Science
Can 70 Moms Save the Endangered North Atlantic Right Whale?
Squilla took to motherhood. When she was first spotted with her new calf in January 2021 off the Georgia coast, mother and daughter stayed so close as they swam that they were touching. The baby rolled around in the water, as calves often do, and Squilla joined in, turning her belly to the sky.
Squilla and her young calf.
Clearwater Marine Aquarium Research Institute, photographed under NOAA permit #20556
The birth of Squilla’s calf was a momentous event for their species, the highly endangered North Atlantic right whale. As one of just 70 or so mothers, Squilla is part of a small group that represents the species’ last chance for survival. The fact that Squilla had a daughter made the birth more significant still, offering the possibility of a new generation of matriarchs.
For decades, North Atlantic right whales were slowly recovering after being devastated by centuries of whaling. But in 2011, their numbers suddenly started dropping. Now, they are one of the most endangered species in the United States.
In 2017, so many dead and injured right whales turned up that federal officials declared an “unusual mortality event” that’s still underway.
While the situation is considered unusual, the reasons are well understood. A document from NOAA Fisheries put it simply: “North Atlantic right whales are dying faster than they can reproduce, largely due to human causes.”
Whales are being killed and injured in vessel collisions. They are getting tangled in fishing gear. And females are giving birth to fewer calves. Biologists think that’s partly because the stress of nonlethal collisions and entanglements takes such a toll, and partly because it’s harder for the whales to find food as climate change alters the oceans.
Many females of reproductive age are not having calves at all, researchers say.
Some opponents of renewable energy say offshore wind projects along the East Coast are responsible for the increase in whale deaths, but so far there is no evidence to support that. Researchers say a better understanding of ocean noise is needed.
If the species is to recover, it will be because enough of the 70 or so mothers, Squilla among them, survive and bring more calves into the world.
“With the loss of a female, you’re losing her entire future of reproduction,” said Erin Meyer-Gutbrod, a marine ecologist at the University of South Carolina who studies right whales.
Squilla and her calf seemed to be off to a good start. Two months after they were first seen off Georgia, they were spotted some 700 miles north, in the waters off New York. They were still swimming side by side.
‘That’s a healthy calf’
When Squilla herself was a young whale, she spent summers feeding off the coast of New England and north into the Bay of Fundy, which stretches into Canada.
But in 2010, when she was about 3, right whales started abandoning those waters. They had little choice, scientists would come to understand. If the whales were humans, we might call them climate migrants.
Right whales feed largely on copepods, a fatty crustacean smaller than a grain of rice. In the early 2010s, researchers have found, climate change fueled a shift in water temperature that caused copepod populations to crash in the waters where whales had long found them.
A young Squilla with her mother, Mantis, in 2007. Mantis has had at least seven calves, and Squilla’s baby was her first known grand-calf.
Clearwater Marine Aquarium Research Institute, photographed under NOAA permit #594-1759
The whales appear to have set off in search of a new supply. And they eventually found it farther north, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. But if the move helped fill their bellies, it came at a high cost: They had ventured into a busy shipping and fishing zone without protections.
The first time Squilla was spotted in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, she was 10. It was 2017, a terrible year for her species. Seventeen North Atlantic right whales would be found dead, about 4 percent of the estimated population. Twelve of those fatalities were around the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In the cases where researchers were able to investigate the cause of death, most were linked to vessel strikes.
Eventually, the Canadian government would implement speed restrictions there for vessels. But up and down the whales’ migration routes from Florida to Canada, collisions remain a grave threat. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries has said current speed limits in U.S. waters don’t offer sufficient protection. Two years ago the agency proposed stricter rules, but they faced fierce pushback from sport fishermen, recreational boaters and harbor pilots. So far, the rules have not been adopted.
At times, the everyday act of swimming in the ocean can be like crossing a highway. This year alone in U.S. waters, three right whale carcasses have exhibited signs of vessel strikes. An orphaned calf is also presumed dead, a fourth casualty.
Despite the dangers, when Squilla took her calf to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in June 2021, mother and daughter appeared to be doing well. The scientists who monitor right whales, identifying them by scars and distinctive markings on their heads, hadn’t given the younger whale a name. Instead, they used a number: 5120.
On a sunny day the next month, Gina Lonati, a doctoral student at the University of New Brunswick Saint John, came across 5120 while conducting research.
“That’s a healthy calf,” she recalled thinking as she looked at her drone videos. “She was chunky, which is a compliment to a whale.”
