North pacific right whale surveys conducted in the Bering Sea and North Pacific Ocean by Alaska Fisheries Science Center, National Marine Mammal Laboratory from 2007-08-01 to 2011-09-10 (NCEI Accession 0133935)
The North Pacific right whale (NPRW) was heavily hunted between the 17th and the 20th centuries. Protection was supposedly afforded by international treaties in the 1930s and 1940s, but the illegal capture of hundreds of individuals by the Soviet Union, primarily in the 1960s drastically impacted the recovery of the …