‘Distribution of southern right whales on the Auckland Islands calving grounds’ from New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research, Vol. 46, no. 3

September, 2012

Onlline

New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research

The southern right whale (Eubalaena australis) population around New Zealand was almost annihilated during the commercial whaling boom of the 18th and 19th centuries. Numbers are slowly increasing and there are now about 2000 in New Zealand waters. In the winter of 2011, the Marine Science Department of the University of Otago visited the Auckland Islands, aboard RV Polaris II, to conduct ‘the first systematic line-transect survey of potential right whale calving habitat’ (Rayment, et al., 2012). This article is the culmination of the research conducted.