Air Date: Week of May 22, 2026

Shown above are a North Atlantic right whale mother, Bermuda (#3780), and her calf. (Photo: New England Aquarium, taken under NOAA Permit #25739-01)

North Atlantic Right Whales were once so thoroughly hunted they nearly went extinct. When hunting these mammals was outlawed, they slowly started to bounce back, but today these Right whales are dealing with newer deadly threats, such as fishing gear entanglement and warming in the Gulf of Maine. So, it’s a relief to advocates to have a successful calving season like this year with 23 new calves, the most since 2009. Amy Warren, the Scientific Program Officer at the New England Aquarium, spoke with Host Aynsley O’Neill.

Transcript

CURWOOD: It’s Living on Earth, I’m Steve Curwood.

O’NEILL: And I’m Aynsley O’Neill.

North Atlantic right whales were once so thoroughly hunted they nearly went extinct. In fact, they were called right whales because they were considered the “right” ones to hunt, as they lived close to shore and floated on the surface once killed. When hunting these mammals was outlawed, they slowly started to bounce back, but today right whales are dealing with new deadly threats from humans. So, it’s a relief to have a successful calving season like this year, with 23 new calves, the most since 2009. Amy Warren is the Scientific Program Officer at the New England Aquarium and she joins me now. Amy, welcome to Living on Earth!

WARREN: Hi, thanks for having me.

O'NEILL: Tell me a little bit about your role there at the New England Aquarium. How closely do you work with our subject here, right whales?

WARREN: So, one of the things that my team does primarily is that we manage the North Atlantic Right Whale Identification Catalog, so any and all photograph sightings of right whales that happen anywhere in the North Atlantic come into our team, and we're responsible for putting those into the catalog, incorporating photos and all the data that goes with it. And so now we have this catalog that has over 800 individuals, so like all of time. The catalog goes back to 1935. So, any whale we've ever identified is in this catalog, living or dead. So, we get anywhere from 3000 to 5000 sightings a year with hundreds of thousands, really millions of photos, and so it's a lot of time and effort, but then kind of zooming in a bit, I do also get to do field work, so I'll be on boats in different areas where right whales are feeding. For example, in the month of April, I was just on the water six days when we see, you know, a bunch of whales every day, we're out there, and then in the summertime I get to go offshore on research cruises, and those usually two weeks where we're living on the boat for two weeks, we're out and we're, again, seeing whales every day.

O'NEILL: Well, so Amy, you're the perfect person for this. If somebody has never seen one of these right whales, not even a photo, how can we help visualize them? What makes these whales identifiable? What helps them stand out?

WARREN: A lot of people know humpback whales, so I think it's sometimes easiest to start with them. And right whales are similar in some ways to people who don't know them in size. They're actually a little bit bigger, a little bit heavier, 50 feet long, 50 tons, but what's unique about right whales is they have these white patches on their head, they're called callosities, and they're actually collections of whale lice, so they're actually small...

O'NEILL: Lice?

WARREN: ... white whale lice…

O’NEILL: Wow!

WARREN: …that congregate on these rough patches of skin on the whale's head, yeah, something that they're born with, and they're all kind of always in different patterns for each whale, and yeah, the whale lice like to congregate on those rough patches. It sounds bad, I know we don't have the best connotation with lice, but in this case it's perfectly fine. They're just kind of feeding off of the dead skin. It's more like a spa day, if we think about it, it's really just, it works for the lice, and it doesn't bother the whales. But the reason why we actually appreciate the lice in this case is that the lice are white and the whale's skin is black, so these rough patches without the lice would basically blend in with the skin, you wouldn't see them, but with the contrast of the white versus the black, it basically makes these like shapes and patterns, and each whale has really unique patterns on its head, and this is why we can identify them.

O'NEILL: And so, these North Atlantic right whales, they are critically endangered. I think estimates have their population at under 400 total. How much do we know about why these population numbers are so small, and how do they compare to maybe the populations in the past?

WARREN: It's actually interesting. We don't know what the populations used to be, because they were decimated so long ago. So, right whales were protected in 1932 from whaling internationally, but at the time no one can really say for sure, but the they're thinking that the population of right whales was maybe between 20 and 50.

O'NEILL: Oh my goodness,

WARREN: no extra zeros, no 1000s ...

O'NEILL: Yeah!

WARREN: ... 20 to 50, maybe...

O'NEILL: Double digits is bad!

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WARREN: Yes, exactly. So their population actually did start to increase because they were no longer targeted, and this again, this is like, think of like 1930s to like 1980s but then jumping to kind of the 80s, 90s, 2000s you know, into now technology has gotten better, fishing gear has gotten stronger, it's gone further offshore, boats are bigger, boats are faster, and so all these new uses of the ocean by us have made it more dangerous for whales. So, the original decimation came from whaling. Then they came back up, and then their increase slowed again once kind of technology caught up to where they were. Add in climate change, you know, is now their food is moving, and so yes, we're part of that, but it's bigger than us. So, as their food has started shifting, it's bringing right whales into new areas, and that can bring them into areas that they have not been before and areas that are not ready for them. So, there's a lot of time and research that went on between, like, the 1980s and the early 2000s in that they like kind of discovered where whales were feeding regularly, they established these like hot spots or these habitats for them and were able to put protections in; either removing ships completely or slowing ships down, removing some of the fishing gear out of the water. In some areas, both up in the Bay of Fundy in Boston, they moved shipping lanes to go around these whale feeding areas, and so a lot of those things were helping. But as the food started shifting, the whales started shifting with them, and then whales started showing up into new places where those protections weren't there, because they didn't need to be there, and so that's kind of where we've been in recent years.

