![]() But he’s increasingly worried about the oil and gas industry’s desire to see what’s under the Atlantic seafloor. The greatest threats to right whales are ship strikes and entanglements in fishing lines, Mayo said. Only a boat with a federal research permit is allowed to get this close. A right whale - about as big as the boat - floated at the surface, and exhaled through its blowhole before taking a dive, its huge tail disappearing under the waves. “There's something over there, way over there,” he said, peering into the distance. "And the most troubling part of the story is that their numbers appear to be declining.”Īs he talked, Mayo kept his eye on the water. “A population that numbers probably in the vicinity of 410 animals left," he said. Much of Mayo’s work focuses on the North Atlantic right whale. ![]() The radio crackled with a message from a spotter plane overhead: About eight individual right whales were spotted going on long dives. That was on the mind of researcher Charles "Stormy" Mayo, director of the Right Whale Ecology Program at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, as he searched the water off Cape Cod recently from inside the cabin of a 44-foot boat. But marine biologists worry about the impact that process could have on some of the ocean’s most critically endangered creatures: right whales. As the Trump administration looks to increase production of domestic oil and gas, they’ve given preliminary approvals for seismic exploration to see what’s under the ocean floor.
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