, we will be responsible for the whales’ extinction, too.
In seven hours aboard the Shearwater, the crew and I saw about 23 right whales — nearly 7 percent of the entire species. Some had scars from boat strikes and entanglements, often so large they could be easily seen through the murky water. Of the 23, we were close enough to identify 18, including Dune and Oakley, Wolf and her calf, Waldo and Wishbone, Freckles, Beaker and Casper.
We were following the last whales we saw that day, Butterfly and her calf. Dr. Mayo was talking about plankton in Cape Cod Bay, telling me why the whales congregate there year after year. And then, behind him, I saw something: a whale breaching.
It was Butterfly’s 4-month-old calf, one of at least 10 of the newborns that swam into Cape Cod Bay this year. Dr. Mayo chuckled. “You might see it again,” he said. “Sometimes, these calves get in the habit.”
The calf moved close to its mother. She began to feed on her side, her eye rising from the water, seeming to peer at us. Nineteen calves this year, five already dead. Some of the remaining 14 will likely meet similar fates — hit by ships, entangled, killed by human-designed agonies — before they reach maturity around 10 years of age and begin having calves of their own. It’s not much on which to rebuild a species.
But sometimes they’ll get into the habit of breaching, of thrusting themselves into the air. We don’t know exactly why whales breach, but in a calf, it’s hard not to read it as playful. It simply seems joyous. And we owe it to the right whale — and to so many other species — to reconstruct what our own history has taken from them. We owe them a world where they can exist not as our prey or our vassals or our traumatized collateral damage, but as themselves. Where that calf, and that calf’s calf, can continue to leap from sea to air.
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