Path to extinction for North Atlantic right whales
Path to extinction for North Atlantic right whales
With recent deaths and fewer than 450 North Atlantic right whales remaining, experts fear loss of species
PROVINCETOWN — Inside the cabin of the research vessel Shearwater, Charles “Stormy” Mayo, senior scientist and director of the Right Whale Ecology Program at the Center for Coastal Studies, pulled up on his computer an image of the family tree of North Atlantic right whale #1140.
This whale — dubbed “Wart” by researchers — has a file of photographs, identifying marks, and a life history, as does nearly every one of the remaining 451 right whales on earth.
“Her productivity has been extraordinary,” Mayo said. But Wart hasn’t been seen since 2014, and some worry her fabled life may have come to an end.
Last summer was particularly tragic with 16, possibly 17, right whales — 4 percent of the remaining population — killed after being hit by ships, entangled in fishing gear, and other unknown causes.
Extinction, experts say, is suddenly a reality.
“It was one of the big stories of the day, that right whales were coming back,” Mayo said. “But up to 2010, you had this appallingly slow climb, then decline. Now we have a species that is clearly headed for extinction.”
Wart, first seen in 1981, at the dawn of right whale research, has been subsequently spotted and identified 66 times from the Bay of Fundy to Florida. Believed to be in her 50s now, she is one of the more successful breeders — mother to seven calves, grandmother to 13 and great-grandmother to six.
But that productivity may not be enough in the face of a host of environmental issues related to an increasingly urbanized ocean — vessel noise, pollution and oil and gas exploration — and the unknown complications from a rapidly warming sea that could affect, for example, the seasonal timing of critical right whale food.
Then, there is the intractable problem of human induced mortality and serious injury.
Sixteen deaths last summer caused many to hit the panic button. Researcher Brian Sharp called it shocking.
“It begs the need for fishery managers, the industry and scientists to push harder to find solutions,” said Sharp, manager of Marine Mammal Rescue and Research at the International Fund for Animal Welfare in Yarmouth.
Twelve of last year’s deaths occurred in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where right whales had been seen sporadically over the last four decades, fewer than a dozen a year, and not well-documented. Five live entanglements also were documented in that area last year. Unlike the U.S., Canada has had no ship or fishing restrictions in place as the numbers of whales documented in the Gulf, possibly following prey driven north by climate change, has grown.
But four deaths also happened in the U.S. last year, despite decades of research and planning on how to create whale-safe fishing gear, massive fishing closures and rerouted and slowed ships to avoid fatal interactions with whales. The U.S. deaths alone were four times the number scientists set as the maximum allowed per year if the species is going to recover.
“There’s a huge misconception that the industry is not sensitive to this matter or not aware of it. We certainly are, and it concerns the industry a lot,” said Grant Moore, of Westport, a longtime offshore lobsterman and president of the Atlantic Offshore Lobstermen’s Association.
The exact number of North Atlantic right whales that existed prior to human killing is unknown, but the population was likely reduced to fewer than 100 by the time the international 1935 ban on whaling was enacted.
Until recently, right whales had made steady, if slow, progress and the population grew by an average of 2.8 percent per year from 270 animals in 1990 to 481 animals in 2010.
After that, growth leveled off and then declined to 451 in 2016. With only five calves last year and at least 16 deaths, the trend appears downward, with possibly fewer than 440 now.
Deepening the concern was the results of a new statistical model announced last May in the Ecology and Evolution scientific journal by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center and the New England Aquarium, where scientists found that from 1990 to 2015, female whales age 5 and older had a lower survival rate than males, leading to the current imbalance of males to females in the population, with 273 males and 178 females in 2016.
If four or five adult females continue to be killed each year by fishing gear entanglements and ship strikes, the estimated 100 adult breeding females that remained in the population in 2015 would be gone by 2038, said Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution biologist Mark Baumgartner, who heads the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium, a 200-member data and research-sharing group.
It could be even quicker than that, said Scott Kraus, vice president and and senior science adviser at the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life at the New England Aquarium. Experts believe we only see one in three deaths — the ones that wash ashore or are found floating.
