Abstract
ESR Endangered Species Research Contact the journal Facebook Twitter RSS Mailing List Subscribe to our mailing list via Mailchimp HomeLatest VolumeAbout the JournalEditorsSpecials ESR 37:133-148 (2018) - DOI: https://doi.org/10.3354/esr00914 ESR Special: Marine vertebrate bycatch: problems and solutions Entanglement risk to western gray whales from commercial fisheries in the Russian Far East Lloyd F. Lowry1,*, Vladimir N. Burkanov2, Alexey Altukhov2, David W. Weller3, Randall R. Reeves4 173-4388 Paiaha Street, Kailua Kona, HI 96740, USA 2Kamchatka Branch of the Pacific Geographical Institute, Far East Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, 6 Partizanskaya Street, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky 683000, Russia 3NOAA Fisheries, Southwest Fisheries Science Center, 8901 La Jolla Shores Drive, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA 4Okapi Wildlife Associates, 27 Chandler Lane, Hudson, Quebec J0P1H0, Canada *Corresponding author: llowry@hawaii.rr.com ABSTRACT: Western gray whales Eschrichtius robustus (WGWs) are endangered, and their range overlaps areas where several important commercial fisheries operate in the Russian Far East (RFE). Throughout their range, gray whales commonly become entangled or entrapped in fishing gear. In the western North Pacific, they have been killed in set nets and seen entangled with ropes and float lines. Signs of fishery interactions on 28 of 150 living whales photographed near Sakhalin Island were reported in a published study. We describe characteristics of RFE fisheries that might entangle WGWs, including fishing effort based on daily catch reports from 2010-2014. We make a preliminary qualitative assessment of entanglement risk, taking into account factors including (1) evidence that the gear type has entangled large whales, (2) fishing effort, and (3) geographic and temporal overlap between WGWs and fishing activity. Fishing for salmonids with pelagic gillnets is no longer allowed in the RFE, and as long as the prohibition is being followed such fishing poses no risk to WGWs. In contrast, the coastal salmon set net fishery poses a high entanglement risk off northeastern Sakhalin and Kamchatka where WGWs feed very close to shore, and that situation should be mitigated. Bottom-set gillnet, demersal longline, snurrevad (also called Danish seine), and trap and pot fisheries overlap substantially with WGW distribution, and bycatch in those fisheries should at least be monitored. More rigorous risk assessment would require additional information on WGW distribution and movements. KEY WORDS: Western gray whale · Eschrichtius robustus · Distribution · Russian Far East · Fisheries · Entanglement risk · Sakhalin Island Full text in pdf format Supplementary material Russian translation available here PreviousNextCite this article as: Lowry LF, Burkanov VN, Altukhov A, Weller DW, Reeves RR (2018) Entanglement risk to western gray whales from commercial fisheries in the Russian Far East. Endang Species Res 37:133-148. https://doi.org/10.3354/esr00914 Export citation RSS - Facebook - Tweet - linkedIn Cited by Published in ESR Vol. 37. Online publication date: October 11, 2018 Print ISSN: 1863-5407; Online ISSN: 1613-4796 Copyright © 2018 Inter-Research.
Highlights
Gray whales Eschrichtius robustus occur in the North Pacific Ocean and adjacent seas
Western gray whales Eschrichtius robustus (WGWs) are listed as endangered in the Russian Red Data Book and under the US Endangered Species Act, considered depleted and strategic under the US Marine Mammal Protection Act, and are listed as Critically Endangered on the Red List of Threatened SpeciesTM maintained by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) (Reilly et al 20082)
Genetic studies have shown differences between the eastern and western populations (Lang et al 2011), telemetric tagging (Mate et al 2015) and photographic and genetic matching of individuals seen in both the eastern and western North Pacific (Weller et al 2012) indicate that a proportion of the Sakhalin and Kamchatka animals migrate to coastal waters of western North America in the winter, where their distribution overlaps that of the eastern stock
Summary
Gray whales Eschrichtius robustus occur in the North Pacific Ocean and adjacent seas. Observations off northeastern Sakhalin Island and southern Kamchatka indicate that at least 200 gray whales use those regions regularly during the summer and autumn feeding season, and numbers have been increasing steadily since the early 2000s (Western Gray Whale Advisory Panel [WGWAP]-17 report). We refer to all gray whales that spend at least part of the year in the western Pacific south of 55° N latitude as WGWs (the gray whales that use waters of the Bering and Chukchi Seas during the summer/autumn feeding season are considered eastern gray whales)
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