Injured North Atlantic right whale calf given antibiotics

By Mary Ann Brag

Posted Jan 16, 2020

Team of experts launches dart of medication in waters off Florida.

FERNANDINA BEACH, Fla. — Biologists gave antibiotics to an injured North Atlantic right whale calf Wednesday with the hope of staving off infection from boat propeller cuts. The calf’s prognosis remained poor, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The newborn calf was the fourth documented in the warm waters off Florida and Georgia, where the critically endangered right whales migrate for calving and nursing.

The mother, known as Derecha, is a right whale that typically visits Cape Cod Bay in the later winter and spring, as part of the annual migration pattern from Florida to the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

The calf’s wounds were first seen by researchers Jan. 8 off Georgia’s Altamaha Sound by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Over the next two days, teams with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources and Clearwater Marine Aquarium Research went out by plane and boat to try to find the mother-and-calf pair to see the calf’s condition, and they spotted the animals Jan. 10.

Medical experts and biologists spent Jan. 11-12 reviewing images and video to continue assessments of the calf’s injury and to determine potential next steps. Based on the images received, the calf’s wounds were worse than originally thought — for example, some of the wounds to the lip may not be repairable, which could make it difficult for the calf to nurse. At that time, the calf’s prognosis was downgraded from “guarded” to “poor.”

On Wednesday, the pair was spotted again. Based on the assessment by the on-site veterinarian, the team determined that antibiotics could benefit the calf.

The calf received nearly 50 milliliters of the long-acting antibiotic Excede delivered by dart launched from a boat about 7 meters away, said Barb Zoodsma, who oversees the right whale recovery program in the U.S. Southeast for NOAA Fisheries.

Both mother and calf remained calm throughout the procedure, Zoodsma said.

Biologists will continue to monitor the calf through aerial surveys.

Cuts from boat propellers, strikes by boats and entanglement in commercial fishing rope are causing deaths of right whales to outpace births, according to scientists, who carefully monitor right whale births each year. About 409 right whales remain in what has been a steady decline since at least 2010, according to a federally sponsored computer model released in 2017.

Material from the Savannah Morning News was used in this report.

Treatment options weighed for injured right whale calf

By Mary Landers / Savannah Morning News

Posted Jan 13, 2020 

Prognosis for newborn struck by propeller off Georgia downgraded to poor.

Wildlife officials are weighing next steps, including the possible administration of antibiotics, in the treatment of a newborn right whale calf injured by the propeller of a vessel.

The then-week-old calf and its mother, nicknamed Derecha, were first spotted Wednesday off Georgia’s Altamaha Sound by biologists with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Photographs revealed the calf has deep gashes on either side of its head.

Two days later aerial and on-water surveys with the commission and the Georgia Department of Natural Resources spotted the pair again about 12 miles south of St. Simons Island.

Medical experts and biologists spent the weekend reviewing images and video to continue assessments of the injury and prognosis and to determine potential next steps, the National Marine Fisheries Service reported on its website. Based on the images received, they determined the calf’s wounds were worse than originally thought — for example, some of the wounds are to the lip and may not be repairable, leading to impacts on feeding.

They downgraded the calf’s prognosis from “guarded” to “poor,” which means not likely to survive, fisheries service veterinarian Dr. Teri Rowles said.

Most worrisome is the gash on the left side of the calf’s mouth, which appears deep enough to have exposed bone and injure the underlying structure that produces baleen.

“We have seen whales come back from horrific injuries,” she said. “But for an animal this age it’s pretty dramatic.”

Officials with the fisheries service and its state and private collaborators plan to locate the mother and calf pair and obtain images to update the assessment of the calf’s injuries, condition and behavior. Antibiotics may be delivered if warranted.

Such treatment of large whales in the wild is rare, but biologists with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources have experience with operations in which a large whale was sedated and given antibiotics. In 2011, one such operation succeeded in disentangling a 2-year-old right whale after it was sedated.

The Clearwater Marine Aquarium Research, SeaWorld and the International Fund for Animal Welfare are also partners in the effort.

Derecha was first seen in December 1993. She is at least 27 years old. This is her fourth calf; she last gave birth in 2010.

North Atlantic right whales are highly endangered, with only about 400 remaining. Deaths, mainly from ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear, have outpaced births of these bus-sized creatures in recent years.

Female right whales migrate from New England to Georgia and Florida waters to give birth.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration law enforcement is investigating the vessel strike, said Barb Zoodsma, who oversees the right whale recovery program in the Southeast for the fisheries service.

