December 17, 2017 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries top administrator in the Northeast has asked for more help from fishermen to save the North Atlantic right whale from extinction, along with receiving assurances from Canadian officials that the 12 whale deaths this year in the Gulf of St. Lawrence will not occur again.
“This is a crisis,” said John Bullard, the outgoing National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Greater Atlantic Regional Administrator, last week at a New England Fishery Management Council meeting. “You do have to use the ‘extinction’ word. That’s what we’re looking at with the trend lines where they are.”
As scientists hone in on the future for the rare right whale, some consider the population likely to be “functionally extinct” in 20 to 25 years. Given that four or five adult females are killed each year by fishing gear entanglements and ship strikes, the estimated 100 adult breeding females left in the population would be gone by 2041, said Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientist Mark Baumgartner cq, who heads to North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium.
“There will still be females left, those that are juveniles today and those that are not yet born, but there will be too few of them to allow the species to recover,” Baumgartner said.
Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times