Wear your mother and calf right whale t-shirt or sweatshirt, the color and fabric of your choosing, with pride.

A gam of eleven mother right whales gave birth to calves this winter (2024-2025). Congratulations to Platypus (age 21 years) with her second calf, Cashew (age 23) with her third calf, Accordion (at least 14 years old) with her first calf, Check Mark (age 18) with her first calf, Grand Teton (at least 44) with her ninth calf, Black Heart with her second calf, Caterpillar (age 20) with her first calf, Minus One (at least 31 years old) with calf, Nauset (age 31) with calf, and No. 4540, a first-time whale mother.   

Right whales gave birth to their young off the coast of Savannah, Georgia. The calves were born without blubber. Mother and calf must swim to New England?s sandy shoaling waters around Cape Cod to fatten up on a diet of copepods and zooplankton.

These waters, which whales depend on, are suffering from excess stormwater carrying pollutants and heat into the sea. As a result, phytoplankton, small floating plants, are 60% less productive, and copepods have fewer calories, causing whales to eat more to get the same nutritional value.

The Ocean River Institute is organizing people and advancing best practices to restore vegetation and soils in our neighborhoods, building more carbon sponges to hold water, reduce stormwater runoff, and improve ocean ecosystems with less pollution, fewer harmful algal blooms, and fewer ocean dead zones.

We have crossed a tipping point. As vegetation and soil continue to be lost and replaced by hardscapes and heat islands, moisture-laden air from off the ocean warms, expands, and rises. Hot air is thirsty and has drawn more than a Lake Huron-sized volume of water from the world?s soils. The atmosphere retains more heat energy as air temperatures rise. Researchers have found that the global temperature increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius is 10% due to rising carbon dioxide and 80% due to increasing water vapor in the atmosphere.  

With increasing humidity intensifying storms and causing more destructive stormwater runoff due to the diminished natural sponge effect of vegetation and soils, Arctic whaling captain William Scoresby's observations remain as relevant today as they were in 1820 when he wrote: ?changes of climate to a certain extent, have occurred, within the limits of historical record; these changes have been... considered as the effects of human industry, in draining marshes and lakes, felling woods, and cultivating the earth.?

We are collaborating with the city of Attleboro, MA, to plant a 2,000-square-foot Miyawaki forest in an old ball field in Capron Park, adjacent to the High School. Planting 35 different native wood plant species from all successional stages creates a biodiverse forest with a massive mycorrhizal network that will grow at ten times the rate of a single stand of trees, resulting in more vegetation and soils that retain stormwater.