How do you lose something that is 15 metres long and weighs 60,000 kilograms? In fact, how do you lose 500 of them? That is exactly what happened in 2013, when almost the entire population of North Atlantic right whales went missing from their normal summer feeding grounds. Those are some pretty massive needles, but then, the North Atlantic Ocean is a very large haystack. Right whale habitat stretches from Florida to Iceland, so the chances of spotting a whale in any random spot are pretty small. On the other hand, right whales are creatures of habit and prefer to spend spring and summer in places with plenty of food. For a right whale, there is no better food than the oil-rich, stage 5 copepodite of a tiny crustacean called Calanus finmarchicus, which the whales strain from the water using massive plates of baleen as a filtering apparatus. And in August-September, there is usually no better place to find large quantities of these copepods than in Grand Manan Basin in the Bay of Fundy, enclosed by the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and nearby Roseway Basin off the southern tip of Nova Scotia.
Most years, you could expect to find a few hundred right whales in the area, diving and filtering out copepods and other plankton concentrated by a huge current gyre driven by a combination of wind and massive tides that flush the Bay of Fundy. In 2013, however, over the course of two weeks of going out with researchers from the New England Aquarium and on commercial whale-watching vessels, I managed to spot only one female with a young calf, probably born about eight months earlier. In order to meet the caloric needs of herself and her rapidly-growing calf, this mother would have needed to consume over 2 billion copepods per day. It was unlikely she was getting anywhere near that number and she did not stay.
Environmental studies in the region through 2012 show increasing water temperatures since 2008, setting a record high in 2012. It was probably no coincidence that right whales swam through the basin in 2012, but did not stay to feed. The water was simply too hot for the copepods. One study predicts that C. finmarchicus will be absent from the region by mid-century, as a consequence of climate change. The copepods may shift north to stay in their preferred temperature zone, but without the right currents to aggregate them, they might not occur in dense enough concentrations to allow the whales to take advantage of them. It was possible that the whales skipped the Grand Manan in 2013 because they found a bonanza somewhere else, but evidence from the breeding ground showed that they did not.
Story & Photos by Doug Perrine ( see OG Issue 30)