| "We are dealing with a species that may become extinct if things don't change." | |
| Chris Slay, New England Aquarium |
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New regulations require ship captains traveling along the East Coast to transmit their positions when they are in waters populated with endangered right whales. A collaborative research tagging program is helping scientists develop a model that will assist mariners in avoiding these threatened animals.
Despite international protection since 1937, only about 300 North Atlantic right whales remain, and the species is showing no signs of recovery. Ship collisions kill more right whales than do any other documented cause of mortality.
"There is a lot of pressure from managers to get as much hard data about these animals as possible," says Chris Slay, associate scientist for the New England Aquarium, one of the research partners. "We are dealing with a species that may become extinct if things don't change."
Last January, the aquarium and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Fisheries Service and Gray's Reef National Marine Sanctuary launched a scientific cruise off the coasts of Georgia and northern Florida, where calving right whales usually winter. A second cruise is planned for January 2000.
"The question is if a right whale is detected at X location at noon on this particular day, what is the likelihood of it still being in that area several hours later, and where is it likely to go," says Steven Swartz, chief of the Protected Research and Biodiversity Branch of NOAA's Southeast Fisheries Science Center. "The information we're gathering is helping us build a model that can be used to predict where right whales are likely to be, which will enable us to warn mariners so they can avoid them."
Regulations that went into effect this summer require that large ships entering waters off Cape Cod and the Florida-Georgia state line must transmit their position, and a Virginia computer center will then transmit to the ships the latest information on right whale sightings. Most of the information on the whales' locations is provided by aerial surveys.
To learn more about the whales' behavior patterns, researchers aboard the Sanctuary's vessel, Jane Yarn, placed a high frequency VHF transmitter on a right whale cow, and tracked the whale and her calf continuously for 44 hours, before running into bad weather. Several days later, the pair was relocated and tracking continued for an additional 96 hours.
"We learned that these whales could move as much as 30 nautical miles over a 24-hour period," Swartz explains. "They spend 45 percent of time on the surface and 55 percent below the surface, which is important because it means the whales can only be detected by the aerial surveys 45 percent of the time. We determined that their behavior is similar during the day time and night time, when they are impossible to detect visually."
"It's essential managers do whatever they can to minimize right whale mortality," Slay says. "Hopefully, we will be able to provide the hard data needed to move forward and identify a cooperative solution that will save these animals."
For more information on the right whale research cruise, point your browser to http://www.rightwhale.noaa.gov. You may contact Chris Slay at (706) 543-6859, or cslay@att.net; and Steven Swartz at (305) 361-4487, or steven.swartz@noaa.gov.
