In a game of scientific telephone, if you find the food, you find the whales--and sound the alarm. North Atlantic right whales sometimes gather at Jeffrey's Ledge, a 62-mile-long underwater ridge about 25 miles off the coast of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. It was a cold and windy week last January, when a group of Maine lobstermen couldn't haul in their traps from Jeffrey's Ledge. The reason why surprised everyone.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The North Atlantic right whale () is one of the most endangered large whales. Their very name references their devastating decline--they were the "right" whales for whalers to target, since the animals floated after being killed. Today, their biggest threats are ship collisions and getting tangled in fishing gear. Estimates for North Atlantic right whale populations are slowly increasing, according to a New England Aquarium statement .

A mysterious sound emitted from the deepest part of the ocean has finally been identified as a Bryde's whale. Now, artificial intelligence is helping researchers track the elusive whale species responsible for the call. The puzzle began in 2014 when researchers recorded a sound resembling a moan followed by metallic sweeping pings over the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench. "Your average person would not think that it was made by an animal – they would think it was some ship or the Navy," says Ann Allen at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Years later, additional recordings of the sound, which researchers call a biotwang, were eventually linked to sightings of Bryde's whales (Balaenoptera brydei) near the Mariana Islands.

Fewer than 400 North Atlantic right whales remain in the wild, and not even 100 of them are breeding females. Their biggest survival threats are boat strikes and entanglement in fishing gear. Protecting these whales, such as by diverting boats from dangerous encounters, requires locating them more reliably--and new technology, described in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, could help make that possible. To listen for marine life, researchers often deploy underwater microphones called hydrophones on buoys and robotic gliders. The recorded audio is converted into spectrograms: visual representations of sound used to pinpoint, for instance, specific whale species' calls.

One of the world's most endangered whales was spotted swimming with a newborn in the waters off South Carolina's Hilton Head island. A drone camera captured footage of a 50-ton North Atlantic right whale and her calf frolicking about four miles from shore. According to the boat captain who spotted the pair on Friday, the mother was 50 feet long and the calf was close to 15 feet. The North Atlantic right whale is among the rarest of marine mammals, with less than 400 left in the world. Collisions with boats and entanglement in lobster nets are the main reason they are critically endangered.

A comprehensive new study of North Atlantic right whales has found the species is significantly smaller and less healthy than southern right whales and could be wiped out in the next 20 years without intervention. The study, the largest of its kind, was organized by Dr. Fredrik Christiansen or Aarhus University in Denmark and involved 12 research institutions across five countries. The team used a fleet of drones to capture images of right whales in the North Atlantic and three major regions in the southern hemisphere. A team of researchers organized by Dr. Fredrik Christiansen or Aarhus University in Denmark used drones to photograph right whales around the world and found North Atlantic right whales are far smaller and less healthy than their southern hemisphere counterparts Using a technique called'aerial photogrammetry,' the team correlated basic information about whale width and length to make determinations about the general health of the whales. In an interview with National Geographic, Christiansen said the team was shocked to find the North Atlantic right whales'looked like a runway…you could basically set up a tent on their backs.'

Scientists can now weigh wild whales using remote-controlled drones hovering above them. In the past it has only been possible to measure the weight of free-living whales if they were dead and out of the water or stranded on a beach. But researchers have released aerial footage of them flying a drone over a mother and baby southern right whale, near Argentina, to work out how much they weigh. They can do this by taking photographs to work out the length, width and height of the animal. This can then be compared to past measurements of the density of that particular species of whale's body, to estimate its volume and weight.

Two self-sailing ships have been travelling across the Bering Sea, off the coast of Alaska. The boats are operated by Saildrone, a company that is creating robotic sailboats that can travel without sailors for up to eight months. These autonomous vessels can collect details on water temperature, salinity and ecosystem information that would be difficult and expensive to collect by person. Saildrone is a company creating robotic self-driving sailboats that can travel without sailors for up to eight months. The Saildrone boats have been used by scientists and engineers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to collect valuable information about the Alaskan coast.