“You could have killed a dozen females last year,” Kraus said.
“Extinction happens fast when you’re killing them off,” he said.
If the North Atlantic right whale were to become extinct, it would be only the second marine mammal after the Caribbean monk seal to be removed from the U.S. Endangered Species Act list because of extinction, NOAA Fisheries spokeswoman Katherine Brogan said.
“To me personally, it would just be a devastating blow to my life and to my career,” said Regina Asmutis-Silvia, executive director for the North America office of Whale and Dolphin Conservation, located in Plymouth. Asmutis-Silvia shuffled through boxes of papers from her 28-year career studying right whales. The same issues were on the table then and now: right whales snared in fishing gear and hit by ships.
“I was willing to be convinced that everything was fine,” Kraus said of himself back in 2010. But he knew that something changed that year. The whales were not looking good.
“A fat, healthy right whale is like a rubber tire. It’s rotund, smooth and black,” Kraus said. There should be a roll of fat behind the blowholes that sticks out like the ribs of the Michelin man, he said.
“When they start to go south, you get a lot more skin sloughing off, sometimes white lesions,” Kraus said. By 2010, the whales were looking skinny, the skin mottled with white lesions. Kraus didn’t know the cause, but recalled thinking, “They’re not fat and happy anymore.”
Scientists are looking, too, with concern at the anemic population growth of the North Atlantic right whale compared with other marine mammals; the Southern right whale comeback was fueled by 7 percent to 8 percent annual population growth and, closer to home, the gray seal’s remarkable turnaround from local extinction in the 1970s showed double-digit population growth annually.
When Kraus began his whale research in the 1980s, oil spills and collisions with ships were considered the worst enemies of the right whale. Those threats have largely been replaced by entanglements in fishing line and gear, which are blamed for 85 percent of right whale mortalities.
“Unless we change things fairly dramatically about how we use the oceans, especially in relation to entanglement, I have a lot of fear about what’s going to happen to the right whales,” said Amy Knowlton, a senior scientist specializing in right whale research at the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life.
A review of scars on 626 North Atlantic right whales over 30 years showed that 83 percent had been caught up in fishing gear at least once, and 50 percent more than once, according to the most recent NOAA assessment. Young whales and calves tended to become wrapped up in gear most frequently. Since 1990, as the strength of fishing rope has increased, researchers believe wounds may have become more severe.
In its draft 2017 stock assessment, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries determined that efforts prior to 2009 to reduce entanglements did not work, and that more recent efforts still need to be evaluated.
Wart’s own life bears that out. She’s suffered through at least two entanglements and every one of her seven calves has the white scars from fishing lines. Three also have been hit by ships, and one is presumed dead. Of the 13 second-generation calves, 12 have entanglement scars, 15 percent show ship-strike scars and two are presumed dead. Half of Wart’s third generation of calves show physical signs of entanglement, one has been hit by a ship, and two are presumed dead.
“When you think of it like that, you get a sense of what these whales are facing,” said Michael Asaro, chief of NOAA’s Marine Mammal and Sea Turtle branch of the protected species division.
A right whale is too strong to suffer a quick death from entanglement, like minke whales that can drown after being weighed down by lobster pots, Asaro said. Instead, with a right whale, the line would break at weak links connecting pots or buoys, then wrap around a pectoral flippers or fluke, or run through its open mouth and hang up on the baleen, which is the hardened hair plates in the mouth that filter food from the seawater.
Some believe that whales roll, possibly trying to shed the line, when they first encounter it. But that can also wrap the line tighter around their body, eventually cutting into flesh and bone, or stopping the whales’ mouth from opening to feed.
“They tend to be prolonged events, lasting weeks, months, years,” Asaro said.
The problem has taken on a new, deadlier dimension in recent years as right whales appear to be moving around a lot more, apparently in search of food they are not finding in places where the whales have been seen feeding for decades.
Since most protections for right whales, such as seasonal lobster and gillnet fishing closures in Cape Cod Bay, are based on where the animals are expected to feed, the whales’ tendency in recent years to venture farther afield places them at a higher risk of harm.
