Are These Whales Doing Better?

0:00 For the first time in years, the North Atlantic right whale population has stopped shrinking. Scientists have estimated about 372 individuals that remain up slightly from previous years. It's this fragile sign of hope for one of the ocean's, most endangered giants. But before we celebrate too quickly. We need to ask ourselves, what does this mean? The small increase mean for this population? Are right whales finally rebounding, or are we just buying them a little more time? We're gonna talk about that on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. Let's start the show. Hey everybody. Welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you could speak up for the ocean, and what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action.

0:49 And on today's episode, we're gonna be talking about the endangered population of the North Atlantic white whale, which sits in the North Atlantic. in the winter, it goes down to Florida in the summer, it goes all the way up to the northeast coast of the US and now into the southern part of the Gulf of the St. Lawrence. We're gonna talk a little bit about that and why that is partly contributed to their decline in the 2010s, but we're gonna talk about a population, think about whale populations before whale hunting existed, like real whale hunting existed. 'cause you gotta remember, whales were hunted for oil. They were hunted for energy. That's how we got oil and that's how we were able to light candles and have basically light at night, essentially. So whales were a big part of that energy. That's how we kept warm, all that kind of stuff.

1:29 And so before that, the populations of the North Atlantic right whale was between 9,000 individuals and 21,000 individuals. Imagine that. 9,000 and 21,000. Here we are celebrating 372 individuals. So think about that when you look at the entire context. Now as whale hunting happened, a lot of whales decreased. Like to the point, some went extinct, some near extinction, and some almost right. And then we have a rebound. We have the moratorium on whale hunting. And then in the 1980s there was like low hundreds and recovering from the whale era. So like, you know, you're looking at a couple hundred, which we don't know the exact number 'cause they're really hard to find. They're really hard to monitor.

2:10 They like to stay just below the surface. And so it makes it really difficult to see if there's an animal there or not, especially when you're doing in the 1980s, you're not using radar, you're not looking at heat signals and so forth. Or we're not doing aerial surveys as much. And so in the 1990s we saw growth. We saw 200 to 400 somewhere in that region. So growing slowly, the population increasing a little bit more similar to what it is today. You know, growth rate about two to 3% from 1990 to 2007. Then around the 2010s, we were looking at 480 to 500 individuals. The peak estimate before the decline that we have been seeing over the last, you know, 10, 15 years. Then in the 2010s, we had another decline period, so about 25 to 30% decline from 2010 to 2020.

2:53 Essentially going down to below, you know, the three fifties. And that's obviously not good. And the reason that happened is we started to see a shift in the population. Now, before we go that, let's talk about why these animals are declining. When decline happened, or pre 1980s during the whale hunting, it was whale hunting. That's what was killing these animals. Now between 2010 and 2020, it was a decline due to two things. It was ship strikes, or it was traps, like got caught in lines because of lobster traps, crab pot traps, whatever it might be. These are fishing devices that were getting bottom dwellers, you know, bottom invertebrates, like crabs and lobsters and such. And so what happens is they take these pots, right, these traps, they stick lines to them, and then they put 'em in the water and they sink 'em.

3:40 And then the lines will be attached to buoys. And the buoys will kind of give away the position for the fishermen to come back and grab the buoy and then be able to bring up the pot or the trap when it's time to get 'em and you get all the animals that are in it and you can take 'em back and you can sell them. Especially on the northeast coast of the US that's a huge thing. Even in Canada, lobsters, crab, that's a big part of the fisheries. There's big unions for it. There's a big fishery for it, and you know, it's a lobby for it as well because they wanna protect their interest in fishing. And especially after the cod dropped and the moratorium on cod happened, and we saw haddock fall. We saw a lot of other fish fall. It was very difficult to find something that was good. So having these invertebrates, these lobsters were just boom because less fish that would eat them.

4:21 You're starting to see a boom in population, especially lobsters, crabs and so forth. So they were fishing for them. Now with that said. You have two destructive things that are happening to these animals. You get ship strikes, which it basically means these animals are coming in. And remember when I said the whales stay right below the surface for the North Atlantic right whale. The boats can't see them. They come in, they hit them, either they have a big cut on them or they're bruised really badly or hit really badly. Think about getting hit by a boat. You know, just imagine that. And some of these are major, major ships, like these are transport vessels. So they're like, four or 500 feet. They're moving quite fast and they're not gonna be able to move last minute to be able to avoid a ship strike. And so these animals either end up dying of their injuries or they die right away. You've seen some images of ships coming in and the whales still being on the ship which is devastating.

5:06 Nobody wants to see a whale pass away that way. Nobody wants to see anything pass away that way, let alone a whale. So, there's that problem, Then you have the crab pots, they're swimming through the lines and they get the lines. Caught on their fins, and that line digs in. They can't take 'em off. They don't have the appendages to take them off. And they can't get their mouth over there to take 'em They have these cuts along the lines where their fins attached to their body, and they start to get cuts and infections and they eventually die from their wounds, or they just get entangled where they can't move and they end up drowning. It's, again, not a good way to go. And so there have been mitigation measures for both of these things. Now in the summer of 2017, we really saw a decline. We saw about 17 individuals die up in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, not all 17, but most of them were, those are the only 17 that we found.

5:52 We found over the summer that 17 animals died, there's a huge monitoring program that's been out since the 1980s and maybe even before to monitor this populations, 'cause it's been on the endangered species list. And so when they saw the decline again, they were worried. They remapped the shipping tracks so that ships wouldn't get into them. And this is in the northeast. And then we saw, you know, changes in where you can fish based on where the whales are. As I said, monitoring programs know where these whales go. They know their migration patterns. If you stay away from that and the shipping lanes stay away from those areas, then we should be okay, for the most part, should decrease the amount of strikes. In 2017, though, we saw a shift in the migration and the distribution of these whales into the Gulf of St.

