A critically endangered North Atlantic right whale has been spotted off the coast of Ireland for the first time in more than a century.
Holidaymaker Adrian Maguire, from County Tyrone in Northern Ireland, glimpsed the large, dark body of the whale on the surface of the water while out fishing for mackerel.
“I just looked in amazement at the size of it,” said Maguire. “I’ve never experienced that in my life.” He described how he let his boat drift while he, his wife and two friends watched the whale for about an hour in McSwynes bay, County Donegal, off the north-west coast of Ireland.
“The sound of the blowing – it’s great to hear that in real life,” said Maguire.
It is the first sighting of a North Atlantic right whale off Ireland in 114 years, said Conor Ryan, honorary research fellow at the Scottish Association for Marine Science.
“I was very sceptical at first because it’s such an unbelievable occurrence,” he said. North Atlantic right whales are exceptionally rare – there are fewer than 400 left. The mammals, which can grow up to 16 metres in length, are usually found on the other side of the Atlantic, off the east coast of North America. Centuries ago they were common in Europe but their population there collapsed due to whaling.
Ryan and colleagues initially pored over pictures of the whale from Maguire and his companions, unsure of the species. But when they saw video footage that showed the animal’s large, crusty white markings – callosities, or skin damaged by whale lice – they knew what they were looking at.
“There’s no other whale in the North Atlantic with that,” explained Ryan, who has studied records of North Atlantic right whale sightings in Europe. Such events are extremely rare, he added, noting that the species appeared off Tromsø in Norway in the late 1990s and also off the Azores in the early 2000s.
The new Irish observation was “wonderful”, said Pádraig Whooley, sightings officer at the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group (IWDG). His organisation has contacted the New England Aquarium, which keeps a catalogue of known North Atlantic right whale individuals. He said the aquarium was hoping to identify which whale was observed off Donegal by studying footage of its markings. “They are working on it,” said Whooley.
The IWDG has urged anyone who encounters the whale to “please give it space”.
In recent years, dozens of North Atlantic right whales have been lost to ship strikes and deadly entanglements with commercial fishing gear. The rate of these deaths, which are often reported off the east coasts of the US and Canada, is currently too high for the animals to make a recovery and, as such, their numbers have continued to decline, said Ryan.
While he didn’t expect North Atlantic right whales to “make a comeback” in the waters off Ireland any time soon, Ryan added that the sighting was, nonetheless, “a glimmer of hope”.