A Large Migrant

How they got to be right

I boarded a whale watch boat in Provincetown. A walk down MacMillan Wharf gave me a strange impression of contrasts. Modern steel tour boats sat near the decaying wooden fishing fleet. At the time, it was one of only two remaining wooden fishing fleets in our country.

As the fish harvest declined due to overharvesting by both U.S. and foreign fishing fleets, whale watch boats began harvesting income from tourists coming to enjoy the resources of climate, scenic ocean beaches, and wildlife. The declining fish population also lessened the number of whales as these giant creatures moved outward, searching for food.

In days gone by, whaling ships left this port in the hope of making enough kills to pay the sailors and investors and keep the operation outfitted for the next voyage. Today, the whale watch boats depart from the same pier, earnings already in hand. Ask a crew member what you will be seeing, and the answer is evasive. Where the old-time whaling captains and investors took the risk, along with the crew, who risked a no-pay cruise, today, the customers pay upfront and risk not seeing a whale.

The guides say that each whale sighting is a unique and valued event. In some respects, the sightings are rare gifts from the whales that seem to be attracted to the low rumbling sound of the boat engines. Nevertheless, boat owners show images of the humpback whales on their signs and videotapes on the docks. It is the humpback whale that visitors expect to see.

We left the harbor amid calm seas, for which my seasick-prone body was thankful. We immediately spotted a fast-moving whale on the horizon, likely a finback. Finback whales are known as the greyhounds of the sea.

We soon spotted a pair of right whales, two adults, accompanied by a calf. Right whales are large compared to us humans. They are 40 or 50 feet long, but this is only medium-sized as whales go. A right whale’s head is covered by callosities, large whitish calluses populated by barnacles, and another organism known as whale lice. The whale lice are not related to the parasitic insects that infest land mammals but are crustaceans more closely related to crabs and shrimp.           

Finding the Right Name

The ship and the other passengers vanished, and only the whale remained. Nearly forty years later, the image remains in my mind. On later whale watches, I would hear the outrush of a whale’s breath as though a bellows were at work on some cosmic forge. I would see the opening and closing of the blowhole, a giant round nostril placed atop the whale’s head to keep out the salt water.

The mouth at the front of the head remained closed, but I learned it was equipped with baleen plates for straining small creatures from large gulps of seawater. I have never seen these baleen plates on a living whale, but I once examined a preserved specimen. It felt like a fingernail. 

Another day, on a later whale watch, I would see fog on the dunes and see the breath of a giant whale turn to wisps of fog. I would see a man try to clean the lens of an expensive camera as the shipboard naturalist exclaimed, “That’s whale snot on your lens!”

I had heard that whales smell fishy, but I noticed no smell, except perhaps the clean salt air, like a beach at high tide when decay and corrupted flesh are flushed back into the ocean’s depths for sharks and rays.

When I saw the right whale, I exclaimed about the size, but the shipboard naturalist pointed out that I was observing a whale calf. The mother was “over there” and huge. According to recorded statistics, right whales can reach fifty feet long and seventy-nine tons.

My wonder at her size paled when I learned of her rarity. This was a North Atlantic Right Whale, Eubalaena glacialis, one of three hundred remaining alive. Here swam three of them, mother, calf, and escort, one percent of the worldwide population.

The escort fills an odd role in whale society. At that time, little was known about them except that an adult whale accompanies the mother. The accompanying whale may be of either gender and will defend the mother and calf if danger appears. Right Whales are not alone in this behavior, for mother Gray Whales and Humpbacks also have escorts.

Male escorts sing to the mother. The song may be an attempt to induce mating behavior. I might be tempted to identify the escort as the calf’s daddy, but this is an artifact of my preconception of a nuclear family, which does not apply to whales.

The mother and escort moved with the grace and rhythm possible for animals ideally suited to their environment. They moved with an alternating rhythm, much like the pistons of an engine. As one rose upward in the water, the other sank a bit with the up-and-down motion of the muscular tail.

I could not have said which adult was the mother and which was the escort. They appeared alike, but one produced more than 100 gallons of milk per day. She had given birth to the calf in cold North Atlantic waters and then turned, swam beneath the body, and lifted it to the surface for a first breath of air. The calf would forever remain attached to the atmosphere above, gliding upward after a dive to gulp another breath. Sometimes the calf would swim near a boat filled with human observers, as had happened on this day.

The tourists had come hoping to see relatives of the Right Whales, the Humpbacks, famous for lobtailing and leaping. No one is sure what provokes the lobtailing behavior in which a whale lies on the surface and slaps its tail repeatedly, splashing anything and anyone nearby.

Perhaps they could see a whale “spy-hopping,” a motion in which the head rises vertically out of the water, believed to be a whale’s attempt to see what is on the surface. Despite the cruise operator’s disclaimer, stating that such displays are a rare gift from the whales, that they are not performers, and that no behavior can be expected and no sightings are guaranteed, some passengers were disappointed by the lack of Humpback Whales on this voyage.

For those curious about the named behaviors, a list of whale behaviors with illustrative photographs appears on the Stellwagon Bank National Marine Sanctuary website, https://stellwagen.noaa.gov/visit/whalewatching/whale-behaviors.html.

I saw some of the many whale behaviors on later trips, but the adult right whales we saw seemed content to make steady forward motion. The calf appeased the passengers with its acrobatics. It waved its flukes (flippers) and splashed with its tail. On one occasion, it appeared to wave goodbye with its tail. It circled the boat and the adult whales with the playfulness that seems to be the domain of young mammals everywhere.

I later read an article that explained the absence of Humpbacks and the presence of Right Whales on Cape Cod Bay that year.  A shortage of the fish on which Humpbacks feed caused them to move to other feeding grounds outside the bay. The absence of the fish caused a spike in the population of the plankton on which the fish feed, and which is also the food of Right Whales. The Humpbacks returned with the fish later that year, and the Right Whales moved off to better feeding grounds with more plentiful plankton as the fish depleted the plankton stocks in the bay.

After receiving protected status in 1935, North Atlantic Right Whales struggled toward a stable population of 300 individuals. Their numbers now exceed 450. This is still a far cry from the pre-whaling population of thousands. The whaling industry, based in New Bedford, Falmouth, and Provincetown, was tough on the Right Whales and gave them their name.

The harpooner who sunk his dart into a Humpback or Finback Whale could expect the whaleboat to surf the ocean and perhaps break apart. It could turn over and leave the crew awaiting rescue in freezing waters. Even in a successful chase, the whalers quickly retrieved the whale. Otherwise, it would sink, and their labor yielded no prize.

In addition to being slow swimmers, right whales float when dead and were easy to retrieve. Whaleboats easily kept pace with them, unlike the faster species. During the days when whalers would roam the ocean in search of the mammals that provided oil for lamps and baleen (whalebone) for corset stays, they were eager to thrust a harpoon into their quarry and watch the gray spout turn to a cherry red with whale blood. Then, they gave these whales the name they have today, Right Whale. They were simply the right whale to kill.