WOODS HOLE, Mass. — November 26, 2013 — Where does a 70-ton, 50-foot-long animal hide? What about hundreds of them?
Scientists are contemplating that question because, for the almost two years, most of the 510 remaining North Atlantic right whales have not shown up at their usual feeding grounds in the area from Buzzards Bay to the Canadian border.
"Years like this, we do scratch our heads and wonder, did they all go over the waterfall?" asked Tim Cole, a marine biologist at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole.
For the past 15 years, Cole has been part of research team that flies 175 feet off the ocean, covering hundreds of miles a day, looking to find members of the world's most endangered great whale species, then identify and catalog their locations and appearance.
The researchers fly so low that if they had engine trouble, they'd have just 30 seconds before the plane hit the water. The pilot and four scientists all wear survival suits equipped with air bottles, signalling mirrors and a flashing strobe-equipped device that sends a locator signal via satellite. Two scientists contort their bodies so that they can stare at the ocean for hours from plastic bubbles protruding from either side of the fuselage.
The information gathered on the flights helps scientists estimate the right whale population and its mortality rate.
"We spend a lot of hours looking at a blank ocean," Cole said.
That was disconcertingly true this past year when, during the survey period from November 2012 to July 2013, the 57 survey flights that covered nearly 13,000 miles from Buzzards Bay to the Canadian border found only 50 right whales. That compared with 419 whales in 58 flights the previous year.
This year's survey flights picked up where last year left off, Cole said. In 30 hours of flying in November, they've seen just one right whale.
Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times