Researchers are on a summer mission to learn more about right whales in the Gulf of Maine

As the 100-foot long whale watch vessel, "Acadia Explorer," idles at the dock in Bar Harbor on this day in late July, passenger Sarah Leiter with the Maine Department of Marine Resources opens her laptop.

"This is the game plan for the next two days," she said, pointing to a map of the Gulf of Maine marked with a series of red dots arranged in a grid-like pattern.

They show the locations of 26 passive acoustic monitors listening for North Atlantic right whales about 30 feet underwater.

On this trip, Leiter's team will swap out some of the units that need new batteries — and will conduct visual surveillance for whales. They'll travel at 10 knots along a predetermined path that zigs and zags in and offshore, stopping first at a point just southwest of Swan's Island.

"Then along the coastline off of MDI, past Mount Dessert Rock over to site 6, and then we kind of create the same pattern following a U, until we get to the last visual waypoint, and then we end up back in Bar Harbor," Leiter said.

Along the way, the crew scans the water almost constantly, looking for signs of marine life.

So far this year they've seen humpback, fin and minke whales. But no right whales.

"All data is equally useful data, so those zeros are just as important as finding a pile of right whales," said Erin Summers, who leads the new marine mammal research division for the Department of Marine Resources.

Trips like these in the Gulf of Maine were once more common. Every spring, North Atlantic right whales were once known to migrate northward from their calving grounds off the southeastern United States to feed in the Gulf of Maine. But that all started to change 15 years ago when the endangered whales were seen in the Gulf less frequently, and researchers shifted their focus to the areas where larger aggregations were known to be in Cape Cod Bay and the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

The Gulf of Maine has lacked consistent survey effort since then. This summer, the Maine Department of Marine Resources is launching its own research program, an initiative that includes the acoustic monitoring, these boat surveys and now monthly flights over the Gulf of Maine to search for right whales. Eventually, researchers will also monitor and sample for copepods, a type of zooplankton, that serve as a critical food source for right whales.

The program received an initial $17 million in federal funds from Congress back in 2022. The funds were included in a federal budget bill that also provided a regulatory pause to the lobster fishery, a last-minute measure that the Maine congressional championed.

Summers said the data that are collected will be used to tell — what DMR officials and the fishing industry hope — will be a more accurate story of when the whales are moving and where they are in relation to Maine's lobster fishery. That information, along with new harvesting data from lobstermen, will also play in role in developing models that the federal government will use in coming years to eventually write new regulations that are intended to reduce risks to right whales.

And if lobstermen are forced to take steps to prevent entanglements with their fishing gear, Summers said they should have confidence that their efforts will actually make a difference in preserving the right whale population.

"We want to foster that buy-in and have them have some confidence in the information that's being used that affects their daily lives, their income, their culture, their economic efficiency, all of that," she said.

Patrice McCarron, acting chief operating officer of the Maine Lobstermen's Association, said the state's research will fill an information void that has persisted since right whale survey efforts dwindled.

"To have more information about how far offshore they are, what numbers of whales we may or may not be seeing, and how many are randomly coming through closer to shore," she said. Is it one, or five, or 10? Or, is it 50?"

And though state researchers have yet to see a right whale firsthand during this new initiative, the network of passive acoustic monitors placed in the Gulf of Maine has picked up several right whale vocalizations during each time of the year.

A right whale sighting here and there is to be expected, McCarron said. But she believes the data will ultimately show what fishermen already believe to be true.

"I think it’s the hope of most Maine lobstermen that it’s going to document what their knowledge about the ocean and right whales tells them, that right whales are very rare."

So rare, in fact, that many seasoned lobstermen say they've never seen one in Maine waters.

Researchers say that claim is not surprising, as most lobster fishing boats are too close to the water to provide a view of the whales, which feed about four feet below the surface.

It's also often difficult to spot right whales in the ocean, even when you're looking for them, said Orla O'Brien, who leads aerial surveys for the New England Aquarium.

The aquarium has added new surveillance flights over the Gulf of Maine this summer, and earlier this month, O'Brien spotted a right whale named Butterfly nursing her calf about 15 miles southeast of Jonesport.

"We’re covering a huge area; Maine is gigantic," she said. "So seeing the mom-calf pair is kind of an indication that that's one sighting. It probably means there might be other sightings out there that we don't catch."

Having more eyes on the Gulf of Maine, however, will help. And O'Brien said the additional information coming from the state of Maine should help scientists better monitor the species and track their behavior through changing environmental conditions.

But the data gathered in the coming months will provide a more accurate picture of what's really happening in the Gulf of Maine, Leiter said.

"The research will tell us. We're out here to figure this out, where they are and when," she said. "And we know we've had occasional single animals visiting the Gulf of Maine at really odd times, and this will help us kind of suss some of that out and figure out what is going on. It's the truth, and that's what we're interested in."

DMR officials acknowledge their time is relatively limited. While Congress paused federal restrictions on the lobster fishery through 2028, the National Marine Fisheries Service has said it wants to restart discussions next fall about a new set of rules to protect right whales from entanglement.

This story is a production of the New England News Collaborative. It was originally published by Maine Public.