January 31, 2001

Right Whales Seem To Rebound

By Barbara Taormina, Gloucester Daily Times staff

A baby boom among right whales is being reported as fishermen get ready to begin using new safety devices to protect the highly endangered species.

According to the National Marine Fisheries Service, 14 right whale calves have been sighted off Florida and Georgia during the last two months. While the number seems small, it's a huge leap for right whales, whose population has dwindled to about 300 animals in the northern Atlantic.

"It's fantastic stuff," said Mason Weinrich, of the Gloucester-based Whale Center of New England. "But we must see sustained seasons, we need to see years of calving like this."

According to Weinrich, the births are not the only good news about right whales. Scientists have also reported the population as a whole seems to be in better health.

Weinrich speculated that the whales' improved appearance could be due to an increase in copepods, the whales' crustacean of choice and main food source.

But while the news is good, scientists tempered their enthusiasm with customary caution.

Right whales have been fighting a long battle against extinction. The whaling industry, which prized right whales for their high blubber content, nearly wiped out the species by overfishing the animals for nearly two centuries.

In 1935, when the population hit rock bottom, hunting right whales was banned. Since then, scientists have watched the whales' painfully slow recovery.

Although a small gene pool and a failure to reproduce are major causes of concern for right whales, scientists believe that fishing gear entanglements and ship strikes are serious threats to the animals.

To protect the whales, the fisheries service's Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team has written a new slate of rules for lobster and gillnet fishermen. The new regulations require fishermen to modify their gear to include weak links and lines that could easily be broken by an entrapped whale, and were scheduled to go into effect last week but have been delayed until Feb 21.

The fisheries service recognized the risk Gulf of Maine fishermen would face switching gear in winter weather. They also acknowledged that, while some whales have been seen in Cape Cod Bay, many are in southern waters for the winter.

But the delayed start of the new regulations brought little relief to fishermen, who have consistently argued that entanglements are not a major threat to the whales.

Gloucester gillnetter John Montgomery points out that whales have long been swimming in water with fishing gear.

"They have always gotten hung up but that's not the cause of their demise," he said.

Montgomery believes ship strikes pose a much greater risk to the animals and, like other fishermen, he is frustrated that the new rules focus on fishermen rather than the shipping industry.

In 1999 there were three right whales deaths, one due to a ship strike, one caused by an entanglement and one death that was not attributed to a specific cause.

Gillnetter Paul Cohan believes the problem with the whales is their failure to reproduce and that fishermen are being asked to solve a problem they did not create and cannot help.

"The big question is how much expense and inconvenience are we going to have to deal with for a situation that we didn't cause -- and to what avail?" Cohan asked last spring.

Cohan is now asking himself how he will pay for the changes that must be made to his gillnets.

But Weinrich insists the cost involved in modifying gear is not great. He and other whale experts have also said that most right whales have scars or marks that suggest they have been entangled in gear at some point in their lives. And they insist that fishermen and others have a responsibility to do everything possible to save the species.

"These births are the best possible news," said Patricia Kurkul, regional administrator for the National Marine Fisheries Service, referring to the 14 new calves. "Recognizing that there may be some natural mortality among the calves, it is important that we keep working to reduce the threat of entanglement and ship strikes in order to give these new whales every opportunity to grow up and contribute further to the population."