A female right whale—there are only 300-400 of them left in the world—turned up dead last week. It had fishing rope stuck in its mouth.
The Montreal Gazette reports that marine biologists had spotted it in trouble more than a month earlier, on Christmas Day, trailing with it about 50 meters of fishing rope because it had gotten tangled in fishing equipment. Right whales migrate about 1,200 miles between the Bay of Fundy in Canada and the southeastern U.S.
There's a lot of fishing territory in there—and as this whale illustrates more than any politician can, the region, and the oceans in general, are in desperate need of better regulation.
Because even where there's been a notion of control over the great seas, it's been false: take the finding, also last week, that 75 times more fish were caught in the Arctic between 1950 and 2006 than was officially reported. Science Daily summed up the problem: "ineffective reporting due to governance issues and a lack of credible data on small-scale fisheries."
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which led the attempted rescue and ultimately pulled the whale to shore once it was found dead, issued a condemning statement about the event and its implications.
Image: NOAA
From the NOAA statement:
The death of a young right whale off Florida drives home the point that while disentanglement responses give the animals a better chance at survival, prevention of entanglements in fishing gear is paramount...Initial observations lead researchers to conclude this whale had been entangled for months. Parts of the rope that could not be removed during the disentanglement efforts were found to be embedded in the whales mouth, possibly impeding it from feeding. The young female was significantly underweight. Weakened and injured by the long entanglement, she was easier prey for sharks. Bite marks on the carcass suggest that scavenging sharks may have finished off the wounded whale by severing major veins at the base of the tail.
The rope removed from the whale was floating groundline from a trap/pot fishery. NOAA Fisheries Service has prohibited floating groundline in U.S. Atlantic coast trap/pot fisheries managed under the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Plan to try to reduce these lethal entanglements, but it is still used in some international fisheries.
To get a better idea of how bad the problem is:
- From SeaWeb: "Some 60% of photo-identified right whales exhibit scars assumed to be caused by fishing ropes and nets, and numbers of whales have been documented in potentially fatal entanglements or with entanglement injuries that were considered serious."
- From the New England Aquarium: "Vulnerable to vessel strikes and entanglement in fishing gear, about half of all right whale deaths are the result of these human activities. They are also threatened by a low reproductive rate, habitat loss, disease and environmental contaminants. Solutions to reduce human impact on right whales exist, but implementation remains a challenge."
At least half of whale fatalities around the world are thought to be caused by fishing gear entanglement or ship strikes, the report by leading scientists says.
It's not strictly fishing lines: shipping needs to be improved and pollution eliminated. We all know about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, for example. But there's debris everywhere. More from NOAA:
Smaller debris items, such as plastic bags and other forms of land-based debris (i.e. litter), also pose a threat to marine mammals. Sometimes marine mammals ingest debris, mistaking it for food. Similar to entanglements, the ingestion of debris may result in starvation, illness, and death. Unlike entanglements however, ingestion of debris by marine mammals is more difficult to study and monitor and therefore little information exists on the subject.
Back to one of the simpler points made by NOAA: "Prevention of entanglements in fishing gear is paramount." Preventing those entanglements means cleaning up the mess that has become of our oceans.
More on the need for ocean regulations
75x More Fish Were Caught In Arctic From 1950-2006 Than Officially Reported: New Data
Red Snapper Populations in Trouble, Simple Fishing Regulations Can Help
All Ocean-Going Ships Near California's Coast Must Now Use Cleaner Fuel