How ‘scientist’ whales are helping uncover the secrets of climate change

Southern right whales are thriving again. Now they face an even bigger threat – the Anthropocene era.

I arrive in Hermanus, a picturesque South African coastal village an hour-and-a-half from Cape Town, at about 11am on a sunny October morning. Ignoring the restaurants and art galleries on the main drag and the throngs of tourists watching southern right whales from the cliff path, I drive straight to the harbour to meet Els Vermeulen, the Belgium-born scientist who heads up the whale unit for the University of Pretoria’s Mammal Research Institute.

She is waiting for her colleagues to return from the last whale-tagging sortie of the 2024 season. “I would normally be out on the boat with the team,” says Vermeulen, who is dressed in a bold geometric print dress and a denim jacket. “But I had to drop my kids at school and couldn’t get down here early enough.” The water next to the concrete pier is so clear that I can see a giant orange starfish inching its way along the rocky seabed.

While we wait for the tagging team to arrive, one boatload of whale-watching tourists departs the harbour and another returns. Hermanus, which is an important calving ground for southern right whales, and a good place to spot humpback and Bryde’s whales too, markets itself as the “land-based whale watching capital of the world”. It even has its own “whale crier” who uses a horn fashioned from kelp to announce sightings.

It wasn’t always this way: In the 1910s and 1920s, three separate whaling stations in the area killed hundreds of whales every year. By 1937, more than 80,000 southern right whales had been killed globally and the species teetered on the brink of extinction. In the second half of the 20th century, the focus turned to conservation, and the whales gradually made a comeback.

The southern right whale’s recovery – there are approximately 20,000 individuals today – is one of the world’s great conservation success stories. The two Northern Hemisphere right whale species have not been nearly as lucky, mainly because they live in a much busier ocean. Deaths from ship strikes and getting entangled in fishing gear have thwarted their recovery since the whaling ban, and both species remain Critically Endangered.