The entangled North Atlantic right whale in this photo was spotted approximately one mile off Crescent Beach, Florida; researchers were able to disentangle the whale the next day.
Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission / NOAA Research Permit # 594-1759
Many fish, marine mammals and seabirds that inhabit the world's oceans are critically endangered, but few are as close to the brink as the North Atlantic right whale (
Eubalaena glacialis). Only about 411 of these whales exist today, and at their current rate of decline, they could become extinct within our lifetimes.
From 1980 through about 2010, conservation efforts focused mainly on protecting whales from being struck by ships. Federal regulations helped
reduce vessel collisions and supported a slight rebound in right whale numbers.
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.
On Thursday, the House Natural Resources Committee passed a bill, called the "SECURE American Energy Act" (H.R. 4239), that can only be described as an oil industry wish-list. The bill's purpose is to mow down environmental concerns that stand in the way of the complete exploitation of fossil fuels in this country. For the oceans, this would mean an end to national monument designation and to some of those pesky safety regulations that were put in place after the Deepwater spill, among other things. And although it hasn't received much attention—yet—one late addition to the bill targets marine mammals in a very big way.
