What if there were no fishing? North Atlantic right whale population trajectories without entanglement mortality

Rd Kenney

doi:10.3354/esr00926

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 37:233-237 (2018) - DOI: https://doi.org/10.3354/esr00926 ESR Special: Marine vertebrate bycatch: problems and solutions NOTE What if there were no fishing? North Atlantic right whale population trajectories without entanglement mortality Robert D. Kenney* University of Rhode Island, Graduate School of Oceanography, Bay Campus Box 40, 215 South Ferry Road, Narragansett, Rhode Island 02882-1197, USA *Corresponding author: rkenney@uri.edu ABSTRACT: The North Atlantic right whale Eubalaena glacialis, one of the world’s rarest mammals, experienced an alarming level of mortality in 2017. The estimated abundance as of 2016 was 451 animals. After 20 yr of relatively steady but slow growth, the population has declined since 2010. Mortality and serious injury from entanglement in commercial fishing gear have had a significant impact on recovery. Despite legal requirements to reduce fishery-related mortality, little or no real progress has been made over the last 2 decades. Here I took a relatively simple approach to estimate what the population trajectory since 1990 might have been under 4 different scenarios of reduced entanglement mortality. Under the best-case scenarios, the population at the end of the time-series would have been 25-30% higher than observed at present. If the population had not experienced nearly 3 decades of increasing entanglement, it could have been much more resilient to a disaster year like 2017. KEY WORDS: Eubalaena glacialis · North Atlantic right whale · Population decline · Entanglement mortality Full text in pdf format Supplementary material PreviousNextCite this article as: Kenney RD (2018) What if there were no fishing? North Atlantic right whale population trajectories without entanglement mortality. Endang Species Res 37:233-237. https://doi.org/10.3354/esr00926 Export citation RSS - Facebook - Tweet - linkedIn Cited by Published in ESR Vol. 37. Online publication date: November 29, 2018 Print ISSN: 1863-5407; Online ISSN: 1613-4796 Copyright © 2018 Inter-Research.

Highlights

The North Atlantic right whale Eubalaena glacialis (NARW) population experienced a disastrous year in 2017 (Pennisi 2017)
The baseline for my analysis was the time-series of abundance estimates from 1990 to 2016 from Pace et al (2017) and Pettis et al (2017), as well as the Potential Biological Removal (PBR) and mortality numbers from the complete series of Stock Assessment Report (SAR)
Tracking the mortality and serious injury (M&SI) data through the SARs is complicated, since assessments of a given incident can change over time, some records may be added several years after the fact, and others can be included for 1 or 2 yr and deleted as better information becomes available

Summary

Introduction

The North Atlantic right whale Eubalaena glacialis (NARW) population experienced a disastrous year in 2017 (Pennisi 2017). Several presentations of recent research, including the study by Pace et al (2017), made it clear that the NARW population is in decline and that both the rate and severity of entanglements are increasing.

Results

Conclusion