A Right Whale Mother and Her Calf
Northern Right Whale
(Eubalaena glacialis)
It's big. It's slow. It floats when dead. It was plentiful just off the coast, and it was full of valuable oil and baleen. Hence, it was the "right whale" to hunt and kill. Captain Ahab may have been stalking Moby Dick, the great sperm whale, but his real business was hunting and killing the easier right whales.
Because of over-hunting which continued until 1935, the Northern Right Whale is the rarest of the world's great whales with perhaps only 350 left in the North Atlantic and half that number in the Pacific. A similar species, the Southern Right Whale, lives in southern oceans and numbers perhaps 2000 individuals worldwide. As a comparison, The humpback whale numbers about 11,000 and the gray whale more than 21,000 individuals.
Right whales, growing up to 55 feet long, are black and have a broad, flat back with no dorsal fin. They have two blowholes and thus spout in a V-shaped blow. The head is often covered with wart-like patches called callosities which help researchers identify individuals since each whale is different.
Second only to the giant blue whale in weight, the right whale can weight up to 65 tons--all on a diet of tiny zooplankton that it strains from the water with the plastic-like baleen inside its mouth. In earlier days this baleen was made into stiffening stays for women's corsets.
During the spring and summer months, the whales feed off Cape Cod Massachusetts and the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia. During the winter, however, the whales seemed to disappear, and for years no one knew where they went. Finally, in 1979 a right whale female and her calf were sighted off the coast of Georgia. By her markings the mother was identified as one seen off Nova Scotia in previous summers.
Further observations of other occasional whale sightings over the years have shown that the waters of the southeastern U.S. are the only known calving ground for the species. This area is a narrow strip of water extending only 5-15 miles offshore from the Altamaha River in Georgia south to the Sebastian Inlet in Florida. About 80% of all right whale sightings in the southeast occur in this small area, especially at the mouth of the St. Marys River and off Crescent Beach, right here at Fort Matanzas!
Right Whales are especially slow moving when a mother is with her calf. The pair will spend a significant amount of time at the surface where they are extremely difficult to see. And this is right in the middle of an area with high ship traffic, with the ports of Brunswick, Fernandina, Jacksonville, and the Kings Bay Submarine Base and Mayport Naval Station all in close proximity. All this activity exposes the whales to the threat of collision.
Through funding from the Navy, the Coast Guard, and the Army Corps of Engineers, an Early Warning Aerial Survey program was established. Every day a team would fly over the high use area and radio back the locations of whales so that ships could avoid them. Since this has been in place, ship and whale collisions have lessened.
We can help. If you see whales off the beach (Look for that unusual double spout), please report it to us at (471-0116) or the Florida Marine Patrol (1-800-342-5367.
