Students got up close and personal during the trip to North Atlantic Right Whales off the coast of Maine.—PHOTO COURTESY OF BILL MCWEENY

Calvineers and their teacher, Bill McWeeny, far right, stand outside the Swallowtail lighthouse on Grand Manan Island during a whale watching trip.—PHOTO COURTESY OF BILL MCWEENY

North Atlantic right whales in particular.

So passionate, in fact, that the biology graduate and sixth-eighth-grade Adams School science teacher is headed halfway around the world next week, to Cape Town, South Africa, and the 17th Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals.

The five-day conference attracts scientists from around the world to talk about studies of all kinds of marine mammals. Besides taking a trip to Kruger National Park in South Africa while there, McWeeney hopes to learn and bring back plenty of information to relay to his students back home, for projects and lesson plans.

“It’s connected to my passion, and what stimulates me is going to stimulate kids in the classroom,” McWeeney said last Tuesday in his class in Castine. “I’ll come back with a notebook full of ideas and it will keep me going to June, minimum.”

In 1983, McWeeney first volunteered to work at the New England Aquarium’s Right Whale Research Station in Lubec and for years since he’s spent his summers in the eastern Maine community, tracking a large population of the whales in the Bay of Fundy with other marine scientists.

And as he’s studied the right whales, which were called “right” because of their high body weight of blubber that causes them to float when killed, making them the “right” whales to hunt, he’s learned about the number of threats that face the already diminishing population.

Those threats, which kill a couple every year of the 354 known North Atlantic right whales, at last count, include ship strikes, net entanglements and environmental factors such as red tide.

Overall, McWeeney said there’s “still not a positive curve” on the endangered species because of a lot of deaths in recent years.

While in Lubec, the Castine teacher and other scientists spend many of their summer days identifying each right whale in the bay, looking for callosities, or callused skin, on their heads, which act as fingerprints, said McWeeney.

As a teacher, McWeeney weaves whale science into the classroom, having students study, say, the body of a whale for anatomy and a whale’s food chain for ecology.

In 2004, he started the Calvin Project — an informational group focused on learning about right whales, presenting the story and writing a book on an orphaned whale named Calvin and spreading the word about efforts to save the endangered species.

While the original “Calvineers” have graduated from the Adams School, a new group of seven seventh- and eighth-grade students have taken their places. Some of those students first saw a North Atlantic right whale, face-to-face, during a trip to Lubec last summer.

More recently, the Calvineers have been busy presenting or preparing to present information on right whales to local elementary and middle schools. Each of the students has his or her own projects focused on whale research that combines elements of education that he or she enjoy, whether it’s music, politics, physics, etc.

“We want all the schools to be educated about right whales and maybe they can do something,” said Calvineer Ben Olivari.

The students feel there should be more education on right whales in school curriculum, especially with the animals living so close to Maine.

“People just don’t realize that they live off the coast,” said Tess Lameyer.

Involvement in the group has taught all of them about speaking in public and teaching to a crowd too, added Lameyer.

The Calvin Project team’s recent presentation at the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium in New Bedford, Mass., received a standing ovation by those scientists in attendance.