September 28, 2016 — It has not been a good week for right whales off the coast of New England, nor for the marine scientists who study them.
In the wake of the three separate right whale incidents since last Thursday, including two involving dead right whales, NOAA Fisheries organized a teleconference Tuesday in which a number of scientists said the recent spate of incidents reflect the continuing crisis of trying to return the right whale population — now estimated at about 500 — to health.
“In recent years, we’re not seeing the strides we had once seen,” said David Gouveia, the marine mammal and sea turtle program coordinator in NOAA’s greater Atlantic region. “When you have something like this, that within a three-day period you’ve lost two valuable members or contributors to the population, that’s something we wanted to share with our partners and wanted to share with the public and wanted to really stress the continued importance of us being mindful of our conservation efforts.”
Michael Moore, a senior research specialist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, was even more emphatic in his reaction to the trio of right whale incidents.
“The fishermen and the fisheries, the stakeholders, have been put through an enormous amount of gear change and stress to make a more whale-friendly fishery and we’re not out of the woods by any means,” Moore said. “There needs to be a revisiting of strategy and public expectations. Something needs to change.”
The first incident occurred Thursday, when recreational boaters off Cape Cod reported seeing an entangled right whale — later identified as an 8-year-old female — towing hundreds of feet of line and buoys from its jaws.
A disentanglement team cut away some of the line and made other cuts scientists believe helped the whale, which scientists believe to be alive somewhere in the Gulf of Maine, to shed even more of the gear.
The gear was recovered and Gouveia said it provides clues to who owned the gear, where it was fished and whether that fisherman was in compliance with safety and gear regulations related to fishing in areas populated by right whales.