2 percent of endangered North Atlantic right whales died this summer: report

Two percent of all North Atlantic right whales, an endangered marine mammal, died this summer, The Washington Post reported Thursday.

Eight have been found dead in Canadian waters in the last four months alone, alarming scientists since there are only roughly 400 of the whales left.

{mosads}“It’s a horrifying step toward extinction,” Regina Asmutis-Silvia, the executive director of Whale and Dolphin Conservation USA, told the Post. “They’re a quiet, understated superhero, and we’re losing them.”

Investigations into the causes of death are still in progress, but early results toward the whales being struck by ships.

Half of the eight North Atlantic right whales to die this summer were breeding females, of which there are believed to be less than 100.

“This is currently very clearly not sustainable,” Philip Hamilton, a research scientist at the New England Aquarium in Boston, told the Post.

“At this rate, in 20 years, we’re going to have no more breeding females, and the population will be effectively extinct.”

The whale species was on the brink of extinction a hundred years ago, but began to repopulate when the League of Nations made hunting them illegal in 1935.

That upward trend reversed in 2010.

Researchers found that 88 percent of deaths for which a cause was determined in the last 15 years were the result of either vessel strikes or entanglement, according to the Post.

Scientists connect those deaths to climate change — they believe that as feeding habitats have warmed, the whales’s food supply has moved north.

“The whales are showing up in areas that we had not seen them previously,” Jonathan Wilkinson, Canada’s fisheries minister, told the Post. “It’s more difficult [to address the issue] when the whales are moving.”