North Pacific right whale

Appearance

Also, North Pacific brindle-colored individuals are less common than they are among southern right whales. E. Japonica is easily distinguished from other North Pacific whale species by several fieldmarks: lack of dorsal fin or bump, very broad, black back, cyamid-covered callosities on the head and lips, a very arched jaw line, a very narrow rostrum, and often a V-shaped spout.

North Pacific right whales can reach 15 to 19 m (49 to 62 ft) in length as adults, larger than the North Atlantic right whale. Typical body mass is from 50,000–90,000 kg (110,000–200,000 lb), or to 100,000 kg (220,000 lb) that weighs twice as of typical humpback whales.

Range and habitat

Right whales' habitat preferences vary depending on the time of year. Since there are so few right whales to observe in the North Pacific and they generally feed far from shore, alternative analyses of habitat preferences are required. Gregr used maps of historic whaling catches and added oceanographic data from other sources to identify preferred habitats.

A western population that summers near the Commander Islands, along the Kamchatka coast, along the Kuril Islands, and in the Sea of Okhotsk is thought to number in the low hundreds. There was a small Aleut whale hunt in the Aleutian Islands, but it was almost certainly too small to reduce the original whale population.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Diet

Like right whales in other oceans, North Pacific right whales feed primarily on copepods, mainly the species Calanus marshallae. Like other right whale species, the North Pacific right whale feeds by skimming water continuously while swimming. This is in contrast to balaenopterid whales, such as the blue and humpback whales, that engulf prey in rapid lunges, surging upward rapidly from the depths.

The mouth is then closed tightly to expel excess water, effectively trapping the prey behind the baleen. Thus, right whales must find copepods at very high concentrations, greater than 3,000 per cubic meter, to feed efficiently.

In crisis

The Northeast Pacific population, that summers in the southeastern Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska, may have no more than 40 animals. The International Union for Conservation of Nature categorizes the species as endangered. It categorizes the Northeast Pacific population as critically endangered. Before the arrival of the pelagic whaling fleet in the North Pacific right whale's range after 1835, the whale's population, at least in the eastern part of its range, was probably at its original size, in the range of 20,000–30,000 whales.

Accordingly, one can consider 1835 as a good year to use as a baseline for the historic population, at least in the eastern North Pacific and the northern parts of the western North Pacific. For comparison, a population of 20,000 or more animals is comparable to the current and presumably early 19th-century population of Gray whales in the North Pacific.

CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.

North Pacific right whale is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.

Sources

Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on North Pacific right whale, Wikidata item Q506604. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.