Jan: Hi I’m Jan Roletto, and I’m a research coordinator at Greater Farallones and Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuaries, and I’m a federal employee, and I work for NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Kristen: Hi, my name is Kirsten Lindquist, and I work for the Greater Farallones Association, and I’m also a NOAA affiliate.
Jan: And together, we work on a project called ACCESS. It’s an acronym for Applied California Current Ecosystem Studies. This project has several partnerships, one with the Greater Farallones Association, one with the NOAA sanctuaries, as well as Point Blue Conservation Science. To learn more about ACCESS and the ACCESS project, you can visit ACCESSoceans.org
For now, we’re going to just dive into our recollection of observing the North Pacific right whale During the ACCESS Project in late May, we were on station, one of our sampling stations within Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary. And when we’re considered on station, and if you can see my fingers, I’d be doing air quotes here, when we’re on station, we are basically stationary in the water. We do sometimes we do some net tows where the ship is moving, but at this time, we were doing what’s called a CTD Cas, and so we were also collecting water samples at various depths. So the ship that we were on was relatively stationary. It was a very blustery day.
Kristen: It was very blustery. It was rough.
Jan: It was nasty, very nasty weather, what we consider somewhere between a Beaufort five and six. And so the observers up on the flying bridge, we were basically on our break. That’s what happens when the CTD is in the water. So we knew that the CTD was coming back up onto the deck, and Kirsten and I, we both kind of got up from basically where we were resting, maybe taking having a snack, basically our coffee break. And we looked in front of this ship, and what, what did you see Kirsten?
Kristen: I remember walking towards the station where the front of the boat, where we observed from, and a whale surfaced and blew and I said whale, and Jan said whale at the same time. And the first thing that I noticed when I saw that whale come to the surface right in front of the boat, was that it was a very kind of V or heart shaped blow, so the whale was swimming away from us, right in front of us. And so you could see that the angle that the air was coming out of the two blowholes was very almost 90 degree at an angle to each other.
Jan: Yes, yes, that’s my recollection also, it was a very different type of blow than what we normally see. And to me, I could see the blow coming out of each nostril of the whale’s blow hole. It’s not just a single nostril, it’s a double nostril, just like ours. And it created a beautiful V shaped blow. And I’ve seen Right Whales in the southern hemisphere, and they have basically the same kind of blow. And it’s very, very unexpected. How many right whales are in the North Pacific, Northeast Pacific?
Kristen: I believe the estimate is 20 to 40 of this stock. Yeah, this Eastern North Pacific stock. So Jan has seen right whales before, the Southern Right Whale. I’ve not seen them, but I’ve been studying seabirds and whales in this area throughout the Pacific for the last 20 years. I’d never seen one, but I knew exactly what I was looking for, and when that whale surfaced right in front of the boat, I knew Jan and I were both thinking the same thing at the same time we went “we need pictures!” We need to look at this whale more. There were different things about this whale that were keying both Jan and I in. And we’ve worked together long enough that we were reading each other’s mind. We’re looking at the color of the whale, the shape of the back, the blow shape.
Jan: I know, yeah, like Kirsten was saying, yes, we know each other really well. We’ve worked together for many, many years, and both of us, we were just kind of gazing out in front of the bow of the ship, and here comes this blow and this really dark black back, and we looked at each other, we turned our head towards each other. We looked at each other, and we didn’t want to say it, because it’s such a rare sighting around here that we just couldn’t believe it. And I remember us saying, are you thinking what I’m thinking? And we’re like nodding our heads Yes, and Kirsten was getting our photographer and our other whale observer Drew over with her camera to start taking pictures right away.
Kristen: Yeah, I remember saying, “Drew camera over here”, and she’s saying, What am I taking pictures of? “Drew pictures over here” because I didn’t want to say, like Jan said, we were still, still needed to observe it again and confirm. And so, a big part of confirming the observations is noting in the computer exactly what time and the location, the GPS coordinates, getting the pictures, these kind of things, yes.
Jan: And between the three of us, and we’re all very experienced marine mammal and seabird observers. I then called down because I could tell even though this ship, the ship is over 200 feet long, and the ship was being blown towards the whale, we weren’t actively motoring or moving, but we were drifting towards the whale. And the whale really wasn’t going anywhere. It was very stationary. It wasn’t skimming the water. It wasn’t feeding. It just was basically kind of, it wasn’t logging at the surface, but it was just kind of meandering and what we call milling.
