High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The North Pacific Right Whale (Eubalaena japonica) is a very large, robust baleen whale species that was common in the North Pacific until 1840, but now extremely rare due to 19th and 20th century whaling. There are apparently two populations of the species in the North Pacific. A population that occurs in the southeastern Bering Sea and eastern North Pacific may be 50 animals or less. A very poorly known population in the Sea of Okhotsk between the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin Island in Russia may number 300 or more animals, but there is almost no data on this population. Although the whales have been protected from whaling since 1935, illegal Soviet whaling in the 1950s and 60s depleted their numbers further. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has expressed concern that its numbers are now too low for recovery, and that extinction may be inevitable. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, the North Pacific Right Whale is the most endangered whale on Earth.