Crawling up on to another dead right whale to figure out how it died is enough to ruin your day.

When biologists had to cut up two calves last month in Northeast Florida, it made them sick. They worry the species is disappearing right before their eyes.

"Those of us who are sick and tired of cutting up animals on the beach are sick and tired of cutting up right whales," said Michael Moore, research biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. "It's embarrassing the number of animals I've had to work up and it's unfathomable that we haven't been able to reduce these (deaths) more than we have."

Some 70 years after the hunting of right whales was banned, their numbers remain dangerously low -- about 300.

Whale scientists such as Moore have waited at least two years for new federal rules to slow down and reroute giant freighters away from the whales, especially in their calving grounds off the Florida and Georgia coasts. They want federal officials to move more quickly.

They'd also like to see an end to the death and destruction from commercial fishing gear entanglement. Without changes, scientists fear Northern right whales could be extinct in the next century. Preventing even two deaths a year could stem the tide, Moore and other researchers wrote in a paper published in the journal Science last summer.

At least eight whales died in 16 months in 2004-05, more than half caused by ship and boat strikes and fishing gear entanglements, the study concluded. And that's just the deaths they know about. As many as 80 percent may go unnoticed, they say, with the whale's body and the cause of its death yielding to the depths of the sea.

"It's staggering," said Doug Nowacek, an assistant professor of oceanography at Florida State University and a collaborator on the study.

The federal government needs to quit proposing rules and extending comment periods and just pass the rules, Nowacek said. Federal officials have imposed various rules over the years, including requiring breakaway fishing nets and making ships in two key areas, one in the North and one in the calving grounds here, report their locations to be alerted to the presence of whales.

But so far, the rules haven't been enough to stop the deaths. A new draft of the proposed federal rules for ships is expected in April, said the coordinator for the National Marine Fisheries Service right whale program in the Southeast, Barb Zoodsma.

The fisheries service is looking at two steps for vessels more than 65 feet long in the rule -- rerouting and speed reduction. Similar efforts have taken place in Canada. Shipping industry officials have voiced concerns about speed limits and say they want consistent rules that don't break up the flow of the world's freight.

The slow-moving federal rule-making process frustrates whale biologists. And, in recent months, the marine fisheries' budget for right whale research has been slashed almost in half, from roughly $12 million to $6 million, said Zoodsma and other biologists.

At a time when they had amassed a vast database of information on individual right whales and felt they were on the brink of answering important questions, Moore said it's "frustrating and very disappointing."

Scientists like Zoodsma, Moore and Nowacek say too many questions are unanswered:

Why aren't more females raising calves? Where do most of the whales go in the winter? How do they know how to find the best food and is there enough?

Researchers suspect calving problems also may be blamed on such problems as inbreeding, decreasing food and too much water pollution and noise. Right whales in the Southern Atlantic seem to have higher birth rates, possibly because they have more food and body fat.

Some years, the joint aerial surveys flown off the Florida/Georgia coasts by federal and state agencies and their research partners find 20 to 30 new calves. In other years, few, if any, are found. This year, scientists were optimistic. They'd seen 16 new calves. But then the two calves were killed, one attributed to a ship's strike. The other is still under investigation.

Researchers are especially distressed about the decline of adult females. About 50 percent of the 300 whales are female, but only half of those bear calves. And they're not like rabbits or hamsters, producing litters every few weeks. It takes seven years for a female right whale to mature, and then she only gives birth every four or five years. It's especially difficult that the whales' only known calving grounds are in some of the country's busiest shipping lanes. Two major naval ports are nearby, Mayport in Jacksonville and the submarine base at Kings Bay in Georgia.

Like other mothers and babies, right whales and their calves are most vulnerable just after birth. If that's when a gigantic container ship loaded with hundreds of rail cars bears down, it's hard to move out of the way quickly enough.

Explosive growth in the number and speed of container ships is cause for concern, scientists say, but the deaths from fishing line and nets worry them even more.

It's a deadly problem. An animal swims into a wall of nets or gets line wrapped around its body or in its baleen, the fingernail-like fibers in its mouth that filters food from the water.

Biologists describe slow, agonizing amputation of tail flukes and fins as lines cut into flesh and infections take over while the animal slowly starves. It's "gruesome to the extreme," Moore said. Fishermen already face many federal rules designed to help the whales. For example, Zoodsma said fishermen are supposed to have weak link gear that breaks away if a whale gets tangled.

But, in December, the fisheries service launched an extensive effort to untangle a right whale. They pulled off about 30 pounds of trailing line but did not get it all. The tracking buoy on the animal broke free and the whale hasn't been seen again.

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