Right whale’s critical habitat to be revised

Rare right whales may soon get more federal protections in Alaskan waters. NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service announced last month that it will consider changing the critical habitat of the eastern North Pacific right whale.

Only about 30 individuals are estimated to be in that population, and they are listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act.

A critical habitat is the area deemed essential for an endangered species’ conservation. When federal agencies fund, permit or perform any activities in a critical habitat, potential impacts to the species need to be assessed.

In 2008, NOAA Fisheries designated two areas—one in the southeastern Bering Sea, and the other in the northern Gulf of Alaska near Kodiak—as critical habitat for North Pacific right whales. These were places where whale sightings were most often documented during the summer. Scientists are still not sure if the animals leave these feeding grounds and where they go. Though their migration routes and calving grounds are unknown, they are suspected to migrate south in winter like other baleen species.

However, there was at least one sighting in February 2022 of a pair of right whales in Unimak Pass, marking the first confirmed visual sighting of in the whales in the Bering Sea over winter.

Several right whale sightings off St. Lawrence Island were also reported in recent years by Alaska Native hunters. A cow-calf pair was spotted east of Gambell in June 2018. A 50-foot right whale was spotted eight miles south of St. Lawrence Island in July 2018 and then spotted again off Chukotka the next month. Another 50-foot right whale was seen 37 miles northwest of

Gambell in 2019. Scientists, too, have documented right whale presence in this area through acoustic monitoring, photo identifications and even one biopsy in 2018 taken south of St. Lawrence Island during a research cruise.

Waters around St. Lawrence Island are not currently included in the critical habitat, and it’s unclear if they will be included in the revised version.

The Center for Biological Diversity and another organization called Save the North Pacific Right Whale filed a petition last year asking NOAA Fisheries to expand the right whale’s critical habitat. But they focused on the waters south of the Alaska Peninsula and eastern Aleutian Island. The environmental groups want the two critical habitat areas to be connected. They argued that recent whale sightings around the Fox Island Passes, especially Unimak Pass, suggest that this area is a “a key migratory point” and provides “connectivity between two essential foraging grounds.”

They also argued that the whales were facing increasing threats in the area from vessel traffic.

After reviewing the petition, NOAA Fisheries concluded that a revision of the critical habitat was warranted. Verena Gill, a supervisory biologist with NOAA Fisheries’ Protected Resources in Alaska, confirmed that the agency did not decide yet which areas will be included in that critical habitat—only that it will be changed in some form.

“During the future rulemaking process, the public will have the opportunity to submit written comments or provide testimony during public hearings,” Gill told the Nugget in an email. “NOAA Fisheries will conduct an analysis and synthesis of available acoustic mooring data, visual sightings, observations of right whale feeding behavior, and spatial temporal patterns in right whale prey to identify new areas that meet the criteria of critical habitat for North Pacific right whales. This will also include evaluating the data on right whales near St Lawrence Island.”

In its findings on the petition published in the Federal Register, NOAA Fisheries also said it will produce an analysis of economic impacts, national security impacts and any other potential impacts that would result from changing the habitat. After the agency publishes its proposed changes, a public comment period will open. NOAA Fisheries did not give a timeline for when that might take place.

Once distributed widely throughout the Bering Sea and the North

Pacific, right whales became a primary target of commercial whaling in the 19th century. According to some estimates, right whales in the North Pacific may have been reduced to a population of hundreds from a population of up to 37,000 in just a matter of a few decades.

A western population of North Pacific right whale lives along the coasts of Russia and Japan and, according to NOAA, is thought to number in the low hundreds.

In the early 2000s, the population of eastern North Pacific right whales was estimated to be just 30 individuals, and of those, about a third are thought to be female. There has not been a more recent survey to determine if that abundance number still holds, Jessica Crance, a bio-acoustician with the Marine Mammal Laboratory

at the NOAA Fisheries Alaska Fisheries Science Center, said during a Strait Science presentation on the whales in March 2022. But researchers have gotten some encouraging signs that the population could be adding new members. In one study conducted 2017 and 2018, researchers identified four new right whales that were unknown to them, including one juvenile.

Right whales look similar to bowheads, but they are known for having with white bumps on top of their heads known as callosities. The white part of these rough patches are actually whale lice that feed on dead skin. The pattern of these callosities is unique to each right whale and stays the same for an animal’s whole life. This means these markings can be used to track individual whales.