The North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) is the most endangered large whale in the oceans today. Fewer than 350 are left in their breeding and feeding grounds, which extend from Nova Scotia to the Gulf of Mexico. Survivors of hundreds of years of commercial exploitation, the right whales we see in the ocean today are barometers for the plight of whales in the 21st century.

For over 900 years, beginning about a.d. 1000, whalers from Europe and the Americas hunted North Atlantic right whales almost out of existence. By 1935, when they were at last given international protection as an endangered species, some scientists suspected that there were fewer than 100 right whales left in the North Atlantic Ocean.

Most thought the right whale was doomed to extinction.