Saving Seafood

Native American tribe wins U.S. waiver to resume hunting Pacific gray whales

June 14, 2024 — After a decades-long struggle, a Native American tribe won the right to resume its hunting traditions off Washington state’s coast when federal regulators granted a waiver on Thursday allowing the Makah people to hunt up to 25 gray whales over a decade.

As part of its 1855 treaty with the U.S. government, the Makah Tribe secured the right to continue hunting whales, a tradition it describes as at the heart of their spiritual beliefs and practices. But the practice was stymied by 20th-century conservation measures.
In 2002, a federal court ruled that the tribe must secure a waiver of a moratorium on whale hunting under the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972.

Oregon crabbers and environmentalists are at odds as a commission votes on rules to protect whales

August 4, 2023 — In the wheelhouse of a crab boat named Heidi Sue, Mike Pettis watched the gray whale surface and shoot water through its blowhole.

Tangled around its tail was a polypropylene rope used to pull up crab traps. It took two men with serrated knives 40 minutes to free the whale, which swam away with a small piece of rope still embedded in its skin. That was in 2004, off the waters of Waldport, Oregon.

Pettis, a crab fisherman, said it’s the only time in his 44 years of fishing he has ever seen a whale caught in crab lines, and he believes that is proof such encounters are “extremely rare.”

Pettis is among a number of veteran crabbers who fear regulators are on the cusp of curtailing the lucrative industry with overregulation to protect whales.

Humpbacks, which migrate off Oregon’s coast, and other whales can get caught in the vertical ropes connected to the heavy traps and drag them around for months, leaving the mammals injured, starved or so exhausted that they can drown.

Read the full article at the Washington Post

Entangled: Making The Sea Safer For Whales

November 1, 2017 — More than 30 times this year, the federal government has received reports of whales tangled in fishing gear along the West Coast. Sometimes the whales manage to wriggle free. Other times you see heart-rending pictures on the news or a rescue mission.

The culprit often involves Dungeness crab pot lines. Now Oregon crabbers are working with marine scientists to make the seas safer for whales and to avoid a black mark on their brand.

Bob Eder has fished commercially out of Newport, Oregon for decades.

“Over 45 years of pulling crab pots—I think I’ve probably hauled in close to a million—I’ve never encountered an entangled whale,” he said.

‘We want to be proactive’

Eder often sees whales at sea and recognizes just one bad outcome blamed on fishing gear could be all it takes to cause a PR nightmare. Whale numbers are up, but so are sightings of humpback whales, gray whales and the odd blue whale entangled in fishing lines and buoys—especially in California.

“We want to get out ahead of it. We want to be proactive,” Eder said. “We don’t want to be sued by the Center for Biological Diversity. We want to see what we can do to mitigate the situation.”

The Center for Biological Diversity is an environmental group and it did just sue the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. The group wants a federal judge to order the state regulator to make crab fishermen do more to avoid harm to endangered whales.

Crab traps themselves are not the problem, but rather the heavy-duty ropes stretching from the seafloor to one or more buoys at the surface. Whales can snag a fin or a tail and get all tangled up if there’s too much slack in the vertical line or excess floating on the surface.

“They normally don’t come in where our gear is,” Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission Executive Director Hugh Link said. “But when we get warmer water and the feed comes in closer to shore, then we have an issue.”

Link and Eder are two members of a work group of crabbers, marine biologists and government agency and nonprofit representatives. They’ve been meeting in Oregon since March.

A grant from NOAA Fisheries launched what is known as the Oregon Whale Entanglement Work Group, which is facilitated and now supported by Oregon Sea Grant. Washington state crabbers and other interested parties plan to meet in Montesano on November 8 to hear an update on whale entanglements and discuss whether the Washington-based/the local fleet should launch a proactive work group too.

The work group agreed to distribute a flyer to crab boat operators ahead of the season opener next month with best practices for setting and tending gear. Oregon and Washington also have programs to retrieve lost or derelict fishing gear. The work group next plans to survey the fleet about potential season modifications and area closures to keep whales away from gauntlets of ropes.

Read the full story at KUOW