Caught in the Ocean’s Cross Hairs

Somewhere in the cold, choppy waters off the Atlantic coast, a whale has been suffering a slow, agonizing death. It’s a solitary battle she has waged, tortured with pain as a nylon fishing line wrapped around her torso digs into her muscles and poisons her blood. The 40-foot whale, entangled since May, has not been seen now for almost a month. She is likely to die before she can reach the warm, tropical waters off Florida later this fall.

The whale’s plight, while tragic, resonates far beyond her own mortality. She is hovering on the edge. Not only of death. But of extinction.

Only around 300 North Atlantic right whales exist, making them the most endangered whale on Earth and one of the rarest mammals of North America. Saving this species comes--quite literally--one whale at a time. With every newborn calf, hope is revived. With every death, hope fades.

Their chances of survival haven’t seemed this grim for two centuries, since the era when these passive giants with broad black backs and bowed jaws fell prey to hunters’ harpoons.

This summer, three right whales have been severely entangled in fishing gear, all of them females of breeding age. Only one of the three has been freed by marine biologists who have attempted to sail up to the 70-ton behemoths, close enough to reach out and cut the lines with a knife. A fourth--a grandmother familiar to researchers for 25 years--died in Cape Cod Bay last spring after a collision with a ship. Making matters worse, scientists say only four calves were born this year--the lowest number ever recorded.

“Under current conditions, the population is doomed to extinction,” scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in March.

So few whales are left, said Scott Kraus, director of research at the New England Aquarium in Boston, “that every kill is a significant loss.”

The plight of the right whale poses a vexing problem: What can society do when an animal seems unable to adapt to modern industrialized life? Perhaps the harsh reality is that right whales just aren’t fit enough to survive in today’s world. They simply are unable to cope with how their only enemy--humanity--has taken command of the seas.

In the United States, the right whale ranks among the rarest of the rare, along with other severely endangered animals like the Florida panther, a predator that is fighting for space as greater Miami grows around it, and the giant California condor, which has trouble coexisting with power lines, pollution and other urban ills.

But unlike many large endangered species, the right whale is little noticed. Schoolchildren on the East Coast are more likely to identify an exotic sperm whale that inhabits tropical seas than a right whale that lives off their own shore.

Migrating near the coast from Nova Scotia to north Florida, the whales feed, breed and raise their young along some of the world’s most heavily traveled shipping lanes and fishing grounds.

Over the past century, as ships have grown in size and traffic has burgeoned, the threat to the whale has intensified. Also, the waters off the Atlantic coast are webbed with thousands of gill nets, lobster pots and other commercial fishing gear.

Every day, right whales run the gauntlet. Every year, on average, at least one doesn’t make it back alive. The toll is probably far greater, but the bodies are never found.

Also, for reasons no one understands--perhaps related to pollution of coastal waters--many female right whales are failing to reproduce.

Right whales have suffered a five-fold increase in their mortality rate in 15 years. Unless conditions improve, the species will inevitably become extinct, scientists predict, although the final demise could still be nearly 200 years away because each whale has a life expectancy of around a century.

Hunting of the whales has been prohibited by international agreement for 65 years, and right whales have been listed as a federal endangered species since 1970. As of July, shippers from around the world who enter critical habitat off Massachusetts, Georgia and Florida must report their location to the Coast Guard so they can be warned about right whales. But the new reporting system is purely educational, and mariners, under most conditions, cannot see the whales until it’s too late.

“It’s mostly just keeping our fingers crossed that no right whales get run over,” said Gregory Silber, coordinator of whale recovery activities at the National Marine Fisheries Service, the federal agency responsible for protecting endangered sea animals.

Like Lambs to the Slaughter

For the right whale, it’s a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time--for a thousand years.

Their very name is ironic: From the 11th century in Europe to the early 20th century in New England, they were considered the “right” whale to hunt because they were easy to kill and floated to the surface when dead. Their thick blubber commanded a high price, yielding large quantities of oil. They also carried a fortune in their mouths: Baleen--the fringed plates in their upper jaw--was the predecessor of steel and plastic, used to make everything from corsets to chairs.

Whalers killed the calves, and when the mothers came to the rescue, they killed them too. An estimated 40,000 died, and at the height of the hunting in the early 1700s, fewer than 30 right whales probably survived. After hunting was outlawed, the population slowly improved. Then, in the 1980s, their numbers began to drop again, said Kraus of the New England aquarium.

Right whales are more vulnerable than other whales because they are slow-moving and linger and feed at the surface near shore. The mothers give birth only in the waters off north Florida and south Georgia and nurse their calves for months, floating where they are in danger of being hit or entangled. Calves especially like to roll around at the surface, exposing their heads and hoisting their flanks. The one-ton babies sometimes wrap themselves over their mothers in what looks like a loving embrace.

The whales feed and rest within 30 miles of shore--sometimes so close, one researcher said, that you can walk along Cape Cod Bay on a spring day and hear them breathe.

For reasons no one understands, right whales seem oblivious to the passings of thousand-ton ships, which can fracture their jaws and rupture their internal organs.

Of the 45 known deaths in the last 30 years, at least 16 were from ship strikes, and the actual fatalities are probably much greater. No one knows how many die of entanglement because their carcasses are rarely found, but Marilyn Marx, a researcher at the New England Aquarium, studied photographs and discovered that 58% of all observed right whales have wounds from fishing gear.

