News Room

Scientists Optimistic After Sightings of Critically Endangered Whale

Doubling the tally of known Right Whales to 25
Submitted by NOAA
October 1, 2004 The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National
Marine Fisheries Service announced today in Kodiak, Alaska, that they have
located more endangered right whales. Scientists on the NOAA Research
Vessel McArthur II nearly doubled the tally of known right whales in the
Bering Sea in two lucky days of whale research. NOAA is an agency of the
U.S. Department of Commerce.

"We saw more right whales in the Bering Sea than have been
documented in the last five years combined," said Robert Pitman, NOAA
fisheries marine scientist. "More importantly, we also saw three
cow-and-calf pairs. Not only is the population bigger than we thought, but
it may actually be growing."

The extraordinary set of sightings expanded the record of known
right whales in the eastern North Pacific from 13 to at least 25
individuals. The North Pacific right whale is perhaps the most endangered
large whale in the world, because it was severely depleted by
over-exploitation in the 1800s. Following international protection in
1931, sighting records indicate there was a small but recovering population
of right whales in the eastern North Pacific. However, illegal takes of
right whales by foreign commercial whaling vessels in the 1960s reduced the
population to a critically low level. Since that time, sightings of right
whales have been extremely rare in the eastern North Pacific, and there
have been concerns that the population was headed for extinction.
"In 2002, scientists documented a sighting of a right whale calf
in the Bering Sea for the first time in more than a century," said retired
Navy Vice Adm. Conrad C.
Lautenbacher, Ph.D., under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere
and NOAA administrator. "Although Bering Sea right whales remain severely
endangered, each new individual whale we find--especially a calf--gives us
hope for their survival."

Scientists took 20 biopsies - small snips of skin and blubber -
that will give an individual genetic record and positive identification of
individual whales in the group spotted. From a plug of skin the size of a
pencil eraser, researchers at NOAA's Southwest Fisheries Science Center in
La Jolla, Calif., will determine a minimum number of individuals present in
the population, the sex of each whale sampled, how many of the females were
pregnant and how genetically distinct the eastern North Pacific population
might be.

Guided by satellite tags that scientists placed on two of the
right whales earlier this summer, researchers sighted the whale group in
the southeastern Bering Sea just south of an area where most North Pacific
right whales have been sighted in the last decade.

The whale researchers on the McArthur lI are participating in the
Alaska summer leg of SPLASH (Structure of Populations, Level of Abundance,
and Status of Humpbacks.) The McArthur II survey, coordinated by the
Southwest Science Fisheries Center, is a part of a three-year international
project involving NOAA scientists along with dozens of other researchers
from the United States, Japan, Russia, Mexico, Canada, the Philippines,
Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua and Guatemala. It is designed as a
systematic survey to estimate the number of humpback whales in the North
Pacific.

In remote Alaskan waters, the SPLASH researchers have been
enjoying extraordinary success with sightings of whales more rare than
humpbacks. They recently made headlines when they documented several blue
whales - another critically endangered species - in the Gulf of Alaska.

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