September 22, 2025 — In recent years, efforts to protect the endangered North Atlantic right whale population have included making ships slow down in known whale zones to avoid hitting them and encouraging fishing crews to use ropeless gear to prevent them from becoming entangled.
But changes to where the whales congregate have been challenging some of those efforts.
Now scientists at the University of Maine and the New England Aquarium in Boston are working together to improve their modelling to predict where the whales will be at any given time.
“North Atlantic right whales utilize a lot of the ocean environment, and so it’s really hard for humans to be out there observing them at all times,” Camille Ross, an associate research scientist at the New England Aquarium in Boston, said in a radio interview with CBC New Brunswick’s Shift.
“And so models like this are really important to fill in those data gaps when we don’t have eyes on the water.”
Ross is the lead author of the study, called “Incorporating prey fields into North Atlantic right whale density surface models,” which was published in the latest edition of the research journal Endangered Species Research.