Northern Right Whale Declared Critically Endangered; 31 Killed Since 2017 By Ships, Entanglement
EDIT
On Thursday, such whales, which got their name because they float after being killed and thus were considered the “right whale” to hunt, were placed on the Red List of critically endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the last classification before they are gone from the wild. The task of responding will fall to an unlikely champion, President Trump, whose recent appeals for support from Maine lobstermen could clash with the task of saving the right whale.
Peter Corkeron, a senior scientist at the New England Aquarium who spent nearly a decade chronicling the gruesome deaths of right whales as the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s research program for large whales, said he feared the listing would have little impact. “A lot of the dynamic was bad anyway, and under Trump it just got worse,” Dr. Corkeron said. “People are terrified to do anything about right whales at the moment.”
The right whales are dying at an alarming rate, from ship strikes and entanglement in lobster and fishing gear. NOAA’s fisheries division found that, to avoid extinction, the population cannot afford even a single death a year, but since 2017, 31 deaths have been reported. The calf found off Elberon was the 11th North Atlantic right whale known to have died since June 2019.
EDIT
Emails released to PEER under public record laws show the Trump administration also has tried to avoid bad publicity about entangled whales. When an adult female right whale, given the name Dragon by researchers, was spotted swimming near the surface with a buoy and rope stuck in her mouth in February, outside groups had to prod NOAA to tell the public about it. The National Marine Fisheries Service, a division under NOAA, was “freaked out about any notion of NOAA putting this story in the news,” Tim Cole, a fisheries biologist with NOAA, wrote to a colleague. “But they’d be all over another calf sighting,” he added. “Ah, I see. They only want to share the good news, not the bad,” Allison Henry, another federal biologist, replied. Two days later, the agency sent out a notice about Dragon.
EDIT
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/09/climate/trump-north-atlantic-right-whale.html