An aerial survey team from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission sighted North Atlantic right whale Derecha (Catalog #2360) with her fourth calf off the coast of Georgia on January 8.
Her calf is the fourth documented calf of the the 2019-2020 calving season. Sadly, the calf has some deep cuts on its head caused by a propeller, and its fate is unknown.
While we wait for more information about this young calf, let me tell you a bit about its extraordinary mother.
Derecha gets her name from Spanish word for right because all her callosity patches are on the right side. We don’t know when she was born, but she was first seen off the Florida coast in 1993 and wasn’t documented again until in 1998. However, through 2010 she was seen regularly in the Bay of Fundy but never in Cape Cod Bay.
In 2011, that pattern reversed. She has not been seen in the Bay of Fundy since 2010 and has been seen in Cape Cod Bay every year since 2011. Many right whales shifted their feeding habitats starting in 2010 or 2011 in response to climate change. Most stopped feeding in the Bay of Fundy and started feeding in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Derecha, true to form, is doing it her way and has never been seen in the gulf. While she still feeds in Cape Cod Bay and surrounding waters in the spring, her summer and fall feeding habitats remain unknown.
The birth of each of her three previous calves are interesting stories as well. In 2004, Derecha took her first calf, named Havana, into the Gulf of Mexico, where very few right whales are sighted. Additionally, the pair were there in early April, when most mothers and calves have already migrated north. Did Derecha’s mother take her into the gulf as a calf? We will never know.
She gave birth to her second calf in May 2007 off the Massachusetts coast. There has only been one other clearly documented birth in the north as calves are usually born off the southeastern U.S. coast. Her timing was again asynchronous. Most calves are born from December through March; her calving is the latest known calving.
Given her April sighting in the Gulf of Mexico with her first calf and her late calving in 2007, it appears Derecha has a different seasonal clock than most right whales. She also took her 2007 calf to Florida in July. Right whales are thought to be heat intolerant. One possible explanation for this journey was that if her calf was female, Derecha needed to show her where to go to give birth to her calves if she ever became pregnant. We don’t know if that rationale is true, but we eventually learned that the calf is indeed female.
There is yet a fourth unique aspect of this second calving. The calf has patches of callosity, or callosity-like tissue, on her back (all other right whales have it only on their head); thus she was given the cumbersome but accurate name Callosity Back by field teams, which then became her Catalog name.
In 2010, Derecha gave birth to her third calf, Equinox, far from shore in the southeast U.S. An aerial team documented the birth, and it is only the second North Atlantic birth ever witnessed.
The story of this fourth calf has yet to be told, but will already go down in the history books as the youngest right whale to be hit by a boat. Derecha does not appear to have been injured in the incident, so regardless of this calf’s fate, we hope Derecha will continue to swim to the beat of her own drummer for many years to come.