“It’s safe to say somebody knows they hit a whale,” said Zoodsma, who has interviewed captains who hit whales. One said it felt like he had “run aground hard” and the force sent his wife “flying from stern to bow.”

Zoodsma encourages marine operators to think of the offshore area at this time of year as a school safety zone.

“We have a nursery and kids playing, whale kids,” she said. “The prudent thing is to slow down to 10 knots or less.”

Mother-calf pairs spend the majority of their time at, or a few feet below, the water’s surface in the Southeast. This is a critical and vulnerable time for right whale mothers to bond with their calves — the law requires staying at least 500 yards away by air (including drones) and by sea.

800 × 800 North Atlantic Right Whale | Defenders ... defenders.org A days-old North Atlantic right whale calf has been severely injured after being struck by a boat’s propellers. This is the first calf its mother, Derecha, has borne in a decade. And these whales are so critically endangered, the loss of even one calf is a devastating setback for the species. Fight for endangered whales and other vulnerable animals with an urgent donation to Defenders of Wildlife. These are the stakes: Fewer than 400 North Atlantic right whales are alive today. News of this injury comes from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, which found that the calf had two “parallel and s-shaped” wounds along its body, most likely caused by boat propellers. Boat strikes and entanglement in fishing gear are among the greatest threats to these docile and slow-moving whales. These threats have slashed the whales’ life expectancy from over 70 years to just 30 years. Support common-sense whale and wildlife protections with your gift, while we can still save these whales! Your urgent support will help us ramp up the campaign to pass the SAVE Right Whales Act, a law that would provide money to invest in technologies to save right whales from being injured and killed by ships and fishing gear. We are also fighting in court to protect right whales from deadly entanglements. Make sure these whales get the protection they need with your support right now! Thank you in advance for your generous support of imperiled wildlife.All around us, the animals we love are being driven closer to the brink of extinction. It doesn’t have to be this way: With your help, we can stop preventable wildlife tragedies like this one! Sincerely, Jane Davenport Senior Staff Attorney Defenders of Wildlife P.S.: Our tireless fight for whales and other imperiled wildlife is only possible because of supporters like you. The best way you can make a sustained impact to protect vulnerable wildlife is through an automatic monthly donation!

Defenders of Wildlife | 1130 17th St NW, Washington, DC 20036 | defenders.org Defenders of Wildlife is a national, nonprofit membership organization dedicated to the protection of all native wild animals and plants in their natural communities. Photo Credit: Right Whale (c) NOAA Florida Fish & Wildlife © Copyright 2020 Defenders of Wildlife

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Right whale consortium urges action to save species

Partial disentanglement of right whale #3125 on 8/2/19. Final cut. CCS, NOAA permit #18786-03.

On Friday, August 2 the Marine Animal Entanglement Response team (MAER) from the Center for Coastal Studies (CCS), in collaboration with the Northeastern Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) partially disentangled a North Atlantic right whale, one of only about 400 individuals left, east of Cape Cod. For more information visit https://coastalstudies.org/ccs-disent...

Right whale consortium urges action to save species

By Doug Fraser

Posted Nov 14, 2019

PORTLAND, MAINE — Right whales continued their precipitous march toward extinction last year.

In presenting the annual right whale report card, Heather Pettis of the New England Aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life told attendees at the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium’s annual meeting in Portland Thursday that the world’s most endangered great whale experienced another population drop in 2018 to 409 individuals.

That estimate was down from 451 in 2016 and 411 in 2017.

Right whales feed on the surface. They move slowly, seem oblivious to ships and are hard to see. Ships were once the main cause of right whale deaths, but have been overtaken in recent years by entanglement in fishing lines, particularly the vertical lines that run from a surface buoy to a lobster pot.

“Yet another year of decline for right whales,” said Consortium Chairman and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution researcher Mark Baumgartner.

While right whale numbers climbed from 314 individuals in 2000 to 482 by 2010, “we’ve eroded half those gains,” Baumgartner said.

Baumgartner saw a grim example of how fast extinction can happen in the vaquita, a tiny porpoise in the Gulf of California that is caught inadvertently by Mexican gillnet fishermen illegally trying to land totoaba, another endangered species. The vaquita went from 500 in 1997 to between six and 22 individuals today.

“When you have a very small population, it can get away from you very fast,” Baumgartner said.

The right whale population is so small that the National Marine Fisheries Service put the number of animals that can be killed by humans each year without impacting the species recovery at less than one. So far in 2019, 10 right whales have died, while three died last year and 17 died in 2017.

