THE WHALE WAS SO BIG, that it took until the middle of the night, and nine hours of manoeuvring, before the industrial excavator could drag her body from the ocean shallows onto the flat beach of Grand Étang, N.S., a rope tied to her tail.
By dawn, a team of wildlife pathologists and volunteers had gathered, in anger and shock, to begin the greasy, smelly, meticulous process of figuring out exactly how she died. Anger because this was a North Atlantic right whale, a species so critically endangered that as few as 200 adults may remain on Earth. Anger, too, because she was the second to die by that point in June 2019, the start of what was to be an extraordinarily grim summer of right whale deaths.
Shock because, by then, they all knew exactly which whale she was: Punctuation, a splendid female that scientists were counting on to help keep the species alive. One of the most productive females in modern decades, she had already given birth to eight calves and was the grandmother of two more. Now just middle-aged, she could have mothered perhaps a dozen more. When she died, those potential calves died along with her.
There was also a personal sense of loss for many on the Nova Scotia beach that morning. They knew Punctuation, so named because of several small scars on her head that looked like dashes and commas. They had been watching her frolic along North America’s eastern coast for 38 years, cataloguing her offspring, marvelling as she continued to survive despite being entangled five times in fishing gear and hit twice by ships. They were rooting for her.
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