"Move over Moby Dick. Big Mama, the first humpback whale to have returned to the North Pacific's Salish Sea after decades of absence, is telling a new story about the global threat to whale populations."
"By the start of the 20th Century, humpback whales had virtually vanished from the Salish Sea, a marginal body of the Pacific Ocean that spans the US-Canada border. The industrialised hunting of cetaceans had led global humpback populations to fall precipitously, and the North Pacific was no exception: fewer than 1,000 humpbacks were left in 1986 – down from 15 times that amount a hundred years before.
The tides turned for Salish Sea whales in 1997 when a single humpback showed up in British Columbia's waters. Known as Big Mama, the fertile matriarch would go on to become the first regularly returning humpback spotted in the region in over nine decades.
Big Mama's homecoming is not an isolated case. Thanks to global efforts – including an international ban on commercial whaling, as well as national interventions, such as the United States' bipartisan Endangered Species Conservation Act – humpback whale populations have made a resounding global recovery. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has even moved the species to a status of "Least Concern", unlike some other large whales and most small coastal and freshwater cetaceans that remain endangered. Whether humpbacks can maintain this recovery, however, is another question."
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