The whales are following instinctual migration patterns that date back thousands of years. Each eats a ton of food a day, so they must inhabit waters with large quantities of tiny shrimp-like copepods. Nothing in the genes or the skills passed on by their mothers has taught them how to avoid lethal human obstacles along the way.

“A species cannot adapt overnight, or in a month, or even over a lifetime,” Silber said.

A separate species, the southern right whale, which lives in waters off South America and Antarctica, is thriving, probably because of the remoteness of its habitat.

But for the right whale that lives along the crowded North Atlantic coast, the birthrate has seemed to decline in recent years, Kraus said.

Even under the best conditions, right whales replace themselves slowly. A female can breed only after she reaches about 10 years of age, and she has no more than one calf every three years. But a large number of the females are not having any calves, and researchers don’t know why.

Some scientists suspect that it may be a problem with the food supply. The zooplankton they feed on along the East Coast has been altered by nitrogen and phosphorus--fertilizing chemicals that flow from farm runoff and sewage treatment plants.

Other pollutants might also be damaging the whale’s hormones, lowering their fertility or causing reproductive disease.

“This species is going the wrong way,” Kraus said. “You should see slowly increasing numbers of calves over time, but there has been no statistical increase.”

It wasn’t until this past summer that the National Marine Fisheries Service mounted its first major measure to warn shippers away from the whales.

All vessels over 300 tons must now report to authorities whenever they enter waters off Massachusetts year-round and the Georgia-Florida border in winter. Within minutes, a message is relayed back that they should be on the lookout for right whales. Known locations of whales are transmitted to the ship’s bridge computer.

While the reporting is mandatory, vessels are not prohibited from the area or required to change course or slow down.

The system is intended to work like flight control at airports, but its usefulness is questionable. Locating the whales is far from guaranteed: Aerial surveys for right whales are scheduled daily by federal agencies and private groups, but the planes are frequently grounded by bad weather. Transmitters have been placed on some whales, but they are often lost.

Capt. Ross Pope, president of Boston’s Moran Shipping Agency, said ship pilots cannot spot a whale at night or during choppy seas, and even when they do, sometimes they cannot stop or turn in time to avoid running them over.

Shipping companies have endorsed the new reporting system. “But,” Pope said, “we’re concerned about the next step if this doesn’t work.”

More Fishing Restrictions Possible

In recent years, researchers and conservationists have debated the need for a more drastic step: Changing shipping routes to avoid right whale habitat.

Such proposals are highly controversial--adding a single day to the voyage of a container ship can cost $100,000. Also, shipping lanes are established so mariners avoid obstacles such as shallow waters. The routes are governed by international rules--500 years of admiralty law guide the sovereign seas--and they have never been altered, anywhere in the world, to protect a single species.

The U.S. government is not considering now asking the International Maritime Organization to reroute ships, Silber said. But in a couple of years, “if we have really good data showing that whales are regularly and consistently being hit, we would consider it,” he said. Requesting voluntary rerouting, he said, may be more practical.

In the last six months, the biggest threat has come not from ships but from commercial fishing.

Andy Rosenberg, deputy director of the National Marine Fisheries Service, said the agency may expand its restrictions on the commercial fishing industry by next spring. Gill nets and other gear are already prohibited in some seasons off Cape Cod and Florida. New proposals, Rosenberg said, could expand those closed areas and require fishermen to switch to equipment that could reduce the threat to whales.

Since May, three whales have been ensnared by various fishing gear off Massachusetts and Maine.

In inflatable boats, scientists with the aquarium and the Center for Coastal Studies chase after the whales and try to get close enough--within a few feet--to hook the lines and cut them with knives. The work can be perilous, exhausting and sometimes futile. Last month, Kraus and a colleague succeeded in freeing one of the three from heavy buoys she was dragging.

The team struggled with another whale for three days, but a line from a gill net was embedded in her blubber. Entangled off Massachusetts in May and last seen off New Jersey in September, she is sicker than any whale they have seen. Some entangled ones slowly starve, taking a year to die. Others succumb to infections, while young ones are killed when the line tightens as they grow.

Marine mammal experts have watched the comings and goings of this whale for nine years. She has no name, only a number--2030. At around 12 years old, she’s probably just coming into sexual maturity. With her death likely, the hope of her spawning a new generation vanishes.

“Every entanglement we’ve had this year has been a female, and we hate to lose females,” Kraus said. “It’s very discouraging, coming on the heels of the lowest reproduction we’ve seen in the 20-year history of this project.”

But marine biologists say it might not be too late to save the right whales--at least not yet. Animals, by their very nature, focus on ensuring their own survival. It’s a powerful force, this drive for life, and with enough human protection, their species could be revived.

“We’re all very, very concerned, but I like to think that the things we’re doing will turn this species around,” Silber said. “I don’t know of anyone who says we should just cut our losses and let this one go down the tubes.”

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The Right Whale in the Wrong Place

The North Atlantic right whale is the world’s most endangered whale species. Only an estimated 300 exist. They are slow-moving and like to linger at the surface, which makes them prone to injuries from ships and fishing gear.

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The whales inhabit waters along some of the world’s most heavily traveled shipping routes and fishing grounds. They spend most of their time in five locations. They summer in the Bay of Fundy and Scotian Shelf near Nova Scotia, migrate to two spots off Massachusetts, and give birth to calves off north Florida/south Georgia in the winter.