The North Atlantic right whale is one of the most endangered whales in the world. Approximately 300 individuals remain. In the past decade, birth rates have declined steeply for unknown reasons, and death rates have increased due to entanglement in fishing nets and perhaps propeller injuries from large ships. We are addressing these problems by monitoring stress and reproductive hormones in whale feces, working in collaboration with Rosalind Rolland and Scott Kraus of the New England Aquarium.

We now have the first pregnancy test ever developed for free-living baleen whales. Fecal progesterone and estrogen are thousands of times greater in pregnant than in non-pregnant females. This new method will help us determine why birth rates have declined in this species. We have also developed the first test ever for age of sexual maturity in baleen whales, solving a long-standing puzzle of whale biology. In both sexes, mature whales have significantly higher levels of reproductive fecal hormones (estrogen, progesterone, testosterone) than immature whales. These data have shown that right whales reach sexual maturity four years later than previously assumed. Such information is critical to developing more effective population models in this and other species. Recent stressful events are being monitored using fecal stress hormones (glucocorticoids). The high glucocorticoid levels in feces of a whale that became fatally entangled in a fishing line in 2001 illustrates this approach. As can be seen below, stress hormones are also affected by gender and reproductive state. We are employing these fecal hormone methods, while also developing noninvasive genetic tools for sex determination using fecal DNA in this species. Most recently, we trained detection dogs to locate right whale scat from the bow of a small boat. Dogs detected samples up to a nautical mile from the source, and located 3-5 times the number of samples per unit effort than were collected by human observers. These combined tools are being used to help identify the timing and cause(s) of reproductive failure and mortality in this species, and hopefully will lead to potential solutions.