Right whale deaths pinned on shift in feeding grounds

Climate change is sending more hungry right whales into the Gulf of St. Lawrence to feed and that is resulting in more deaths from collisions with ships and tangles with fishing gear, officials say.

The North Atlantic giants swim on the surface jaws “wide open,” scooping up zooplankton and krill. They take large gulps of water and then filter out their tiny prey using comb-like baleen plates that resemble a broom brush, said Matthew Hardy of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

Right whales, endangered since the 1930s and thought at one point to be near extinction, have grown slowly in number from 300 to 500 in the world in recent years, DFO scientists estimate.

With rising temperatures, their habitat has apparently changed from summer feeding in the Grand Manan Basin of the Bay of Fundy to the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

“They follow the food,” Hardy said.

Dozens of right whales, which swim alone rather than in groups, have been sighted in the past weeks, he said.

One of the deepest and largest estuaries in the world, the St. Lawrence maritime estuary extends nearly 250 km before it widens at Point-des-Monts into the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Eight whales — or about one per cent of the species according to conservationists — have been found dead since the beginning of June, and at least two others have been rescued from snow crab gear this month.

The government closed part of the snow crab fishery two days early, one of the immediate steps taken to try to save North Atlantic right whales.

“It’s still not clear how the animals were killed but “ship strikes and entanglement in gear,” is what we expect in reports from veterinarians and pathologists, Hardy said.