Hello, and welcome to my Right Whales webpage. This was a school project done a few years ago, and was recently lost. I won an online award from studyweb (now lightspan) for having the best educational resource in their system for kids to find online information about Right Whales. I'm not a research but am hoping that someday my future will lead me on the path of saving these beautiful and delicate creatures. I have links towards the end of this project and hopefully you'll find them helpful. If you have any suggestions or questions, please e-mail me. I'm happy to make any improvements, learn new things, etc. Hopefully I'll be keeping an eye out for new articles, etc. and try to make updates in links and new information. Remember, this project is over three years old so it might be a little outdated. The links are more updated. Thank you, and remember: Extinction Is Forever.

  Introduction
The whale is one of the most incredible animals on earth, and the Right Whale was one of the most hunted whales in the time of the whaler. It was named the "right whale" because it was the right whale to catch: it was a slow swimmer and floated on the surface after being killed. Because of its habitat (the northern hemisphere) near Europe and North America, the Right Whale was killed from the intense amount of that took place during the age of whaling.  As some of my resources have said, "The few hundred northern right whales left alive today have never known a time when they weren't fighting for their biological lives." It is the most endangered species of whales off the U.S. coasts. There are an estimated (in these past years) to be about 400 Northern Right Whales left in the world.

The beginning of whaling wasn't exactly what whaling is now. For centuries there were whales that would wash up on shore and someone would find them. The village or community would have a feast and a celebration. Some of the earliest accounts of  whales showed that men were afraid of them. One of them was the story of the whale that swallowed Jonah, and would only let him go at God's command.   

Humans had very little control over whales and hunting in the middle of the ocean was very dangerous. "Then a man first took the life of a whale and survived to boost of it. A new and romantic hero was born - the whaler. "* The first whalers whaled in the European and Asian waters, then they spread out into the remote seas. In the mid 1700's New England dominated whaling. But the life of a whaler was very risky and rather brutal. It was sometimes very hard in those days to decipher whether the whale or the men in the boat were in greater danger. This was because the small boats that the hand harpoons were thrown from were dragged by whales for miles.

This was called a "Nantucket Sleigh Ride".

    Whaling in wooden boats continued until the mid 1800's. At that time the new era of steam and steel had occurred in New England. The invention of the hand harpoon had shifted the balance a bit between the whaler and the whale, but in this new age the deadly harpoon cannon (that had an explosive warhead) was invented. With the new range and speed of the steel and steam ships, the whalers could go into the polar waters where some of the "great whale" species lived in large numbers. The whalers learned to inflate whales with compressed air to keep them afloat.
    Today only six nations still whale: Russia, Denmark, Norway, Japan, Saint Vincent, the Grenadines, and the U.S. It is not well known, but the U.S. lets the Inuit in Northern Alaska kill 51 Bowhead Whales a year, but it is illegal for any other U.S. citizen to kill a whale.

*A quote taken from the National Geographic Video:The Great Whales.

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The Life of a Right Whale

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The Right Whale is a baleen whale, a mysticeti. The Right Whale is called baleine franch or baleine noire in Quebec. They have narrow, dark baleen, between eight and nine feet long with grayish bristles. There are approximately 225 of them in one Right Whale mouth. They have large, stocky bodies about 35-50 ft long. When the calves are born, they are about 15 to 20 ft long and the calves and cows have a strong bond. Right Whales can weigh up to 100 tons. They have large callosities---irregular crusty protuberances made up of a protein called keratin. But the calves are born without them.  They have large upper jaws and tend to stay near the surface of the water. They have white patches on their body from whale lice. They swim slow, one of the reasons why whalers hunted them so much, and how they got their name. They were the "right" whale to kill, because of their slow swimming, their gentleness and willingness to approach whaling vessels. After they were killed they would float to the surface, unlike some other whales.
    One of the easiest ways to spot a right whale is by its V-shaped spout. The blowholes are so far apart that they blow out in different directions, rather than straight up. The waterspout goes 15 ft high in the air.
    The sounds that Right Whales make are low- frequency moans and belch like utterances.
    Right Whales are specialized eaters (possibly part of the reason why there are so few left). They eat krill and copepods (very small crab-like creatures) and sometimes small fish on the ocean floor. They have been found eating in the Bay of Fundy, Browns Bank, the Great South Channel and George's Bank.
The Southern Right Whale and the Northern Right Whale are similar in behavior and looks, but are geographically separated and considered two different species. The Greenland Right Whale is not even a Right Whale, but is most commonly known as a Bowhead Whale. It is sometimes confused with the Right Whale because of its similar looks.
    Migrating Right Whales will stay in one place for weeks at a time and records have shown some groups travel about 1000 miles during migration. Some records have shown the same whale travel from Greenland, to Canada, to Georgia and finally to Florida.

