The last 300 North Atlantic right whales will get some needed protection from the heavy shipping traffic off the Massachusetts coast beginning this month. Ships entering busy Boston Harbor will travel slightly narrower lanes. Large ships above 300 gross tons will be asked to avoid an area in the Great South Channel from April through July where slow moving right whales feed and face the greatest chance of being hit. NOAA researchers used twenty years of sighting data to determine the collision risk to right whales and develop the lane changes which were assessed for safe navigability by the US Coast Guard. About 3,500 ships move through the shipping lanes off Boston every year, and more than half of the world's North Atlantic right whales are in the same area during the spring. Recommended chart changes have been adopted by the International Maritime Organization, so they will be reflected on all charts used by international shipping. In a related positive development, ENS reports that the mating call of the fantastically large blue whale has been recorded off the shores of the Big Apple. Cornell University's Bioacoustics Research program identified the blue whale songs. It had monitoring equipment deployed from about 10 miles to 80 miles east of the entrance to New York Harbor to study the effect of man made noise on whales.[photo: North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium]