The captain of the Cerulean, a 58-foot boat currently fishing for cod in the Bering Sea, didn’t know it at the time, but the whales he was watching were North Pacific right whales. They’re critically endangered.
There are three different types of right whales: the North Atlantic, the Southern and the North Pacific. And the North Pacific right whales are split into two stocks: the eatern and the western.
Crance — who has been studying right whales for more than a decade — said the eastern stock feeds in the southeastern Bering Sea during the summer months. But because there are so few of them to track, it’s still unknown where they go the rest of the year.Prior to this, we assumed that they all migrated south, much like every other large whale population,” said Crance.
NOAA has a catalog of whales they’ve seen before, with corresponding numbers or names, Crance said. And they’re able to track specific whales based on their callosities.“There’s no way to know if these are known individuals or are new to us,” Crance said. Notchy was named for the notch on its flukes, and is the first and only North Pacific right whale to have been matched to both a high and low latitude area, according to Crance. Notchy was photographed in April of 1996 in Hawaii and, four months later, in the Bering Sea in Alaska. Notchy has made at least one migration, according to Crance, and is the only documented migration they have for this population.
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