Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences (BLOS) hosted its first Café Sci of the 2025 season July 16. Over 200 seats were filled; other attendees stood along the perimeter of the new Harold Alfond Center for Ocean Education and Innovation, and about 60 attended via livestream. The free public lectures let visitors learn from researchers and this season, BLOS is tackling some of Maine’s toughest, most controversial topics head-on: right whales, PFAS in Casco Bay, water and human health through watershed protection, and marine epidemiology for fisheries and ocean health. The talks are popular; space is limited: Advance registration is wise. A recording of each lecture can be viewed from BLOS's YouTube channel: Whales in the Forecast: Using 21st Century Tools to Understand an Endangered Species

Senior research scientist Dr. Nick Record began the lecture after an introduction by President and CEO Deborah Bronk. Record provided history of the North Atlantic right whale, how they’ve been hunted historically, and the unique ecological role they play, specifically in the Gulf of Maine, where the right whale is largely the only whale that eats Calanus (a copepod). This means the right whale is "the only species that serves that role in the food web in this part of the North Atlantic,” he said, highlighting right whales’ conservation value.

According to Record and New England Aquarium, there are only about 350 North Atlantic right whales left; the species likely reached its lowest point of around 100 in the mid-1900s, based on genetic estimates. When the Right Whale Recovery Plan was implemented in the 1990s, there were about 261 right whales. The population had recovered to almost 500 when another decline began, connected to changes in climate and feeding conditions; so forecasting plays a crucial role in managing the conservation of endangered species.

Postdoctoral scientist Jonathan Syme then walked the audience through his species distribution modeling. “The primary factors influencing right whale distribution and feeding patterns are largely interconnected, centering on the availability and density of their primary food source and the environmental conditions that facilitate its presence,” he said. His advanced modeling can predict prey availability and density, oceanographic conditions such as water temperature, salinity and currents, and seasonal movements and migrations. A weakening of a cold, deep water current has caused the whales’ traditional feeding grounds to move from the Bay of Fundy to southern New England. Thus, there are fewer right whales in Canada and more in the Gulf of Maine.

In a 2024 Café Sci presentation, Dr. Catherine Mitchell spoke of using color from satellite imagery to track large-scale oceanic changes, a project that won funding from the National Aeronautic Space Administration (NASA) and has led to the scientific contributions Dr. Rebekah Shunmugapandi, a BLOS postdoctoral scientist, offers to right whale conservation efforts. Shunmugapandi can track and predict Calanus populations through color analysis from satellite imagery. Her data fuels Syme’s species distribution models as it tracks the whale’s food source. By tracking these Calanus concentrations from space, researchers create predictive maps of whale locations and assess risk areas like shipping lanes with remarkable accuracy.

Questions from the audience on threats to right whales from fishing gear and ship strikes produced grim answers. They are the two primary sources of mortality for right whales, so much so, scientists predict not a single right whale will die of old age.

Scientists say it is often challenging to determine the exact cause of death for right whales. While the exact proportions can vary year by year, over the last 30 years, the sources of mortality from fishing gear and ship strikes have been roughly in equal proportion. Most right whales have scars from multiple entanglements, and most whales in the population also bear scars from ship strikes. “Most of the whales in the population have scars from one or both of those. So, what I'm saying is there's a cumulative effect, you know, a whale can be entangled and struck by a ship, even multiple times throughout its life. And those all have health impacts,” said Record. Shunmugapandi showed a chart of right whale populations overlaid on shipping lanes, and the audience gasped.

Record continued: “In the early 2000s, there were changes in fishing gear to make lines sink to the bottom, more in a way that they wouldn't entangle whales. There were changes in shipping lanes to avoid areas where right whales would feed on average. And a lot of those (management strategies) have become more challenging recently for two reasons. One is due to the changes in climate that John (Syme) explains. A lot of the management we've been using assumes that whales would go to the same places at the same times every year, and now things are changing from one year to the next. With these forecasted tools, we now have a really good idea. The other thing that's happened recently is that this whole process has become more polarized ... Over the last 10 years or so, the recommendations that have come out of this group have been taken up by NOAA or the National Marine Fisheries Service, and then they've been taken to court by both sides – by both the industry side, pulling in one direction and by the conservation side, pulling in the other direction. And in both cases, those sides have won, so it's really hard for management to know what to do. Hopefully, it's consensus-based and a science-informed direction.”

July 23, Café Sci presents Water Health and Humans: Leveraging Community Partnerships to Protect Maine’s Waterways.