“They are exposing themselves to new risks like the Gulf of St. Lawrence,” Asaro said. In 2015 and 2016, right whales have numbered more than 40 in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and last year the documented count was over 100, although the counts coincide with a increased effort to more accurately survey the Gulf.
Chronic entanglement is cited in both research and by federal officials for its impact on female reproductive health. Females typically reach sexual maturity at 9 or 10 years of age, and they birth one calf at a time. Although right whales previously gave birth every three to five years, more recently, the average calving interval has extended to approximately 10 years, according to the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium report card.
At least some of the observed variability in the North Atlantic calving rate is related to variability in nutrition and possibly increased energy expenditures from reproductive females dragging fishing gear, according to draft stock assessment and recent research.
“I would say that my greatest concern, and it’s not one that is as current and voiced as it should be, is with the calving rate,” Mayo said. “You’ve got to have pluses and right now it’s looking like we have zeros or very low numbers.”
Disentangling Wart
When Scott Landry, who directs the marine animal entanglement response program at the Center for Coastal Studies, heard from an airplane survey team that Wart was in the Great South Channel off Chatham in May 2010, she was in the middle of a prolonged period without producing a calf. Wart had a buoy rope lodged in her mouth like a horse bridle, which would over time start to cut into her upper jaw and skull, causing infection, Landry said.
But cutting that rope away was not going to be easy.
Typically, a whale disentanglement team might use an old whaling tactic known as “kegging,” attaching buoys to the line that the whale is caught in to slow the whale and keep it at the surface long enough to use knives on long poles to cut the lines.
But Wart’s entanglement was at her mouth, the first part of her body to go underwater during a dive. Plus, with the characteristic skittishness of right whales, she closed her mouth, stopped feeding and started swimming hard as soon as the disentanglement team came within a mile and half of her, Landry said.
“We certainly had the sense that once we got into the neighborhood, she was just keen to get out of the neighborhood,” Landry said.
In preparing for the chance to free Wart, Landry had in the winter of 2009 developed a crossbow technique with hundreds of practice shots at a dead fin whale that had washed up in Cape Cod Bay. The technique kept rescuers at a safe distance, but it would take a great shot to cut the rope with the modified turkey hunter tip — four blades attached to the arms of a cross.
As the rescuers followed Wart in their boat, with the airplane surveyors overhead, they prepared to free her, Landry said. She came up to the surface to take a breath. Landry put one foot in the crossbow stirrup and pulled back on the line, cocking the bow before slipping the odd-looking bolt into the flight track and pulling the nock snugly onto the string.
“We fired the arrow, and the whale went right down on a dive,” Landry said. That took about a second and a half, he said.
“You could see that she had extensive wounds all across her gums, where the rope had been cutting into the whale over the last three years,” Landry recalled.
The crossbow bolt had skipped across Wart’s upper jaw and severed the line that Wart then shook off. When she surfaced, she was opening and closing her mouth.
“She obviously felt that something had just changed,” Landry said.
“The whole point of getting her out of this entanglement was not only for her and her life,” Landry said of Wart. “What we were hoping was simply to get her back into the population and get her producing kids again.”
Deep scars, prolonged suffering
As of June, scientists were monitoring 61 right whales for serious injuries, of which 84 percent are from fishing gear and 14 percent are from a ship strike, according to the report card from the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium.
In both injury and death, the physical suffering is palpable in the NOAA North Atlantic right whale stock assessment reports: 16 deep propeller cuts scar the back of one 3-year-old male last seen off South Carolina; a 28-year-old female last seen off North Carolina with her injured newborn is found dead with a fractured skull; a whale is found dead, trapped underwater near Clam Bay, Nova Scotia, with fishing gear wrapped around its tail section.
Listen: Audio interview with Scott Landry, who directs the marine animal disentanglement program at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown. Interview by Mary Ann Bragg/Cape Cod Times
Locally, a whale is found dead off Nantucket, anchored underwater, with fishing ropes wrapped around its head, pectoral flippers and peduncle. Another, a a 4-year-old male named Lou, was last seen off Truro with gray skin, a heavy coat of whale lice and new cuts, probably from wraps of rope.
