page_title: North Pacific right whale
section_title: The challenge of finding right whales
hierarchical_section_title: North Pacific right whale / Conservation / The challenge of finding right whales
caption_attribution_description: Right whale blowing with classic v-pattern which helps distinguish this species. 2007 circa.
context_page_description: The North Pacific right whale is a very large, thickset baleen whale species that is extremely rare and endangered.
  The Northeast Pacific population, which summers in the southeastern Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska, may have no more than 40 animals. A western population that summers near the Commander Islands, the coast of Kamchatka, along the Kuril Islands and in the Sea of Okhotsk is thought to number in the low hundreds. Before commercial whaling in the North Pacific there were probably over 20,000 right whales in the region. The taking of right whales in commercial whaling has been prohibited by one or more international treaties since 1935. Nevertheless, between 1962 and 1968, illegal Soviet whaling killed at least 529 right whales in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska as well as at least 132 right whales in the Sea Okhotsk. plus an additional 104 North Pacific right whales from unspecified areas.
  The International Union for Conservation of Nature categorizes the species as "Endangered", and categorizes the Northeast Pacific population as "Critically Endangered". The Center for Biological Diversity argues that the North Pacific right whale is the most endangered whale on Earth.
context_section_description: A threshold problem for conserving this species is locating them.  Other right whale species can reliably be found on their feeding grounds (North Atlantic right whale), or on their wintering grounds (both North Atlantic and Southern right whale). In contrast, there are no reliable places where researchers can find North Pacific right whales.  In the eastern portion of their range, there are so few whales that researchers have described it looking for a needle in a haystack. In the western portion of their range, the ability of researchers to find right whales in the Sea of Okhotsk and Kuril Islands is greatly hindered by the difficulty and expense of getting access to these areas which are in Russian territorial waters and EEZ, and by the fog that makes visibility minimal.
  Until recently nearly all the records of North Pacific right whales have been visual observations from ships or from shore. However, on their summer grounds in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska, the sea conditions are frequently so rough, windy and/or foggy that detection of right whales known to be present is problematic. In 2015, a NOAA research cruise in the Bering Sea off Kodiak focused on finding right whales detected acoustic signals on two occasions from a right whale, but in neither case were the researchers able to visually locate the whales. Previous NOAA dedicated ship surveys in the southeast Bering Sea also have had only sporadic success in visibly locating right whales.  A month-long NOAA dedicated research cruises in August 2007 in the southeast Bering Sea sighted no right whales.
  More recently, scientists have increasingly been using a new technology to acoustically detect right whales. As described above, right whales make calls that can be distinguished from the calls of other species so that researchers have concluded they such detections constitute reliable records based solely on the acoustic recordings.
  The technology is able to detect submerged animals, independent of water clarity.
  Acoustic searching for North Pacific right whales has been done with two types of listening devices. Directional and ranging sonobuoy are floating devices that are deployed from ships are monitored for short periods of time (hours) from ships. Alternate listening devices are permanently moored acoustic recorders that acoustically sample over long periods (months) until the acoustic is retrieved by a ship.
  Acoustic detection and visual searches are often used in conjunction. Right whales are detected acoustically then are located visually by shipboard observers. In August 2004, NOAA  listening devices in the southeastern Bering Sea detected right whale vocalizations. The researchers then deployed directional and ranging sonobuoys to locate the calling whales. This information allowed researchers to find visually the whales and photograph, biopsy dart (to collect genetic samples) and tag two whales.
  Researchers have also developed increasingly sophisticated and durable satellite tags that can be attached to whales, including right whales. These tags can collect information for months about the long-distance travels of whales, and have produced information on movements of right whales in the North Atlantic and Southern Hemisphere. (citations needed)   satellite-monitored radio tags. These are non-lethal, and applied with a crossbow, can beam the whales' location, movements, dives and other information to researchers.  However, the only occasion on which researchers have visually detected a right whale and been able to attach a satellite tag was on the 2006 NOAA research in the Bering Sea. However, of the ___ tags deployed,  ___ failed within __ days.
  Only one tag worked, and it failed after 40 days, just as the whale was expected to start its southern migration. During that period the whale moved throughout a large part of the shelf, including areas of the outer shelf where right whales have not been seen in decades.
   and 1997–2004.
  There may be locations in the Sea of Okhotsk where right whales can reliably be found in summer. In the Sea of Okhotsk, th
caption: Distinctive V-shaped blow of a right whale in the Bristol Bay feeding ground Alaska (Identification of a whale as a right whale requires more than just a photo of the blow shape because some gray whales can also produce V-shaped blows.)
exif: {}