Cutting the Lines
Increasingly, the planet’s most majestic mammals are becoming entangled in fishing and lobster traplines. These whales are being cut, maimed and often drowned. Photographer Nick Hawkins heads to the Bay of Fundy to capture the story and meet a small, dedi
More and more whales are becoming entangled in fishing and lobster traplines and these magnificent creatures are being cut, maimed and often drowned. In the the Bay of Fundy, a small, dedicated crew of locals together with scientists are rescuing as many as they can.
It was a typical July morning on the Bay of Fundy, a place known for its massive tides, diverse and plentiful marine life… and for its dense fog. I had spent the last two hours enveloped in it, aboard the MV Quoddy Link: fruitlessly waiting to photograph whales, scanning back and forth in the opaque fogginess, listening intently for the sounds of blows in the still air. I could sense that like me, my fellow whale-watchers’ initial excitement was gradually fading as it was becoming obvious just how unlikely it would be to catch sight of a whale in these conditions.
Suddenly, one of the crew’s naturalists signalled something off the stern. I swung my head just in time to catch the sleek fin of a minke whale cut through the glassy surface at the edge of the fog line. We all waited quietly, hopefully — cameras raised in anticipation. Once again it surfaced, letting out a laboured breath, raising its head awkwardly. Something wasn’t right. Then we saw it: a rope wrapped round the whale's lower jaw, running through its mouth, with the ghostly outline disappearing taut into the depths below. This whale was in serious trouble: anchored by its jaw to the sea floor and struggling to reach the surface to breathe, it would not survive like this for very much longer.
The naturalists aboard knew immediately what to do; they radioed MARS, the Marine Animal Response Society, a local charity responsible for coordinating rescue efforts for whales and other marine mammals over the entire 16,000 square kilometres of the Bay of Fundy. The dispatcher told the captain to stay put and to stand by; it would be nearly impossible for the rescue team to locate the whale in the thick fog without us. The wait was agonizing. We watched helplessly as the whale struggled against the rising tide and powerful current, all of us wondering if each breath would be its last. Finally, the distant hum of a boat engine disrupted the silence. A small boat materialized through the mist, circling the exhausted whale once while a crewmember positioned himself at the bow. The approach was calculated and swift: the man in the bow took a long pole with a hooked knife at the tip, thrust it below the surface and hooked the deadly line just to the whale’s side. With one sharp pull, he severed the rope, which fell away. The whale was free. The water boiled with the kick of its tail as it disappeared back into the fog.
The Bay of Fundy, encircled by the coastlines of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, has the highest tides in the world. They are semi-diurnal tides, which means that they have two highs and two lows each day. Every six hours, 160 billion tonnes of sea water surge into and back out of the broad but relatively shallow bay, delivering a double pulse of nutrient-rich water, spurring the growth of phytoplankton, the microscopic organisms that form the basis of the entire marine food web. This tide is the engine that drives the Gulf of Maine and Bay of Fundy marine ecosystem, one of the most dynamic and productive on Earth. It attracts visitors from far and wide. Among them are the world’s giants: minke and finback whales, their gigantic sleek bodies the epitome of grace and power; massive humpbacks and right whales, whose charismatic nature delights whale-watchers the world over.
Evolutionary biologists suggest that as whales got bigger they could go further, their hefty bulk supporting their epic migrations. Over a lifetime, each whale travels thousands of kilometres, crossing oceans from where they give birth and mate during winter to the intensely productive seasonal seas where their food is abundant, like the Bay of Fundy, during summer.
Whales aren’t the only ones to traverse oceans in search of rich fishing grounds. For five centuries, the wealth of marine life along these shores has drawn fishermen from all parts of the Atlantic, like those early Europeans drawn here despite tremendous risks. Today, although much has changed, these waters continue to support dynamic coastal fisheries. The cod and other groundfish populations that once dominated have all but collapsed, but there has been a dramatic rise in the lobster and crab fisheries.
With these changes, coupled with new technologies, have come new lifethreatening hazards for whales. First, there has been a move away from light, natural fibre rope to rot-resistant tensile-strength polypropylene lines of incredible durability. Second, there has been a shift over the last decade to fishing in increasingly deeper waters. This has precipitated a horrifying reality of modern day commercial fishing: shallow or deep, migrating whales are constantly encountering lethal lines, traps and buoys, stretching from the ocean floor to the surface. The result is a tragedy: the chronic and lethal entanglement of large whales.
Several species of large whales in the Northwest Atlantic (right, blue, fin and humpback) are under some form of endangered species legislation in the U.S. and Canada — a testament to the brutal effectiveness of commercial whaling that nearly emptied the world’s oceans of large cetaceans. Despite the international ban on commercial whaling in 1986, startlingly high mortality rates have continued.
One study looked at 1,762 known deaths and likely fatal injuries of large whales in the northwest Atlantic between 1970 and 2009. When cause of death could be determined, entanglement in fishing gear was the single biggest killer. Whales can become entangled through the mouth while feeding, or around their flippers while swimming, often at depths where reduced visibility makes it impossible for them to see the gear. If the animal cannot immediately break free and get to the surface to breathe, it will drown. Some of these animals are eventually found, with deep lesions, ropeimprinted skin and strangled limbs. Many, however, are not found at all.
