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

Sea Shepherd Activists Halt Pursuit of Japanese Whalers

August 30, 2017 — The environmentalist group Sea Shepherd has called off its annual pursuit of Japanese whaling ships in the Southern Ocean, according to the group’s founder, who said it cannot keep up with Japan’s surveillance technology.

“What we discovered is that Japan is now employing military surveillance to watch Sea Shepherd ship movements in real time by satellite,” the group’s founder, Paul Watson, said in a statement. “If they know where our ships are at any given moment, they can easily avoid us.”

Sea Shepherd, a self described “eco-vigilante” group founded in 1977, has spent years patrolling the remote Southern Ocean, investigating and documenting illegal fishing and whaling operations, putting it directly at odds with Japanese vessels. In addition to filming the operations, the group uses confrontational tactics that include shooting water cannon and stink bombs at the Japanese vessels.

Mr. Watson maintains that his group acts within the law. “We never caused a single injury to any person in all of these years,” he said in an interview. “The criminals are quite plain to see.”

Since 2005, Sea Shepherd has patrolled the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, a protected area where whaling is prohibited. A few nations, including Japan, have special research permits that allow for some whaling.

Read the full story at the New York Times

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

U.S. opens investigation into deaths of right whales

At least 13 of the rare whales have been found dead this year off the coasts of Canada and New England.

August 25, 2017 — The federal government is launching an investigation into the recent deaths of more than a dozen North Atlantic right whales.

At least 13 of the whales have been found dead this year off the coasts of Canada and New England. The whales are among the rarest marine mammals in the world, numbering no more than 500.

An arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Thursday that it is declaring the deaths “an unusual mortality event.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Portland Press Herald

Another right whale found dead

August 18, 2017 — There doesn’t seem to be an end to the bad news on right whales this summer. With a dozen found dead this year, most of them in a flurry of deaths since June, the Coast Guard reported right whale death number 13 Monday, 145 miles east of Cape Cod.

On Thursday, the whale was identified by matching the pattern of hardened patches of gray skin with photos found in a database at the New England Aquarium. The right whale Couplet was a frequent visitor to the Cape, arriving here first as a yearling in 1992, and seen in Cape Cod Bay mostly in April to feed on abundant plankton blooms for 15 of the 26 years of her life. The last time she was sighted here was in 2015, and she brought her last of her five calves to Cape Cod in 2014.

“We study this unique animal and it is hard not to get attached to it,” said Amy James, aerial survey coordinator for the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown. “You get used to seeing the same ones come back year after year.”

The loss of females is especially tragic, James said.

The Northwest Atlantic right whales are among the most endangered whale populations on earth with around 500 individuals and less than 100 breeding females.

“All of her future calves, the ones she could have gone on to create, that opportunity has been lost,” James said.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

Accidental deaths of endangered whale threatens its survival

August 16, 2017 — PORTLAND, Maine — A high number of accidental deaths this year among the endangered North Atlantic right whale threaten the survival of the species, according to conservation groups and marine scientists.

The right whales, which summer off of New England and Canada, are among the most imperiled marine mammals on Earth. There are thought to be no more than 500 of the giant animals left, and there could be fewer than 460, as populations have only slightly rebounded from the whaling era, when they nearly became extinct.

Twelve of the whales are known to have died since April, meaning about 2 percent of the population has perished in just a few months, biologist Regina Asmutis-Silvia of the Plymouth, Massachusetts-based group Whale and Dolphin Conservation told The Associated Press this week. She and others who study the whales said this summer has been the worst season for right whale deaths since hunting them became illegal 80 years ago.

“This level of deaths in such a short time is unprecedented,” she said. “I just don’t know that right whales have time for people to figure it out. They need help now.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at WRAL

Endangered right whales seeing catastrophic die-off in New England, Canadian waters

The deaths of dozens of whales may be the result of a migration to less-protected areas because of lack of food in the Gulf of Maine.

August 15, 2017 — The North Atlantic right whale, the world’s second most endangered marine mammal, is having a catastrophic year in the waters off New England and Atlantic Canada, and scientists from Maine to Newfoundland are scrambling to figure out why.

At least a dozen right whales have been found dead this summer in the worst die-off researchers have recorded, a disastrous development for a species with a worldwide population of about 500.