In November, Nantucket police heard reports of a “massive blob” on the beach, said Scott Leonard of the Marine Mammal Alliance Nantucket. Leonard didn’t realize it was a right whale until he went to the beach and saw the pectoral flippers. Then he saw shoulder bones. Samples taken from the carcass by International Fund for Animal Welfare staff are undergoing genetic analysis to see if the whale is the 17th death of 2017.
In the last millennium, humans have killed whales for business and commerce, Michael Moore, a veterinarian at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said in a paper in the Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review. Since the 1930s, that direct killing of whales for oil and baleen has changed to incidental injuring and killing of whales — still for commerce, Moore said.
“In terms of values, the question of extinction and avoidance of prolonged suffering to animals is counterpoised against consumer satisfaction and societal nutrition,” he said.
Particularly for a whale with a chronic wrapping of fishing rope on its body, death can come after months of the rope cutting into the whale’s body or weight loss due to an inability to feed in what are prolonged and uniquely painful forms of suffering, Moore said.
“I know everybody loves their lobster, but because of that love for lobster you’re decimating a population,” said Christy Hudak, research associate with the Center for Coastal Studies. The heightened demand for fast delivery of products also creates the shipping risk to whales, she said.
“There’s got to be a compromise,” she said.
The first right whale death of this year, found off the Virginia coast in January, was a 10-year-old female who died from chronic entanglement in fishing gear, based on initial findings of the necropsy. Her family tree, like Wart’s, tells a grim story of interactions with humans and commerce. The young whale’s father was among the 12 right whales killed last year in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where a necropsy June 30 indicated he died from acute internal hemorrhage compatible with blunt trauma, which suggests a ship strike. A brother of the young whale died at a year old as a result of entanglement. The 10-year-old whale herself had survived one entanglement as a 3-year-old after gillnet float line was partially cut away by rescuers and she shed the rest.
It’s ironic that Massachusetts voters approved a state ballot question in 2016 banning the sale of products from hens, pigs and calves raised in spaces too confining for them to move around, Baumgartner said.
“The level of suffering, compared to chickens and pigs, that right whales go through when they do entangle is orders of magnitudes worse,” he said.
Some progress seen
Of the two big threats to right whales — ship strikes and entanglement — ship strikes, at least in the U.S., are seen as significantly reduced if not eliminated through a combination of technology, common sense and cooperation.
“The management measures that we put in place certainly have reduced the number of strikes,′ Knowlton said. “I really do believe that.”
Measures include permanent relocation of shipping lanes, such as in Stellwagen Bank, mandatory seasonal slow-down areas for ships, such as in Cape Cod Bay and off Race Point, and nearly real-time whale location data for mariners.
“We’ve had two strikes off of Cape Cod in the past couple of years,” she said. “There are other areas that I’m concerned about like off New York.” Knowlton said talks with shipping industry officials will be initiated about further potential changes to what’s in place now.
With entanglements brought to the forefront, fishermen are shouldering much of the burden of saving the species.
“I think the industry is really aware of the severity of the situation,” Moore said. “They are also terrified they will be left out (of the solutions) and not have any input.”
At both state and federal levels, fishery managers have the difficult task of both managing fish stocks for the maximum sustainable yield to fishermen, while charged with protecting endangered species such as right whales.
“Our challenge is to provide protection (for the right whale) while trying to maintain a healthy and profitable fishery at the same time,” said Robert Glenn, a lobster biologist with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries. “Our whole emphasis is to be as surgical as possible and make conservation decisions that are least harmful to fishermen.”
So too is NOAA Fisheries faced with the somewhat conflicted mission of managing fish stocks while ensuring the recovery of endangered marine mammals like the North Atlantic right whale under the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act and the U.S. Endangered Species Act.