O'NEILL: And as I understand it, the problem isn't only with the whales themselves dying, but there's also an issue with the birth rates overall. How right is that?

WARREN: Yeah, so there's a lot going into it, and it overall comes down to the health of the population, but also the health of each individual whale. So, you know, if whales aren't healthy, they're not going to be able to give birth, and when we say a whale isn't healthy, that could be for a number of reasons. It could be because they're not finding enough food, it could be that a whale was hit by a boat and it survived, but it has this injury that now its body is kind of like fighting back from.

O'NEILL: And so, tell us about this year, though, in the numbers, what did this calving season mean for the North Atlantic right whale?

WARREN: So, this year we saw 23 right whale calves born, and that is the fourth highest calf count we've ever recorded, and the highest calf count since 2009. So, that is great. One good year isn't going to save a species. We need lots of good years, and we recently had a lot of bad years, like low numbers. We had a year zero calves, a year of only like five, and so one good year kind of just makes up for a few bad years. But it's hopeful, it's good. We love to see it. We're seeing that a lot of these females were giving birth more often. So, like a healthy right whale, we think, can give birth every three to four years. But in the last, like, decade or so, we were seeing females wait 10 years between subsequent calves, potentially because it was taking them that much longer to get back to, like, a healthy weight, a healthy status before they were ready to get pregnant again. But this year we are seeing a lot of whales three, four, five, six years between calves. That's very promising. That's to us maybe a sign that they are a little bit healthier.

O'NEILL: What would need to happen for these whales to reach healthier population numbers?

WARREN: We need years and years of these very high calf counts, and years and years with no whales dying from human-caused injuries, which is a very tall order. But also, we need all of these calves to survive into adulthood, too. It was two years ago where 5 of the 20 calves born were not with us anymore by three months in, and then you know this year, just in January, we had two juveniles die from human causes, so you know they weren't even adults yet, so they couldn't even help add to the population, so that's another part of it too, that all these 23 calves born, the chances of all of them making it into adulthood... pretty low.

O'NEILL: Amy, what do you think is important for people to keep in mind when they see this headline about, oh, great year for the North Atlantic right whale?

WARREN: I know we like to talk about numbers a lot, right? We like to talk about the population number, we like to talk about the calf numbers, but in general, I think it's important to take a step back and look at the status of the population, just 20 whales here and 10 whales there, like in the grand scheme of things, that doesn't matter as much of the population, whether it's healthy or not, whether it's doing well, and like are there things that we could do to be helping them more, and I think over the years we have established a lot of management mitigation measures that do seem to be working, and especially giving a year with some positive news, I hope that can just be incentive to keep going, like don't stop, don't fall back thinking we fixed everything, it's not that simple.

O'NEILL: Amy, what is it that these whales mean to you?

WARREN: Oh, what do they mean to me? I've always loved whales since I was a kid. So, part of it was there was just this early love for the ocean and whales and dolphins, and I just thought those creatures were so interesting. And I can't tell you how many times I've been on the water, how many trips I've done over the years, but like, it never gets old. Like, the excitement of seeing a whale does not change, and I think to go really specifically into right whales, the fact that we know so much about a wild population that lives across the North Atlantic, we know these whales individually, a lot of them have names that we've given them, we know when they were born. We know, like, who their siblings are. We know their parents and their grandparents. We know how many calves they've had. We just have all these, like, really unique stories. And I think, because we know each and every one of these whales, like, we do kind of create these personal connections with them, and you know, not to anthropomorphize them at all, but you know, you do start to see a little bit of personality, like some whales do certain behaviors a lot, and some whales don't do those behaviors at all, and some whales only show up in this one area and are never seen anywhere else, or vice versa. So, just to see that individuality, I think is really interesting, and it's relatable. I think that's another part of it too, like, yes, they're very different. They live in the ocean, but they are mammals. They give birth to young, you know, they take care of them, they live long lives, you know. It's just.. it's relatable.

O'NEILL: Amy Warren is the Scientific Program Officer at the New England Aquarium. Amy, thank you so much for taking the time with me today.

WARREN: Thanks for having me. It was great to be here.

 

Links

CBS News Boston | ““Hopeful” Sign for Right Whales: Critically Endangered Species Sees Highest Number of Births Since 2009”

Read more about North Atlantic right whales at the New England Aquarium website

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Division information about North Atlantic Right Whales

Amy Warren’s profile at the New England Aquarium website