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Jason Schreiber @Schreibernews / Twitter
This week, a video of a failed attempt to put a dead, 4,000-pound whale into a tiny dumpster made the rounds on the internet, garnering chuckles and comparisons to Peter Griffin forklifting and impaling a beached sperm whale on Family Guy.
The juvenile minke whale washed up on Jenness Beach in Rye, New Hampshire on Monday morning, NBC 10 Boston reported. It was found with entanglement wounds, so researchers with the Seacoast Science Center and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) wanted to move the carcass from the beach to a lab for a necropsy to study its death.
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A little whale and its mother, photographed in Feb. 2008, are two of only a few hundred North Atlantic right whales on Earth. GA DNR
The North Atlantic right whale is already one of the most endangered whales, with fewer than 450 of the iconic marine mammals left on the planet.
But the situation appears to be getting worse: Researchers tracking the whales' usual calving grounds off Georgia and northern Florida have not seen a single calf yet this breeding season, which started in December and peaks in January and February.
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EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
An Arctic tern entangled in fishing gear. Governor of Svalbard / Norwegian Polar Institute Facebook
A disturbing amount of plastic is building up in the once-pristine European Arctic.
According to a study from the Norwegian Polar Institute, "plastic in all sizes" can be found throughout the Norwegian Arctic and in the Svalbard islands, an archipelago between Norway's mainland and the North Pole that's also one of Earth's northernmost inhabited areas.
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North Atlantic Right Whale Population Dips Below 450 After 'Deadliest Year' Since Whaling Era
06 October 2017
Animals
An endangered North Atlantic right whale near a ship off the East Coast. Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission/NOAA
Fifteen North Atlantic right whales—one of the most endangered of all large whales—have already died this year in U.S. and Canadian waters, according to researchers.
"This makes it pretty much the deadliest year we've seen for North Atlantic right whales since the days of whaling," Tonya Wimmer, director of Canada's Marine Animal Response Society, told the Toronto Star.
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A North Atlantic right whale that a team of state and federal biologists assisted in disentangling on Dec. 30, 2010, off the coast of Daytona, Florida. Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission
The population of endangered North Atlantic right whales is under threat due to entanglement in fishing gear and a resulting drop in birth rates, according to a study published by the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.
Even though North Atlantic rightwhales numbers have modestly increased from 295 individuals in 1992 to 500 individuals in 2015, the rate of baby right whales born annually have dropped by nearly 40 percent since 2010, the study states.
Due to these low calving rates, the study implies that the whale's already-precarious population faces a grim future.
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