The North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) is an endangered baleen whale that primarily occupies coastal and shelf waters of the western North Atlantic Ocean, and has a population size of around 380 individuals (Linden, 2025). In these urban waters, North Atlantic right whales are especially at risk for collisions with vessels and entanglement in fishing gear (Moore et al., 2021). Their distribution has been shifting in recent years (Davis et al., 2017), and improved knowledge of the full extent of their calving grounds and location of their migration route is needed to minimize interactions with human activities. Long-term moored passive acoustic monitoring is an efficient and effective tool for monitoring rare whale presence to understand distribution and occurrence patterns.
Pegg et al. (2026) studied this question.