Even if they don’t die right away, large whales are often powerful enough to drag the gear along with them as they swim. As they do, the lines wrap and tighten around the body as the animals struggle, restricting blood flow to their flippers. Their powerful movements can work taut lines like a steel wire saw, cutting into flesh and bone, leading to massive tissue damage and systemic infection. Most lethal entanglements involve the head region, often with a line running through the mouth. The resulting
damage to the delicate baleen feeding system leads to a reduction in feeding ability and death by starvation. The increased drag from trailing gear alone can be enough to slowly tax a migrating whale over the vast distances it travels. Often it is a combination of emaciation, tissue damage and infection that ultimately kills the animal. Either way, it is far from a quick death; studies show that it takes an average of six months for a lethally entangled whale to die.
Studies of the scars left behind on whales from past entanglements are revealing, and sobering: 83 per cent of right whales have scars from at least one entanglement, another 59 per cent from two. One whale encountered had been entangled six times. Even more alarming, studies indicate that only 10 per cent of entangled whales are detected. In 2016, a record year for entanglements, there were 46 cases reported along the Eastern seaboard alone, though there is no way of knowing exactly where they occurred.
Whales and dolphins rank along with primates as among the most sentient and intelligent of all animals, with a high sensibility to pain and suffering. While increasing attention has been focused on the welfare of these animals in captivity, their wild counterparts get short shrift. Indeed, one could argue that more whales suffer as the result of human activity in the wild — and indeed are even more inhumanely restrained — than any in captivity. While we condemn countries like Japan, Norway and Iceland for hunting whales, we largely ignore the killing of whales in our own waters. Meagrely funded volunteer rescue teams are struggling to deal with the harm done to whales as a result of commercial seafood landings, the value of which was over $2.3 billion in Atlantic Canada in 2014. Innovation and policy must now shift focus to the ethical and moral challenges we as harvesters and consumers face.
It was nearly 40 years ago that the first efforts to rescue distressed whales surfaced in Canada. Jon Lien, an international leader in marine conservation and animal behaviour at Memorial University of Newfoundland, initiated the first whale disentanglement teams in Canada in the late 1970s. These first rescue teams were made up of untrained responders and fishermen who volunteered for the arduous — and dangerous — task of freeing the animals.
Lien and another experienced disentangler, Charles “Stormy” Mayo from the Center for Coastal Studies in Massachusetts, received funding in 1999 from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to train teams in the Bay of Fundy. “It became obvious the region required a capability to respond to marine mammals in distress,” says Jerry Conway, who served as the marine mammal advisor for DFO at the time. A supply of disentanglement equipment was purchased: a Zodiac-style inflatable boat with an outboard engine and specialized cutting knives that could be fixed onto long poles,
along with the necessary safety equipment. Ultimately, this cache of gear would end up stationed on Campobello Island, a 14-kilometre stretch of land strategically located at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, best known as the summer retreat for U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt.
By 1999, Mackie Greene, a fisherman born and raised on Campobello, had been working to release entangled whales in the area for several years. Greene brought in other lifelong local fishermen Robert Fitzsimmons, David Anthony and Joe Howlett, and together they formed the Campobello Whale Rescue Team. “Joe was my fishing partner on deck,” David Anthony says. “He had gotten involved [in rescue] and he made a really good argument about giving back to the oceans by helping the whales.” They were the first whale rescue team made up entirely of fishermen. The team received additional training from Maine’s Center for Coastal Studies.
In 2004, the team attracted the attention of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, a Canadian NGO that began supporting the whalerescue efforts with annual grants of $20,000. “Our grants allow the team to focus on their real work as the only specialized rapid-response, whale disentanglement team in the Bay of Fundy… and an important bridge between fishermen and fishing practices and the whales in the region,” says Jan Hannah, program coordinator for IFAW. In total, IFAW has provided $300,000 for operational costs, boat maintenance and repairs.
But even with the organization’s support, the team struggles to obtain adequate funding to operate safely and efficiently, relying on additional limited funds from DFO and aging equipment that limits their capacity to respond. Compounding the problem, in 2015 the DFO announced its officers were no longer permitted to cut lines during rescues, deeming it a “highrisk activity,” better left to experts. “Whale disentanglement falls within the federal mandate,” says Jerry Conway, now retired from DFO and an active member of the Campobello team. “But fisheries officers are not permitted to actually be involved. They can stand by to assist but not otherwise get involved. It’s left up to volunteers to do the work, many taking time away from their jobs in order to respond to entangled whales while receiving no compensation.”
Since its formation, the team has disentangled dozens of whales, including the minke we encountered on our whalewatching tour. They are currently the only fully functioning whale rescue team in the entire Maritimes, meaning there are large gaps in response capability; they have been asked to respond to cases as far away as the Acadian Peninsula in northern New Brunswick and the St. Lawrence Estuary in Quebec.
