Saving Seafood

MSC delivers a pinch to Canada’s snow crab fishery

March 6, 2019 — Canada’s snow crab fishery is looking ahead at another year without its Marine Stewardship Council certification, but the real risk may be at the hands of the ecolabel.

Last March, the MSC scrambled to suspend its certification of Eastern Canada’s snow crab fishery after a high rate of right whale entanglements and deaths traced back to the fishery in 2017.

What happened next was a little surprising — the lack of a label didn’t have much effect on prices. Despite a buoyant market, Canada’s fixed-gear fleets as well as federal and provincial managers set about on an international mission to work with their neighbors to the south who have long been fighting the good fight to reduce right whale interactions.

Maine’s lobster fishery has been at the forefront of gear innovations to coexist with right whale migratory and feeding patterns. Ten years ago, the fleet made an expensive conversion to sinking groundline instead of using floating rope between pots on a trawl. But the population of an estimated 411 right whales has been expanding its territory into Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence, where regulations haven’t been as robust.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

How a new simulator helps scientists study whale entanglements

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

 

NOAA Issues Report on Protecting North Atlantic Right Whales

November 12, 2018 — NOAA Fisheries researchers have been looking into how to preserve the shrinking population of critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whales.

Officials have concluded that the surest way of protecting the species is by preserving the lives of adult females in the population as a way to promote population growth and recovery.

According to Royal Society Open Science, most right whale deaths are attributed to entanglement in fishing gear and collisions with ships.

Read the full story at CapeCod.com

Low Numbers of Endangered Whales Sparks Debate About Whether Lobster Industry Threatens Species

March 9, 2018 — The population of the endangered North Atlantic right whale took a big hit last year with a record number found dead in Canadian waters from ship strikes and entanglements. With this year’s calving season ending and no new births observed, an ongoing debate over whether Maine’s lobster industry poses a mortal threat to the species is gaining new urgency.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientist Mark Baumgartner says that to help the whales survive much longer, the ropes Maine lobstermen use to tend their traps have to be modified or even eliminated. And it’s not just for the whales’ sake.

“I feel the industry is in jeopardy,” Baumgartner says.

Baumgartner was at the Fishermen’s Forum in Rockland late last week to detail the whale’s plight. If the lobster industry doesn’t respond effectively, he says, the federal government will step in.

“As the population continues to decline and pressure is put on the government to do something about it, then they’re going to turn to closures, because that’s all they’ll have,” he says.

There were about 450 North Atlantic right whales estimated to be alive in 2016. There were only five calves born last year, and a record 17 deaths caused by entanglement or ship strikes.

Read the full story at Maine Public

 

A new model for right whale estimates

New system confirms population decline as another death is reported in Canada.

September 21, 2017 — NEW BRUNSWICK, Canada — Another North Atlantic right whale death in Canadian waters has brought further attention to the threat of fishing gear to the endangered marine mammals.

“It’s considered a severe entanglement,” New England Aquarium spokesman Tony LaCasse said of the dead female, believed to be around 3 years old. Fishing rope and gear, including a snow crab pot, entangled the pale, deeply cut carcass, estimated to be 36 feet long.

The right whales, which frequent Cape Cod waters in late winter and early spring, are among the rarest whales in the world, with 524 estimated in 2015 in a report by the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium. The death brought the total fatalities this year to 14, representing about 3 percent of the population.

The carcass was spotted by airplane surveyors Friday off Miscou Island, New Brunswick. The dead whale was towed to the island Monday, and a necropsy was performed Tuesday.

“The key thing is that the animal was entangled,” said Tonya Wimmer of the Marine Animal Response Society in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

California crabbers use GPS to find whale-killing gear

September 14, 2017 — HALF MOON BAY, Calif. — Fisherman Jake Bunch leans over the side of the fishing boat “Sadie K,” spears his catch, and reels it aboard: an abandoned crab pot, dangling one limp lasagna noodle of kelp and dozens of feet of rope, just the kind of fishing gear that has been snaring an increasing number of whales off U.S. coasts.

Confirmed counts of humpbacks, blue and other endangered or threatened species of whale entangled by the ropes, buoys and anchors of fishing gear hit a record 50 on the East Coast last year, and tied the record on the West Coast at 48, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The accidental entanglements can gouge whales’ flesh and mouth, weaken the animals, drown them, or kill them painfully, over months.

This year, Bunch is one of a small number of commercial fishermen out of Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco, and five other ports up and down California who headed to sea again after the West Coast’s Dungeness crab season ended this summer.

The California fishermen are part of a new effort using their cellphones’ GPS and new software pinpointing areas where lost or abandoned crabbing gear has been spotted. They retrieve the gear for a payment — at Half Moon Bay, it’s $65 per pot —before the fishing ropes can snag a whale.

Especially stormy weather this year has meant more wayward crabbing gear than usual, Bunch said recently on a gray late-summer morning at sea.

“Makes it all the more important to pick it up,” he says.

