As whales fade, movement they spawned tries to keep up hope

PROVINCETOWN, Mass. (AP) — Regina Asmutis-Silvia, a biologist who has dedicated her career to saving right whales, is cleaning out a file cabinet from the early 1990s, and the documents inside tell a familiar story — the whales are dying from collisions with ships and entanglements in commercial fishing gear, and the species might not survive.

Fast forward through a quarter-century of crawl-paced progress, and it’s all happening again.

“It’s a little scary to think if we hadn’t been working on this all these years, would they have been relegated to history instead of Cape Cod Bay?” said Asmutis-Silvia, of Plymouth, Massachusetts-based Whale and Dolphin Conservation. “We’re standing on the cliff and going, ‘It matters, they’re still here, they’re still something to fight for’.”

Despite eight decades of conservation efforts, North Atlantic right whales are facing a new crisis. The threat of extinction within a generation looms, and the movement to preserve the whales is trying to come up with new solutions.

The whales are one of the rarest marine mammals in the world, numbering about 450. The 100,000-pound animals have been even closer to the brink of extinction before, and the effort to save them galvanized one of the most visible wildlife conservation movements in U.S. history.

But the population’s falling again because of poor reproduction coupled with high mortality from ship strikes and entanglement. Scientists, environmentalists, whale watch captains and animal lovers of all stripes are rallying to renew interest in saving right whales, but many admit to feeling close to defeated.

Charles “Stormy” Mayo, director of the right whale ecology program at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, and other scientists have said the species could be extinct as soon as 2041. Mayo, a ninth generation resident of Cape Cod whose ancestors harpooned whales in the 18th and 19th centuries, now leads expeditions to find the animals and try to learn how to save them.