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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

While many clinics feature glowing testimonials from satisfied customers, patient experiences with MERT run a broad gamut.

The Times spoke to parents who said MERT led to positive, lasting changes for their autistic children, improving their ability to communicate, concentrate and sleep through the night.

The Times also spoke to many parents who saw only minimal changes in their children’s behavior, or no changes at all. Others saw worrying behavioral regressions that persisted long after therapy was complete.

Without accompanying data, there is no way to know whether any patient’s experience with a treatment is typical or an outlier.

“If you go to a clinic website and they have dozens of quotes from parents saying, ‘This changed my child’s life in XYZ ways,’ that isn’t the same as evidence,” said Zoe Gross of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN), a nonprofit group run by and for autistic adults. “If the main way something’s advertised is through testimonials, it may be because there isn’t research, or what research was done showed it wasn’t effective.”

ASAN is one of five autism advocacy groups The Times consulted that said there wais not enough evidence for them to recommend MERT as a therapy.

Deli meats, grab-and-go salads and frozen meals are staples of the modern American diet — convenient and inexpensive options that shoppers readily toss into their carts during grocery runs.

But after hundreds of those products were flagged in major listeria-related recalls recently, nervous consumers have been left to scour their refrigerators for potentially tainted food as government inspectors try to piece together how the problems began.

Listeria contamination at a BrucePac processing plant this month and a deadly multistate outbreak linked to Boar’s Head liverwurst over the summer led to the sweeping recalls. All told, about 20 million pounds of meat and poultry products sold nationwide at Trader Joe’s, Walmart, Target, Ralphs and other businesses were affected, highlighting the public health challenges that come with producing food for the mass market despite significant advancements in sanitizing and testing.

“The messages that go out to consumers typically are, ‘We have the safest food supply in the world,’” said Barbara Kowalcyk, director of the Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security at George Washington University. “What these back-to-back recalls show is we aren’t where we thought we were.”

Although listeria has been the culprit in many food scares lately — on Friday, TreeHouse Foods issued a recall for hundreds of frozen waffle and pancake products for potential contamination — food safety experts said the string of incidents is merely coincidence.

“There’s no evidence at all to suggest that our food supply is less safe than before — in fact, I would argue for the opposite,” said Martin Bucknavage, a senior food safety extension associate at Pennsylvania State University’s Department of Food Science.

The safety of mass-produced food has improved dramatically in the last three decades, experts noted, thanks to better sanitization procedures, increased regulation and the use of technologies such as whole genome sequencing to help detect pathogens quickly.

But listeria, a common and stubbornly persistent type of bacterium, presents unique hurdles.

Unlike many other foodborne pathogens, it thrives in the cool, damp conditions found in processing plants. Unsanitary facilities can cause contamination, but the bacteria can also be introduced through raw ingredients, water, soil tracked into a plant on a worker’s shoe and even incoming air, said Brian Schaneberg, executive director at the Institute for Food Safety and Health at Illinois Institute of Technology.

“It is ubiquitous in the environment,” he said.

Making things worse, listeria can spread easily if food comes into contact with contaminated surfaces and multiply rapidly despite aggressive cleaning and sanitizing, according to the USDA. Listeria has been found in products including cold cuts, hot dogs, sausages, unpasteurized milk, soft cheeses, smoked seafood and raw vegetables and fruits.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service has jurisdiction over the safety of meat, poultry and egg products. It requires manufacturers to develop and implement systems to prevent and reduce the occurrence and numbers of pathogens on their products and to decrease the incidence of foodborne illness.

Meat and poultry processing facilities are checked by federal inspectors at least once during every shift that a plant is in operation, according to a Food Safety and Inspection Service spokesperson.

For their part, food companies take preventive measures such as requiring workers to cover their shoes or step onto sanitized mats or into disinfecting foot baths whenever they enter a facility, and change their disposable aprons and gloves when moving from one production line to another.

They also conduct their own in-house testing, which can include extensive swabbing of surfaces, raw ingredients, finished products and areas where listeria is known to thrive, such as floor drains.

“No company wants to have an issue like this,” Bucknavage said, referring to the recent spate of recalls. Listeria’s ability to adapt and proliferate under varied conditions means “it’s an ongoing battle,” especially at large food-processing establishments like BrucePac, which churns out precooked, ready-to-eat meat and poultry products in huge quantities.

“You’ve got chicken juices, you’ve got people moving around, you have a lot of different types of equipment,” he said. “All of that has to be controlled down to the microbiological level.”

BrucePac and Boar’s Head did not respond to requests seeking information on how they conducted their safety tests before the recalls.

Every year an estimated 48 million people get sick from a foodborne illness, 128,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which typically coordinates 17 to 36 investigations in multiple states each week.

