Abstract
Few cetaceans escape the heavy hand of man in today’s world. Ocean industrial impacts include vessel collision, fishing gear entanglement and acoustic stressors. We know so little about our impact on cetaceans. How much pain and suffering does a cetacean have carrying a chronic, constrictive fishing gear entanglement, or a transdermal intramuscular tag, or while asphyxiating in a gill net at depth, or in long term captivity, or when harpooned?1,2,3 Whaling has taken the brunt of public outrage in the past few decades, and managed care most recently. Yet whaling kills whales very quickly in the context of the months it takes to squeeze the life out of entangled whales; and managed care is indeed quality care, however limited the subject’s physical and behavioral horizon might be. The dichotomy between public socio political focus on the perceived wrongs of whaling and managed care, versus the wholesale tacit acceptance of cetacean suffering in the wild is extraordinary, and the ultimate expression of ‘out of sight is out of mind’. However, the cetacean managed care industry is in a unique position to educate its audience about the suffering of wild cetaceans, and the positive, practical and immediate steps that can be taken to reverse it. Consumer demands for sustainable fisheries to not only sustain the target species, but also highly endangered vanishing victims of bycatch, such as Vaquita and North Atlantic right whales, in addition to more plentiful species also very seriously impacted, would go a long way to enabling the technological solutions that are now practical and under development.4 An example is the potential for using acoustic trap markers and remote trap retrieval to remove the need for surface trap buoy markers and their dependent, entangling end lines.5 The impact of removing the abundant rope of trap fishery end lines from the water column would have a dramatic and immediate impact on large whale and leatherback turtle entanglement rates. It would take a major revolution in how the fisheries are regulated, operated, enforced and equipped, but it would enable a whole new era of where whales and trap fisheries co-exist sustainably. Cetaceans in managed care can be ambassadors for this revolution, and their audiences encouraged to seek to consume seafood that is genuinely caught sustainably, for target, and humanely, for non-target species.
Acknowledgements
Funded by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Independent Research & Development Program.
* Presenting author
Literature Cited
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5. www.ropeless.org