A recently published study adds more scientific weight to a claim the Trump administration is trying to discredit:

The Rice’s whale, Earth’s only filter-feeding whale that lives exclusively in the Gulf of Mexico offshore Florida, is a species of its own.

A team of university and federal researchers mapped DNA from 25 Rice’s whales, accounting for about half the estimated total alive today. They found the species has existed as a small, isolated population in the Gulf for tens of thousands of years.

The findings add more evidence about the uniqueness of one of the planet’s rarest — and most endangered — whales at a time when the Trump administration is sowing doubt about their rarity and rolling back their protections in the name of drilling for more oil.

The study’s lead author told the Tampa Bay Times it’s urgent for the public to be aware of the ongoing research. A federal comment period ended Monday on whether the species should still be considered endangered, and a top Trump official indicated in April the administration could move to invalidate the Rice’s whale’s species status.

When scientists five years ago determined the Rice’s whale was a unique species, the decision came with big implications. With an estimated 50 left in the wild, the charcoal gray gentle giants became one of the most at-risk whales on Earth.

Oil companies for years have argued that more habitat protections in the Gulf interfere with offshore drilling operations. And despite opposition from all of Florida’s Congress members, the Trump administration is proposing to drill closer to Florida shores in Rice’s whales’ habitat.

“These whales in particular are a unique species — if they go extinct, there isn’t another one,” said Diana Aguilar-Gómez, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“They can recover, but we have to give them the space to do that,” she said.

Aguilar-Gómez and the team of scientists used what’s called a “whole genome” analysis on the whales’ skin samples, considered the gold standard when mapping an animal’s evolutionary history.

Researchers used about three decades’ worth of tissue samples collected from both living and dead, washed-up whales dating back to 1992 and as recent as 2024, Aguilar-Gómez said.

The researchers found that while the Rice’s whales have remained an isolated population for generations, a few likely bred with Bryde’s whales, one of their closest relatives, in the Caribbean at least 350 years ago.

Researchers for years thought the Rice’s whale was a subspecies of the Bryde’s whale, until new genetic research in 2021 confirmed it was a unique species.

The breeding between species, generations ago, still shows up in Rice’s whales genes today. According to the findings, a little more than 4% of its DNA is shared with Bryde’s whales.

The findings are still being peer-reviewed, but they have already undergone months of internal review among federal scientists, Aguilar-Gómez said. She believes the research is increasingly pertinent, though, given the recent attempts at the federal level to discredit science around the species.

The Rice’s whale population offshore Florida’s coastline has seen a sharp decline in recent years, in large part because of humans: A study after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill estimated about half the whales’ habitat was exposed to oil, killing as much as 22% of the population. Since the disaster, few whale calves have been seen in the wild, federal scientists say.

Models run by researchers in the latest study show that a steadily growing Rice’s whale population is essential to curb the risk of inbreeding. That can lead to less genetic diversity and more harmful mutations among the few remaining wild animals, said Aguilar-Gómez, who has also studied the genetics of endangered Florida panthers.

“The conservation implications of our findings are therefore immediate,” the researchers wrote in their paper, noting that the whales “are unusual among large whales in having an exceptionally restricted distribution and occupying the heavily industrialized Gulf of Mexico, making it ecologically and evolutionarily irreplaceable.”

The new research arrives after a string of recent rollbacks for endangered marine wildlife in the Gulf, including Rice’s whales, which can be up to 41 feet long and weigh 30 tons.

In late March, national security officials exempted the oil and gas industry from having to adhere to endangered species protections. Then the government proposed revisiting the decision to name Rice’s whales an endangered species.

And in April, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick contradicted the scientific findings from his own agency when he cast doubt that the Rice’s whale was a unique species.

“We need to study that, and if it is not (a separate species), we need to stop the nonsense of treating something as if it’s endangered when, of course, it’s plentiful,” he said during a congressional hearing.

Lutnick committed to use federal research funding to investigate whether the Rice’s whale is a species of its own, despite a growing body of research showing it is.

He also cited a scientific opinion paper from a Texas A&M professor who argued the 2021 decision to name the Rice’s whale as its own species may have been premature based on available evidence.

The author of that paper, Randall Davis, told the Times he disagreed with his work being used to advocate for cutting protections.

“My paper should be understood as a scientific argument about taxonomic standards, not as support for dismissing previous researchers as biased, delisting (the) Rice’s whale (from the endangered species list), reducing environmental protections, or expanding oil and gas activity in its habitat,” Davis told the Times in May.

Earlier this week, environmental advocates cited recent genetic research in defense of the Rice’s whale keeping not only its endangered status, but also its existence as a separate species.

In a letter to the federal government, the nonprofit Healthy Gulf said any delayed action from leaders could end the species forever.

“Rice’s whale remains in critical danger of extinction throughout its range and requires the strongest available protections,” the group wrote.

“Delayed or incomplete protections will only increase the likelihood that this species is lost.”

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