Early on Friday morning, Moe received news of a right whale carcass on the Nova Scotia coast. Moe, Jerry (NEAq volunteer), Amy and I headed across the Bay of Fundy in Campobello Whale Rescue's Fast Rescue Craft (FRC) inflatable to search for the whale. We caught up with Phil, a Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) officer, on a rocky coastline where the 43 foot male whale was found. We needed to relocate the significantly decomposed carcass to a beach with accessible roads in order to conduct a proper necropsy. The whale was towed to an ideal location, a large sandy beach only a mile away. Unfortunately for us, this large sandy beach was also ideal for weekend beach goers. To appease residents' understandable concern, DFO hired Mr. Stanton, a local fisherman, to help tow the carcass another 10 miles away.


Mr. Stanton needed a deckhand, and before I knew what was going on, I was in his skiff and headed to his boat. I notified him that I had limited boating experience, but apparently he felt confident in me, as he left me in charge of his 45 foot vessel while he tied a line on the whale. About five hours later we arrived at our destination. The locals were intrigued by our arrival and helped the DFO officers and our crew secure the carcass. The crew worked until 3 am to secure the carcass above the high tide line to ensure the carcass would not drift away over night. Final arrangements have been made, and the necropsy has been scheduled for Sunday. We may be one step closer to finding out who this whale was, and why he died. Stay tuned...


Marianna

[Note: Other members of the New England Aquarium staff have responded to deceased whale incidents. You can read about another incident closer to Boston in this post from the Marine Mammal Trainers.]

Since our first survey in the Bay of Fundy last Monday, we have only been able to get out to the Bay one other day (Saturday). The wind and fog have been relentless, forcing us to stay onshore for several days at a time (Click here to view a blog about Bay of Fundy weather). We were able to survey in the Bay last Saturday, however, we were forced to come in earlier than planned after the wind switched from NW 5-10 kts to SW 10-15 kts more quickly than forecasted. Normally 10-15 knots of wind is not a problem, but the wind was blowing against the outgoing tide making the seas too rough to collect data from our small boat. Although the weather cooperated long enough to complete a partial survey, we did not see any right whales.


However, a naturalist aboard a whale watch vessel out of Grand Manan Island located a mom/calf pair on Saturday west of the critical habitat area. They were able to take photographs of both individuals which we used to identify them as Insignia (Eg# 2645) and her calf.




Whale watch vessels are an excellent platform for education and public awareness of the issues facing right whales. Similarly, Thursday morning, during a team meeting, we received a call from a local whale watch vessel who informed us there was a right whale in the inland waters of Head Harbour Passage near Campobello Island, a mere mile from our dock. The crew aboard the whale watch boat didn't have a camera, so we broke up our research meeting, gathered our gear and headed for the boat. There was thick fog as the R/V Nereid left the dock in our impromptu attempt to locate and photograph the whale. However, before the team reached the whale's last known location, the fog had closed in again and the whale could not be found.


We often work with crews and naturalists on whale watch vessels in the Bay to locate right whales and, as in Saturday's right whale sighting from the Elsie Menota, obtain identification photographs. In this case their efforts resulted in the confirmation of the first mom/calf pair of the season in the Bay of Fundy!

Zach

Monday was my first day of fieldwork with the right whale project. Until then I had never been around animals as large as these giants. Rather, much of my fieldwork experience came from studying the acoustic behavior of killer whales in the San Juan Islands, Washington for my Masters degree, and conducting passive acoustic marine mammal surveys fifty miles offshore of North Carolina. I have come to the Lubec field research team as a PhD student from Penn State University, interested in studying the effects of ship noise on right whale behavior, hoping to learn as much as I can from the other researchers during this field season, and eager to help them with data collection and processing.

Our first day on the water began promisingly! As I was standing on the bow sprit gazing out at glassy blue-black water and trying to remember all of the things I had just learned about marine mammal surveying in the Bay of Fundy, I saw a smooth, slender, dark form break the calm surface and rise tall, with a forked tip. My thoughts registered this foreign shape as a right whale fluke, and I cautiously gave the right whale symbol to the crew, aware that it was unusual to see right whales so near the harbor. No doubt the crew assumed it was a humpback whale and that my amateur eyes were overly eager to spot right whales. I certainly second-guessed myself too, during the ten minutes we waited for it to resurface from its dive. But, upon surfacing we all cheered when we saw the characteristic callosity pattern atop the rostrum, confirmation this was indeed a right whale!

Our day continued in much the same way—flat waters and abundant wildlife. And though we saw no more right whales, we saw many other creatures I had only read about or seen on television: breaching humpback whales, basking sharks, fin whales, and a mola mola. My experiences doing fieldwork off the coasts of Washington and North Carolina had offered many other surprises, but never these sights. What a beautiful place the Bay of Fundy is--I look forward to discovering more about what it offers!

Jenny

After such a surprising sighting, I suspected a busy first day as we worked out the early season kinks. As it turns out, we would not see another right whale all day. We did, however, see almost every other large marine creature to be found in the Bay. On our way toward the basin to start the first survey transect line we saw basking shark after basking shark (19 in total). It was easy to spot their black triangular dorsal fin from hundreds of yards away since the water was so calm and our view was uninhibited by waves or swell. Off in the distance, a group of humpbacks gave us quite a show breaching, sometimes simultaneously, and slapping their flippers and tails against the water. We saw several schools of tuna and even a breaching Mola mola, or ocean sunfish. The species list was rounded off with hundreds of porpoise, a couple fin whales, harbour seals and a minke whale.

All and all, it was a great day for us to get back in the survey groove and allow the new crew members, myself included, to get use to procedures and protocols on the boat. The next few days are calling for bad weather but hopefully the whales will slip in with the fog and keep us busy all summer.

Zach