Mary Landers, The Current
On an icy Sunday morning in January, Senior Wildlife Biologist Jessica Thompson and two colleagues boarded the DNR’s 26-foot rigid inflatable boat, the RV Timucua, and set off from Brunswick in search of North Atlantic right whales.
These bus-sized beasts have become so rare that researchers can identify by sight most of the remaining 370 or so individuals. Right whale mothers migrate here in the winter, swimming south from their feeding area off New England and northeast Canada to give birth in their only known calving area, the heart of which is off the coast of Georgia. About 70 breeding females remain.
Thompson and fellow Georgia Department of Natural Resources Senior Wildlife Biologist Mark Dodd, along with Wildlife Technician Trip Kolkmeyer have spent thousands of hours on the water and at their computers in the service of these whales.
It’s unclear if they’re saving them from extinction or documenting their demise.
From their dock near the base of the Sidney Lanier Bridge in Brunswick, they pilot the RV Timucua out of the Turtle River and into St. Simons Sound. The team works in tandem with researchers with the Clearwater Marine Aquarium in a Cessna 337 flying at 1,000 feet overhead looking for whales.
Black and sleek with no dorsal fin to alert boaters to their presence, right whales are tough to spot even when you’re looking for them. Add choppy water and it’s nearly impossible. But the water this day is calm, the winds low and the researchers are vigilant for the flash of light that tells them a right whale has come up for a breath.
Just after 10 a.m. the radio crackles a message from the flight team. They’re headed to a whale sighting called in by a professional observer on a dredge. The Timucua heads south to document what turns out to be a juvenile not previously seen this season.
About 20 minutes later, with the plane crew flying circles overhead and taking photos from its vantage point, dolphins cavorting around the whale give away its position to the boat crew.
Kolkmeyer and Thompson launch a drone to get photos of the whale’s head, where a pattern of markings has emerged as the animal matured. Called callosities, the white pattern is made of tiny invertebrates that grow on rough patches of skin. Each whale’s pattern is akin to a fingerprint, unique to that individual.
Despite help from the dolphins, it takes a half dozen or more attempts to find the whale as it comes up for a breath, get the drone in position and get the needed photographs.
The work is repetitive, with a lot of seeking and not finding, day in and day out. The Timucua has no cabin or bathroom and the crew is often out for stretches of 8 hours or more.
Their main mission is to document the females and their calves and the survival of each.
“That’s the basic information we collect from the plane and the boat,” said Dodd, who’s been doing the work for decades. “And that’s boring stuff. It’s not exciting. People think science is learning all this new stuff. Well, a lot of science is the repetitive collection of data. It’s boring and it’s a grind. I mean, it’s good to be around whales. Personally, it’s pretty cool, but it’s a grind.”
This calving season isn’t looking good for right whales.
“At this time last year, we had 14 calves already that we had documented, and we’re just at seven, so we’re half of last year,” Dodd said.
The 2024 season ended with 19 calves, far below the 30-35 calves a year needed to keep the population stable, according to the modeling. And five of last year’s calves are known to have died.
In the summers, this same DNR team works with another iconic Georgia species — the loggerhead sea turtle — that offers a more optimistic look at recovery. Loggerhead numbers were plummeting in the 1970s and ’80s. Among the conservation efforts credited with saving them was a Georgia invention that prevents sea turtles from drowning in shrimp nets. NOAA made these turtle excluder devices mandatory nationwide in 1987. Drownings dropped and over the last four decades population numbers have steadily increased.
Right whales aren’t caught in shrimp nets but they are killed when ships and boats strike them and when they get entangled in fishing gear.
“It’s very clear that for the population to recover, we have to reduce vessel mortality in right whales,” Dodd said. “We also, you know, at the same time, have to reduce entanglement and mortality associated with commercial fishing gear. So those two things both have to happen to some extent.”
A regulation aimed at decreasing vessel strikes looked like it was coming to fruition last summer, but NOAA withdrew the expansion of its vessel speed rule just four days before Trump took office in January.
Among those leading the charge against the regulation was Coastal Georgia congressman Buddy Carter (R-St. Simons).
After photographing the whale from the drone, the DNR team needed to complete one last chore. Because the juvenile whale could not be identified by its markings, they need to get a biopsy sample. If the whale had been biopsied as a calf, before its distinct markings appeared, the DNA analysis will match the samples and identify its mother.
A game of cat and very big mouse ensues to maneuver the boat close enough to the whale to allow Thompson to shoot a hollow-tipped dart into its side and procure a tiny piece of skin and blubber.
The whale dived. The boat followed. The whale dived. The boat followed. After five attempts the position is good and Thompson, standing above the deck in the boat’s pulpit with the crossbow drawn, lets the dart fly.
The whale doesn’t flinch. A foam collar on the dart prevents it from penetrating more than about an inch. The foam also acts as a float to allow Thompson to lean over and retrieve the dart. She and Kolkmeyer, careful to keep the sample sterile, label it and freeze it onboard in a canister of liquid nitrogen. They’ll send it to St. Mary’s University in New Brunswick for DNA analysis.
