Date: Thu, 22 Aug, 1996
Right whales swim in dire straits
By Michael Ellis

BOSTON (Reuter) - Like an airborne traffic cop, Jim Hain flies above the Great South Channel shipping lane near Cape Cod, watching for near-collisions.

He patrols from a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter to make sure ships in the area avoid colliding with 60-ton North Atlantic right whales, once hunted to near-extinction and now the most endangered of the great whales. Only about 300 remain, and scientists said their numbers have been declining in the last three years. Collisions with ships and entanglement in fishing gear are believed to be the leading causes of death for the slow-moving black-and-gray mammals.
"Rights are infrequently hit by ships. However, because of the low population and the low calving rate, it's an issue," said Hain, a biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. "We're trying to prevent an event that doesn't occur very often."

The project is one of many cooperative ventures along the Atlantic coast to try to save the threatened species. Vessels searched fruitlessly off the coast of Massachusetts this month for a 50-ton right whale that was seen entangled in fishing gear by a Gloucester, Massachusetts, whale-watching vessel.
"Basically, we'll go anywhere in the North Atlantic to rescue a right whale. We believe each one is important for the species survival," said Peter Borrelli, executive director of the non-profit Center for Coastal Studies based in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Six right whales have been found dead since the first of the year, at least two a result of ship collisions. This is an alarming number considering the small size of the whale population, said Charles Mayo, a senior scientist at the Center for Coastal Studies whose father and grandfather once harpooned whales. "We have to assume for every one known to have died there have to be a number that are not known. This whale is right on the brink, probably because of a lot of early whaling."

A thousand years ago, Basques began hunting the right whales -- so-called because their slow speed and high oil content made them the "right" whale to capture. By the time of the great whaling era in the first half of the 18th century, when the Massachusetts towns of Nantucket, New Bedford and Salem were the whaling capitals of the world, the right whale was already commercially extinct.

Sixty years after hunting for whales was outlawed in U.S. waters in 1935, the protected continental shelf off Massachusetts has turned into fertile feeding grounds for many species of whales, spawning an estimated $20 million whale watching industry, said Brian MacDonald, co-founder of the Northeast Whale Watching Association.
"(Massachusetts) has changed from a whaling state to a whale watching state," he said. At least 25 whale watching outfits in the U.S. Northeast take approximately 1.5 million people a year on cruises to see humpbacks, finbacks and minkes, but MacDonald said they steer clear of right whales.
"The whale watching industry often works very closely with us to report whale entanglement," Mayo said. "I think they can be congratulated on being a central part of a story in the rescue of dozens of different types of whales."

Scientists also suspect inbreeding along with pollutants and subtle climatic changes may be curtailing right whale reproduction rates, Scott Kraus, head of right whale research at the New England Aquarium in Boston, said. There is very little scientists can do about inbreeding or climatic changes, Hain said, but one difference they can make is warning vessels to steer clear of right whales.

The Great South Channel, sandwiched between Nantucket Island and Georges Bank, is dense with plankton, the main food source for right whales. It is also the main waterway between Boston and Portland, Maine and the lower U.S. East Coast.

Since the pilot project began in May, Hain said he has spotted right whales on many of his bi-weekly flights and radioed warnings to ships spotted in the area. He said navigational charts will soon be marked with the breeding and feeding grounds of right whales.
"The monitoring flights alone won't solve the problem, but they're part of a multi-pronged approach," he said. "The other approach is the education of mariners."



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