Researchers identified Squilla’s calf by a number, 5120.
Gina Lonati/University of New Brunswick
And soon, 5120 would make it safely to her first birthday. At around that age, she was spotted off New York alone, now apparently separated from her mother, Squilla. She’d spend the next months in the Northeast, moving to Massachusetts and then back into Canada.
Out on her own
It was sometime in those months, during the spring or summer of 2022, that the young one got into trouble.
In late August, the Canadian authorities spotted a whale off the coast of New Brunswick with fishing gear wrapped around her tail. It was 5120.
Fishing gear tangled around 5120’s tail.
Fisheries and Oceans Canada Science Aerial Survey Team
After reviewing photographs, NOAA biologists made a grim assessment. “As the yearling grows,” officials wrote, “the entanglement is likely to cause increasing harm and eventual death as it constricts the tail and other areas of the whale’s body.”
Experts compared it to a collar getting tighter and tighter around the neck of a growing puppy.
But hope was not lost. From Canada to Florida, there is a network of groups that makes dangerous excursions to try to free entangled whales. One, the Center for Coastal Studies, spotted 5120 from a plane in Cape Cod Bay in January 2023.
Disentangling a giant wild animal in the ocean requires bravery, grit and luck. Unlike with land mammals, you can’t just knock the whale out. Rescuers don’t get into the water; it’s too hazardous, and whales swim away too quickly, anyway.
In January, in a frigid wind, a team spent two days at sea trying to disentangle 5120. They got as close as they could from a small boat. They threw custom-made hooks with razor-sharp blades designed to latch onto and sever thick fishing line. They spent hours trying to stay with her as she tried to flee, invisible under the turbid water.
A team spent two days at sea trying to disentangle 5120.
Center for Coastal Studies, filmed under NOAA permit #24359
With right whales, such efforts succeed about half the time, the group says.
But not this time.
“Sunset came and we had to go home,” said Bob Lynch, who was on the boat. The team hoped for another chance to respond, but they never found her again.
“It’s a reminder of how much of a Band-Aid we are to the overall entanglement problem and how prevention is so clearly a better choice than relying on this kind of response,” said Mr. Lynch, operations manager for the center’s rescue team.
Most entanglements are thought to come from lobster and crab gear, because ropes connect traps on the ocean floor to buoys on the surface. In the mid-1990s, fishermen started switching to stronger ropes, which appears to have led to more severe entanglements for right whales. Separately, the population of lobsters started booming and people started catching them farther from shore.
“It’s just this perfect storm of all sorts of things ramping up: stronger ropes, more gear, more overlap with the whales,” said Amy Knowlton, a senior scientist at the New England Aquarium.
For years, the federal government has been working with fisheries to mitigate these effects. Lobstermen have reduced the amount of rope in the water by concentrating more traps per buoy and by connecting those traps along the bottom with line that doesn’t float. For the buoys, they have switched to ropes that are easier for whales to break. In Massachusetts, Cape Cod Bay and surrounding waters are closed to lobster traps from Feb. 1 to April 30, when right whales typically congregate there.
But in Maine, which produces about 90 percent of the country’s lobster, right whale sightings have been more diffuse. The gear changes largely allowed the state to avoid seasonal closures.
“Lobstermen care deeply about everything in the ocean and nobody wants to see right whales harmed,” said Patrice McCarron, policy director at the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, an industry group. “But they also very much feel like they’ve been overregulated and are implementing measures that are not necessarily benefiting the species, because we don’t have a significant amount of interaction with them.”
Scientists and environmentalists see a lot of promise in a type of new equipment, known as ropeless or on-demand gear, that releases a line or flotation bag only when the fisher is on hand to check the trap, sharply reducing the danger to whales.
Source: NOAA Marco Hernandez
But lobstermen have been skeptical, worried that this kind of gear will be inefficient and too expensive.
Just weeks before the failed effort to disentangle 5120, Maine’s congressional delegation added a provision to a huge federal spending bill. The move mandated a six-year pause on any new regulations for the lobster and Jonah crab fisheries related to right whales, and provided additional money for research.
“The fact is, there has never been a right whale death attributed to Maine lobster gear,” the Maine delegation and Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, said in a statement at the time.
Squilla’s calf would change that.
Half a lifetime tangled in ropes
Her body washed up in the surf on Martha’s Vineyard early this year.
