A University of Otago-led expedition leaves Dunedin for the Auckland Islands today hoping to learn how to create the ideal conditions to encourage the return of the leviathans to our waters.
"Our overall goal is to once again see large numbers of these whales around our coast, as there used to be," expedition leader and the university's department of marine science research fellow Dr Will Rayment said on Friday.
"That's what it would have been like. Otago Harbour would have been full of them.
"They used to be a big feature in Otago. They'd come inshore in winter time looking for sheltered waters for calving.
"They would have been having calves all around Otago.
"But shore-based small boats went hunting them and they were easy prey, because they came very close inshore and were slow swimmers.
"They got wiped out very quickly by shore whaling. They were very valuable for their oil and their baleen plates, which were used to make corsets."
The whales were hunted to the brink of extinction in the nineteenth century and only began to be seen again in New Zealand waters from the mid-1960s.
"There were no sightings around the mainland between 1928 and 1965.
"They were completely wiped out and reduced to the subantarctic and remote locations around Fiordland," Dr Rayment said.
"But, in the last five years, they're starting to come back again.
"Conservation is so often reactive, but we're trying to be proactive and look at the areas they prefer and what we can do for them.
"We want to mitigate any impacts before they occur.
"We will use data on whale distribution at the Auckland Islands to predict areas of mainland New Zealand that are likely to be recolonised by these whales in the future.
"This will enable us to identify the areas where distribution of whales might overlap with potentially harmful human activities and to proactively prevent conservation issues before they occur," he said.
"We are also going to record the sounds right whales make, which hasn't been done before in New Zealand."
An estimated 10,000 southern right whales live in the southern part of the southern hemisphere.
An adult female can reach 18.5m in length and weigh up to 80 tonnes.
The three-year project involves 11 scientists and staff from the University of Otago, Department of Conservation, Otago Museum and Massey University.
The group will also study for the first time the winter diet of the critically endangered New Zealand sea lion and gather samples from dead sea birds and marine mammals to research hydrocarbon levels in New Zealand coastal and marine wildlife.
The expedition leaves Careys Bay for Port Ross at noon today and returns to Dunedin on August 18.
