‘This is a whale nursery’: The Day of the Right Whale in southern Brazil

A crowd cheers from a lookout point in Florianópolis, Brazil, as a whale jumps into the air and comes crashing down. 

Felipe Mesquita and his wife watch from the side of the road. They’ve recently moved to the region, and it’s their first time seeing the whales.

“It’s marvelous. It’s so beautiful to see this in nature,” said Mesquita. “And so close. Passing right by, saying ‘hi’ to us.”

The roadside is packed with people. Their eyes scan the horizon. Many parents hold small kids in their arms, pointing out to the ocean. A line of cars stretches back several miles: whale traffic. 

“There’s five or six out there,” resident Luciana Mascarenhas said. “And they’re putting on a nice show for us today.”

Mascarenhas said the whales are also a boon for local tourism, vendors and restaurants that line this stretch of the coast.

It’s whale season. Winter in the South. During this time of the year, whales migrate from their home in the southern Arctic to Brazil and other countries throughout the Southern Hemisphere. The state of Santa Catarina is their top breeding ground. They’re even nicknamed the “giants of Santa Catarina.”

“This is a whale nursery,” said Paulo César Simões, a whale zoologist at the Santa Catarina Federal University. “They come here to have babies and nurse their young in the relatively shallow and protected waters.”

But they weren’t always protected. 

Brazil’s coast used to be big for whale hunting. A local beach called Mataderos, or “slaughterhouse,” was where fishermen would gut and carve up the whales. Whaling was prohibited in the 1980s. At the time, whales had largely disappeared from Brazilian coasts.

But they began to come back and got an extra boost in 2000 when Brazil created the Right Whale Environmental Protection Area along an 80-mile stretch of coastline. It runs through 10 municipalities and encompasses an area of 370,000 acres.

“The Right Whale Environmental Protection Area has its own ordinances,” said Eduardo Renault, field manager at the Australis Institute. The institute is the country’s top Right Whale conservation organization, located in Imbituba, about two hours south of the state capital of Florianópolis.

“It regulates things like tourism and fishing, and it has a really important role in the conservation of the whales,” Renault said, “because it allows them to have peace in the place where they reproduce.”

Renault said that roughly 400 female whales now return to breed in Brazil and that, according to his research, their numbers are rising at a rate of almost 5% a year. 

That seems like a reason to celebrate, and that is what many did on July 31 to commemorate the annual Day of the Baleia Franca, or Right Whale.

On Saturday, for this year’s festival, there were kids’ activities and music while vendors sold whale-related arts and crafts. The day remembers the successful rescue of a beached whale in Santa Catarina back in 2003. It’s been celebrated since 2018, after the same whale was once again seen in the area with her own calf.

“The Right Whale is so important ecologically,” said Ana Paula Suhr, a zoology student and Australis Institute intern. “They are so important as a carbon sink, for the food chain and for maintaining our ecosystem, and it’s so sad knowing that they are at risk of extinction.”

Brazil’s whales are better off than their northern cousins. 

There are three species of Right Whale on the planet. The other two — in the North Pacific and Atlantic oceans — are struggling with populations under 500. It’s a legacy of the whale hunt and consistent threats to their species.

These whales, in English, reportedly got their name from whalers who said they were the “right” whales to hunt because they were abundant, slow, found close to shore and floated when killed.

In Brazil, despite rebounding, the Southern Right Whale still faces danger: fishermen’s nets, run-ins with ships, noise pollution and climate change.

Field manager Eduardo Renault said some whale mothers are arriving in Brazil malnourished, which he believes is due to rising temperatures’ impact on the decreasing abundance of krill, their main food source, in the Arctic.

The future is uncertain, but those celebrating the Right Whale today say these mighty creatures are beautiful, and their story of resilience offers hope for tomorrow.