This summer, a couple of female right whales, Curlew and Koala, are serenely grazing on zooplankton in the ocean waters north of Prince Edward Island, Canada, the land of Anne of Green Gables. The elusive cow whale duo made history, turning south from the right whale birthing grounds off Georgia to travel through the Florida…
My first experience with a right whale was as a college student alone on the deck of a twenty-seven-foot sailboat. Suddenly, beside me was what looked like a sandbar the length of the boat. Yet, it was alive and moving forward. Those below decks thought I was having an epileptic attack. I had never imagined…
Phytoplankton in the Gulf of Maine have become 65% less productive. The Gulf of Maine is home to the North Atlantic right whale, a critically endangered species with less than 350 left alive. Right whales feed on zooplankton, krill, and other small crustaceans. These animals are fed by phytoplankton, organisms at the base of the…
Massachusetts officially declared April 24 as Right Whale Day to raise awareness about the endangered: North Atlantic right whales, the state’s official marine mammal. Right whales have been coming to Cape Cod Bay in April for as long as there has been a Cape Cod Bay. These sandy, shoaly waters warm faster than deeper, dark-bottom…
Recently, nearly five hundred long-finned pilot whales have stranded themselves on sand spits in the waters off of Macquarie Heads on Tasmania’s west coast. A place much like Wellfleet in Massachusetts Bay, this is a tidal area with shallow shoals of sand and mudflats. Marquarie Heads is a known hotspot for pilot whale stranding. More…
I recently returned from a research sail through the Denmark Straits and I couldn’t be more in awe of mother nature. We sailed aboard the gaft-rigged ketch Tecla out of Isafjordur, Iceland, bound for Greenland. We were thirteen women and men on a hundred-foot steel-hulled sailing vessel. As we cleared the steep-sided fjord and sailed…
