November 23, 2018 — More than 80 percent of North Atlantic right whales become entangled in fishing lines at least once in their lives, making it a leading cause of death for the critically endangered whale species. Now, with the help of new entanglement simulation technology, scientists at the New England Aquarium are working to change that.
Tim Werner, a senior scientist at the aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life, is one of several aquarium researchers who collaborated with scientists from Duke University to develop a graphic model that gives them an opportunity to study entanglements and potential solutions in a practical and humane setting, aquarium officials said in a press release.
“This gives us a tool we can use right away to say, ‘If you have an idea, let’s evaluate it,’ and we can evaluate it over the course of several days rather than over the course of several years,” Werner said in a telephone interview.
The goal for developing the model was to reverse-engineer entanglements in order to figure out ways to modify fishing gear so that it poses less of a risk to helpless marine animals going forward.
“If you can re-create the way the rope wraps around the animal in the model, you can figure out how to change the gear to reduce the risk of entanglement,” Werner said, according to the release.
Read the full story at the Boston Globe