COURTESY OF NOAA FISHERIES
Endangered North Atlantic right whales
WOODS HOLE – A new study reveals that critically endangered North Atlantic right whales use nearly the entire eastern seaboard during the winter and move around a lot more than previously thought.
The findings, which have been published in “Nature Scientific Reports,” were based on passive acoustic monitoring all along the east coast. The data collected between 2004 and 2014 shows the whales have increased their presence in the Mid Atlantic while decreasing in the Northern Gulf of Maine since 2010.
The sound data was collected using 324 listening devices between Florida and Canada and was analyzed by 19 organizations.
“This study demonstrates that passive acoustic monitoring is a useful tool in understanding and tracking shifts in the movements of large whales over long periods of time,” said Genevieve Davis, an acoustician at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center’s Woods Hole Laboratory and the lead author of the study.
“This kind of information is impossible to access in any other way because of weather and day light constraints for visual surveys.”
The population of the species is estimated to be under 500.
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