Onboard a dangerous mission to disentangle a right whale
Dedicated volunteers, combined with strict fishing policies, may be softening the right whale’s decline
How do you save a whale that's 15 metres long and thrashing around in distress?
Every summer, North Atlantic right whales migrate up the eastern coast of North America where they face an onslaught of threats. They get struck by ships, face food shortages and — all too often — become entangled in fishing gear and ropes.
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that there are currently fewer than 350 North Atlantic right whales, with less than 100 breeding females in that population. Over the past decade, the whales have experienced unusual mortality levels. Since 2017, the administration reports, 20 per cent of the population has been found dead, injured or ill.
When the whales return north to the waters around the Bay of Fundy, Gulf of St. Lawrence and the New England coast, teams of rescuers from a network of agencies are on call, ready to help entangled whales.
But freeing a 60-tonne behemoth from ropes can be tricky — and very dangerous.
"Right whales are flexible enough that they can actually touch the tip of their nose, their rostrum, with their tail," says Scott Landry, director of the Marine Animal Entanglement Response Program at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, Mass. "So if you're anywhere near the head of a right whale, that is an extremely dangerous place to be."
Landry and other right whale rescuers are featured in Last of the Right Whales, a documentary from The Nature of Things, alongside the citizen scientists, fishers and researchers who are doing everything they can to save the species.
'The real culprit is rope'
In 2017, Joe Howlett, a volunteer whale rescuer who co-founded the Campobello Whale Rescue Team, was killed when an entangled whale flicked its tail, hitting Howlett with about a tonne of force.
That summer, seven right whales were found entangled in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Two of them died.
When the rescue team locates an entangled whale, they leap into action. They need to get as close to the whale as possible while maintaining safety for the crew on board.
The teams use an old whaling strategy called "kegging": attaching a floating buoy to the trailing rope so the whale can't dive and escape.
"The real culprit is rope," says Landry in the documentary. "It is rope in the places where these animals have to live."
Many blame the snow crab fishery for the problem. "When they find a whale entangled in the gear … and it's in the snow crab gear, they say, 'Well, it's the snow crab's fault,'" says Martin Noël, a crab fisher. "It's hard to say it's not when you see a buoy that comes from a crab pot."
Noël is testing out new, innovative ropeless methods for crab fishing. Though there may be a few kinks to work out, the promising technology could reduce the amount of fishing gear in the right whales' habitat.
"Any measure that would reduce the amount of rope would benefit whales," says Landry, adding, "I'm talking about reducing rope, not reducing fishing."
The end of the decline?
Between 2017 and 2019, 21 right whales died in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Now, whenever whales are detected in the region, Fisheries and Oceans Canada imposes strict temporary or season-long fishing area closures, making sure non-tended fixed gear is removed from the water.
These closures, conservation groups and scientists say, are reducing the risk of entanglements.
But while no whale deaths have been recorded in Canadian waters since 2019, the population was still in decline in 2021.
According to Heather Pettis, a researcher with the New England Aquarium and executive director of the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium, only one-third of whale deaths are ever seen.
"We haven't detected any. That doesn't mean that there have been zero mortalities," she told the CBC. "We also know that there have been several entanglements of whales."
But Pettis is hopeful: "It looks like the decline, the downward trend, is sort of softening a bit."
Watch Last of the Right Whales on The Nature of Things.
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