Tell Congress to protect America’s whale-monitoring programs!

The North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) is a critically endangered species of cetacean, devastated by whaling for centuries and declining in the 2010s due to ship strikes and fishing gear entanglement as they migrate through the high-traffic sea lanes crisscrossing its U.S. East Coast habitat.

But a new report finds that things are beginning to look up for them in 2025. There were an estimated 384 individual North Atlantic right whales in the world in 2024, up from 376 in 2023 and up by 7% from 2020. Four mother whales recently had their first calves. And 2025 is the first year since records began in 2017 that there were zero recorded North Atlantic right whale deaths due to ship strikes or fishing gear!

Whale population recovery has widespread benefits for the ocean ecosystem. Whales fertilize ocean waters with their plumes of iron-rich feces, which both allows blooms of food web-supporting phytoplankton to grow and sequesters lots of carbon.

However, right whales’ progress may be under threat, as the current administration just unexpectedly defunded two major U.S. whale monitoring efforts. In September 2025, the Interior Department was a federally supported New England Aquarium research program that has been surveying Eastern Seaboard whales from the air for 14 years, providing vital early warning of vessel strikes and rope entanglements. Next, they shut down the POWERON program, where offshore wind farms pay the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to deploy a network of undersea listening devices monitoring whale activity to ensure safe coexistence. For both the aerial surveys and POWERON, the funding was cancelled secretively without any public announcement, leaving researchers stranded. The hypocrisy is particularly notable given that this administration repeatedly makes false claims attacking offshore wind farms as dangerous to wildlife (when in fact they provide new “artificial reef” habitat) but now defunds programs meant to ensure that offshore wind farms do not disturb whales. Ongoing attacks on NASA’s budget for earth-sensing satellites also imperils research that has been successfully tracking swarms of copepod zooplankton, a key food source for right whales, and thus identifying feeding hotspots for ships to avoid.

Congress should act to restore funding to America’s whale-monitoring research programs, sustain NASA’s earth-sciences budget, and restrain capricious federal attacks on the nation’s scientific infrastructure!

Tell Congress to protect America’s whale-monitoring programs!