Humpback Whales Still Dominate Our Sightings Report

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WEST COAST

The Trump administration has thrown out a new rule meant to keep endangered whales and sea turtles from getting tangled in mile-long West Coast fishing nets.

The National Marine Fisheries Service announced Monday it was cancelling the pending limit on the West Coast’s sword-fishing industry – even though the fishing industry itself proposed the new rule.

The regulation was designed to cut the numbers of humpback whales, leatherback sea turtles and other creatures that accidentally get tangled in long, drifting nets.The regulation allowed for shutting down swordfish fishing with the drift nets for up to two fishing seasons if too many of the endangered animals are getting hurt by the nets.

The federal fisheries service says it decided the new rule wasn’t warranted.

Environmental groups say it’s one of the first such Trump administration rollbacks targeting endangered-species protections off the West Coast.

NATIONAL & INTERNATIONAL

Australian dolphin researchers have revealed a complex and strange behaviour where male humpback dolphins pose with their head and tail lifted from the water, often with a sea sponge on their foreheads to attract females.

Striking a ‘banana pose’ shows dolphins are intelligent and have complicated social lives, according to Simon Allen of the University of Western Australia….

Last summer’s expansion of Hawaii’s Papah?naumoku?kea Marine National Monument created the world’s largest marine protected area. In October, the Ross Sea – home to some of the most productive waters in the Antarctic – was finally declared a marine reserve after a decades-long push. When a coalition of 24 countries agreed to provide international protection for 1,548,812 square kilometres of the Southern Ocean, the Ross Sea surpassed Papah?naumoku?kea as the largest marine reserve. Most impressively, Palau, part of Micronesia in the western Pacific, turned 80 per cent of its waters – an area the size of California – into a marine reserve. Britain established the Pitcairn Islands reserve in the South Pacific, a contiguous underwater park nearly the size of Pakistan.

In 2016, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and then U.S. president Barack Obama issued a joint statement to "substantially surpass" international commitments to reach 10 per cent marine protection, even though Canada has protected less than one per cent so far. Our government is getting started, though. It announced strong protection?for globally significant glass sponge reefs?near B.C.’s Haida Gwaii earlier this year, ending years of inaction.

Along with increased ocean protection, new technologies are …

TRINITY, NL – It’s a rare sight. Six sperm whales were spotted in the Bonavista Bay earlier this morning.
Shawna and Kris Prince, who run Sea of Whales Adventures, say that it’s their first time spotting sperm whales since 2013.
They believe that these six whales may be the same ones that were seen four years ago as, even though they have not seen the whales since then, they have heard them echo-locating on their hydrophone, a special microphone used to detect sound waves underwater.

he central African nation of Gabon announced Monday the creation of Africa’s largest network of marine protected areas, home to a diverse array of threatened marine life, including the largest breeding populations of leatherback and olive ridley sea turtles and 20 species of dolphins and whales.

The network of 20 marine parks and aquatic reserves will protect 26 percent of Gabon’s territorial seas and extend across 20,500 square miles (53,000 square kilometers). In creating the protected areas, the Gabon government also set up what scientists call the most sustainable fisheries management plan for West Africa …

Pygmy Killer Whales (Feresa attenuata) are an enigmatic and rarely seen species. For almost a century the species was only know by the recovery of two skulls, until the 1950s. A blackfish-boat harpooned one of the individuals, and since that point their have only been a scattering of sightings, in the Indian and Western Pacific oceans. Strandings, bycatch and sight records have made up the bulk of the current data. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classifies the species simply as "Data Deficient" because we know so little about them.

Another point that contributes to our lack of understanding …

In Suitland, Maryland a giant warehouse holds the largest collection of whale bones in the world.

Stacked from floor to ceiling are bones of sperm whales, gray whales, and the largest whales on Earth-blue whales, which can reach 380,000 pounds. Ancient whale fossils, tens of millions of years old, are also packed into the collection.

It’s the job of Nick Pyenson to try to figure out how these whales developed to what they are now. He sees himself as kind of a paleontologist detective. His more formal title is Curator of Fossil Marine Mammals for the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History….

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