6:33 Lawrence where these animals started to pop up. Now, with that said, is. These ships were not ready for these animals to pop up. They're moving at 20 knots. And when you're in these shipping lanes or you're in these areas where these animals are supposed to be the North Atlantic right whales, you should go down to about 10 knots. And so before we even discovered that there were a good number of these animals, a few got tangled in crab pots or lobster lines unfortunately. And so they weren't ready for that from a management perspective. So mitigations went in temporarily and we saw a decrease of these strikes and these entanglements that we saw, that we discovered. You have to remember that a lot of these North Atlantic white whales. We don't see what they could be. So like, just as much as the estimates could be low or the fact that there could be a higher death rate.

7:16 Also back before 2010 when we saw the 400 8500 numbers, there could have been more. We just didn't see them. They're a little bit elusive when it comes to a massive animal, believe it or not. And so it's difficult to find out how much there actually are, but we kind of know the overall trend. And we've hit the low point in the early 2020s, around 356 to 358. With new studies, we're starting to see that this population is up a little bit slightly to 372. We've seen a slight increase doesn't mean that the population is rebounding. It just means what we're doing in terms of mitigation works right now, for now. This is what we've discovered. It could just be a summer. We haven't really found them. If animals have died or they've sunk down to the bottom of the ocean, so we may not have found them.

7:57 The fact is we just found more of them. There's more effort to find them. Who knows? Right? So now we have slight increase, which is a good news. This is positive news. It should be celebrated, but also we shouldn't rest here. This is just the beginning. Just like I talked about the green sea turtle last week a couple of episodes ago. You know, this is great. It was great news to see that they're not endangered, They're just vulnerable. At least vulnerable, I think is what their level is. And that's great to see. But, we still have a lot of work to do because they could just go back down to endanger just as easily if we slightly lift some of the mitigation factors or mitigation measures, like things that we do to protect them up a little bit, or we don't go full throttle on protection.

8:38 We need to continue the protection so that we see that trend get more and more positive. That's what we're looking for here. So we'd like to see even higher numbers next year in the estimate. Luckily, there are great research programs that are going on. There's a lot of nonprofit organizations, the government's involved in the US and Canada to monitor these animals. There's a lot of private consulting that are monitoring these animals because we wanna make sure that we are protecting them. That is an important aspect to what we are doing here for these animals. And so the monitoring programs are in, hopefully the money remains in. For monitoring these animals. We're gonna see what happens in the states. We know there's a lot of cutbacks. Hopefully Canada can make up for it on the north side of the border. But this is what we're looking at. This is a celebration that there has been a first year in a while where there's been an increase and not a decline, and that maybe these things are starting to rebound into something a little bit better.

9:27 Monitoring needs to stay. We need to continue to make sure that we are doing all the mitigation measures that we have to. We are looking at lobster pots and crab pots, traps, whatever you want to call them to be mindless, meaning that they go down in the water without any lines. They catch their lobster or crabs, and then the fisher just kind of presses a button and it blows up these balloons and they float to the top. Is it perfect? No. But is it starting to get better and better? The technology's starting to get better and better. Yes. And we're starting to see more experiments and, more fishers are getting involved and trying these things. Now. I know the initial experiments didn't go the way the fishers want. It's very difficult. Sometimes they didn't work and all that kinda stuff. But as we continue to improve the technology, we'll get better and better and hopefully we'll never lead lines again and we don't have to worry about entanglement for a lot of these whales and other animals like sea turtles and so forth.

10:16 And we'll see better protections with those and increase phishing yields if that's needed, hopefully managed well. but provide the fishers with the income that they need to survive. That's essentially what we're looking here for the better compromise. So, we can mitigate shipping lanes, we can change those up as we need, but we also need the monitoring because climate change is one of the factors in changing the distribution of these whales. We're gonna see that in fish. We're gonna see that in plankton, which is why probably these animals, these North Atlantic white whales have probably shifted north ' cause the plankton have shifted north and what they like to eat. And so we're gonna see animals shift and we need to continue monitoring that so that we can mitigate any kind of disasters, like a disastrous summer from 2017. We don't want a repeat of that.

10:56 So we have to act fast. We have to adapt to the distribution. We have to monitor, monitor and adapt. That's the big thing. And continue to manage these animals and hopefully we'll see a bigger increase next year and then the year after that, and the year after that. And we just continue, even if it's slight every time I'll be happy with that as long as it goes in the positive. These animals are slow growing. They don't reproduce very much over the summer. It's one calf per female every summer. If we can get that, if that, probably not, it's probably a lot lower than that at this point. But if we can get to very close to that, that would be great. We're not gonna get close to that anytime soon, but as the animals get healthier and as there's less indirect or direct effects on them. Then maybe we can see that growth even better.

11:37 There's a probably, I think it's under 90, maybe even 80 reproductive females, so that needs to increase as well. So I think there were 12 calves this year, which is great. Which is great to see. I feel like they're still alive so far, so that's great. That's great news. Great news all around. I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on this North Atlantic Right whales. What are your thoughts? Big increase or slight increase? What do you think we're gonna see next year? I would love to hear your thoughts. Let me know in the comments in the video. But love if you're watching this on YouTube or if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast app, you can go to speak up for blue.com/contact. Just fill out the form. It goes right to my email. I'd love to hear from you. Or you can just DM me on Instagram at how to protect the Ocean. That's. At how to Protect the Ocean.

12:17 I wanna thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin from the True North Strong and Free. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation.