Franca Whale Austral

GENERAL INFORMATION

The Southern Right Whale is a marine mammal, it has a 15 meters length. The females are bigger than the males. It has a mouth with “cornea beards”. With the “cornea beards” the right whale filters the water, retaining the little organism that it eats. Southern Right whales are skimmers, filter feeders that swim slowly with their mouth open, constantly eating. On occasion, they are also bottom feeders, eating benthic prey from the mud on the ocean floor.
The fine baleen hairs can filter out very tiny prey including copepods, steropods, euphasiids and mysids (tiny crustaceans).The Southern Right Whales are baleen whales with bow-shaped lower jaw and a head that is up to one-quarter of the body length. The head is hairier than most whales; up to 300 hairs are found on the tip of the lower jaw and 100 are on the upper jaw. There are also callosities (a series of horny growths) behind the blowhole, on the chin, above the eyes, on the lower lip, and on the rostrum (the beak-like upper jaw).Nowadays, this specie has more than 1.800 different individuals, which have inhabited the Peninsula de Valdés.
Every year, in the autumn ending, arrives to the Pensinsula de Valdés (San José gulf and Nuevo gulf) a big community of Southern Right Whales. In this period, that community is looking for not much deep water to give birth to the litters . Between October and December, the right whale gives up the “litter zone”, and moves to its feeding summer areas. This areas are located in deep ocean waters. The main food of the right whale is the “krill”.

NATURAL HISTORY

In April, between 450 and 600 right whales arrive to the Nuevo gulf and San José gulf, in the Peninsula de Valdés. The right whales stay there during the winter and the spring. This place is one of the reproduction areas, due its quite waters.
The right whale gestation period is about 12 months and the calf is born tail first (this is normal for cetaceans) and near the surface. The newborn instinctively swims to the surface within 10 seconds for its first breath; it is helped by its mother, using her flippers. Within 30 minutes of its birth the baby whale can swim. The newborn calf is about 16-19 feet (4.8-6 m) long. Twins are rare; there is usually one calf. The baby is nurtured with its mother's milk and is weaned in about 1 year when the calf is roughly 28 feet long. Between July and October are born 200 whales.

CONSEVATION

Due its low swimming and the fact that the Southern Right Whale floats when it dies, the right whale is one of the species that suffered the most important commercial pressure between the 17 th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Right whales were named by whalers who considered them the "right" whales to hunt, since they were rich in blubber, they were easy to catch (they are relatively slow swimmers) and they floated after being killed.The Southern Right whales are vulnerable. They are being killed for their blubber. Man has been killing whales from the beginning of history. The Eskimos were one of the first people to hunt whales. By 1788 the British, French and American ships were hunting the Southern Right whales off the South African coast. Between 1790 and 1825 12000 Southern Right whales were estimated to have been killed.N owadays, the right whale is protected by different legislations. This specie is protected by the International Whaling Committee -that bans its hunting-, and the International Threatened Flora and Fauna Species Convention –that bans any commercial action with the right whale-.
The Bonn Convention includes this specie in its appendix about migratory threatened species, and the International Conservation of Nature Union includes the right whale in its Red Book. In Argentine Republic, the right whale has absolute protection since 1984, when the specie was declared Natural Monument by the law number 23.094. This law is open to the provinces adhesion. The Chubut province has signed different local legislations to protect the right whale.