{"id":161792,"date":"2025-09-22T16:35:15","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T16:35:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/161792\/"},"modified":"2025-09-22T16:35:15","modified_gmt":"2025-09-22T16:35:15","slug":"new-england-scientists-honing-models-that-predict-where-right-whales-will-pop-up-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/161792\/","title":{"rendered":"New England scientists honing models that predict where right whales will pop up next"},"content":{"rendered":"

In recent years,\u00a0efforts to protect the endangered North Atlantic right whale population have included making ships\u00a0slow down in known whale zones to avoid hitting them\u00a0and encouraging fishing crews to use ropeless\u00a0gear to prevent them from becoming entangled.<\/p>\n

But changes to where the whales congregate\u00a0have been challenging\u00a0some of those efforts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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\u00a0interview with CBC New Brunswick’s Shift.<\/p>\n

“And so models like this are really important to fill in those data gaps when we don’t have eyes on the water.”<\/p>\n

Ross is the lead author of the study, called\u00a0“Incorporating prey fields into North Atlantic right whale density surface models,”<\/a> which was published in the latest edition of the research journal Endangered Species Research.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"ACamille Ross, an associate research scientist at the New England Aquarium in Boston, was the lead author on the study. (Submitted by the New England Aquarium)<\/p>\n

A description of the research on the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service website says\u00a0there are only about 370 of the endangered whales remaining in the world. Of those, about 70 are females of\u00a0reproductive age \u2014 10 years and older.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ross said the whales are moving to different areas to adapt to a changing ocean, so the models have to be able to predict where new feeding habitats are located too.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“Then we can send teams out there to go look for the whales and have potential to discover where they might be going and put conservation measures in place before there are further mortalities,” she said.<\/p>\n

Tracking zooplankton<\/p>\n

The modelling focuses on types of tiny zooplankton\u00a0that whales feed on, primarily calanoid copepods. Ross and other scientists went back through past studies looking at what scientists estimated to be the minimum amounts of prey the whales need to ingest per day,\u00a0to predict where whales would travel based on sufficient food sources.<\/p>\n

We end up with this pretty comprehensive image of where prey might be in the Northwest Atlantic.\u2014\u00a0Camille Ross<\/p>\n

Ross said\u00a0zooplankton sampling programs have been going on for decades, which is helpful in their studies. The research team then uses statistical algorithms for the areas not covered by existing zooplankton studies to fill in the gaps.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“So we end up with this pretty comprehensive image of where prey might be in the Northwest Atlantic,” Ross said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There is room for improvement, she said, and new studies will be drawn in as they are generated to further update their models.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

“If we have some sort of representation of the food that they’re going after, we have a better shot of accurately predicting where they might show up,” she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The models are only as good as the underlying data, Ross noted.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“So we need to continue to have teams out in the field observing these animals and collecting data that can then inform models, especially with a shift in climate where we know that these animals might not stay in the same patterns that they have been.”<\/p>\n

\"AMatt Abbott, Fundy Baykeeper for the Conservation Council of New Brunswick, said studies like this are incredibly important. (Mike Heenan \/ CBC News)<\/p>\n

Matt Abbott, the Fundy Baykeeper\u00a0and Marine Program Director\u00a0with the Conservation Council of New Brunswick, said the research was important.<\/p>\n

“A study like this can give better information to decision-makers to work collaboratively with the shipping industry, fishery and others to limit our impacts, to reduce \u2014 and in some ways, in terms of entanglements and ship strikes, hopefully eliminate \u2014 some of those impacts on the right whales,” Abbott said.<\/p>\n

“The population [is] so low that individuals count, especially breeding females.”<\/p>\n

He said it’s become increasingly rare within the last 15 years to see right whales in the Bay of Fundy.<\/p>\n

“We used to have concentrations in the Bay of Fundy, up until\u00a0the last decade or so, where just the ecology of the bay, the wildlife in the bay wasn’t meeting their needs,” he said.\u00a0“And so they had to go elsewhere to look for it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In recent years,\u00a0efforts to protect the endangered North Atlantic right whale population have included making ships\u00a0slow down in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":161793,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":{"0":"post-161792","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161792\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/161793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}