Saving Seafood

Grandmother and Grandfather Among 4 Endangered Whales That Died This Month

June 26, 2019 — Four North Atlantic right whales were found dead in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada in the last three weeks, representing about one percent of the remaining population that is closely watched.

One, named Punctuation, was a breeding female who had mothered eight calves and then gone on to have several grandchildren, making her death a significant loss for a dwindling population. She had been sighted as long ago as 38 years.

Another, known as Comet, was roughly 33 years old and well known to whale-watching experts, who also said that he had become a grandfather.

Two others were a younger male named Wolverine that died earlier this month, and an 11-year-old female that was found dead along with Comet near New Brunswick’s Acadian Peninsula on Tuesday night.

The New England Aquarium, which tracks the endangered population, said in a statement: “The loss of sexually mature females is biologically a major loss to this species that has seen a precipitous population decline over the past several years.”

The aquarium noted that hundreds of the right whales had migrated northward into the Gulf of St. Lawrence as warming waters reduced their food source, mainly copepods in the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of Maine.

Read the full story at The New York Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Officials confirm year’s second right whale death

June 24, 2019 — The second dead right whale of the year was found Thursday by a surveillance flight, drifting northeast of the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, according to the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

The death was confirmed by New England Aquarium, which has identified the whale as “Punctuation,” an adult female that has been studied by researchers for nearly 40 years and seen more than 250 times along the coast of the U.S. and Canada.

The aquarium maintains a photographic identification catalog that encompasses most of the right whale population. Punctuation was first photographed in 1981.

“All right whale deaths hit hard, but this one is particularly devastating to the population,” the aquarium staff wrote in an emailed statement.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

Making Catch-And-Release Safer For Sharks

June 10, 2019 — Say the word “shark” to a New Englander these days and the mind jumps straight to great white sharks, which have seen a remarkable increase here in recent years.

But great whites aren’t the only sharks around. And it turns out we know little about many of the sharks that frequent New England’s waters.

Now there’s a new effort to understand how catch-and-release fishing of sandbar sharks impacts their survival.

“We want to know if the catch and release processes is harming the fish in any way, and if it is, we want to work with fishermen to try to figure out what is it about the capture event that is causing the sharks to die,” Jeff Kneebone told Living Lab Radio.

Kneebone is a fisheries scientist with the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life at the New England Aquarium and much of his research focuses on figuring out where sharks are and what they’re doing as they move around the region.

Twenty years ago, Sandbar sharks had a large population off the mid-Atlantic coast. When the population dropped, it became illegal to catch and keep them. But fishermen still are allowed to pursue them using catch-and-release fishing.

Given the sharks’ susceptibility to population declines, Kneebone wants to know more about what happens after they are caught and released. When they die, why?

“Is it how long they’re being fought? Is it how they’re being handled when they’re landed on the beach? Is it where they’re being hooked?” he said.

Read the full story at WCAI

Link To Stress, Health Of Whales Might Be In Giant Mouths

May 29, 2019 — Whale researchers in New England believe they’ve found a new way to measure the amount of stress felt by whales when they experience traumas such as entanglements in fishing gear, and they say the technique could help protect the massive sea creatures from extinction.

The scientists, with the New England Aquarium in Boston, said the method involves measuring stress hormones by studying baleen, the bristly filter-feeding system in the mouths of the biggest whales on the planet. The baleen serves as a record that shows a spike in stress hormones when whales encounter threats such as a changing climate, ship strikes and entanglements, lead author Rosalind Rolland said.

Scientists can use the data to read the stress levels a whale experiences over the course of many years, somewhat similar to reading the rings on a tree. The data is important because whales experiencing more chronic stress are less likely to reproduce, and they can become more susceptible to disease — a bad combination for populations that are perilously low.

“A whale responding to any type of stressor could be interacting with a ship. It could be fishing gear. It could be environmental changes that stress the whale out,” Rolland said in a telephone interview. “This shows the stress hormones are related to what was going on with the whale.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at WBUR

MASSACHUSETTS: Seals on a comeback, attracting sharks

May 28, 2019 — Seals have rebounded to healthy numbers along Massachusetts’ shores after being nearly decimated by early settlers and a bounty that later wiped out tens of thousands of them, according to experts — and that is what is attracting sharks.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates there are at least 27,000 gray seals and 75,000 harbor seals in U.S. waters during their breeding seasons.

“What we’re witnessing is a comeback to a really healthy marine environment,” said Kimberly Murray, seal program lead at NOAA Fisheries in Woods Hole.

The numbers are a stark contrast to the 1700s, when gray seals had been nearly wiped out during the first 100 years of New England settlement, said Tony LaCasse, a spokesman for the New England Aquarium in Boston.

