Scientists spot two rare whales in Bering Sea

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Federal researchers studying critically endangered North Pacific right whales sometimes go years without finding their subjects. This month they got lucky.

A research vessel in the Bering Sea photographed two of the animals Sunday and obtained a biopsy sample from one, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Aug. 10.

NOAA Fisheries research biologist Jessica Crance was on board the Yushin Maru 2, when the whales were spotted. The ship is part of the Pacific Ocean Whale and Ecosystem Research program, a collaborative effort headed by the International Whaling Commission. Using an acoustic recorder, and between sounds of killer whales and walrus, Crance picked up faint calls of a right whale east of Bristol Bay, Alaska.

The sounds came from an estimated 10 to 32 miles away and the ship headed west, she said in a blog entry. After four and a half hours, despite the presence of minke and humpback whales, and only a few calls from the right whales, the rare animals were spotted.

The two right whales are part of the eastern stock that number just 30 to 50 whales, said Phillip Clapham, head of the cetacean program at NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle.

A French whaling ship recorded the first kill in 1835 and reported seeing “millions” of others. That claim was exaggerated but it drew hundreds of other whalers to the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea, Clapham said.

Within 14 years, Clapham said, the overharvest of the slow, buoyant animals sent many whalers through the Bering Strait to hunt bowhead whales instead.