Whale Breath

Sniffing a whale’s breath doesn’t sound all that appealing. But a recent study suggested that a good sniff could help scientists analyze a whale’s health.

The study looked at North Atlantic right whales—among the most endangered of all whales. In fact, they’re called “right” whales because they were just right for whalers: they’re slow, they stay close to shore, and they have a lot of blubber, so they float after they’re killed and they yield a lot of oil. By the early 1900s, they’d been hunted to near extinction; the population might have dropped to just a hundred or so.

Today, the population has rebounded to about four hundred. Scientists are trying to find ways to protect those whales and help the species grow. One way to do that is to keep a close eye on the health of the whales. And that’s what the study was all about.

Scientists watched whales in Cape Cod Bay, in Massachusetts, during the spring foraging seasons from 2016 to 2024. Drones carrying petri dishes hovered above the whales’ blow holes. When a whale exhaled, the drone snagged a sample. Scientists then analyzed the microbes in the whale’s breath. They compared those samples to other measures of the whale’s health.            

They found that healthier whales had higher levels of helpful bacteria in their breath. Less-healthy whales had higher levels of nasty bacteria. The study suggests that it might be possible to measure the health of a right whale just by sniffing its breath.