Read the full story at the News & Observer

An Alarming Number of California Whales Are Getting Caught In Fishing Lines

California has seen a record-breaking number of whale entanglements over the last three years. Now, the Center for Biological Diversity is suing the state for failing to protect its endangered species.

August 30, 2017 — Justin Viezbicke once saw a whale struggling to swim up the coast of California without a tail. Though it was a disturbing sight, Viezbicke wasn’t exactly shocked; he’d encountered similar circumstances before. Viezbicke, the California stranding network coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, surmised that this particular whale’s flukes had been severed off by fishing gear. He knew the animal wouldn’t make it far.

In the past, Viezbicke has come across whales that lost blood-flow to their tails due to rope lines tangled tightly around their bodies. Less severe entanglements than the one Viezbicke witnessed can still lead to deadly infections or otherwise interfere with the animal’s ability to feed or forage.

“These entanglements are long, drawn-out processes,” Viezbicke says. “They can last months, sometimes even longer depending on the nature of the entanglement, and the will of the animal.”

The number of whales entangled in fishing lines off the West Coast of the United States has been sharply rising in recent years. In 2016, 71 whales became entangled in fishing gear off the West Coast, breaking the entanglement record for the third consecutive year. “We’re lucky if we get some or all of the gear off of a half dozen to a dozen of the whales every year,” Viezbicke says.

Entanglements are not always fatal, but for some threatened species, even a small number of deaths could be enough to collapse an entire population. (One subpopulation of humpback whales that feeds off the coast of California, for example, now numbers a mere 400.) Twenty-one endangered or threatened whales and one leatherback sea turtle were entangled in Dungeness crab gear in the Pacific Ocean in 2016; typically, Dungeness crab traps consist of a pot used to collect crabs on the seafloor, attached to a line of rope that extends to a buoy on the ocean surface.

Read the full story at Pacific Standard

NOAA Fisheries seeks info about about whale off Oregon coast

August 15, 2017 — The following was released by the West Coast Seafood Processors Association:

NOAA Fisheries is seeking more information about an entangled whale off Reedsport, Oregon.

If you see it, call 1 877 SOS-WHALE

Time: 9:20 am 8/11/2017

Description: The Reporting Party was 1/4 mile away at the time of the first sighting – no size or description of the species – just a blow and large orange poly ball following behind. Watched for 10 minutes and never saw the body of the whale, just blows and poly ball.

Heading: East at 4 knots.

Location: 13 miles west of Reedsport, OR – Winchester Bay

Lat: 43 38.5 N

Long: -124 30.68 W

Scientists blame fishing gear for fewer whale births

September 7, 2016 — ELLSWORTH, Maine — A study recently published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science says that, despite efforts by fishermen and federal fisheries management authorities, more right whales than ever are getting tangled up in fishing gear. The study also states that injuries and deaths from those incidents “may be overwhelming recovery efforts” for the endangered right whale population.

In the report published in July, lead author Scott Kraus, a whale researcher at the New England Aquarium in Boston, says that while the population of whales has increased from fewer than 300 in 1992 to about 500 in 2015, births of right whales have declined by 40 percent since 2010.

According to the National Marine Fisheries Service, between 2009 and 2013 an average of 4.3 whales a year were killed by “human activities,” virtually all of them involving entanglement with fishing gear.

From 2010 to 2015, 85 percent of right whale deaths resulted from entanglements with fishing gear. Those numbers stand in sharp contrast to what occurred between 1970 and 2009.

Read the full story at the Ellsworth American

Fishing for a solution for endangered right whales

December 29, 2015 — Sometimes technology solves a problem, sometimes it makes it worse.

When researchers at the New England Aquarium and the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown examined ropes recovered from whales entangled in fishing gear from 1994 to 2010, they found that entanglements for North Atlantic right whales, the world’s most endangered great whale species, accelerated dramatically from 1993 to 2010, in both frequency and in the severity of the entrapment.

The culprit, scientists believe, is a new type of rope known as Polysteel, that rope manufacturers began making and marketing to fishermen and others in the marine trades as being 40 percent stronger and more durable than other synthetic ropes. Plus, the lobster industry also shifted from wood to wire traps that allowed them to use heavier gear and for the pots to stay in the water through the winter, increasing the likelihood of interaction with whales.

Even though fishermen already employ weak links designed to break and separate the line from the buoy when a whale pulls on it, researchers found the lines themselves were still doing a lot of damage.

“It was a huge change,” said Amy Knowlton, the lead author of the study and a research scientist with the New England Aquarium working to reduce the risk of whale entanglement and death from fishing gear and lines. Scientists put the number of North Atlantic right whales that can be lost due to human causes at less than one per year, if the population is going to increase and avoid extinction. The National Marine Fisheries Service has calculated that 3.25 right whales per year either died or were severely injured between 2007 and 2011 by being caught up in fishing gear and lines. The agency estimates that 83 percent of the right whale population shows scarring from fishing gear.

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times