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On a breezy spring day, scientists and conservationists methodically conducted experiments near 15 North Atlantic right whales that occasionally spouted and surfaced in a bay south of Boston.
The pod of adults and calves is about 4% of the worldwide population of a marine mammal that almost disappeared from the planet after many decades of commercial whaling. There now are only a few hundred of the behemoths, which can weigh 70 tons (63.5 metric tons) and subsist on small ocean organisms.
Although right whale numbers are dwindling, conservationists attribute their continued survival to the U.S. Endangered Species Act.
The landmark federal law — a half century old this year — has forced the fishing and commercial shipping industries to take important steps to help protect the critically endangered whales. And it’s spurred government agencies and scientists to undertake research.
David Wiley, research ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was part of the crew that spent late March and early April testing the water off Cape Cod for the presence of a naturally occurring chemical that could help predict where right whales will congregate.
That knowledge, Wiley said, can help in forming new rules that safeguard the whales from threats such as entanglement in fishing gear and collisions with ships. While Wiley’s crew was working, a right whale was found entangled in Cape Cod Bay.
“They will go extinct in our lifetime if we don’t do something,” he said. “The goal of my research is to protect animals, right whales, humpback whales.”
Numerous whale species are protected under the Endangered Species Act, including the blue, fin and sperm whale. Some, including the North Atlantic right whale, have been listed since the act passed in 1973. The law also protects other marine mammals, including some seal species, and ocean dwellers such as sea turtles.
Few animals have brought more change to marine industries than the right whale, and conservationists say survival of the species, which numbers about 340 worldwide, is testament to the act’s importance.
“While they continue to decline at this very moment, I’m convinced that without the Endangered Species Act they wouldn’t be here,” said Regina Asmutis-Silvia, executive director of Massachusetts-based Whale & Dolphin Conservation USA.
But as federal regulators craft new protections for the whale and other declining marine animals, fishing and shipping industries that have been altered by decades of conservation laws are digging in for a new round of fighting for their own interests.
