Right Whale Returns to NZ

More than one hundred years after it was hunted to local extinction, the right whale is finally finding its way back to its ancestral calving grounds in New Zealand, with seven whales now migrating between the sub-Antarctic islands and mainland New Zealand. It is believed that once more than 3, right whales spent each winter in New Zealand’s protected bays giving birth and raising their young. But among right whales, the lesson of where to go to breed is passed from mother to calf. Once all the whales born in those sheltered bays had been killed, there was no one to tell the other whales where to migrate. However a remnant of the population survived near the Auckland and Campbell Islands. It appears that some of them have finally found their way back. “I suspect that we may soon see a pulse of new whales following the [seven] pioneers, to colonize their former habitat,” Scott Baker, associate director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, said in a release. Oregon State initiated a study of the whale population in 1995.