The proposed expansion of the vessel speed rule sought to require boats 35 feet or longer to slow to 10 knots (about 11.5 mph) when whales are expected to be present in the area. The existing 2008 regulation, which remains in place, applies the speed limit to vessels 65 feet or longer. The proposal also would have expanded the areas and adjusted the dates for which the rule applies, but these changes would have been minor in Georgia.
When it abandoned its plan to finalize the regulation, NOAA indicated it ran out of time during the Biden administration to evaluate the 90,000 public comments it received since the expansion was proposed in August 2022.
That’s not the whole story, said Gib Brogan, campaign director for Oceana, an international advocacy organization dedicated to ocean conservation. The real reason has to do with preserving the rule for the future, he suggested in an interview with The Current. The Congressional Review Act allows regulations passed late in one administration to be revoked with relative ease by the next, Brogan said.
“For the vessel speed rule to be protected from that look back under a Trump administration and a Republican House and Senate, they would have had to put the final rule out by August 1 this past summer,” he said. “So the Biden administration let that pass. They knew about it, and it’s frustrating. That inaction is extremely frustrating.”
Brogan said he didn’t know why the Biden administration failed to act when it had the opportunity.
“The end result is we have whales that are inadequately protected up and down the Atlantic coast,” Brogan said. “We have the mothers and calves that are off of Florida and Georgia and South Carolina right now. We have a group of whales that are at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. We have them up into New England, and they’re all at risk because the Biden administration didn’t follow the advice of its experts.”
There was fierce industry pushback against the rule from trade groups including the National Marine Manufacturers Association and the Passenger Vessel Association as well as harbor pilots, including those in Savannah and Brunswick. None of them were happy with the idea of slowing smaller vessels for whales, arguing it would cost too much, be dangerous at times for people and ultimately have little effect. They took their complaints to elected officials including to U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter, who was “at the front of that opposition,” Brogan said.
Carter’s spokesperson Harley Adsit did not respond to an emailed request for comment, but the congressman took a victory lap on the regulation’s demise in late January when he addressed the Passenger Vehicle Association, the national association representing the interests of the U.S. passenger vessel industry, at its national convention in Savannah.
“PVA has been very involved in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) proposed rule dealing with North Atlantic Right Whale regulations that would have devastated their industry and many others…. Fortunately, NOAA has dropped the proposal,” Carter wrote in his weekly newsletter to constituents.
Whale advocates including Brogan dispute the negative effects of the speed rule on marine industries. (The Current produced a fact check on the issue.)
“It was mostly misinformation with a dose of hyperbole, trying to to push back on this proposal that would change the way that they use the oceans,” Brogan said. “We saw one quote saying something along the lines of, ‘this is the largest land grab in the history of the United States that will close off the oceans.’ And it isn’t a land grab, and it didn’t close the oceans. It would have put requirements to operate at a safer speed on these boats, but it by no means would have closed it off to anybody.”
Back in her office after a day on the water, Thompson, who coordinates the marine mammal program at DNR, heads to her computer to upload photos of the juvenile whale to a shared database and prepare for the next day’s 7:30 a.m. start.
“As stewards of this of this coast, we really have to strive to understand the entire system,” she said. “And so, yes, these are a handful of individuals each year that come down here, but something about this ecosystem brings them here each year, and the more we know about their interactions, why they come back here, that they’re coming back here, the more we can know about other whale species as well.
“We’re watching a species go extinct, and we’re documenting it heavily, and so hopefully, we can learn enough in time and put measures in place to reverse that.”
It’s happened before with other species. She cites elephant seals, once down to fewer than 100 individuals but now thriving.
“Hopefully all of the work we do, from your readers, from local politicians to all of us working here, we can take those steps to hopefully reverse the trend that we’ve been seeing,” Thompson said.
The work is valuable whether the species survives or not, she said.
“We’re really focused on right whales because they’re critically in danger, because these are the calving grounds,” she said. “We spend a lot of time with a few individuals, but it really is about the ripple effect and understanding the greater ecosystem and then how population recovery happens.”
She’s looking for the whales’ effects on other species, and “how we can help alleviate the pressures of development on our coast, on the whole ecosystem,” she said.
The whales’ precariously low numbers means the advocacy work continues, too.
“The scientists tell us, if we kill more than two every three years from all human causes put together that the species won’t recover and they’ll fly closer to extinction,” Brogan said.
He’s not willing to just wait for a more favorable federal climate.
“If we continue at the current protections for the whales, waiting four years for better protections from vessels traffic could have devastating effects on the population. This is why we’re not waiting, and we’re going to continue to push the Trump administration to do better and give the whales protections that are better than what’s in place right now.
“We need to find the coexistence between boating and shipping and fishing that will allow those to continue and let the whales recover. And that coexistence is possible. It’s just going to take some creative thinking and some leadership at the government level, and we’re hopeful that we can find that leadership and get the protections in place in time.”
This story comes to GPB through a reporting partnership with The Current
