FEATURE CREATURE
FEATURE CREATURE NORTH ATLANTIC RIGHT WHALE (EUBALAENA GLACIALIS) FEATURE IUCN RED LIST 2020 PHOTOGRAPHY DAVID ABEL
RED LIST CATEGORY & CRITERIA: CRITICALLY ENDANGERED Scientific Name: Eubalaena glacialis Synonym: Balaena glacialis Müller, 1776 Common Name: North Atlantic Right Whale TAXONOMIC NOTES The taxonomy follows the view of the IWC Scientific Committee and the Society for Marine Mammalogy’s Committee on Taxonomy which now recognise Right Whales in the North Atlantic, North Pacific and Southern Hemisphere as three distinct species in the genus Eubalaena, namely E. glacialis (North Atlantic Right Whale), E. japonica (North Pacific Right Whale), and E. australis (Southern Right Whale) (IWC 2004), based mainly on the mtDNA phylogenetic findings of Rosenbaum et al. (2000). The North Atlantic Right Whale was included in previous Red Lists together with the North Pacific Right Whale under the species name E. glacialis (Baillie and Groombridge 1996). Rice (1998) classified Right Whales in the North Atlantic, North Pacific and Southern Hemisphere as the single species Balaena glacialis, in the genus Balaena along with B. mysticetus, the Bowhead Whale. While not all cetologists accept that the three Right Whale 34
DIVERS FOR THE ENVIRONMENT | MARCH 2022
taxa qualify as full biological species, their clear geographical separation means that their treatment as separate taxa for conservation purposes is appropriate. JUSTIFICATION The estimated number of North Atlantic Right Whales alive at the end of 2018 was 409 individuals (Pettis et al. 2020), of which fewer than 250 were mature. The population was declining during 2011-2020 due to a combination of increased mortality rates (driven primarily by entanglement in fishing gear and vessel strikes) and reproductive rates below the average for previous years. Because the former eastern North Atlantic subpopulation of Right Whales, if it still exists, contains at most a few individuals, it can be assumed that the western North Atlantic subpopulation contains over 90% of North Atlantic Right Whales. The species therefore qualifies as Critically Endangered under criterion C2a(ii). GEOGRAPHIC RANGE The Right Whale formerly was common on both sides of the North Atlantic. It appears to be effectively extirpated in the eastern North Atlantic but in the past probably ranged from a calving ground in the Golfo de Cintra (23°N) off Western Sahara, through the Azores, Bay of
Biscay, western British Isles, and the Norwegian Sea to the North Cape (hence the Dutch, German and Scandinavian name Noordkaper/ Nordkaper) (Rice 1998). It may also have occurred in the Mediterranean Sea (Rodrigues et al. 2018). In the western North Atlantic the species migrates from calving grounds off Florida and Georgia along the eastern seaboard of North America, to summering grounds largely in the Gulf of Maine, south of Cape Cod, Bay of Fundy, Scotian Shelf, and Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Today, North Atlantic Right Whales are regularly seen in the winter calving grounds off Florida and Georgia, and in spring/summer feeding grounds in Cape Cod Bay and south of Cape Cod, the Great South Channel off Massachusetts, the Gulf of Maine, the Scotian Shelf, the Bay of Fundy, and increasingly in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence (Hayes et al. 2019). There have been a few sightings off Cape Farewell (southern tip of Greenland) (Brown et al. 2007) and Iceland (Hamilton et al. 2007), and in the Gulf of Mexico (Ward-Geiger et al. 2011). Adult females appear to migrate to the southern calving grounds in winters in which they bear a calf while most males and other females do not migrate to the calving grounds, especially after summers with below-average prey abundance (Gowan et al. 2019).
