Saving Seafood

Canada announces changes to protect right whales

January 24, 2018 — NEW BRUNSWICK, Canada — Canadian officials announced new restrictions Tuesday on the amount of rope that snow crab fishermen can use in an ongoing effort to reduce the effect of fishing on the highly endangered North Atlantic right whale.

“We don’t want meters and meters of rope floating on the surface of the water,” Fisheries and Oceans Canada Minister Dominic LeBlanc said.

With 450 or fewer right whales remaining, after the death last year of 16 in Canadian and U.S. waters, and a possible 17th death still under review, pressure is increasing on two ways that humans cause right whale deaths: fishing gear entanglement and ship strikes. Last week, U.S. conservation groups sued the National Marine Fisheries Service to tighten restrictions on lobster fishing to protect the whales.

A roundtable on right whales, convened by LeBlanc last November, with fishing and marine business people, environmental groups, indigenous community members, scientists and Canadian and U.S. government officials, led to a more thorough understanding of the situation, according to a statement from the Fisheries Service and Oceans Canada.

LeBlanc’s announcement Tuesday was about four initial changes in snow crab fishing policy and practices to better protect right whales, 12 of which were documented as being found dead in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. More initiatives to limit entanglement and ship strikes are likely to come, he said.

Conservation groups sue to force greater protection for North Atlantic right whale

January 19, 2018 — Three national organizations went to court Thursday in an effort to force the federal government to provide greater protections for the endangered North Atlantic right whale.

The plaintiffs allege that the federal government has failed to manage the fishing industry by not enforcing the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Scientists say right whales are facing extinction largely because the animals die after becoming entangled in lobster trap lines and commercial fishing gear.

The civil suit against the National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Secretary of Commerce was filed Thursday in federal court in Washington, D.C., by the Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Humane Society of the United States.

During a meeting in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in October, scientists said the species is doomed to extinction by 2040 if humans don’t make substantive changes to protect them. A total of 17 right whales were found dead last summer and fall in the waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and off Cape Cod.

Dave Cousens, president of the Maine Lobsterman’s Association and a lobsterman who fishes out of South Thomaston, said he wasn’t surprised by the lawsuit after last year’s die-off.

“A lot of whales died,” Cousens said. “We have done a lot (to avoid entanglements) in Maine, and I have to say I don’t think Maine has been the cause of any of the deaths.”

Cousens said he fully expected that conservation organizations would demand that additional steps be taken to avoid entanglements with fishing gear.

In the suit, plaintiffs sharply criticize the NMFS for supporting a 2014 biological opinion that found commercial fisheries are likely to kill or seriously injure more than three North Atlantic right whales a year, but also led the federal agency to conclude “that the fishery is not likely to jeopardize the continued existence of North Atlantic right whales.”

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

 

Right whale deaths raise concern for species’ survival

October 24, 2017 — CAPE COD, Mass. — The discovery Monday of another dead North Atlantic right whale off Cape Cod escalated the already fevered concern among Canadian and U.S. marine scientists and fishery managers on the imperiled state of the highly endangered species.

The discovery of the severely decomposed whale brings the 2017 death count to at least 16, with the majority of the mortalities — attributed exclusively by researchers to ship strikes and gear entanglements — occurring in Canadian waters.

Four of the right whale deaths have occurred off the coast of Massachusetts.

“Our research and data have shown us that ship-strike or entanglement are the only definitive cause of death,” said Mike Asaro, NOAA Fisheries’ Gloucester-based marine mammal and sea turtle branch chief for the Atlantic region. “There’s nothing else we’re aware of.”

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times 

Troubling signs for right whale population

April 10, 2017 — The quickly fading population of vaquitas sets a worrisome example for those trying to save North Atlantic right whales.

“It has me slightly terrified,” said Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution biologist Mark Baumgartner, who heads up the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium, at the annual U.S. Marine Mammal Commission meeting, held last week at the Sea Creat Beach Hotel in North Falmouth.

In 1997, scientists first counted 567 of the small porpoises in the Bay of California in Mexico, but in 20 years that has dropped precipitously — to 30 — as the vaquitas drown when caught underwater in gillnets.

The North Atlantic right whale population, at 524 animals, is currently on a downward trend, too, members of the consortium announced in November. This year’s low calving rate —only 3 right whale calves were documented — is one thing, Baumgartner said.

But a low calving rate coupled with increasing deaths due to fishing gear entanglement spells trouble.

“What could we expect in the next 5 to 10 years?” he said.

At the annual commission meeting, scientists delivered the sobering news that, starting in October, several vaquitas would be captured in the wild and placed in a conservation area for safekeeping and breeding. A recent and intense market in China for the swim bladder of totoaba, which is caught illegally in the bay using gillnets, “caught everybody by surprise,” said Peter Thomas, Marine Mammal Commission International and Policy Program Director. The vaquitas get caught in the gillnets and drown; their corpses are then brought up with the fish and are discarded by the fishermen.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times