Billy Hickey for The New York Times
Sarah Sharp, a veterinarian with the International Fund for Animal Welfare, was assigned to lead the necropsy. Arriving at the beach, she was first struck by how young and small the whale was, just 3, far from grown.
As she examined the carcass, she was astonished by the severity of the injury from the fishing lines encircling the base of 5120’s tail.
“They were so deeply embedded,” Dr. Sharp said. Inches of scar tissue had tried to heal over the wound. “The lines looked like they were coming out from close to her spinal column, and just coming out of the soft tissues.”
The wound could not heal, in part because the drag from the lines kept it open and bleeding. 5120 spent half her short life with that entanglement.
The Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe received her body. In a ceremony, they said prayers and expressed gratitude for her life. Then they buried her.
“It hurt us very deeply,” said Cheryl Andrews-Maltais, chairwoman of the tribe. “It’s a child.”
This month, NOAA Fisheries announced the official cause of death: chronic entanglement.
In the past, it’s been hard to know the origin of fishing lines involved in entanglements. But in recent years, NOAA started requiring certain fisheries in New England states to mark their gear with specific colors.
The rope that was pulled out of 5120 was marked with purple cable ties, indicating that it was from Maine.
Some of the rope that entangled 5120, including a purple tie.
NOAA
Among the state’s lobstermen, the news was met first with shock, then sadness for the whale and fear over what the consequences could be for their livelihoods, Ms. McCarron said.
Even entanglements that don’t kill right whales can contribute to killing off the species. The lines create drag in the water, making it harder for whales to swim and driving up the number of calories they need to survive, researchers say. “On average, an entanglement energy cost is the equivalent cost of producing a calf,” said Michael Moore, a scientist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “And so if you have an entanglement, you’re not going to get pregnant.”
Scientists believe North Atlantic right whales used to give birth every three years or so. But recently, it’s been “six, seven to 12 to never,” Dr. Moore said.
More than 85 percent of right whales have been entangled in fishing gear at least once, according to research funded by NOAA Fisheries. Squilla has been seen with entanglement scars three times. Squilla’s mother, Mantis, has been seen with them twice.
Dr. Moore spotted Squilla this past spring, as he conducted research on right whales in Cape Cod Bay. Given her measurements, it is unlikely that she will give birth again this year.
But she wasn’t entangled. There were no signs of recent wounds. She was swimming strongly.
Squilla in March, in Cape Cod Bay.
Michael Moore and Caroyln Miller/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, photographed under NOAA permit #27066
Note
The video and images of whales in U.S. waters in this article were taken by researchers with training and permits that allowed them to approach the endangered animals safely and legally. It is unlawful to get closer than 500 yards to a North Atlantic right whale in U.S. waters without a research permit.
NEW YORK — Scientists have unearthed communities of marine life — including jellyfish, tubeworms and brittle stars — thriving on a whale graveyard that is millions of years old.
These graveyards form when whale carcasses fall to the sea floor, becoming a sustaining snack for nearby critters. This one, located up to 23,000 feet below the surface of the southeastern Indian Ocean, spans the largest area and is so far the deepest and oldest found.
A whale’s sheer size and the unique chemistry of its bones are the keys to forming these unique underwater neighborhoods, said Xikun Song, a biologist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering.
“At the same time, the very nature of the deep ocean makes these sites exceptionally difficult for scientists to locate,” Song, who was involved with the latest find, wrote in an email.
Researchers explored the remains during multiple deep-sea submersible trips in 2023, collecting samples and mapping the extent of the necropolis. They found five carcass sites and fossils, including skulls belonging to beaked and baleen whales. The oldest bones date back 5.3 million years.
Feeding and living on the carcasses were myriad creatures, large and small, including sea cucumbers, squat lobsters and saltwater clams. Many of them are likely species that have never been documented, according to findings published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
“The potential number of specimens is just astounding,” said paleontologist Stephen Godfrey with the Calvert Marine Museum in Maryland, who wasn’t involved in the research.
Many factors likely conspired to preserve the bones for millions of years, according to the study authors. They’re dense enough to outlast attacks from bone-eating worms, and located deep enough in the ocean to avoid getting buried by dust and loose particles. The bones also were coated with a light layer of minerals from the surrounding seawater, which may have prevented them from degrading.
Why did so many whales die here? Maybe they were already living in the area and died of natural causes. A few could have perished from exhaustion or illness caused by deep-sea diving. The area’s shape, akin to the letter V, could also have funneled the remains to their resting spot, the authors wrote.
