 The situation was especially bad in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea, where the population was reduced to less than 30 animals overall and does not appear to have made any recovery since the illegal Soviet whaling.The Okhotsk Sea populations, despite numbering only a few hundred whales, may be slowly recovering.Initially, biologist Nikolai Doroschenko only discovered 372 illegally killed right whales from the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea in his original data (1994); it was not until 2012 that records of nearly 300 additional illegal kills from the Sea of Okhotsk and the Kurils region were found as well.