First, Kate Laemmle saw a recognizable tall, thin blow erupt out of the glassy Atlantic Ocean on a July 24 aerial survey. To see the exhale of an endangered fin whale was cool enough, the scientist thought.
Then, a little head popped up.
“Oh my gosh, that’s amazing,” Laemmle, an assistant research scientist at the New England Aquarium, said she exclaimed to her three team members from the aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life.
The endangered fin whale and its calf is a rare sight for the researchers, Laemmle said. There is still a lot scientists don’t know about the whales, like the length of time calves spend with their mothers and their social and mating systems, she said.
“It was really, really special to see a mom and calf pair,” Laemmle said in an interview on Wednesday. “I’ve been in the whale world for a long time, and I can count on one hand, the number of times we’ve seen a fin whale mom and calf.”
The researchers were about 130 miles southeast of Cape Cod when they spotted the pair at the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, the only U.S. marine monument in the Atlantic Ocean. Created in 2016, the Monument is a protected habitat with four underwater mountains and three deep-sea canyons, the New England Aquarium said in a press release on Wednesday.
Heavy hunting of the whales in the 1900s killed over 700,000 fin whales, according to Laemmle, and while they have “bounced back” since the late 1900s, ship strikes, climate change, and entanglements keep them on the endangered species list. The whales, which reach up to 75 feet in the northern hemisphere, are also “very fast” in the water traveling up to 30 miles an hour, Laemmle said, which makes them difficult to spot.
The aerial survey in July was one of only four the team does each year, and every one in the plane except for Laemmle had never seen a fin whale mother and calf pair before, she said.
“It was just, honestly, really cute,” Laemmle said, pointing out that the calf looked like it was nursing.
The fun didn’t end there.
Along with the whale, Laemmle and the team spotted more than 1,000 marine animals, including seven endangered fin whales, one endangered sperm whale, one humpback whale, two minke whales, 781 common dolphins, 108 Risso’s dolphins, 55 pilot whales, 30 bottlenose dolphins, 20 striped dolphins, and 22 devil rays.
Laemmle had never seen a striped dolphin before, she said.
The protected area is a “hotspot of biodiversity,” according to the press release.
“All of a sudden, you start seeing dolphins and whales and activity in the water,” Laemmle said. “You feel it going from a desert to almost an oasis.”
Ava Berger can be reached at ava.berger@globe.com. Follow her @Ava_Berger_.