North Pacific right whale
Trying to research and manage human interactions with whale populations that are spread out geographically in remote areas and hard to locate is expensive. With governments around the North Pacific facing reductions in budgets, funding for such efforts are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. Most of the research on the right whales in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska was funded as part of proposed leases for oil and gas exploration that recently have been deferred and that funding ended. The U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service reports "currently there is no funding at all for North Pacific right whale research despite the critically endangered nature of this population."