“Most of our sightings in December and early January have been of animals in what we call surface active groups, but almost all of the whales on Saturday’s flight were observed in shallow subsurface feeding,” said Ryan Schosberg, an aerial observer with the center, in a statement.
North Atlantic right whales are large, docile creatures that were hunted to the brink of extinction. More recently, ship strikes and fishing gear entanglements have driven their numbers down. But experts said new protections and the whales’ hardiness have stabilized the population and even sparked modest growth.
Now, several weeks into the whales’ calving season, scientists have spotted a promising number of mother-baby pairs, the Globe reported Sunday.
Right whales, seasonal visitors to the waters off New England, can grow to be longer than an MBTA bus and are thought to be able to live for at least 70 years, though their lives are often cut short by humans. Only a few hundred are alive today, researchers say.
The whales are especially vulnerable to vessel strikes, which can break bones and lacerate their bodies, because they often live in proximity to major ports and shipping lanes. Fishing gear is also a threat. When whales become entangled, they can slowly starve, lose limbs, or even suffocate if they are unable to come up to the surface to breathe.
Right whales mounted a slow recovery in the decades after whale hunting was banned, reaching a high of nearly 500 whales in 2011. But the following years were dire for the species. During the 2018 calving season, not a single right whale was born. By 2020, researchers estimated only 358 whales remained.
Since 2020, the population of whales has grown by about 7 percent. In 2024, the most recent year for which data’s available, the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium estimated there were 384 whales, an increase of about 2 percent from the year before.
Material from prior Globe stories was used in this report.
Travis Andersen can be reached at travis.andersen@globe.com. Kate Selig can be reached at kate.selig@globe.com. Follow her on X @kate_selig.