New Jersey holds just 25 fin whale records, one of the thinnest counts in this entire dataset, and every one comes from the open Atlantic rather than any park or refuge on land. A fin whale is an animal of deep water, and the state’s mapped locations for terrestrial wildlife simply don’t apply to it.
An offshore giant, not a park species
Unlike the state’s land mammals, the fin whale has no burrow, den, or forest to tie its records to. What counts as its New Jersey range is the stretch of Atlantic continental shelf off the coast, water far too deep and far offshore for the state’s parks and refuges to capture. In recent years, fin whales and other baleen whales have been drawn closer to the Jersey Shore than usual, following dense schools of Atlantic menhaden that have rebounded along the coast, occasionally putting a whale within sight of beachgoers at places like Long Beach Island or Sandy Hook.
A lunge-feeder built for speed
A fin whale is the fastest of the great whales, capable of powerful bursts as it lunges through a school of menhaden or krill, engulfing a huge volume of water and prey at once before straining it back out through baleen plates. Its asymmetric coloring, a pale lower jaw on the right side only, is thought to help it herd schooling fish while feeding on its side near the surface.
Status in New Jersey
NatureServe ranks the fin whale S1, critically imperiled, in New Jersey waters, though the species is native to the Atlantic here and its global population is recovering from commercial whaling losses.
Full species profile