Such discoveries are important because they clue scientists into the vibrant communities that find a way to live even in remote, hard-to-reach environments.
Studying the whale graveyards “is important for understanding how life can adapt to such extreme conditions, not only due to the lack of light and oxygen but also to the incredibly high pressure,” said study co-author and paleontologist Giovanni Bianucci with the University of Pisa in Italy in an email.
Ramakrishnan writes for The Associated Press.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Science
El Niño turns crumbling California pier into climate battleground over what to save — and who pays
As a historic El Niño supercharges the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco experiences record high seasonal sea levels, the latest structural casualty of intense wave action is prompting Bay Area politicians to call for help from the state and federal governments.
They want to rebuild a concrete pier shut down this month after officials deemed it unsafe because of cracking from decades of pounding surf and storms.
As waves crashed against the derelict structure Monday morning, U.S. Rep. Sam Liccardo (D-San José) held a news conference and asked the federal government to follow through on $50 million in climate resilience funding promised by the Biden administration but terminated by the Trump administration in 2025.
The city of Pacifica had been on the shortlist for the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, managed through FEMA. California and 22 other states successfully sued to reinstate the program, but the funding has yet to be allocated.
Liccardo also asked for nearly $1 million in promised funds from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for a handrail project on the pier and an additional $9 million to protect coastal bluffs.
Coastlines are already being buffeted and inundated by rising seas. With the closed-off Pacifica Municipal Pier in the background, local politicians and community members said they’re on the front lines and want to rebuild.
“Pacifica is ground zero for coastal resilience,” said state Sen. Josh Becker (D-Menlo Park), as he asked Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare a state of emergency and “help us fix this pier and help this community recover again.”
“This is very much a reminder that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” he said, noting that previous attempts for funding went unheeded. “We cannot wait until infrastructure fails before we invest in protecting it.”
As climate change starts to become expensive, it prompts questions about what to protect and what to abandon.
Chad Nelson, chief executive of the Surfrider Foundation, a coastal environmental advocacy organization, said city piers provide coastal access to people who can’t swim or walk on the beach; they are often popular fishing spots and tend to serve a broad swath of their communities.
On the flip side, he said, they keep getting beat up by the ocean and costing taxpayers millions of dollars to repair or replace.
In Santa Cruz, a public wharf damaged by storms in 2024 recently reopened after $1.3 million in repairs. In Capitola, a storm-damaged wharf reopened earlier this year after $10 million had been sunk into repairs. The city is now considering building an open-air restaurant, public bathrooms, a bait shop and a boat launch.
“I think the larger question is: Are we subsidizing bad responses to problems that we know are going to persist?” he said, responding to a question about infrastructure that won’t last.
Charles Lester, director of the Ocean and Coastal Policy Center at UC Santa Barbara, agreed with Nelson that it’s important to distinguish public from private benefits.
“There’s a bit of a difference between a public recreational pier, for example, and your private development that’s going to impact the beach,” he said.
And at some point, he said, we have to acknowledge things are only going to get worse.
In a white paper authored by Lester and Nelson, the two described the coming El Niño as a “reckoning” for the California coast.
El Niños result in larger waves, elevated sea levels and powerful storms — “predictable signature(s) of a climate pattern that returns every two to seven years and is expected, as the planet warms, to intensify,” they wrote.
Wave energy along the shore can run 50% above average during an El Niño, while sea levels can climb 6 to 12 inches — flooding coastal homes, roads and infrastructure. Coastal erosion increases by more than 69% during extreme El Niño events, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
During the 1997-98 El Niño, seven Pacifica seaside houses were condemned after powerful waves and storms made them unsafe and irreparable. Seventeen people in the state died as a result of the historic flooding and storms.
The funding requests for the pier also come as San Francisco sees its highest summer water levels ever. On Saturday, the National Weather Service recorded levels 1.83 feet above normal high tide. Early Monday morning, the popular Pier 14 along the city’s Embarcadero waterfront was submerged.
High surf along the coast killed a young girl in Laguna Beach, and hundreds of people have been rescued at Newport Beach. Water stranded a hiker along the cliffs of San Francisco’s Presidio — requiring a seven-hour rescue mission that ultimately left the hiker and a rescuer injured as the waves crashed them into the rocks.
“This stretch of coast has been a continuous coastal emergency declaration for almost 10 years due to the repeat damage of storms in recent El Niño years,” the mayor of Pacifica, Christine Boles, said.