Kristen: It was coming to the surface, taking a breath, slowly going down, but not diving very deeply, and then surfacing again and blowing. And so we watched that for about 20-25 minutes.
Jan: Yes. I think it was about 20-25 minutes, because I remember recording that in our data logging computer, and I remember speaking to the bridge and asked them to veer away from the course that we were at, mainly because we didn’t, I did not want to hit this very, very rare and unique whale in our area, so we turned course, and so instead of the whale being right in front of us, the whale ended up off of our stern. And that’s when we got some video. But yeah, unfortunately, the photos and the videos, because it was such a blustery day that that all we could see is this really black back and a few blows and spouts here and there. But that was about it. I did get when it was in front of us. I did get the opportunity of seeing just a little bit of the white callosities on the top of the head.
Kristen: And I remember seeing that too, yeah, just maybe the second time it surfaced in front of us.
Jan: Yeah, right at the very beginning, when we first started that observations. But we were like pinching ourselves. We were so excited seeing it.
Kristen: I was in awe. And what was really cool when Jan called the Flying bridge and let the commanding officer and the crew there know, basically the whole ship was able to hear over the radio that there was something really unusual to be seen. And I know the cook from the galley came out to see it, most of the people on the boat.
Jan: A couple of the engineers that were off duty at the time, yeah,
Kristen: To see this incredibly rare thing, which is so cool for this, this ship, which is a research platform, and they’re out there making science happen by making the engines go and cooking the food and doing all these things to get to see what an important service they provide to science. Super cool.
Jan: So, I think it’s important to share about how we verified because they’re so rare. I mean, we hear, we since, since then, we’ve heard reports of Right Whale sightings within a, you know, several 10s of miles of where this sighting was, in the Halfmoon Bay area, in the Monterey Bay Area, and there might be one siding every few years off of the coast of California. But they’re not usually verified. Sometimes they’re relied upon very good observers and reliable observers, and sometimes they’re seen from overhead, like in a helicopter. I remember our regional director at the time, Bill Duros, he saw one from a helicopter one time, and unfortunately, he didn’t have a photo. But, I mean, they’re pretty distinctive. They’re very broad backed, no dorsal fin. He could see the white callosities, and that was off of Monterey. In order to verify for identification purposes, because it is such an important sighting, we did go through the process of sending photos and video to the Right whale, experts within National Marine Fisheries Service and the Seattle lab and they were very quickly able to get back to us within less than 24 hours, and verify that yes, and this was all over the three day holiday. So, people were on their holidays. They were on their vacations. They weren’t in the office. And all of the Right Whale biologists, they were very excited to hear about this observation, and they were able to confirm very quickly that, yes, this was a Northeast Pacific Right Whale.
Jan: So, ACCESS the Applied California Current Ecosystem Studies has been a collaboration and a partnership since about 2004 and we work with other sea bird and marine mammal research organizations and federal and state agencies and provide information about abundance and distribution of whales as well as sea birds within the Northern California region. So, we look at birds, mammals. So, what’s unique about the ACCESS Project is that we not just look at abundance and distribution of seabirds and marine mammals, but you also look in conjunction with those observations, their associated prey species. So, we do net tows, and we do acoustic sampling, basically sampling the biomass that’s in the water. So, it’s basically a glorified fish finder or krill finder. Is what we look at as far as forage species. So, we’re looking not just abundance and distribution, but we’re also looking at behaviors, and we’re identifying really kind of the hot spots of foraging areas for the birds and mammals that are in our area.
Kristen: Yeah. I mean, ACCESS is looking at the conditions of the waters in this area, from the prey species all the way up to the large vertebrates, the seabirds and the whales. So, we’ve been we’ve been doing these cruises for a long time.
Jan: The ACCESS project has been in existence since 2004 and our May 2024 Cruise was our 70th cruise.
Kristen: So, we have been looking for whales all of these different cruises, and never seen a North Pacific Right Whale. When I think of seeing something rare, I would never even consider saying I want to see a North Pacific Right Whale on an ACCESS cruise. They are just that extremely rare. When I saw it, I thought, that’s the whale of a lifetime. I never, I will never see one again. I have no doubt.
Jan: Yeah, yeah. The uniqueness of seeing a Right Whale in the North Pacific is it’s just really rare.
Kristen: It’s extraordinary.
Photos by: NOAA/Pt. Blue/ACCESS, D. Devlin
-Kristen and Jan from ACCESS Oceans
This post was adapted from a voice recording in episode 73 of the Whale Tales Podcast, listen here.
Leave a Reply