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Troy Bright is used to seeing whales from his research station off Malcolm Island.
The one he spotted on Sunday, however, was one he had never seen before.
“It breached like a good six, maybe seven times just right in front of me,” Bright said.
He has been documenting and photographing whales for 30 years with Bere Point Research, and quickly pulled out his camera to capture this rare whale.
“The pectoral fins are really short, and they’re quite black, that’s how I knew it wasn’t a humpback whale,” Bright said.
Bright and other cetacean experts confirm the whale he spotted was an endangered North Pacific right whale.
“They’re the rarest and the most endangered whales on our planet,” Bright said.
Jared Towers, a Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) cetacean research technician who lives nearby on Alert Bay, went out on the water for hours in search of the whale.
“It was very easy to miss,” Towers said. “The only reason it was found is because it was rolling around at the surface with a piece of kelp.”
Newborn whale
North Pacific right whales have only been spotted seven times in B.C.
“This is the most critically endangered whale population in Canada,” Towers said.
A rare and endangered whale was spotted in B.C. waters, generating buzz among researchers. As the CBC’s Alanna Kelly reports, it’s not just spotting the whale that’s a big deal.
What it looked like was also a sign of hope.
The size of the whale — roughly eight metres long — spotted off Malcolm Island is also significant.
“This is a juvenile right whale,” Towers said. “It’s quite likely the first time it’s ever been documented.”
The sighting in B.C. waters is a positive sign for this small population of fewer than 50 whales, according to researchers.
“There hasn’t been a North Pacific right whale calf seen in many, many years,” Towers said. “So this is an encouraging thing that this animal was a calf recently.”
Experts still do not know where these whales give birth.
“There’s not a lot known about North Pacific right whales, especially in Canada, because we have so few sightings,” Towers said.
Back in 2024, DFO collaborated with two National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists using sonobuoys to detect acoustics.
A unique characteristic of the North Pacific right whale is that they are known to sing songs called “gunshot calls.”
Thomas Doniol-Valcroze, the cetacean research program lead at DFO, said they detected the right whales off Langara Island near Haida Gwaii.
‘Humans killed a lot of these whales’
The recent sighting in Canadian waters has caught the attention of researchers in the U.S.
Kevin Campion, founder of Save the North Pacific Right Whales based out of Washington state and Oregon, was excited to hear about the sighting.
“We’ve kind of been holding our breath waiting for one to get reported,” Campion said. “[This is] a very, very rare whale, if not the rarest.”
The species was hunted and killed throughout the 1800s and early 1900s, and researchers questioned whether they would go extinct completely or make a comeback.
“They are in the plight they are in, with this small population size and a highly endangered whale, because of humans,” Campion said. “Humans killed a lot of these whales.”
Campion said Pacific North right whales face a lack of available prey along with the threat of entanglements and being struck by ships.
“We owe it to them to do everything we can to help them recover from that damage that we’ve done,” Campion said.
These large whales are skim feeders, swimming along with their mouths open and collecting copepods, tiny aquatic crustaceans the size of a grain of rice.
“The fact that one of the largest animals in the world can exist, feeding on one of the smallest animals in the world, is also pretty cool and just shows how productive the Pacific Ocean is,” Campion said.
Sunday’s sighting is giving researchers hope for insight into these rare animals.
“One of the most important things is learning more about these animals … what they’re feeding on and how we can better protect those areas that are really important for them,” Towers said.