Pacifica has been planning for climate change for years, she said. But climate change is outstripping those efforts, and without financial and regulatory support from the federal and state governments, the battle will be all but lost.
Science
Californian is infected with rare tick-borne illness. What to know about the deadly bacteria
A Northern Californian has been confirmed as the fourth-ever person diagnosed with a newly recognized and rare tick-borne disease that causes symptoms similar to Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
The California Department of Public Health confirmed the latest case of Rickettsia lanei bacteria in a patient who was diagnosed in April of this year. Two other California cases were reported in 2004 and 2023.
Public health officials told The Times that the infected person “was seriously ill, hospitalized and has since been discharged and is recovering.”
It is unclear how long the person was in the hospital or what their symptoms were. The state agency said it could not disclose the home county of the person but confirmed the infected person lived and worked in Northern California.
Rickettsia lanei comes from the spotted fever group Rickettsia, bacteria transmitted to humans from the bite of an infected tick.
In California three types of ticks — the American dog tick (Dermacentor similis), the Pacific Coast tick (Dermacentor occidentalis) and the brown dog tick (Rhipicephalus sanguineus) — can transmit the bacteria that cause Rocky Mountain spotted fever in humans and dogs, according to the California Department of Public Health.
Symptoms of Rocky Mountain spotted fever can range from fever and a rash to long-term effects that include damage to internal organs or neurological disorders.
The tick-borne disease has been spreading globally since the early 2000s, most notably in Mexico and Brazil, with reported fatality rates that can exceed 50%, according to a study published by UC Davis.
What is Rickettsia lanei?
Rickettsia lanei bacteria were identified this year in a few Pacific Coast ticks, including a tick in Contra Costa County, according to SFGate, where the latest case was first reported in April.
The new bacterium was added to the list of potentially transmittable pathogens in 2024 by the state public health department after its severe symptoms were studied in two cases of infected men nearly 20 years apart, according to a report published in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Emerging and Infectious Diseases journal.
“Sustained investment in public health has enabled development of the advanced molecular tools that detected these infections,” the California Department of Public Health said in a statement to The Times.
According to the report, both men fell ill after spending time outdoors, one playing golf at five courses in Alameda and Contra Costa counties within 14 days of the onset of his symptoms. This first patient had fever, headaches, muscle pain, malaise, loss of appetite, diarrhea and abdominal pain, among other symptoms. His condition worsened on his third day in the hospital, according to the report. The man was ultimately in the hospital for 22 days, including 11 in the intensive care unit with a primary diagnosis of rocky mountain spotted fever and a secondary diagnosis of acute kidney injury.
The other infected person had visited and camped at a county park and state beach in San Mateo and Marin counties. The second man reported a five-day history of headaches, vomiting, light sensitivity, neck pain and confusion, according to the report. On the third day of hospitalization, the man became comatose and was intubated, the report stated. After 13 days, he was discharged with a primary diagnosis of severe Rickettsia.
Researchers have known about Rickettsia lanei since 2018 when it was detected in rabbit ticks in Sonoma County, but they didn’t know its potential harm to humans because the rabbit tick rarely bites people.
“The Pacific Coast tick, which bites humans more frequently, may occasionally acquire the organism from an infected rabbit, which is the most likely route for the rare human infections that have been identified,” the state health agency said.
Should I be worried about contracting Rickettsia lanei?
Human infections are rare but could be underreported because Rickettsia lanei symptoms are very similar to those of rocky mountain spotted fever, said Janet Foley, veterinarian and disease ecologist at UC Davis.
“I think it’s so new that I don’t know if anybody’s really gotten a grant to study it or put it under a microscope,” Foley said.
Rickettsia lanei bacteria cases could also have gone undetected for so long because some cases were not severe, she said.
Foley said Californians should be aware of Rickettsia lanei and take precautions against tick bites.
How to keep disease-carrying ticks at bay
The best way to avoid ticks and tick bites is to be vigilant in your surroundings, Foley said, noting that ticks can transmit other diseases such as Lyme disease.
To keep a disease-carrying tick at bay, Foley recommends:
- Covering up your arms and legs when outdoors by wearing pants and long-sleeved shirts.
- Staying out of the grass where a tick can latch onto your clothing. Instead stay on a cleared path.
- Wearing light-colored clothing so it’s easier to spot a tick if one jumps on you.
- After an outdoor activity, take off your clothes, toss them in the wash and take a shower.
- If your dog goes with you for outdoor activities, give it a bath and then apply tick medication.
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