April 3, 2018 by Patrick Whittle
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.
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