Cape Cod is seeing a lot more of some singularly welcome tourists: endangered right whales enticed by the fine dining possibilities of its plankton-rich bay.
Experts tracking the marine mammals — among the rarest creatures on the planet — said nearly half the estimated global population of 500 or so animals has been spotted in Cape Cod Bay over the past few springs.
They are back again in what looks like record numbers, thrilling amateur photographers and scientists still anguishing over their future.
“It’s rather extraordinary and somewhat mind-blowing,” said Charles “Stormy” Mayo, a senior scientist and director of right whale ecology at the US federally-funded Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
North Atlantic right whales have foraged for centuries in Cape Cod Bay, where their numbers were decimated by whalers who hunted them for their oil and plastic-like baleen bone.
However, until recently, they were seldom spotted in the bay. For a stretch in the late 1990s, fewer than 30 whales were sighted each year, said Mayo, who has been surveying them and their ecosystem since 1984 by boat and plane.
“There has been a huge pulse in numbers in the past few years,” New England Aquarium’s Right Whale Research Project scientist Amy Knowlton said.
“Right whales are probably scouting for food all the time. Maybe when one of them finds it, they call their friends” she said.
Each whale has a unique marking on its head, and researchers use those to identify and catalog individuals. The aquarium, which also closely monitors the population, gives specific animals amusing names such as Kleenex, Snotnose and Wart.
Right whales spend most of their time in the western Atlantic and many are believed to congregate in the Gulf of Maine. They are rarely seen north of the entrance to the Gulf of St Lawrence in the Canadian Maritime Provinces. A few venture as far south as coastal Florida and Georgia, mainly females giving birth to calves — something scientists say does not happen often enough.
“They’re a little like cows in a field. They go away from places that are not good and go to places that are good,” he said.
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