“These are detected mortalities,” said Pettis, who also serves as the consortium’s executive administrator. “This is the best-case scenario, the reality is much worse.”

In recent years, possibly chasing food, rights whales have shown up in Canadian waters not accustomed to seeing them and with virtually no protections in place. Since 2015, 25 dead right whales have died from entanglement in fishing gear and ship strikes, mainly in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

The deaths have Canadian officials scrambling to find solutions.

“It was very clear this had to stop,” said Tonya Wimmer, a marine mammal biologist and the director of the Marine Mammal Response Society of Nova Scotia. Wimmer’s team performed some of the necropsies on the nine dead right whales found in Canada this year.

“The teams needed it to stop too. It was getting to be depressing,” she said.

With extinction on the horizon, New England states agreed in April to craft measures that would result in a 60% reduction in fishing mortality by lobster pots on right whales. The meeting of the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team, a NOAA advisory group, led to draft proposals by Massachusetts and New Hampshire to reduce the number of vertical lines by 30% and to use rope with a 1,700 pound breaking strength that large whales could break through without getting entangled.

Rhode Island proposed an 18% reduction in the number of lines. Maine, with over 3 million traps and 4,500 permitted lobstermen, is the largest lobster fishery by far. At the time, it appeared to agree to a 50% reduction in the number of vertical lines and the use of breakaway rope, but later withdrew from the agreement.

Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, told the consortium Tuesday that they felt that the fisheries service had not been accurate in assessing the 60% reduction. She said data showed few confirmed cases of verified death by entanglement in lobster gear and suggested that gillnet gear, large panels of nets that float upright like a fence and are anchored to the bottom, was more to blame.

“The 60% reduction was too high for our fishery,” she said Tuesday.

The fisheries service is working on new regulations to achieve that reduction and the states all have to submit plans to the agency that accomplish that, said Sean Hayes, the chief of protected species at the Northeast Fishery Science Center.

But McCarron said the agency should be looking more closely at other fisheries like gillnets and the shipping industry, which has been responsible for most of the Canadian deaths.

“Entanglement rates went up in the last decade and seem to be the prevailing cause of death,” countered Scott Kraus, a senior scientist with the Anderson Cabot Center and the incoming consortium chair.

Kraus noted it was hard to confirm what type of gear was responsible in most whale deaths, but the evidence of entanglement was strong, with 83% of right whales showing scars from line. Evidence also shows that lobster lines were by far the most prevalent in the ocean, he said.

“The entanglement risk is everywhere,” he said.

Amy Knowlton, gear research specialist for Anderson Cabot, said it was time to stop arguing over whose gear was causing the problem.

“We have to stem this tide of death and destruction,” she said, arguing that entanglements were occurring everywhere and involved all fishing gear using anchored vertical lines. The data showed that closures intended to protect whales were not working as they frequently moved out of protected areas, or they were instituted too late. Plus, determining where whales were being entangled was difficult, especially since large areas of the Maine coastline were exempt from federal whale protection measures.

Knowlton proposed that breakaway links developed by South Shore lobstermen that separate at 1,700 pounds, which is strong enough to haul gear but weak enough that it would separate when encountered by a whale, be used in all fixed gear fisheries in all areas.

This, she said, could be a stopgap measure until scientists developed a ropeless buoy system that was dependable and affordable.

“Clearly the trajectory is alarming,” said Philip Hamilton, a research scientist who manages the whale identification data base at the New England Aquarium.

But Hamilton noted the species had a big recovery in the early 2000s.

“We just have to stop killing them,” he said.

Humpback whale disentangled 10/4/19. CCS, NOAA permit 18786-03

A commercial fisher reported an entangled humpback whale this morning in Cape Cod Bay, off Provincetown. The Center for Coastal Studies Marine Animal Entanglement Response team responded and found the whale with a buoy on the right side of its flank, with line from the buoy going under the body, around the chin, over its back and down to a trap. Despite poor and worsening sea conditions, the MAER team was able to cut the line between the buoy and the chin of the whale. There was no entanglement visible when the whale next surfaced, so it’s likely that that once the line was parted the remaining gear fell away. The CCS Humpback Whale Studies Program is attempting to identify the whale. Many thanks to the fisher who reported, documented and stood by the whale until the CCS team arrived on scene. To report any live or dead marine animal entanglements, call 1-800-900-3622 or hail the USCG on VHF 16.