But the effort to protect right whales from entanglement is splintered among different entities and is glacial in its progress. The most recent major amendment to the federal Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Plan under the Marine Mammal Protection Act was published in 2014, and became effective in 2015, but began with an agreement in 2003.
Sharon Young, marine issues field director at The Humane Society of the United States, is worried the issues facing the right whale are now too complex and the species has little time.
“I worry we’re going to ‘meeting’ this thing to death,” Young said.
“I don’t want to put us in the situation where we say we need another five to 10 years of study before mitigation,” Baumgartner said. “This species doesn’t have that time.”
Some tension exists between states over differences in regulatory requirements such as lobster landing reporting, coastal areas exempted from federal review and the marking of fishing gear.
The general sentiment among the region’s coastal fisheries, though, is that they have done a lot already and that the other guy hasn’t done enough.
“We have tested everything. Glow rope, stiff rope, time tension cutters. We took the gear and put it out on boats and ran it through the hauler to get actual feedback to scientists,” said Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association. “We did all that and guys did it for free because they want to help find a solution.”
Measures imposed by regulators looking to save the whales come with a cost to fishermen. In 2009, lobstermen were required to use sinking line. But lying flat, particularly on rocky bottom, caused the rope to chafe more and lines didn’t last as long and had to be continually mended or replaced.
“That adds about 10 grand a year plus labor,” McCarron said.
Orleans lobsterman Jonathan Granlund said about 50 percent of his gross income goes back into capital costs like bait, fuel, boat maintenance and gear. The proposal to switch out the lines he currently uses for ones with weaker breaking strength could cost him $30,000 and would cut the profit margin in half if done in one year. New England fishermen have also been reducing the number of lobster pots they put out.
Government officials and scientists are now considering two new solutions to the entanglement problem: weaker ropes on vertical lines leading from pots to buoys and “ropeless” technology, still in the prototype phase, that could eliminate most if not all vertical lines.
“Whales are strong, but not infinitely strong,” Knowlton said. She was the lead author in a 2016 study that concluded that entanglements resulting in death or serious injury would drop by 72 percent if the industry went to ropes with lower breaking strength. The study examined 132 ropes from 70 entanglements and found that there was a dramatic increase in their strength beginning in the 1990s as rope-making technology improved. That led to a dramatic increase in severe injuries and complex entanglements.
Moore felt the reduced breaking strength probably would work for inshore buoys but he questions their use in the deeper waters of the Atlantic.
“Weaker breaking strength rope is always a possibility. It’s the next option people have been talking about,” Granlund said. He already uses metal links that part at 300 pounds, half the breaking strength required by regulations.
The more complicated ropeless system is one in which there is no surface buoy and the line is wrapped around a spool on the bottom, an on-call buoy, summoned to the surface only when fishermen come out to pull their traps. It’s been developed by a team at WHOI, but it’s costly, at around $2,000 per unit, and bulky. At over 300 pounds, the spool must be lifted by a mechanical crane.
Moore and Granlund thought they would be too expensive and too big.
“I’d rather use kite string,” Granlund said.
Kraus and others, though, believe they are seeing a change in attitude among fishery managers and fishermen working together to solve the problem.
“There may be some innovations in fishery technology or in spatial management that actually might make a big difference, but at least everyone is starting to take it seriously,” Kraus said.
The last sightings
After giving birth to a female calf in 2005, Wart did not have another until after she was cut free by Landry and his team. She surprised researchers by appearing off Plymouth in the winter of 2013 with a calf that they believe she gave birth to in Cape Cod Bay, only the second documented northern birth. Wart’s “northern” calf, later identified as a female, worried researchers because they thought she might not survive in colder water. But sighting records show that the calf visited Cape Cod Bay each year through 2016.
Wart’s saga and tales of others like her have become familiar to Knowlton and other researchers.
After starting as a volunteer in 1983 on the right whale project at the New England Aquarium, Knowlton has seen an awful lot in her career.
“Personally, it would be pretty devastating to witness the species continuing to decline and potentially go extinct,” she said. “I guess I think we can do so much better. To do better, it’s going to take a lot of collaboration between everybody involved.”
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