Saving Seafood

An Alarming Number of California Whales Are Getting Caught In Fishing Lines

California has seen a record-breaking number of whale entanglements over the last three years. Now, the Center for Biological Diversity is suing the state for failing to protect its endangered species.

August 30, 2017 — Justin Viezbicke once saw a whale struggling to swim up the coast of California without a tail. Though it was a disturbing sight, Viezbicke wasn’t exactly shocked; he’d encountered similar circumstances before. Viezbicke, the California stranding network coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, surmised that this particular whale’s flukes had been severed off by fishing gear. He knew the animal wouldn’t make it far.

In the past, Viezbicke has come across whales that lost blood-flow to their tails due to rope lines tangled tightly around their bodies. Less severe entanglements than the one Viezbicke witnessed can still lead to deadly infections or otherwise interfere with the animal’s ability to feed or forage.

“These entanglements are long, drawn-out processes,” Viezbicke says. “They can last months, sometimes even longer depending on the nature of the entanglement, and the will of the animal.”

The number of whales entangled in fishing lines off the West Coast of the United States has been sharply rising in recent years. In 2016, 71 whales became entangled in fishing gear off the West Coast, breaking the entanglement record for the third consecutive year. “We’re lucky if we get some or all of the gear off of a half dozen to a dozen of the whales every year,” Viezbicke says.

Entanglements are not always fatal, but for some threatened species, even a small number of deaths could be enough to collapse an entire population. (One subpopulation of humpback whales that feeds off the coast of California, for example, now numbers a mere 400.) Twenty-one endangered or threatened whales and one leatherback sea turtle were entangled in Dungeness crab gear in the Pacific Ocean in 2016; typically, Dungeness crab traps consist of a pot used to collect crabs on the seafloor, attached to a line of rope that extends to a buoy on the ocean surface.

Read the full story at Pacific Standard

Why whales are returning to New York City’s once polluted waters ‘by the ton’

August 29, 2017 — Growing up on his father’s boat off the Rockaways in Queens, New York, Tom Paladino was always on the lookout for whales.

“My father started a fishing business in 1945 when he came back from the service, so I never really had a job. I was just on the boat my whole life,” Paladino said as he steered his own boat, the American Princess, back to shore.

The giant animals rarely ventured into the city’s busy, dirty waterways, Paladino told ABC News, and “in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, we used to see one whale a year.”

But on a recent August Saturday, Paladino and Paul Sieswerda, the founder of the nonprofit Gotham Whale, spotted five humpbacks and more than 100 dolphins during a four-hour tour, just three miles off the Rockaways.

“People don’t really connect New York City with whales at all,” Sieswerda told ABC News. “I’ve been involved with wildlife all my life, and I am just so amazed it’s coming back by the ton — literally by the ton — with whales.”

In 2011, when Sieswerda, 75, started leading whale watching tours after retiring from his job at the New York Aquarium, the group logged just three sightings with a total of five whales, he said. More than one whale can be present at any given sighting, he added.

“We called it a whale watch ‘adventure,’ because it was an adventure, if we were going to see whales or not,” said Sieswerda.“Then in 2014, the number of whales we saw was more than the previous three years put together.”

Read and watch the full story at ABC News

NOAA Reminds Boaters to Watch Out for Whales

July 28, 2017 — WASHINGTON — NOAA Fisheries is reminding boaters to keep a close eye out for feeding and traveling whales, along with following safe viewing guidelines.

During the summer whales are feeding on small schooling fish and zooplankton in coastal areas around New England.

Vessels should stay at least 100 feet away from humpback, fin, sei and minke whales and 500 feet away from critically endangered North Atlantic right whales.

“Increased whale activity in areas off Northern New England are coinciding with summer boat traffic. We want to remind boaters of ways to prevent accidental interactions with whales, which can be fatal to the whales and cause damage to boats,” says Jeff Ray, the deputy special agent in charge for NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement.

Read the full story at CapeCod.com

Mass Die-Off of Whales in Atlantic Is Being Investigated

April 28, 2017 — Humpback whales have been dying in extraordinary numbers along the Eastern Seaboard since the beginning of last year. Marine biologists have a term for it — an “unusual mortality event” — but they have no firm idea why it is happening.

Forty-one whales have died in the past 15 months along the Atlantic coast from North Carolina to Maine. In a news conference on Thursday, officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries said that they had not identified the underlying reason for the mass death, but that 10 of the whales are known to have been killed by collisions with ships.

The agency is starting a broad inquiry into the deaths.

These whales “have evidence of blunt force trauma, or large propeller cuts,” said Deborah Fauquier, a veterinary medical officer at the agency’s Office of Protected Resources. These collisions with ships were “acute events,” Dr. Fauquier said, and were being treated as the “proximate cause of death.”

Dr. Fauquier said that the number of whale strandings was “alarming,” and that she hoped the investigation might give a sense of what kind of threat this presents to this population of humpback whales and those around the world.

Read the full story at the New York Times

NOAA investigates ‘unusual’ whale deaths

April 27, 2017 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries says the deaths of 41 humpback whales dating back to last year in the waters between North Carolina and Maine will have “a focused, expert investigation into the cause.”

NOAA made the announcement Wednesday, noting that the deaths constitute an “unusual mortality event.” Under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, an unusual mortality event is defined as “a stranding that is unexpected; involves a significant die-off of any marine mammal population; and demands immediate response.”

NOAA is expected to release more information on the investigation Thursday.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

Despite recovery, humpback whales still suffer from ship strikes

April 27, 2017 — Decades after most countries retired their harpoons, whales still face threats from fishermen, ships, and coastal pollution. But one species that seemed to have overcome these challenges was Megaptera novaeangliae, better known as the humpback whale.