Necropsy performed on whale carcass found off Long Island

By Mary Ann Bragg
Posted Sep 19, 2019

WANTAGH, N.Y. — Researchers completed a necropsy on a North Atlantic right whale Wednesday afternoon at Jones Beach State Park, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The 40-year-old male whale, known as No. 1226 and named “Snake Eyes,” died after being seen swimming in July and August by researchers in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Right whale scientists had been gravely concerned about the whale, according to the New England Aquarium Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life. When the whale was seen Aug. 6, fishing rope was wrapped through his mouth while his tail appeared to drag toward the bottom, meaning he may have been anchored to the ocean floor. Further aerial surveys failed to spot the whale until his body was reported Monday 5 miles south of Fire Island Inlet off Long Island.

The carcass was towed to the state park. Biological samples were taken for further study.

Critically endangered right whales are experiencing what is called an unusual mortality event along the Atlantic coast, given the high number of deaths since 2017, which currently stand at 29.

The death of Snake Eyes was the first carcass reported this year in U.S. waters. Eight carcasses have been documented this year in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada.

Snake Eyes was first spotted in 1979 off the New Hampshire coast when research was just beginning on right whales, according to the Anderson Center. In the 1980s and 1990s, the whale was seen almost exclusively in the Bay of Fundy and in the Roseway Basin, off Nova Scotia.

Starting in 2000, the whale started to feed in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where he was seen regularly.

New estimate lowers number of right whales

By Mary Ann Bragg 
Posted Nov 7, 2018 

Annual report card comes as researchers work to identify whale found dead off Nantucket. .

NEW BEDFORD — A gut feeling among North Atlantic right whale experts that the population of the beleaguered animals has dropped to around 400 has been reinforced with a new statistical estimate of 411 animals as of the end of 2017.

“The public shouldn’t think there are exactly 411 whales,” Center for Coastal Studies right whale researcher Charles “Stormy” Mayo said Thursday at the end of the two-day North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium annual meeting. “We believe that they are in the low 400s, or around 400.”

The consortium’s annual report card for the end of 2016 had set the population number at 451, using a statistical model unveiled last year.

The loss of about 40 right whales, under the statistical model, between the end of 2016 and the end of 2017 would include the 12 documented deaths in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada and the five off the Cape and Islands linked in large part to human causes of entanglement in fishing rope and being struck by ships.

“Everyone in the field — conservationists, the public, scientists — continue to be saddened by the decline,” Mayo said. “There’s no question there’s a decline. There’s no question we need to solve the mortality issue.”

The maximum number of human-caused deaths should be no more than one a year to sustain the critically endangered population along the U.S. and Canadian coast, according to a federal stock assessment in September.

U.S. and Canadian government agencies and nonprofit organizations are working to identify the best ways to respond, with new technology to eliminate vertical ropes in the water, for example.

So far this year three right whale deaths have been documented, all in U.S. waters, and all linked to entanglement in fishing rope.

On Monday, the National Marine Fisheries Service said researchers hope to use DNA testing to identify the third whale, which was found floating Oct. 14 about 100 miles east of Nantucket. The whale had been dead for one to four weeks when it was examined, and the decomposed carcass carried no entangling rope when it was found, spokeswoman Jennifer Goebel said. But deep imprints on the animal’s body showed that ropes had tightened around and cut into its chest and flippers. 

“The necropsy team can’t say for sure how the entanglement affected this particular animal — whether it drowned quickly or what its movement may have been when it was alive and entangled,” Goebel said. “We just don’t have enough information. Generally, entanglements can affect the whale’s ability to migrate, to feed, to breathe. Even if an entanglement does not cause death, it can affect a whale’s health by constricting its movements, feeding, breathing, et cetera.”

The dead whale was at least 35 feet long, meaning it had not yet grown to adulthood. As scientists work to identify the whale through DNA and a comparison of records for known North Atlantic right whales, that could provide information about when and where it was born, whether it was a male or female and its family tree.

Scientists are particularly concerned about a decline in females and in the lack of calves born during the 2017-18 calving season.

“We still have a fair number of females, about 100, that ought to be capable of reproducing,” Mayo said.

After such a poor calving season a year ago, researchers will look for a resurgence of mother-and-calf pairs off the coast of Florida and Georgia within the next few months, Mayo said. The right whales typically migrate seasonally along the East Coast and arrive in Cape Cod Bay to feed in the late winter and early spring.

https://www.capecodtimes.com/news/20181107/new-estimate-lowers-number-of-right-whales