Biologists Hope to Unlock Right Whale’s Fatal Secret

Scott Kraus crouched near the head of a dead baby right whale and peered into what had been the animal’s mouth.

“Amazing. Unbelievable,” Kraus said, leaning forward to get a better look inside the whale’s head, part of which had been carefully sliced away.

Kraus was supervising the first detailed dissection of the carcass of a newborn right whale, the world’s rarest species of the marine mammals.

Kraus and his colleagues hope that the necropsy might provide clues to why the animal died. That could help develop ways to increase the world’s right whale population and stave off extinction.

“One of the mysteries of right whale biology is ‘Why do these animals die?’ ” said Kraus, a research associate at the New England Aquarium. “No one really has taken apart a large right whale in the detail we’re going to take this one apart. This whale offers us the opportunity to go through it essentially inch by inch.”

There are only about 300 right whales left in the North Atlantic and perhaps only 3,000 of the toothless species in all the world’s oceans.

“In the greater scheme of things, it seems to me the right whale represents the way humanity has exploited resources since the beginning of time,” Kraus said. “And if there’s anything that we can do to reverse some of that trend, maybe the right whale is the best metaphor you could pick to show some change in attitude.”

The right whale population is so small because it became the favorite target for whalers in the 1800s. It was dubbed the “right” whale to kill because it swam near the coast and moved slowly, making it easy to find and kill. Right whales also float after they die.

Although other species of whales have increased in number since preservation efforts began, the right whale population has not, even though right whale hunting has been banned since 1937, Kraus said.

“There just hasn’t been any evidence that the population is increasing,” Kraus said. “It seems to be at a very small number, compared to what you might think it should be.”

Researchers are unsure why this is the case, but they suspect that it might be because right whales are unusually prone to be killed by large shipping vessels, ocean pollution and fishing nets.

Scientists also speculate that because the right whale population was decimated, there is a lot of inbreeding, increasing the chances of birth defects.