Johnson, HD (2018). Whalemap. Full interactive map available at https://whalemap.ocean.dal.ca.
• North Atlantic right whales are the third largest whale in world, after blue and fin whales. They grow up to 18 metres long and weigh up to 70 tonnes.
• Despite their large size, they eat one of the smallest sea creatures, called copepods – a tiny zooplankton. They gorge on thousands of copepods in a single mouthful, eating about 100 million per day.
• Right whales are filter feeders and strain food through hundreds of plates of baleen that can reach three metres in length.
• They are called “right whales” because they are often found near shore, swim slowly and tend to float when killed, which made them the “right” whale to hunt during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
• They are black with some white on their undersides and can be distinguished by white patches on their heads called callosities. Callosities can be used to identify individual whales.
• Calves nurse for the first one to two years of their lives and remain close to their mothers until around age 10. They can live to be up to 70 years old
• Their habitat and migration routes span from summer feeding grounds in Eastern Canada and New England to winter calving grounds off the southeastern U.S.
