North Pacific Right Whale Management and Research

Management

North Pacific right whales are managed by NMFS. They were first protected by the 1931 international or multi-national Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, which took effect in 1935. However, neither Japan nor the Soviet Union signed this agreement, so it was theoretically still legal for them to kill right whales. In 1949, the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling protected right whales from commercial whaling. This species also falls under the legislation of the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act and the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

Research

ADF&G has contributed funding to the acoustic monitoring of North Pacific right whales. In August 2004, the Cetacean Assessment and Ecology Program (CAEP) at the National Marine Mammal Laboratory initiated a North Pacific right whale tagging project. This is a collaborative study with the whale-tagging group at the Greenland Institute for Natural Resources in Copenhagen, Denmark. Three main questions are being addressed by this study:

  1. Where do North Pacific right whales go in winter?
  2. What migratory route do they take to get to their wintering grounds?
  3. Do right whales found in the southeast Bering Sea in summer also use other feeding areas in Alaska?

The project should provide information about specific habitat use in the Bering Sea, with the potential for investigating the oceanographic conditions of those areas.

For more information on this project and other research on North Pacific right whales please visit Alaska Fisheries Science Center - North Pacific Right Whale website.