Early in the year, researchers had a little good news. Ten calves were spotted. Not the bumper year they’d been hoping for, but not the bust of 2018, either.
They had intricate plans for weeks at sea on research expeditions in the gulf during July and August. On the itinerary: plankton surveys and oceanographic investigations. In addition, they would rely on regular government airplane surveys, an underwater glider fitted with sensors to listen for right whales, and acoustic buoys to detect right whale sounds. All of these would feed data into an interactive map designed by Hansen Johnson, a PhD candidate in biological oceanography at Dalhousie University in Halifax. Scientists would be able to see where the whales were in real time.
But even the best laid plans collapse during a pandemic.
While government airplane surveys and underwater listening devices remained in place this year, all ship-based right whale expeditions to the gulf had to be cancelled once the border with the U.S. closed in March. The sole exception was a tiny boat operated by Canadian photographer Nick Hawkins, who recently received a National Geographic explorer grant to document the right whale. He is the only non-researcher with permission from Fisheries and Oceans Canada to approach the whales.
Hawkins lives in New Brunswick and, by chance, was there when the borders to that province closed. He put together what amounted to a small summer research station — complete with a specially stabilized camera and a drone for aerial filming — on Île Lamèque, perhaps half an hour’s sail from where right whales are sometimes spotted.
Because he was to be the only one on the water, Hawkins and his wife, Andrea Tapia, volunteered to photograph and help identify individual right whales this year and to send the information to the catalogue at the New England Aquarium.
By June, researchers were jumpy. Some talked of having post-traumatic stress disorder from last year’s dreadful season. Several said they hated to hear the phone ring or pick up emails for fear of hearing yet another dead right whale needed to be necropsied, or a live one disentangled.
“I’m literally sitting here holding my breath,” said Wimmer, of the Marine Animal Response Society, from her office in Halifax in mid-June.
A week later, on the one-year anniversary of Punctuation’s necropsy, the first of this year’s new crop of calves was found dead off the coast of New Jersey. It had survived awful propeller gashes on its head and chest after being hit by one ship, only to succumb after being struck a few weeks later by a second.
Another badly injured calf had already vanished from sight after a ship ran into it off the coast of Georgia, and so had an emaciated adult female, called Dragon, who was spotted off the coast of Massachusetts earlier in the season with a fishing buoy lodged in her mouth. They are presumed dead.
In July, the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List, alarmed, moved the species from the category of “endangered” to “critically endangered.” That’s one step from “extinct in the wild.” They are the closest to the edge of any big whale on Earth.
It’s hard to find signs of hope. But there are some. For one thing, as Brown says, local fishermen and ships’ bridge crews and quartermasters alike are passionately interested in avoiding interactions with whales.
“Those are the guys saving the whales. And they don’t get a lot of credit.”
A move toward smaller-gauge ropes that whales can break free from more easily is under consideration. So is the idea of rope-less gear, including having some traps attached to inflatable balloons rather than buoy lines.
“Three years ago, people thought this was Star Trek,” says Brillant, from the Canadian Wildlife Federation, describing the leap in technology. “But in the last three years, with the imperative of this situation, the fishing community, let alone the scientific community, has really jumped on this.”
Scientists and policy-makers are exploring more mechanisms to separate ships from whales, including early warning systems and no-go zones that exclude ships altogether while the whales are there. The conservation group Oceana Canada is calling for mandatory speed restrictions in the Cabot Strait leading into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Brillant says it’s time to consider a gulf-wide shipping restriction at certain times of the year.
“I think we need to get to the point where we start to look at some of the ideas that are crazy,” he says. “We need to be crazy because the situation is becoming so critical.”
Whale biologists are brainstorming new ways to study the species so they can devise more ways to protect it. Among the ideas: taking the temperature of air coming out of the whales’ blowholes by drone-carried thermal cameras, measuring by high-resolution photographs, even whale-watching by satellite.
Perhaps most touchingly, a new generation of right whale researchers is eagerly stepping up, with passion to spare. Among them is Gina Lonati, who started her PhD in January at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton under the supervision of oceanographer Kim Davies. Lonati heard about the threats to the species at a conference in Halifax in 2017.
“It was like a call to me,” she says. “As a marine mammal enthusiast and researcher, I felt what better way to dedicate my energy than to the right whale cause?”
Whether the North Atlantic right whale survives or not is, at this point, in our hands. It is a philosophical question rather than a practical one. The right whale is no longer a commercial species, needing to be saved because humans rely on it for food or income. If we save it, it will be because we know it has its own intrinsic value, the rightful heir of its evolutionary legacy. If we save it, it will be a form of redemption for all the species we have let go extinct.
Two images remain. Metaphors, if you will.
The day after this year’s first calf was found dead, Hawkins was out on the water filming and taking photographs. The day was perfect. Light cloud cover. Little wind. A rarity in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
To his joy, he spotted a mother, Harmony, and her chubby calf, one of the eight remaining from this year’s batch and the fourth mother-calf pair sighted in the gulf by that point. He sent up his drone to get some footage, keeping well back.
Harmony dived down to feed, leaving her calf at the surface. The calf looked over, curious. What was that thing floating on the water? It swam over to look — a baby, but still half again as long as the boat. It looked up at the hull from underneath, circling around the boat, diving underneath it, then surfacing maybe three metres off the stern. In its element. Almost near enough to touch.
“At that moment, you just drop the cameras and appreciate the moment,” says Hawkins.
A year and a day earlier, Hawkins had been at the necropsy of Punctuation, taking his haunting photographs. He was there at the end, when Bourque and Daoust and the others had to clean themselves up. It was quite an ordeal. Bourque ended up sitting in the ocean, scrubbing her tools and gear with sand to get off the scent and viscera of the whale.
Punctuation was in pieces by then. The excavator went back to work later, digging her a huge grave in the dunes, back from the beach. It was the tidiest solution. She couldn’t be buried at sea because bits would end up washing back to land. Somehow, the fact that she couldn’t go back home in death was the most ignominious thing of all.