Whales

It sounds like a crime show episode at sea: In late January 2024, federal regulators learned that a dead female North Atlantic right whale had been sighted near Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. The whale was towed to shore, where more than 20 U.S. and Canadian scientists converged to perform a necropsy, or animal autopsy. On Feb. 14, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that the whale was #5120 in a catalog that tracks individual right whales. Further, the agency said, rope that had been deeply embedded in the whale’s tail had likely come from lobster fishing gear in Maine. Entanglement in fishing gear is a deadly threat to these critically endangered animals. Scientists estimate that before commercial whaling scaled up in the 18th and 19th centuries, there may have been as many as 10,000 North Atlantic right whales. Today, fewer than 360 individuals remain. Almost 90% of them have been entangled at least once. When whales become en...

The Southern Ocean encircling Antarctica is the world’s largest feeding ground for baleen whales – species like humpbacks that filter tiny organisms from seawater for food. In the 20th century, whalers killed roughly 2 million large whales in the Southern Ocean. Some populations, like the Antarctic blue whale, were reduced by more than 99% and have been struggling to recover, even though most nations ended commercial whaling in the mid-1980s. Today a new threat is emerging: industrial fishing for Antarctic krill – tiny swimming crustaceans, roughly 2 inches (60 millimeters) long. In a newly published study, colleagues and I found that competition with this burgeoning fishery may impede whales’ recovery. I first learned about this issue in early 2022, when a colleague working aboard a cruise ship told me that he had seen approximately 1,000 fin whales feeding on krill near the South Orkney Islands, just north of Antarctica. This was probably the largest a...

Maine lobster fishermen received a Christmas gift from Congress at the end of 2022: A six-year delay on new federal regulations designed to protect critically endangered North Atlantic right whales. The rules would have required lobstermen to create new seasonal nonfishing zones and further reduce their use of vertical ropes to retrieve lobster traps from the seafloor. Entanglement in fishing gear and collisions with many types of ships are the leading causes of right whale deaths. Maine’s congressional delegation amended a federal spending bill to delay the new regulations until 2028 and called for more research on whale entanglements and ropeless fishing gear. Conservationists argue that the delay could drive North Atlantic right whales, which number about 340 today, to extinction. This is the latest chapter in an ongoing and sometimes fraught debate over fishing gear and bycatch – unintentionally caught species that fishermen don’t want and can’t se...