Right Whales Remain At Risk

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Free Internet Press

Right Whales Remain At Risk
2007-10-20 17:24:13 (31 minutes ago)

Proposal to slow ship speeds in effort to save endangered sea mammals stalled in agency fight.

Sixteen months ago, a federal agency proposed slowing ships in certain East Coast waters to 10 knots or less during parts of the year to save the North Atlantic right whale, one of the world's most endangered marine mammals, from extinction.

Nine months later, officials at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said the situation was so dire that the loss of one more pregnant female might be the death knell for the species, whose surviving population numbers fewer than 400.

Today, however, the rule remains the subject of intense debate among senior White House officials, and the toll keeps rising: Since NOAA published the proposed rule, researchers have found three of the whales dead from ship strikes, and another two suffering from propeller wounds.
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The slow pace of federal action on the NOAA proposal, however, has triggered suspicions among advocates that political interests are blocking a regulation that the scientific evidence amply justifies.

"It looks like an economic decision, not a scientific decision," said Scott Kraus, vice president for research at the New England Aquarium in Boston, Massachusetts."The science behind this rule is airtight."





Read more: http://freeinternetpress.com/story.php?sid=14000

[zonkers]

1. I am sick. just dont want to tlive in the world anymore.

Everywhere I turn is greed, senseless destruction and anilhilation. Why cant we be the custodians of the earth?

[Submariner]

2. Good old corporate greed trumps common sense

"Hard Loss For Right Whales"

By Chris Slay

Two weeks ago yesterday I witnessed one of the most bizarre sights I've seen in the 15 years of working around right whales. As you know if you're on the water enough, with bizarre sights you'll be presented. A right whale in and of itself would almost qualify, strange beast, but even lacking animals, the landscape of the sea produces chimeric days of unearthly places in fog of all shades and those grey evenings when the sea is mirror calm, an ocean of mercury, reflecting a near identical sky, undulating purplish hues across the expanse of water to no clear conjoining of air and water, and with no horizon the mariner floats as if with nothing above or below. Then a whale surfaces and it's exhalation carries a mile to the witness who turns, perceiving a short note of inhalation but seeing nothing but water, or is it sky? The sea can be otherworldly without oddities like landbirds taking up aboard boats, hundreds of miles from their proper neighborhoods or a dozen sei whales surfacing together in a perfect concert of geysers. And it would be no good for me to catalogue the truly weird things seen in this line of work now, because such a digression could go for pages, and several of you have e-mailed and asked that I describe the aforementioned event of two weeks ago and it's already taken this long to respond.

Not that it would be an unworthy task to pool our most curious experiences and I'm guessing that more than a few would involve whales come ashore. Michael Moore, Sue Barco, Bill McClellan, et al, lived through a completely surreal experience while directing behemoth diesel monsters, yellow, bellowing and belching smoke along a barren dunescape, struggling to pull a great whale from her natural world and into ours, only to pick her massive, rancid corpse apart to illustrate the unnatural violence these last few right whales are subject to. Perhaps when that hardy company has recovered we'll hear more of the experience. Not a week before this largest of North Atlantic right whales had been retrieved from the sea, what was surely the smallest among this current population found itself on land, fully alive but no more intending to be there than did its distant dead cousin, soon to be found floating 500 miles up the coast.

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http://whale.wheelock.edu/rightwhale/RtWhaleCalf04/

[MasonJar]

3. This makes me sick; I hate our greedy, self-serving country. What can

we, who care, do?