April 18, 2001

For This Tourist, A Grisly Fate

By Barbara Taormina, Gloucester Daily Times staff

New whale-friendly gear regulations approved for New England fishermen earlier this year might have saved a young humpback whale entangled in a net last week off the coast of Virginia.

Last fall, a 28-foot humpback whale spent months swimming and feeding along the North Shore. The whale became a familiar and welcome sight on the waterfront, and researchers named the animal Inshore after it spent much of the season inside Gloucester, Beverly and Salem harbors.

But last week, the animal was found floating 500 yards from the shore of Virginia Beach with pieces of gill net wrapped around its head and tail.

"It's really a tragedy that an animal that won the hearts of so many people here had to meet a fate like this," said Mason Weinrich, executive director and chief scientist of the Gloucester-based New England Whale Center.

The whale is the third humpback to die in the mid-Atlantic area this month. The other two animals also had serious entanglement scars.

Weinrich is a member of the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team, a group formed by the National Marine Fisheries Service to study ways whale populations can be protected from fishing and shipping activities.

Earlier this year, on advice from the team, the fisheries service required New England fishermen using gill nets and lobster trawls to modify their gear by installing weak links in their float lines. The links, or thinner pieces of rope that are placed every 50 feet in a line, allow the whales to break free if they become tangled in the gear.

But the fisheries service did not pass the same rules for mid-Atlantic fishermen despite the fact that young humpbacks are known to spend the winter months feeding off the coast of Virginia and the Carolinas.

"The same changes were recommend for the mid-Atlantic," said Weinrich. "I don't really know why they weren't required at the same time they were required for the Northeast."

George Liles, a spokesman for the National Marine Fisheries Service, said this morning that the number of entanglements in the North Atlantic prompted the agency to expedite the weak link rules here but he anticipates they will also be implemented in the mid-Atlantic soon.

"A subgroup has recommended similar weak links for the mid-Atlantic," he said. "That will go to the full Take Reduction Team."

While Weinrich and other researchers can't say for sure that weak links would have saved the whale that died last week, they believe she would have had a better chance of survival.

And the fact that the weak link rules were passed for New England and not the mid-Atlantic is bound to raise questions among local fishermen who believe they are consistently being asked to take a greater share of the responsibility for conserving fish stocks and protecting marine mammals.

Although Wienrich recognizes that local fishermen have made more sacrifices than other regional fleets, he also believes New England has set the example for responsible fishing.

"We have to find ways which allow fishermen to continue to fish and whales to live alongside them, and these gear modifications represent an important hope," he said.