“Just imagine you put 500 dollars in the bank, and every time you put five in, the bank takes 15 out,” says Moira Brown, a right whale researcher with the New England Aquarium who is based in Campobello Island, New Brunswick. “This is a species that has not been doing well, even before we had all the dead whales this summer.”

Canadian authorities have documented 12 dead whales in the Gulf of St. Lawrence since June 7, though it’s possible that two carcasses that weren’t recovered after their initial sighting were counted twice. Two more of the rare, slow-moving whales were found dead off Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, bringing this summer’s mortality to between 12 and 14 whales, more than 3 percent of their total population.

Humans appear to have been the immediate cause of at least some of the deaths. Necropsy results have been issued for just four of the whales found off Canada, showing one had become entangled in snow crab fishing gear and three were apparently struck by ships.

The whales deaths have prompted Canadian officials to impose emergency restrictionson shipping and snow crab fishermen in parts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence – the vast body of water bounded by New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Labrador and eastern Quebec – and an urgent effort by researchers to figure out what happened.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

NOAA Fisheries seeks info about about whale off Oregon coast

August 15, 2017 — The following was released by the West Coast Seafood Processors Association:

NOAA Fisheries is seeking more information about an entangled whale off Reedsport, Oregon.

If you see it, call 1 877 SOS-WHALE

Time: 9:20 am 8/11/2017

Description: The Reporting Party was 1/4 mile away at the time of the first sighting – no size or description of the species – just a blow and large orange poly ball following behind. Watched for 10 minutes and never saw the body of the whale, just blows and poly ball.

Heading: East at 4 knots.

Location: 13 miles west of Reedsport, OR – Winchester Bay

Lat: 43 38.5 N

Long: -124 30.68 W

Tenth right whale found dead: ‘This population can’t sustain another hit’

August 3, 2017 — The first North Atlantic right whale to turn up dead in the Gulf of St. Lawrence was a 10-year-old male, back on June 7. Researchers had spotted it just six weeks earlier in Cape Cod Bay, looking healthy.

Another was a vital 11-year-old female that might have added at least five to 10 calves to the dwindling population.

Among the others: Two whales at least 17 and 37 years old, according to the New England Aquarium, which catalogues them through their distinctive white markings.

The 10th and most recent carcass of the critically endangered species found in the gulf was reported Tuesday, a horrendous die-off not seen since the docile, curious creatures were hunted for their oily blubber in the 1800s.

The federal Department of Fisheries said the “unprecedented number of right whale deaths is very concerning.”

It’s estimated there are only about 500 North Atlantic right whales still living, and Jerry Conway of the Canadian Whale Institute in Campobello, N.B., said the losses are disastrous for an already vulnerable species.

“We feel there is tremendous urgency,” he said Wednesday in an interview. “This has had catastrophic ramifications on the right whale population, this number of whales being killed when we only know of three calves being born this year.

“It certainly indicates a rapid decline in the population.”

Read the full story at the Times Colonist

Opposition grows to seismic testing for offshore oil reserves

More state and local officials join scientists in voicing concerns about impacts on marine life

August 1, 2017 — Scientists are worried that an executive order issued by President Trump earlier this year that seeks to open large portions of the mid-Atlantic and other coastal areas to oil and gas exploration would harm the endangered North Atlantic right whale and other species that occasionally visit the Chesapeake Bay.

Trump’s order, issued April 28, would reverse a 2016 policy from the Obama administration that closed federal waters off portions of the Atlantic, Arctic and Pacific coasts and the Gulf of Mexico to drilling as part of the administration’s effort to boost domestic energy production. The order also instructed federal agencies to streamline the permitting process to speed approval of seismic testing to locate oil and gas reserves in those areas.

But the action is increasingly unpopular with many elected officials along the East Coast. In July, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan publically stated his opposition to any further offshore exploration. And the attorneys general from nine East Coast jurisdictions — including those from Maryland, Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia and Delaware — submitted comments opposing additional surveys.

“The proposed seismic tests are themselves disruptive and harmful,” Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh said in a statement. “Worse, they are the precursors to offshore drilling that would put the Chesapeake Bay at risk to drilling-related contamination. That contamination would have catastrophic impacts on fragile ecosystems and important economies. This is a foolish gamble with our precious natural resources.”

Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia is the lone Southeastern governor supporting marine oil exploration, saying he “never had a problem” with seismic testing. While 127 municipalities have passed resolutions against the tests, only five are in Virginia.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal