In the cold, deep waters of the Roseway Basin off of Nova Scotia, a critically endangered giant is found floating.
It’s late August, 2006, and a young, female North Atlantic right whale has been killed by a ship strike.
The 14-metre-long whale, one of only hundreds remaining in existence, is moved onto dry land where, after a necropsy takes place, its bones are brought to the New Brunswick Museum.
But its story doesn’t stop there.
This whale is one of several in the NBM’s collections that has helped shape a new scientific tool to better predict the impact of ship strikes, and hopefully, prevent other whales from meeting its same fate.
In the spring of 2025, fisheries research scientist Alexandra Mayette with the Canadian Wildlife Federation set out to update a model that measures the likelihood of a lethal ship strike—one of the leading causes of death for large whales around the world.
Mayette wanted the model to not only consider the speed of a vessel, but also its size, and the impacts on different species of whales. Think about it this way: just as a container ship and a sailboat are dramatically different sizes, whales can also vary wildly.
A minke whale for instance can reach up to approximately 10 metres in length, which might not seem small, but it’s dwarfed by the blue whale, which is the largest animal known to have ever lived on the planet at more than 30 metres.
But to include whale size into the updated vessel strike simulation, Mayette needed data on bone and blubber thickness, which is where the New Brunswick Museum comes in.
The NBM has the second largest collection of whale specimens in Canada, representing 26 different species—including exceedingly rare species like the Cuvier’s beaked whale. Specimens from bone to baleen to tissue are carefully prepared and preserved, allowing scientists to use them for research and conservation for generations after the animal has died.
For this project, Mayette measured the vertebrae of a sei whale (Balaenoptera borealis), sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus), humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae), North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis), minke whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata), and fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus) at the New Brunswick Museum to help the model account for different species.
Measurements of blubber thickness from these species were also obtained for the study using records available within the NBM’s online data portal, Biodiverse NB.
Other organizations helping Mayette fill in the blanks on whale measurements were Cascadia Research, Dalhousie University, Falklands Conservation, Fisheries and Oceans Canada – Newfoundland Region, International Fund for Animal Welfare, Marine Animal Response Society, and the Mingan Island Cetacean Study.
The result of this research is an updated tool for scientists and conservationists, available as a package called “whalestrike” in the statistical software program R. This can be used to help identify high-risk areas, inform conservation and management measures and protect populations of large whales both today and into the future. To learn more about this tool, you can check out the press release from the CWF here, and you can read the recently published scientific paper, “A regression-based method to estimate vessel mass for use in whale-ship strike risk models” in which Mayette is the lead author here.
