North Atlantic Right Whale Study Using Acoustic Zooplankton Fish Profiler

Once abundant throughout the North Atlantic, the North Atlantic right whale population has been reduced to fewer than 360 individuals and has been designated by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature as a critically endangered species.

During the whaling era, these whales were exploited by the thousands for their plentiful oil and baleen. Now they face new challenges of ocean regime shifts linked to human-induced climate change. In the Gulf of Maine and the Scotian shelf regions, these regime shifts have resulted in less favorable foraging environments for the right whales.

To investigate the impact of these ocean regime shifts on the North Atlantic right whale, Kimberley Davies and her team from the University of New Brunswick along with collaborators that include the New England Aquarium, the Canadian Whale Institute, Dalhousie University, and snow crab fishers in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, have been deploying ASL’s Acoustic Zooplankton Fish Profiler (AZFP). The AZFP, along with other oceanographic instruments, are mounted to a cage which is lowered and raised to collect water column transects in two right whale habitats: the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence, where right whales currently frequent, and the outer Bay of Fundy, where they used to be very abundant but have recently abandoned the area.