Species Spotlight : Northern Right Whale
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Right whales were so named because they were considered the "right" whale to kill. That is, they were slow swimmers, floated when dead, yielded large amounts of commercially valuable oil and baleen (‘whalebone’ once used in corsets), and they were abundant in coastal areas. Unregulated hunting over a period of 800 years reduced the number of right whales to critically low levels.
Today, only about 300 right whales remain in the North Atlantic population, which spends most of the year breeding and feeding off the New England and southern Canadian coasts. Between December and March, pregnant females and some males and juveniles head south to the shallow waters between Savannah, Ga. and Port Canaveral, Fla. This area is the only known calving ground for this species.
An adult right whale is 40-53 feet long and may weigh as much as 40-50 tons. The body is dark brown or black and the head has a large, light colored projection of hardened skin called a bonnet. Similar projections may also occur around the mouth and above the eyes. The pattern of these projections helps to identify individual animals. Right whales may also be distinguished by shape — they generally are large and rotund, and have a flat back (no dorsal fin). When exhaling through paired blowholes located on top of their heads, they produce a distinctive V-shaped blow, or spray of air and water, visible from a distance. When feeding, right whales swim along the surface with open mouths, filtering water through their baleen plates, which trap tiny, planktonic animals called krill.
Right whales are the most endangered of the large whales and are clearly in danger of extinction. Most whaling nations stopped killing right whales in the 1930s. In 1949, the International Whaling Commission banned all hunting of right whales. Today, ship collisions and entanglement in fishing gear cause 30 percent of right whale deaths.
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