Endangered Right Whales on the Southeastern Bering Sea Shelf

摘要

The eastern North Pacific right whale (Euba- laena japonica Gray) was nearly extirpated by whaling by the 1960s. Today it is the most endangered population of large whale (1). Their historical summer distribution included the Gulf of Alaska and the southeastern Bering Sea, and that of the endangered western Norht Pacific population included waters east of Kamchatka, the Okhotsk Sea, and the Sea of Jpan (2). During the intensive whaling era of the 1940s to 1960s, right whales in the southeastern Bering Sea concentrated in deep (>200 m) waters north Of Unalaska Island, where they fed on the oce- Anic copepod Neocalanus cristatus (2).