Abstract
Increased use of fishing gear in the marine environment can be detrimental to animals such as cetaceans, particularly through entanglement. Examination of the impact of such mortality on two substocks of the western North Atlantic humpback whale, Megaptera novaeangliae, indicates that when entanglement losses are added to natural mortality estimates and subtracted from birth rate estimates, annual mortality may be as high as 5.4% in the Newfoundland and Labrador population and 4.8% in the Gulf of Maine population. More effective entanglement reporting and assisting systems are needed in the Gulf of Maine and increased efforts are needed to decrease entanglements, entanglement mortalities, and damages to fishing gear. We conclude that monitoring of the size of humpback populations needs to continue, given their particular vulnerability to coastal fishing and the potential impacts of entanglement mortality.
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