Entanglements have surpassed ship strikes as a leading danger to right whales in recent years. Forty-four percent of diagnosed right whale deaths were due to ship strikes and 35 percent were due to entanglements from 1970 to 2009, the study said. From 2010 to 2015, 15 percent of diagnosed deaths were due to ship strikes and 85 percent were due to entanglements, it said.
Each year around 650,000 whales, dolphins and other marine mammals are unintentionally caught and killed in fishing gear worldwide. Under the new rule, foreign fishermen must meet the same marine mammal protection standards applied to U.S. fishermen or their fish will be banned from the lucrative American seafood market.
The Del Norte Triplicate reports: July 7, 2016. Last year’s crab season delay had a disastrous impact on our state’s fishing industry, and it wasn’t great news for humpback whales either – California saw a record number of entanglements… Read More ›
Crab fishermen have taken the lead on this issue and many are already taking part in a limited basis pilot project that was initiated two years ago. Approximately 1,500 lost crab pots have been collected in that program. SB 1287 will build upon the successful pilot project by advancing a statewide solution to the growing problem.
A post-mortem of the creatures, found ashore near the town of Toenning in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, showed their stomachs were full of plastic.
This plastic included a 13-metre-long (43-foot-long) fisherman’s net and a 70-centimetre (28-inch) piece of plastic from a car.
“There is no need to kill whales in the name of research,” he added. “Non-lethal research techniques are the most effective and efficient method of studying all cetaceans.”
HONOLULU >> The Navy agreed to limit its use of sonar and other training that inadvertently harms whales, dolphins and other marine mammals off Hawaii and California in a settlement with environmental groups approved Monday. A centerpiece of the agreement… Read More ›
A crowdfunding project called Snotbot, which aims to fund quadcopter-enabled research of whales by collecting their projectile exhalations, has been getting a lot of attention. … Since 2013, scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and the National… Read More ›
More than a month after discovering them on April 21, scientists are still trying to determine what killed about 20 endangered whales found beached in Chile. The whales — which number 20 according to local authorities, although scientists reportedly counted… Read More ›
Twelve dead whales, including grays, a humpback and a sperm whale, have been documented in Northern California since March. That includes a badly decomposed and headless whale found Tuesday on South Beach along the Point Reyes National Seashore, officials with the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary confirmed.
Neptune 911! 