Unmanned gliders will soon scour the waters off Canada’s Atlantic coast to try to find out where the North American right whales have gone. The 60-tonne mammals are among the world’s most endangered marine mammals.
The population has gone up from 300 in the 1990s to about 500 more recently, possibly because of efforts to have ships avoid the areas the whales frequent. Right whales often travel into Canada’s Bay of Fundy in summer to feed, as well as the Rosewater Basin off the coast of the province of Nova Scotia.
Ship strikes, nets are big dangers
But numbers were down last summer and Canadian and U.S. scientists have decided to deploy the gliders to try to locate them.
The ultimate goal is to try to protect the whales from ship strikes and entanglement in fishing nets.
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