On August 13, 2016, the right whale research team from Boston’s New England Aquarium had just started their daily survey of the Bay of Fundy when a call came in over the marine radio. One of their colleagues on the water had encountered a severely entangled right whale and was standing by until help could arrive. Again, the call went out to the team on Campobello, who jumped into action, forgoing any work commitments and plans. There would be only a small window of opportunity to travel the 25 nautical miles to the whale’s location in seas notorious for rapidly changing conditions and intense ocean currents.
The New England Aquarium has a web page dedicated to the North Atlantic right whale. One of the most endangered whales in the world, “its name comes from the idea that it was the ‘right’ whale to hunt: it was slow moving, floated after death, and had enormous amounts of oil and baleen.” Even though international treaties have tried to ban the commercial fishing of right whales since 1935, fewer than 500 of them are alive today. Between 2009 and 2014, an average of four right whales died from entanglements each year — that’s significant for a species numbering a mere 500 individuals. Animals that do survive often show declining health and reproductive failure long after the entanglement is over. Injuries and mortalities from entanglements alone may now be overwhelming the species’ slow recovery, indicating the need for immediate action to avoid the scales tipping towards extinction. They are listed as endangered under Canada’s Species at Risk Act, requiring a legal obligation to implement action plans for the species’ recovery.
When the Campobello team arrived on the scene, they were shocked by what they saw. “I’d never seen a whale with so many lines on it,” says Moira Brown, a Canadian scientist at the New England Aquarium, where she focuses on the human-related threats to the right whale population in Canadian waters. She has made it her life’s work researching the biology and population dynamics of the North Atlantic right whale. “There were lines through both sides of the whale’s mouth, around the flippers and body, as well as a tangle of line and buoys on the whale’s back. We counted a dozen separate lines in total.” The entangled whale was a six-year-old male known to whale rescue teams. Deep scars on his head and tail identified him as the same whale that had been disentangled back in 2014 when he was spotted swimming off the coast of Georgia trailing over 100 metres of lead weighted line. This whale’s survival was living proof of the success of whale disentanglement efforts and the animals’ ability to recover — but also of the pervasiveness of the issue. Here he was again, entrapped by fishing gear, his survival dependent on the skill and experience of a small, dedicated team of volunteer rescuers.
The rescue team’s first step was to attach a control line; a grappling hook thrown from the bow to tie into the entangling lines and attach a buoy to help keep track of the whale between dives. After the line is secured, each approach is a carefully executed manoeuvre that relies on the experience and coordination of each of the team members. This is where the skill and experience of the fisherman is paramount. “They have great situational awareness — used to working with knots and lines under tension and keeping themselves clear of all that,” says Brown. But still, the team can never predict how a whale will react to their efforts, putting their own safety at risk when working with distressed and frightened animals that can weigh more than 50 tonnes. On this day the team was lucky; throughout the rescue, the whale swam slowly, not appearing too agitated by the efforts of its rescuers. “The whale could have easily swamped or capsized our boat,” Jerry Conway says, “I like to think it realized we were trying to help it.”
After attaching the control line, the team began cutting lines that were running through the mouth. Then they worked their way back to the tail using a variety of sharp, specialized knives. It took five hours and multiple approaches, cutting lines one by one until the mass of gear slipped off the back and hung around the right flipper. Finally, with one last cut, the whale was free. “Hauling the entangling lines on board the rescue boat was stunning,” Brown says. “It explained why cutting was so difficult; the lines measured 15 millimetres in diameter, some of which were woven with strands of lead.”
Gear retrieved from entangled whales can provide some of the most important insights into how entanglements occur. Most lines and buoys, however, are not adequately marked and cannot be identified to their respective fishery or location. Improving the capacity to identify gear is a much-needed step toward learning how entanglements can be prevented.
“The bottom line is that work needs to be done on preventing entanglements,” says the IFAW’S Jan Hannah. “There needs to be a concerted effort to reduce the threat of entanglement before it happens.” This means doing everything possible to keep the animals and the gear separate in space and time, while limiting the amount of line in the water when whales are present. Working to identify how to do this and reduce injury and mortality from entanglements has become a priority of marine management groups. “We are dedicated to working with commercial fishers to develop measures that effectively reduce the risk and severity of entanglement while minimizing the impacts to industry,” says Alan Reeves, resource manager for DFO Maritimes region. For some working in the field, there is a feeling of hope; in November 2016 Prime Minister Justin Trudeau launched a $1.5-billion Ocean Protection Plan, stating a new commitment to the protection of marine mammals and “the development of a national approach and capacity to respond to marine mammal incidents.” How this new commitment will translate to actions on the water isn’t clear yet, and the results remain to be seen.
In the meantime, one thing is certain: following in the wake of those who have dedicated their lives to the cause, we owe it to the great creatures with which we share the oceans to develop, fund and deliver effective, practical methods to reduce the extraordinary cruelty and harm that results from whales becoming entangled in fishing gear. We are also obligated to provide more support — financial and otherwise — for the dedicated men and women of the sea, like those of the Campobello Whale Rescue Team, who are willing to put their own livelihoods and safety on the line to save entangled whales.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
To learn more about the Marine Animal Response Society, visit www.marineanimals.ca.