Heavily hunted by the early 20th century, an international whaling moratorium and protection under the US Endangered Species Act (ESA) gave humpbacks the breathing space they needed to recover.

From 1986 to 2008, the whales’ numbers rose to 60,000 worldwide, and their status on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s “Red List” improved from “Endangered” to “Least Concern.” By last September, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that nine of the 14 distinct humpback populations no longer warranted ESA protection. Last year, one was even spotted in the Hudson River.

But a study published Tuesday in the journal Marine Mammal Science puts an asterisk on this progress. Close to shore, ship collisions threaten several species of whales, and these strikes may be greatly underreported for one humpback population in the Gulf of Maine.

Read the full story at the Christian Science Monitor

Whale of an Idea: Satellites Help Monitor Migrating Humpbacks

February 7, 2017 — First drones, and now satellites are allowing scientists to spy on whales — for research, that is.

Though they are massive animals, whale populations are difficult to monitor, according to researchers. Drones have been used to capture footage of whales, and now scientists are turning to even higher-flying help. Researchers in Australia are using satellite imagery to track local humpback whale populations, reported the Australian Broadcasting Corp. (ABC).

Humpback whales were considered an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. However, the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service lifted the whales’ endangered status last year as a result of successful conservation efforts. But despite this success, the migratory whales are difficult to track, and many population estimates are largely speculative, according to Curt Jenner, managing director of the Centre for Whale Research in Western Australia. [In Photos: Tracking Humpback Whales in the South Pacific Ocean]

Read the full story at LiveScience.com

The real reason why you’re suddenly seeing whales in N.J. and N.Y. waters

November 28, 2016 — If you’ve spent any time walking the beaches or boating the ocean waters of New Jersey or New York in recent weeks, you’ve likely been treated to spectacle that has been a rarity in these parts for most of the past century or so: whales.

They’ve been seemingly everywhere.

Breaching just past the sandbars in Asbury Park.

Swimming past groups of surfers in Rockaway Beach.

Bumping into boats off Belmar.

And this week’s ultimate cetacean sensation: a humpback whale swam up the Hudson River for a photo op in front of the George Washington Bridge.

Besides inspiring a chorus of oohs and aahs, the increase in sightings is adding a blubbery new wrinkle to a raging debate over a far smaller fish: the Atlantic menhaden. It’s the menhaden, also known as “bunker” — clumsy, multidinous, slow swimming virtual floating hamburgers — that those whales are chasing.

Even as the whales were gulping down bunker along the coast of New Jersey, the ASMFC has been pushing the commercial quotas back up closer to pre 2012 catch levels. Last year, the catch limit was raised 10 percent, with the ASMFC citing data that showed bunker were not being overfished.

And, then, three weeks ago, the council voted to raise the commercial catch limits another 6.5 percent.

That move has been cheered by commercial fishing operations who argue the limits were never necessary and simply jeopardized an industry that employs hundreds of people from New Jersey to Virginia, where the largest menhaden processing operation, Omega Protein Corp, is located.

“The fact that there’s a lot of fish around has nothing do with reducing these quotas,” said Jeff Kaelin, spokesman for Lund’s Fisheries, a Cape May commercial fishing company that sells bunker as lobster bait. The increased number of whale sightings is simply the result of smaller fish growing to a larger size due to “environmental conditions.”

“The stock was not overfished,” he said. “It’s never been.”

Kaelin said the 20 percent coast-wide reduction translated into a roughly 50 percent cut for New Jersey companies that harvest bunker, because it shut down the fishery early in the year and put the state’s crucial fall harvest off limits.

“If the science says we need to cut back we will, but in this case we feel very strongly that we’re underfishing the stock,” he said.

Read the full story at NJ.com

Falmouth researchers discover new information about whale songs

November 7, 2016 — A group of Falmouth-based researchers has gained new insight into the songs of the humpback whale.

When a whale sings, physical vibrations can be felt around the animal. A team of researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found that these vibrations, known as particle velocity, can be felt much farther away than originally thought.

“Particle velocity is kind of the long bass that you feel when a car is approaching you. You can hear the sound far away, but you can also feel the vibration,” said Aran Mooney, a Woods Hole biologist. “But sound doesn’t travel as well in air as it does in water.”

In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Biology Letters, the Woods Hole team detailed their findings from studying a group of humpback whales off the coast of Maui. Mooney said they measured vibrations from about 200 meters away from the whales, but believe they could be felt as far as one kilometer away.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

OPINION: Humpback whales a welcome sight off NJ coast

October 3, 2016 — Beachgoers in the Monmouth County town of Manasquan were thrilled in late August when a humpback whale appeared offshore. For two hours, it breached, spouted, slapped its fins on the water and waved them in the air.

Of course, the humpback wasn’t there for entertainment. It was simply having a long lunch, feeding on abundant small fish in the water.

Humpback whales are making a comeback. Fishermen in the New York Bight — the triangular corner of ocean between Montauk Point, Long Island, and Cape May — are seeing them regularly.

On September 6, a few days after the Manasquan sighting, the National Marine Fisheries Service announced its decision to remove most humpback whale populations from its endangered species list. Once depleted by commercial whaling, humpbacks had been on the list since 1970.

Humpback whales are divided into 14 distinct global populations. The population along the East Coast of the United States, which breeds in the Caribbean and migrates north for feeding, is considered stable and not at risk. Four endangered populations remain, including one that breeds off of Central America and migrates up the coasts of California and Oregon.

Read the full opinion piece at the Courier News