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Impossible To Live In



On April 3, 2018 NOAA Fisheries held a 2-day meeting in Providence, RI, the Ocean State, to discuss with the fishing industry and managers how to approach the lawsuit filed against NOAA regarding the protection of whales. The suit claims NOAA has failed to protect whales as required by the Endangered Species Act. The evidence, the suit claims, is the declining population of northern right whales and the rope that has been found on living and dead right whales. The current legal challenge is over vertical lobster trap lines.

No reasonable person would deny an effort should be made to preserve the right whale. But not just any convenient effort. For 20 years the legal challenge in New England has focused on lobster trap lines. The lawyers suing NOAA over vertical lobster trap lines know they are dealing with two iconic brands, the whale and the lobster.

Over the last 20 years Maine lobstermen have participated in gear and other research, and complied with a range of gear changes. Measures, it was thought, that would protect whales. Meanwhile, slower ship speeds were optional, seismic testing was OK, dumping plastic trash at sea continued, Canada did nothing about lobster trap rope, and ocean water temperatures and acidity have soared. All real and present threats to the right whale.

The day before the April 3 meeting the 8.5-ton Chinese space station Tiangong-1 crashed into the Pacific Ocean. Before entering the earth’s atmosphere it traveled through one of the three layered “space junk” zones that now form thickening debris shells above the earth’s atmosphere.

A week later a necropsy on a sperm whale that had washed up on a beach in Spain determined it died from an intestine plugged with 64 pounds of plastic trash. It was one of 30 whales that died in that region in the past year. A recent report by the United Kingdom predicts the amount of plastic littering the oceans will triple within a decade.

Scientists have documented the habitat shift the northern right whale has made to the cooler Gulf of St. Lawrence. Vertical trap lines is a low-hanging issue in the larger problems the right whale faces. Another mammal is making the ocean impossible to live in.