Admiral and her fellow right whales are a remnant population, one decimated by whaling and struggling to overcome constant, often deadly human interactions. Today, there are only around 500 North Atlantic right whales left. That’s an uptick from a few decades ago, when there may have been as few as forty right whales in the North Atlantic, but it’s still too soon to celebrate. As the National Marine Fisheries Service tries to regulate ships and fishing gear — the two main causes of right whale mortality — the population is in a state of limbo that is both hard to study and hard to change. Each birth and death can alter the species’ chances of survival.
Genetic analysis of the remaining whales suggests that there are only five unrelated female lineages left. That could mean that the population at one point dwindled to just five living females, but it’s more likely that there were around 40, and that the whales in the current population happen to all be descendants of five of those 40 female whales.
That means that the surviving whales are not very diverse genetically. But no one really knows how this will affect the species’ chance of survival. Some experts think the smaller gene pool will make it harder for the whales to adapt to environmental changes. Others studies have suggested that the population had a tiny gene pool even before whaling ships arrived, which could explain their struggle to repopulate.
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