Today, the Rice's whale's main threats are related to industrial and commercial activities within its habitat, including oil pollution, ship collisions, and underwater noise from seismic surveys and vessel traffic.

It has also shown to be especially vulnerable to local catastrophic events such as the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which single-handedly killed nearly twenty percent of the species' population.

[4] The taxonomic situation remained unchanged until 2019 when a dead individual washed up at Everglades National Park in Florida, providing the needed holotype without having to kill or harm any living members of the critically endangered population.

The dorsal fin is shaped like a large hook that can range between ~24–38 centimeters (9.4–15.0 in) tall in adults and located around two-thirds of the length back from the snout.

In some phenotypic variations, a gradient of white also appears around the rim of the dorsal fin and/or along the side of the body, but there is no consistency of the trait between individual whales.

The third is the skeleton (UF33536) of the 12.65-meter (41.5 ft) long lactating female, which washed up in Tampa Bay, Florida, in 2009 and was subsequently disposed of via burial at a nearby park.

[4] Prior to the stranding of USNM 594665, this was considered a candidate specimen to serve as the Rice's whale holotype, but upon its excavation in 2018 it was found that the skull was crushed and much of the skeleton corroded as tides submerged it in water over the nine years it was buried.

The stylohyal bone, the largest component of the hyoid apparatus that stabilizes the larynx, pharynx, and tongue, is broad and exhibits little curvature.

Specifically, scientists identified its core habitat range as a small stretch along the continental slope between depths of 150–410 meters (490–1,350 ft) within and near the De Soto Canyon off the coasts of western Florida, Alabama, and eastern Louisiana.

[3][12] It is still unknown why the Rice's whale's distribution has declined to its current state,[17] but the NOAA considers increased industrialization throughout the Gulf of Mexico and the subsequent underwater noise it brought a likely major factor.

However, these efforts did not survey other potential habitat locations such as the continental slope north of the Campeche Bank, where a number of historical Rice's whales were recorded.

A compilation of recent isolated cetacean encounters in the Mexican Gulf collected by Ortega-Ortiz in 2002 found no records of potential Rice's whales.

In addition, acoustic studies off Jacksonville, Florida, and Cherry Point, North Carolina, were unable to detect Rice's whale calls.

It revealed that the Rice's whale had a diel vertical diving pattern, spending its day in deep water and night near the surface.

[17] What exactly it was feeding on remains a mystery, but lanternfish and hatchetfish are common in these areas, so it is possible that they are part of the Rice's whale diet.

In occasional association with long-moans are tonal-sequences, which consists of a series of narrow-bandwidth tonals that each have an average duration of 3.6 seconds at a frequency range of 99.4–107.4 Hz.

[12] Another potential predator may be the great white shark, which is known to hunt North Atlantic right whale calves in nursery waters off the coast of Florida and Georgia.

[1] Multiple population studies of the species have been conducted since 1991, but due to the difficulty in surveying Rice's whales they are largely based on models and reliable exact figures are difficult to determine.

[1] A 2015 study by Roberts and colleagues[24] produced a larger estimate of 44 whales based on a habitat modeling technique that integrates survey data between 1994 and 2009.

[1][25] More recently, a 2016 status report for the Endangered Species Act estimated the number of remaining mature individuals at 16, while the 2017 edition of the IUCN Red List puts this at 17 with the general population trend continuing to decrease.

Multiple offshore drilling operations take place in the Gulf of Mexico, many nearby the Rice's whale core habitat range.

Accidents from these operations can release huge quantities of oil into the ocean, which can inflict a range of harmful to lethal effects to marine life including respiratory, digestive, and endocrine disruption, impaired vision, reproductive failure, increased susceptibility to diseases, and direct poisoning.

Large oil spills require tremendous human effort to clean up, and some of the most efficient methods in doing so such as the use of dispersants can themselves be toxic to the whale.

The lactating female from Tampa Bay (USNM 593536) showed signs of severed vertebrae, lung damage, and internal bruises consistent with a death by a ship strike.

In 2019, a live Rice's whale was sighted with a severely deformed spine behind the dorsal fin, damage that is also consistent with vessel collision.

The diel vertical diving pattern of the Rice's whale makes it especially susceptible to such collision accidents, given that they may spend the majority of their nighttime hours within 15 meters (49 ft) of the surface, which is also the range that puts cetaceans at the greatest risk of colliding with ships.

[17] The Rice's whale's usual habitat also overlaps with deep-water reef fish fisheries, which operate by dropping bottom longline nets at the seafloor between depths of 100–300 meters (330–980 ft) during daytime hours to catch yellowedge groupers, tilefish, and sharks.

[4] A multitude of anthropogenic noises are produced in great quantities from industrial activities throughout the Gulf of Mexico that can harm baleen whales.

As sound levels diminish rapidly as it travels through the water, this type of damage will only occur to whales that are within 100 meters (330 ft) to 1 kilometer (0.62 mi) of a 260 dB airgun.

As mitigation, seismic surveys are often mandated to be accompanied by protected species observers and to immediately cease operations whenever within 500 kilometers (310 mi) of a whale.