There's been a lot of media coverage over the past few days about an extraordinary sighting of a whale off the west coast of Ireland. For the first time in a century, there’s been a confirmed sighting of a magnificent North Atlantic right whale in Irish waters.
A holidaymaker, fishing for mackerel in McSwynes Bay, County Donegal, was lucky enough to watch the whale for over an hour. Besides taking still photos, it was his video which enabled researchers from the Scottish Association for Marine Science to positively identify the species owing to the animal’s large, crusty callosities, and rough patches of skin which are home to whale lice.
Although North Atlantic right whales have occasionally been spotted in European waters in recent years (once in Norway in the late 1990s and also in the Azores in the early 2000s), there have been no sightings in Irish waters since 1910. This last record is preserved as a grainy photo of a Nordcaper or Biscayne whale (the names by which the right whale used to be called) on the flensing deck of the Blacksod Whaling Company in Ireland.
In the 1600s and early 1700s, North American whalers called them black whales, seven-foot-bone whales, rocknose whales, and various other names. During that same period, Europeans who hunted or scavenged these whales knew them by local names, such as the nordcaper or noortkapers (Dutch for “the whale from Norway’s North Cape”), Biscayne (derived from their prevalence in the Bay of Biscay and a favoured target of Basque whaling ships), or the sletbag (Icelandic for “the smooth-backed whale”). Despite all these different names one common element is that right whales were once prolific in the northeast Atlantic and found in large numbers from Norway right down to Spain.
Their current plight is one of the biggest cetacean conservation issues globally, with an estimated 360 animals remaining, only 70 of which are functionally reproductive females. The whaling onslaught that the species had to endure for centuries, combined with ongoing modern threats such as ship strike and entanglement in fishing gear, means that the population has never been able to bounce back in the way that other species have.
While it’s tempting to speculate about this rare and solitary sighting, it's only possible to take hope for the future of North Atlantic right whales, rather than expectation.
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