Often when we hear of a new species, it’s something petite, fast-moving…easy to miss as it scurries across the forest floor or hides out in caves. A tiny gecko in Madagascar, a tropical sunbird in Indonesia, deep-sea octopuses off the shores of Costa Rica.
But every once in a while, that new species might in fact be a giant in our midst—one that weighs as much as four T. rexes and lives in our literal backyard.
Indeed, it was just three years ago when scientists confirmed that the Gulf of Mexico served as a full-time home for a unique species of whale: the Rice’s whale. They quickly assessed that the population was in trouble: According to estimates, merely 51 of these under-the-radar (and very demure) marine mammals remained.
The unusual finding bolstered the case of marine mammal advocates from NRDC and other groups who’d been asking the federal government to protect the population for close to a decade. In 2014, NRDC petitioned the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to list the whale as endangered—protections were finally granted in 2019—but the Gulf has remained an exceedingly dangerous place for sea life.
Now, the fight to save what’s left of the Rice’s whale population has entered a new, and increasingly urgent, phase. And an upcoming decision from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on a critical habitat designation could be a game changer.
How the Rice’s whale hid in plain sight
The existence of a Gulf of Mexico whale was not unknown to scientists. But their categorization of the creature was misunderstood.
You see, it was once thought that this group of whales belonged to another species, known as Bryde’s whales (pronounced “broodus”). “For all intents and purposes, they look very similar,” says Matthew Leslie, a biologist at Ursinus College outside of Philadelphia. “But once we dug down into the genetics, they started to look really different.”
So far as scientists can tell, Rice’s whales (Balaenoptera ricei) swam into the Gulf of Mexico about three million years ago, when the land bridge between North and South America had not yet fully formed. After that barrier closed the passage, however, the whales seem to simply have stayed put, feasting on small fish and squid. As the only baleen whales living in the region year-round, they had the ocean’s bounty mainly to themselves.
The trouble is that this gigantic warm water basin is now a very different place than the one these animals evolved to live in. Logbooks from whaling vessels suggest that this species may have been hunted historically, perhaps as early as the 1700s. But it’s modern times that have pushed the species to the brink of extinction.
These days, Rice’s whales must contend with a daily onslaught of noise that the industry produces as it searches for the next big fossil fuel deposit. There is also a nonstop parade of vessels, which sometimes slice across the whales’ backs as they rest at the surface. Heavy levels of pollution remain an ever-present risk, as do the threats that come with small population sizes and reduced genetic diversity.
But advocates believe these whales still have a shot. “Firstly, we know what the threats are,” says Leslie. “And I would say the second source of hope is the fact that we’ve got really great examples where, if we address the issues and modify human behavior to leave these animals alone and let them do what they do, we’ve seen many examples of whales not only surviving but recovering.”
