Black Heart’s sighting wasn’t necessarily unusual, but exciting nonetheless.
The North Atlantic right whale, around 19, made her celebrated debut a little more than 2 miles east of Cape Lookout National Seashore’s High Hills on Nov. 20, five days into the start of calving season.
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The mom of one, on the record at least, was spotted roughly 1,000 feet above by a small survey team panning ocean waters off North Carolina’s shores.
And, until April 15, when another calving season comes to an end for the critically endangered species, this same survey team will take to the skies every day. Weather permitting, of course.
It’s been five years since the Clearwater Marine Aquarium Research Institute’s North Carolina Early Warning System, or NCWS, survey team was financially resurrected by the Army Corps of Engineers.
Since the early 2000s, three-person teams collected information and aerial imagery off the North Carolina and South Carolina coasts regularly before the mid-2010s, when funding ceased for the program.
Now survey teams, including one based in Beaufort, one in Georgetown, South Carolina, another in St. Simons Island, Georgia, and a survey team with Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, take to the skies to scour hundreds of miles of the southern eastern seaboard each week through this crucial five-month period for right whales.
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“More eyes in the sky has been fantastic,” said Melanie White, a research biologist and North Atlantic Right Whale Conservation project manager. “We’ve seen that there are sightings of whales that are being seen in the past years off the North Carolina coast that have not made their way further south into South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Every single whale is so vitally important to the population, especially those adult females. Anything that can be done to help give these animals a chance is really, really important because their numbers are so small.”
There are an estimated 370 North Atlantic right whales. About 70 of those are reproductively active females, which carry their pregnancies one year and birth no more than one calf in a season.
Researchers can only hope Black Heart has made her return to warmer waters to give birth this season. It’s simply not possible to tell whether a female is pregnant, White said.
Several hours after White spoke with Coastal Review, Oceana publicly confirmed the first whale calf of the 2024-25 season had been spotted with its mom by a boater off Cape Romain, South Carolina.
The yet-to-be identified mom and calf were first documented four days after Black Heart was spotted by researchers.
“The first calf of every calving season brings hope and excitement for the future of this critically endangered species, with only around 370 remaining,” Oceana Campaign Director Gib Brogan said in a statement. “Unfortunately, this first calf also evokes the fresh and painful memory of the first calf from last season that was killed by a boat strike after only a few months of entering this world.”
North Atlantic right whales migrate hundreds of miles between their northern feeding grounds south during calving season.
Their long-distance treks along the East Coast of the United States make them particularly vulnerable to human activity.
Boat strikes and fishing gear entanglement are the leading causes of right whale deaths.
“So, part of the reason for us to be conducting these surveys is to know their location so that information can be relayed to the maritime community,” White said.
When a whale is sighted, its location is added to a whale map, which is a public site.
Information gathered during each sighting is share between various research organizations, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Georgia and South Carolina’s departments of natural resources, Corps of Engineers, U.S. Coast Guard Atlantic Area Command, U.S. Navy, Duke University and Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
“We’re really just trying to keep these animals safe,” White said.
By federal law, vessels must remain beyond 500 yards of right whales.
Seasonal management areas have been designated offshore from North Carolina down to northeast Florida to reduce the risk of vessel strikes. During calving season, vessels 65 feet and longer must maintain a speed of 10 knots or less.
Mariners also play an important role in helping report right whale sightings because they have an advantage aerial survey teams do not. Right whales are capable of holding their breaths for almost an hour at a time, which means they can be submerged and out of sight as a Cessna flying a survey team overhead makes a sweep of the area.
“The more eyes on the water the better,” White said. “Even though there are four aerial survey teams that are conducting work in the southeast each winter, we can’t be everywhere at the same moment so we do rely heavily on any public sighting information that comes in. Every sighting is an important sighting.”
Every good weather day – clear skies with winds 15 knots or less — aerial early warning system survey teams typically remain in the air around six hours at a time before landing, refueling and, as daylight allows, returning to the sky to what are called track lines. There are 107 track lines, well over 400 miles nautical miles of coast line, between North and South Carolina.
These track lines are flown in an east-to-west direction up to 40 miles offshore.
While two members of a survey team look out for whales, the third is a dedicated ground contact, relaying information about the airplane’s location to a field team on the ground.
Each whale that is spotted is photographed and can be individually identified by the callosity pattern on its head. These patterns are similar to human fingerprints.
Right whales are born with these patterns, which are rough patches of skin, on their heads. Within the nooks and crannies of these rough patches live colonies of tiny crustaceans known as cyamids. Cyamids are bright white, which allows researchers to see a whale’s callosity pattern.
And this is how many, but not all, of the whales get named, “based on that kind of pattern on the top of their heads,” White said.
All of the whales are, however, identified by a four-digit code that is referenced for cataloging purposes.
As of last week, Koala and Curlew have been tallied in the sightings this calving season.
Anyone who sees a right whale is asked to call 1-800-WHALE-HELP or go to SCG on VHF Ch. 16. #givethemspace
