October 15, 2020 — For the first time in four decades, marine scientists were unable to find any North Atlantic right whales in the Bay of Fundy this year.
“Always we would have a handful, even in recent years. So to have zero is certainly disturbing or frustrating,” says Amy Knowlton, a New England Aquarium whale researcher who has been tracking the endangered species from a base in Lubec every year since the early 1980s.
She says that for decades, anywhere from a 50-150 right whales showed up in the summer and fall to forage. The numbers started to drop off around 2010, as water temperatures in the Bay and Gulf of Maine began to rise at a rapid clip.
“It’s just a reflection of how the ocean is changing with climate change, and their food resource, plankton, they’re not blooming at the same time and in the same areas that they used to, so it’s a reflection that for them and for our oceans things are changing pretty dramatically,” Knowlton says.