Cut cut cut
People need to stop dumping fishing gear in the ocean.
These guys get most of the lines off but the last bit is the riskiest, because they’re that much closer to the whale. In this instance the whale throws his head back (at 40 seconds) and sinks, thus escaping the snare.
85% of the few remaining North Atalantic Right Whales have been entangled in fishing gear. Occasionally this is fatal. A study has shown that over the last few decades the whales have been getting smaller. Smaller females raise fewer calves, which, in an endangered species, is not good. The whales can be identified individually by their markings, so researchers know the ages of whales born since such ID records started being kept:
CBC report here: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/right-whales-atlantic-endangered-1.6057736
Paper showing decreasing NA Right Whale size here: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)00614-X?fbclid=IwAR2MbRuIYYju440vP-SU2Aen2hDAb7yFVasv3NFiNqzf9WZ8WBhSfCVuLbU
God that’s awful.
Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum mounted an exhibit called Great Whales: Up Close and Personal. Although I didn’t manage to see it (we weren’t crazy about the idea of going to Toronto under COVID conditions), I’d read about it. It featured skeletons of a Blue Whale, a Sperm Whale, and a North Atlantic Right Whale, all of which had died in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. The Right Whale had been entangled on at least three occasions, but was killed by ship strike.
The skeleton of the Right Whale was displayed in front of a wall panel showing individual photos of every single living member of its species. Just over 350 of them. That’s between a third and a quarter of the number of students that were in my high school. Spread around an ocean. You can see this here: https://torontoguardian.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/IMG_6433.jpg It’s sobering to see in front of your eyes the fragility and tenuousness of this huge creature’s existence on Earth. More so when we are the cause of its declining numbers, even when, for the most part, we’ve stopped trying to kill them. Our touch is Death.
Southern Resident Killer Whales, a unique culture (yes, that’s the correct word) of Orcinus Orca has only 73 members left. Resident Orcas live with their mothers their entire life. Pods are led by the oldest, most experienced females. Killer Whales (along with humans and Pilot Whales) are one of the few animals on Earth known to experience menopause. Family is everything.
Increased ship traffic and its noise makes it harder for them to hunt and communicate. Decreased salmon means that many of them are malnourished; some of them are starving to death. Up until the 1960’s and 70’s, it was thought there were thousands of Killer Whales along the west coast of North America. Turns out there were only hundreds, and rather than being one large, interbreeding population, they consisted of a number of small subpopulations, and ecotypes (perhaps even species), each with its own food preferences or specializations, dialect, and home range. Residents are fish-eaters; Transients (or Bigg’s Killer Whales) are mammal hunters; Offshores eat sharks. Their ranges can actually overlap, but their cultures keep them separate. Bigg’s Killer Whales are currently thought to have been reproductively isolated from all other ecotypes for 750,000 years!
On August 8, 1970, an infamous roundup of 80 Orcas took place at Penn Cove, Puget Sound, Washington. The whales, Souther Residents, were herded using boats, aircraft and explosives. Younger whales were favoured for capture, as they were smaller and easier to transport. Five Orcas died, seven were kidnapped. The Southern Residents have never really recovered from this loss. One of those kidnapped whales survives, a lonely exile in a tank at the Miami Seaquarium. Called “Lolita” by here captors, and known as Tokitae, or Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut by those who would like her returned to her home waters, she is thought to be about 56 years old. The Orca believed to be her mother, known scientifically as L25, (and, less clinically, as Ocean Sun), is still alive; at about 93, she is the oldest living member of the Southern Resident Killer Whales.
It’s a wonder that any whales anywhere ever choose to have anything to do with humans at all.