Consumption of food contaminated with listeria can lead to listeriosis, a serious infection that primarily affects adults 65 and older, people with weakened immune systems, pregnant women and newborns. Symptoms include fever, muscle aches, headache, stiff neck, confusion, loss of balance and convulsions sometimes preceded by diarrhea or other gastrointestinal issues. It is the third leading cause of death from foodborne illness in the U.S., the CDC said.

The Boar’s Head outbreak, which began in July, has been linked to 59 hospitalizations and 10 deaths across 19 states. No illnesses have yet to be reported in the BrucePac and TreeHouse recalls.

TreeHouse Foods is recalling hundreds of its frozen waffle and pancake products for potential listeria contamination. The items were sold under various labels and distributed to stores including Trader Joe’s and Target.

(TreeHouse Foods Inc. via AP)

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There’s also a steep financial cost. The economic burden of foodborne illness was estimated to be as high as $90 billion annually, according to a 2020 research paper published in the Journal of Food Protection.

Listeria is unusually hard to trace after an outbreak because it has a long incubation period — the CDC says it can take up to 10 weeks for some people to develop symptoms. Many people don’t seek medical attention after they become sick, and those who do generally have trouble recalling what they ate several weeks ago.

Boar’s Head, which produces and sells deli meats, cheeses and condiments, called the outbreak a “dark moment in our company’s history” in a letter to customers in September.

“Comprehensive measures are being implemented to prevent such an incident from ever happening again,” the Sarasota, Fla., company said.

Boar’s Head has been working with the USDA, state government regulatory agencies and food safety experts to determine what went wrong. The investigation is still ongoing, and the results will include “what needs to be improved and where policy changes are needed,” the Food Safety and Inspection Service spokesperson said.

Boar’s Head shared some preliminary findings last month, saying it had identified the root cause of the contamination as “a specific production process that only existed” at its facility in Jarratt, Va., and was used only to make liverwurst. As a result, it said it was permanently discontinuing the production of liverwurst and was closing the Jarratt plant for good.

An aerial view of the Boar’s Head processing plant in Jarratt, Va., that was tied to a deadly food poisoning outbreak in July.

(Steve Helber / Associated Press)

Boar’s Head also published a notice of suspension that the USDA sent on July 31, which laid out numerous “insanitary conditions” and other problems at the plant. Among them: beaded condensation dripping over products, employees moving racks of coolers between lines without changing personal protective equipment and a sample collected from a pallet jack that tested positive for listeria.

“Clear liquid was observed falling from a square patch in the ceiling,” the notice said. “A black fan was mounted to the ceiling and was blowing the leaking clear liquid into the Blast Cell Hallway, where 9 trees of uncovered Assorted Hams were stored.”

Besides working with government inspectors to investigate contamination, food manufacturers also have to help track down products affected by their recalls, an unwieldy task in situations where hundreds of different items with various sell-by and best-by dates were sent to businesses around the country. In the BrucePac case, items were widely distributed to supermarkets, big-box discounters, wholesale clubs, restaurants, schools and other establishments.

Retailers like to say they have close relationships with their suppliers and buy only from vendors they trust. But issues still arise, leaving companies scrambling to get the word out to customers.

Trader Joe’s, which is in the process of recalling several of its private-label salads, wraps and other items made with ready-to-eat BrucePac products, says it does “daily work to make certain our products meet our stringent food safety expectations.”

Trader Joe’s recalled products such as its White Meat Chicken Salad, Harvest Salad With Grilled Chicken and Chicken Enchiladas Verde after supplier BrucePac discovered listeria contamination at one of its facilities.

(Chris Pizzello / Associated Press)

“We voluntarily take action quickly, aggressively investigating potential problems and removing the product from sale if there is any doubt about its safety or quality,” the company says on a food safety page on its website.

Yet another high-profile deadly outbreak was announced Tuesday, when the CDC issued a food safety alert after discovering an E. coli outbreak linked to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders; there are currently 49 cases across 10 states, including 10 people who were hospitalized and one who died. The CDC, USDA, Food and Drug Administration and public health officials in multiple states are now investigating.

Although inspections and investigations are shared responsibilities between food manufacturers and government entities, “the onus is really on the company,” Kowalcyk, of the Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security, said.

“If you look at the complexity of our food supply and the number of producers and the number of importers, it’s growing exponentially,” she said. “Do I think the agencies can do more? Yes. Do I think they have the resources that they need to do more? No.”

Food safety will “never be perfect because pathogens are living things and all systems fail,” she continued. “We’ve got to recognize we’ll never get to zero, but we can get pretty close and that’s what we should be striving for.”