A right whale surfaces with a V-shaped double blow: a stocky black body, no dorsal fin, white roughened patches on its head.Source 1
Those patches — callosities — form a pattern unique to each whale, and scientists have used them to identify every individual since 1980.Source 1Source 2
It feeds by skimming through dense clouds of copepods the size of rice grains, one to two tons of them a day.Source 1Source 3
Whalers named it the right whale to hunt because it swam slowly and floated when killed. By the 1890s it was nearly gone.Source 1
It never recovered. The old threat has simply changed shape: today the danger is rope and hulls, not harpoons.Source 1
More than 85 percent of right whales have been entangled in fishing gear at least once; some have survived it nine times.Source 1Source 3
Protection is specific: large vessels must slow to ten knots in seasonal zones, and fresh sightings trigger new voluntary slow zones.Source 4
Each December, pregnant females travel south to calve off Georgia and Florida — and the population has grown by about twenty whales since 2020.Source 3Source 1
To witness the right whale is to watch a species hold on within sight of one of the busiest coastlines on Earth.Source 1
Whether it keeps growing is decided by choices — ship speeds, rope-free fishing gear, and how carefully we share the water.Source 4Source 1