    The Right Whale had been hunted for about 900 years, between 1000 A.D. and the 1900's by humans. Once, whalers could see hundreds of Right Whales feeding together, and now you're lucky to see a Right Whale at all. In 1935 there was a law passed that prohibited all whalers from killing Right Whales because they had been pushed almost to complete extinction. In 1980, American biologists, Scott Karus, Randall Reeves, and Porter Turnbull were flying over the Bay of Fundy conducting a cetacean inventory when they encountered their first Right Whales. By taking pictures of the unusual callosities and whitish patches of these right whales, they could identify 26 individual Right Whales. This included four calf/cow pairs. In 1982 they found 45 different whales on Browns Bank, and 69 in the Bay of Fundy. Information on North Atlantic Right Whales has been collected for the past few decades by scientists to create the Right Whale Catalog. These scientists were from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, Marineland of Florida, the University of Rhode Island, the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the New England Aquarium.
    A question arose as to why the population of the Right Whales was so high in the Bay of Fundy. Some scientists figure that the whalers thought that the conditions were bad (fog, bad currents, etc.) for whaling. We may never know, but whatever the reason was, it helped in the fight for the Right Whale's survival.

By studying information on Right Whales, whaling, and what people are doing to help them, I have concluded that the Right Whale is slowly making its way back, but still need our help to survive. It looks as though they might make it, but only with persistence. Their history has been long and horrible once man became the whaler, and the population may never recover to what it had once been. We must be careful of what we do to the environment because everything is affected by everything no matter what you do.

"Extinction Is Forever."

Bibliography

Scott Kraus &Kenneth Malloy. The Search For The Right Whale, Crown Publishers, Inc., New York. 1993. The whole book was used for notes.

Erich Hoyt. The Whales of Canada, Camden House Publishing (a division of Telemedia Publishing Inc.). 1984. Pg.57-62

National GeographicVideo:The Great Whales, National Geographic Society. 1978

Sarah Riedman & Elton Gustafson. Home is the sea: for Whales, Rand McNally & Company. 1966. Pg.37 (picture)

Bill Spence. Harpooned, Conway Maritime Press. 1980. Pg.14 (picture)

American Heritage Junior library. The Story of Yankee Whaling, American Heritage Publishing Co., Inc. 1959. Pg.10 and 62 (pictures)

Sarah Riedman & Elton Gustafson. Home is the sea: for Whales, Rand McNally & Company. 1966. Pg.37 (picture)

Maclean Hunter. "Right Whales - In the Wrong Place", Maclean's . April 1, 1996 From Electric Library. http://www.elibrary.com/s/edumark

Chris Slay. (1998) Early Warning System for Right Whales, In Whale Net. http://whale.wheelock.edu

WhaleNet. (1997) Northern Right Whale Information, In Whale Net. http://whale.wheelock.edu

WhaleNet. (1997) Northern Right Whale Information, In Whale Net. http://whale.wheelock.edu

Shigeko Misaki. (1996) Responsible Management of Renewable Resources: Case For Whaling, In the Whaling Library. http://luna.pos.to/whale

If you have any comments, questions, or more info., just e-mail me.