Can 70 moms save a species?

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.

Although the situation is considered unusual, the reasons are well understood. A document from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 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. Only about 370 of them remain.

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 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 about 700 miles north, in the waters off New York. They were still swimming side by side.

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.

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 exhibited signs of vessel strikes. An orphaned calf is also presumed dead.

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 that 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 about 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.

It was sometime in those months, during the spring or summer of 2022, that the young one got into trouble. In late August, 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.” 5120’s body washed up in the surf on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts at the start of 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,” 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.”

Last month, NOAA Fisheries announced the official cause of death: chronic entanglement. In the past, it was 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, 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.”

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.