By the late 1800s, the seals had rebounded, but conflicts with commercial fisheries and a desire for the seals’ meat and pelts led to a bounty on both gray and harbor seals from 1888 to 1962 in Massachusetts and Maine. During those years, as many as 135,000 seals were killed, Murray said.

“Seals were perceived as competitors to fisherman,” LaCasse said. “Fishermen would carry shotguns in their boats and shoot them on sight.”

Read the full story at the Boston Herald

Moulton’s right whale bill sailing toward House

May 3, 2019 — Last week, a federal panel drafted a slew of conservation recommendations to help the imperiled and declining North Atlantic right whale population. Now Congress may enter the fray.

A House bill to create a decade-long, $50 million grant program to help protect the North Atlantic right whales was approved Wednesday by the National Resource Committee and is heading to a vote by the full House membership.

The bill, with U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton — now announced as a presidential candidate — as the primary sponsor, would require the Commerce secretary to provide $5 million annually for 10 years to fund competitive grants for projects related to the conservation of the whales, whose declining population is estimated to hover under 450.

“The health of the right whales is directly tied to the health of our region’s economy and identity,” Moulton said in a statement. “The whales play a key role in an ecosystem that supports thousands of jobs in commercial fishing and tourism, and it’s up to us to do everything we can to save this species.”

The bill is supported by the New England Aquarium in Boston and the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance.

A similar bill, with Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey as a co-sponsor, has been filed in the Senate.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

Right Whale Births Up, But Species Faces Extinction

March 13, 2019 — A year after the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale population produced zero calves for the first time on record, the animals have given birth to seven calves so far this winter. But that number is still far too few to convince scientists that the population is rebounding.

“Without concerted efforts to reduce the effects of human activities, this species is likely to go functionally extinct in about 20 years,” Scott Krauss, senior science advisor at the New England Aquarium, said during testimony March 7 at a congressional hearing examining the threats to right whales.

The global population of North Atlantic right whales, which currently stands at about 400, was growing steadily in the 1990s and 2000s, including a record year in 2009 when 39 calves were born. But reproduction rates have slowed precipitously since then.

Read the full story at ecoRi News

Lawmakers take up threats to North Atlantic right whales

March 11, 2019 — The sound of an air horn echoed through a Congressional subcommittee hearing Thursday, set off by U.S. Rep. Joe Cunningham, D-S.C., to mimic what critically endangered North Atlantic right whales might experience during seismic testing for oil and gas.

The loud demonstration occurred at a hearing focused on permits that could soon be issued by the U.S. Department of Interior to five companies to explore oil and gas reserves off the mid- and southern Atlantic states. Critics of the move argue that the North Atlantic right whales, many of which visit Cape Cod Bay to feed, could be harmed in the process.

“We must reduce exposure of all whales but particularly females to stressors that can slow or stop reproduction,” said Scott Kraus, an expert witness with the New England Aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life, who appeared during a hearing before the Subcommittee on Water, Oceans and Wildlife.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

MASSACHUSETTS: Meet the New England Aquarium’s robotic research assistant

March 4, 2019 — It weighs around 100 pounds, is about the size of a mini-fridge, and comes with single robotic arm and an 800-foot cord.

The New England Aquarium’s new, remote-controlled underwater vehicle — an unexpected gift from software giant Autodesk Inc. in 2017 — has a range of abilities, from locating lost fishing gear in the Boston Harbor to recording video of sea life that would be off-limits to human divers. Importantly, the device helps fulfill the 50-year-old institution’s often-overlooked core research mission.

“There’s this supposition that aquariums don’t do scientific research,” said John Mandelman, vice president and chief scientist of the Aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life. “I think the (vehicle) is a surprise to people because it’s an example of using high-technology to do scientific research at an aquarium that people don’t realize has a scientific research angle.”

It was a couple years ago now that Autodesk’s Boston office called out of the blue to say it wanted to donate a remote-controlled vehicle, or ROV, made by San Diego-based Teledyne SeaBotix, said Mandelman. The company had bought it three years earlier for a one-time project, but it had sat on a shelf unused ever since.

Read the full story at the Boston Business Journal

Whale-saving efforts target oil and gas companies

February 21, 2019 — In an effort to protect endangered whales, conservation groups today filed a motion to stop oil and gas companies from conducting seismic airgun exploration from Delaware to Florida.

“In my expert opinion, the introduction of seismic airgun surveys off the U.S. East Coast represents an existential threat to the North Atlantic right whale, an endangered species that is already in a dangerous state of decline,” Scott Kraus, vice-president and senior science adviser for the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life at the New England Aquarium, said in an expert declaration filed with the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction.

The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is poised to issue permits to five oil and gas exploration companies, and seismic surveys could begin as early as March 30, according to the motion.

The plaintiffs want to halt “seismic airgun blasting” in the Atlantic until the merits of their claims are resolved in court, according to the motion.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times