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Commercial Fisheries News Volume 33 Number 1 September 2005 Scientists say right whale deaths undercounted BOSTON, MA - Several well-known scientists recently let the world know they have run out of patience with the federal government’s efforts to protect northern right whales from ship strikes and fishing gear entanglement in US waters. In a manifesto published in the July 22 issue of the journal Science, the scientists said that the actual number of right whales killed each year is probably seriously underestimated, and they urged immediate changes in whale protection rules to further reduce human-induced mortality. Second only to a call for emergency action to reduce ship strike risks, the scientists said, “The amount of fixed fishing gear in the water column should be eliminated or minimized.” They went on to list several steps the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) could take to achieve this: Mandate changes in the pot fisheries, including lobster, crab, and hagfish, that would reduce the amount of gear in the water; Require the use of alternative rope types, such as sinking groundline, “to minimize entanglement deaths”; Develop and implement fishing methods “that do not use vertical lines attached to surface buoys”; and Develop a fast-track process for permitting fishing gear experiments and for implementing requirements for modified gear by streamlining current rule-making and National Environmental Policy Act processes that now take years. “This is a crisis that cannot continue unless we as a society are willing to accept our role in the extinction of this species,” Amy Knowlton, a New England Aquarium (NEA) scientist and one of the paper’s authors, said in a NEA press release. The other scientists listed as authors were: Scott Kraus, Moira Brown, and Philip Hamilton, all of the NEA; Hal Caswell and Michael Moore of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Christopher Clark of Cornell University; Masami Fujiwara of the University of California Santa Barbara; Robert Kenney of the University of Rhode Island; Scott Landry and Charles “Stormy” Mayo of the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies; William McLellan and D. Ann Pabst of the University of North Carolina; Douglas Nowacek of Florida State University; and Andrew Read of Duke University. Deaths offset births In the paper, the scientists addressed one of the growing questions among laymen concerning the right whale population. Since recent years have produced record-setting numbers of calves, why doesn’t the total number of northern right whales ever go up? The answer, they said, is that many more whales are dying than news stories indicate, resulting in a net population loss of at least two percent per year. “Despite good calving years, our population models suggest that there are still more whales dying than being born every year,” said Kraus, lead author and NEA senior scientist. In fact, the population models cited in the Science article indicate that only 17 percent of right whale deaths are detected each year, leaving 83 percent of actual deaths uncounted on an annual basis. According to the NEA release, based on their models and known deaths, the scientists estimate that as many as 47 right whales may have died in the past 16 months – many more than the eight deaths that have been documented. The paper listed the eight animals killed as follows. Six confirmed deaths were adult females, three of which were carrying near-term fetuses. Four of the eight were killed by human activities, three by ships and one by fishing gear. A fifth was “probably” killed by a ship, two more were sighted offshore and could not be retrieved for examination, and one was a young calf that died on a Florida beach. “The loss of this number of whales, and particularly this number of reproductive females, in such a short period is unprecedented in 25 years of study of this species,” the authors said. The eight deaths in the last 16 months were 2.9 times the average annual rate previously calculated. The authors came down hard on ship strikes as a cause of right whale death, saying that of the 50 dead whales reported since 1986, at least 19 were killed by vessel collision. They also called on NMFS to exercise its authority to implement emergency measures to reduce speeds and reroute commercial and military ships as the agency recently recommended in an advance notice of proposed rule-making. However, the paper also seriously questioned the effectiveness of current and even proposed restrictions on fishing gear in reducing the risk of entanglement. Since 1986, only six whales were listed as killed by fishing gear entanglement but there were 61 confirmed cases of whales carrying fishing gear, including those mortalities. Of the rest, scientists suspect 12 eventually died because they haven’t been seen since and/or were in “extremely poor health” when last sighted. Another eight whales are believed to be still entangled and 33 animals either shed the gear or were disentangled. “Chronically entangled whales lose weight, so they sink after death, unlike healthy animals that float if killed,” the authors said. “Thus, right whale mortality from fishing gear is probably underestimated to a greater degree than ship kills.” /cfn/ Back to story list |
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