DURHAM – At 50 feet long and tipping the scales at 50 to 70 tons, the north Atlantic right whale is hard to miss, but for a cargo ship weighing over one thousand times more, the large mammals can be hard to avoid.

"If you're a big ship and you hit it, you probably don't even feel it," said University of New Hampshire Professor Ken Baldwin. "It's like us running over a pebble on the roadway."

Ships collide with right whales each year, killing a small number and putting a dent in a population that once numbered well into the thousands, but has dwindled to less than 400.

With only a handful of hits each year, data on right whale collisions are meager, so Baldwin, director of UNH's Center for Ocean Engineering, and his colleague Mechanical Engineering Associate Professor Igor Tsukrov, are taking a different route to study the strikes.

Baldwin and Tsukrov have studied a right whale's giant mandible bone, which is about 13 feet long and weighs about 480 pounds, testing its elasticity to create a basic computer model on whale-ship collisions that could one day help alter shipping patterns to better protect the whales. Researchers are looking at how the bone bends, rather than breaks, to see what sort of impact it can withstand.

"There's just so many loose ends here and it's a problem that in my eyes nobody has really pushed too hard to solve," Baldwin said. "The model you build on the computer is only as good as the data you put into it."

Baldwin and his researchers used the mandible bone because the right whales are often hit while at the surface feeding, making the devastating mouth impact more likely.

A model of ship-whale collisions must be more advanced to show possible changes in shipping patterns, such as speeds or shipping lanes, but there's simply not enough data to create such a model right now, Baldwin said, though he noted the current model is an important first step in the right direction.

"We've been able to solve a rudimentary collision problem," he said.

"Sometimes you have to start pretty basic."

Baldwin and Tsukrov will present their findings to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts in December so researchers there can include it in a report to be presented to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration in January. NOAA may use those findings to try and alter shipping patterns, but with so many competing interests it's hard to say when or even if that may happen.

In the meantime, collisions are continuing to affect right whale population, said Regina Campbell-Malone, a post doctoral research associate at Woods Hole who specializes in the species.

"Population models say that if you kill two females per year the species will be extinct in 200 years," she said, referencing a well-known and respected paper written by Woods Hole Researchers Hal Caswell and Masami Fujiwara.

North Atlantic right whales have four main habitats -- in and off of Cape Cod and in and off of Nova Scotia, Campbell-Malone said, as well as calving grounds off the coasts of Georgia and Northern Florida. Each area puts the whales in the path of major shipping lanes and at risk for collisions.

About two-thirds of all north Atlantic right whales that die are a result of human activity, such as ship collisions or fishing gear entanglement, Campbell-Malone said.

"They're all out there together and the fact we don't see more whales (being killed) is a welcome surprise to me," she said.