Right whales return to New Zealand after 100 years

More than a hundred years after it was hunted to local extinction, the playful, frolicking right whale is finally finding its way back to its ancestral calving grounds in New Zealand.

It's believed that once more than 30,000 right whales spent each winter in New Zealand's protected bays giving birth and raising their young.

But among right whales, the lesson of where to go to breed is passed from mother to calf. Once all the whales born in those sheltered bays had been killed, there was no one to tell the other whales where to migrate.

But a remnant of the population survived near the Auckland and Campbell Islands south of New Zealand in sub-Antarctic waters. And it appears that some of them have finally found their way back, according to a paper published this week in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.

"We used DNA profiling to confirm that seven whales are now migrating between the sub-Antarctic islands and mainland New Zealand," Scott Baker, associate director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, said in a release. Oregon State initiated a study of the whale population in 1995. "I suspect that we may soon see a pulse of new whales following the pioneers, to colonize their former habitat."

The baleen-feeding whales can grow up to 60 feet long and weigh up to 100 tons. They are believed to live for 70 years or more. Playful and happy to swim close to shore, they are major tourist attractions where larger populations of them live in Argentina and South Africa.

They're called right whales because they were "right" species to kill -- they have so much blubber that when they were slaughtered they floated.