For North Atlantic right whales, every migration is a test of survival, and every calving season offers a fragile opportunity for recovery. The biggest threats to their survival are getting entangled in the ropes and lines of fishing gear and collisions with boats. With fewer than 380 individuals remaining in the wild, each newborn calf represents hope for one of the world’s most endangered whale species.
Each year, North Atlantic right whales undertake one of the longest migrations of any mammal on Earth, traveling roughly 1,300 miles from the frigid waters off Canada’s east coast to the warmer seas of the southeastern United States. For pregnant females, the journey is especially critical. After months of feeding in northern waters and building the fat reserves they need, they migrate south to give birth, relying on those energy stores to sustain both themselves and their newborn calves before making the arduous return to their northern feeding grounds.
It’s a colossal endeavor, made all the more treacherous by one of the great threats facing North Atlantic right whales: entanglements in fishing lines. These entanglements are often fatal to these whales; each loss a devastating decline that pushes the species faster toward extinction.
But rather than take all the reasonable and necessary steps to give North Atlantic right whales a fighting chance, some in Congress are proposing to prevent any new measures to reduce entanglements in fishing gear (already delayed until 2029) for an additional seven years.
If you don’t think this bill will mean much for this species, consider the journey of one whale: Snow Cone.
Snow Cone: From Success to Resilience to Tragedy
Born in 2005, Snow Cone – named for the unique pattern in front of her blowholes that evokes the summertime treat – is making her way down the East Coast in 2019.
At 14 years old, she is about to become a mother for the first time, which is a little late for North Atlantic right whales considering they typically mature by 10. In fact, she is about to be the first mother of the 2019-2020 calving season, after a disastrous calving season two years prior where not a single North Atlantic right whale calf was observed – a tragic first.
She and her newborn are first sighted on December 16, 2019, and delight people in the Southeast, making history as one of the few recorded sightings of North Atlantic right whales in the Gulf of Mexico. But as the pair navigates the journey back north to the feeding grounds, dodging traffic between ports and recreational boaters, her calf is hit not once but twice by a boat before dying from its injuries, by her side, off the coast of New Jersey.
Despite the loss, Snow Cone perseveres. Twenty million years of evolution drive her to find dense groups of tiny ocean bugs (called copepods), and to skim through the water column, mouth open, and gorge on copepod soup that summer – up to 5,000 pounds daily of these tiny ocean creatures the size of a grain of rice. She transforms that food into blubber reserves on her body to support a second pregnancy. As she chases those patches of prey she swims right into a man-made forest of vertical fishing lines, rope that connects trap pots on the ocean floor to buoys at the surface. As she tries to feed, the rope is caught in her baleen (the bristles in her mouth), along with any copepods she may have scooped up. As she swims away from the trap, the drag of the water and the laws of physics pull the rope deeper into her baleen until it becomes embedded in her jaw and impossible to remove.
While rescue teams are able to remove some rope, other rope remains, including some permanently in her jaw. The entanglement is so bad that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration determined she was likely to die from it, either slowly through sepsis as the rope cuts into her body deeper or because the rope is embedded in her mouth, making it difficult to feed, resulting in starvation, or exhaustion and drowning.
In spite of these seemingly insurmountable obstacles, on December 2, 2021, she is sighted with a newborn calf off the coast of Georgia. This means that Snow Cone successfully migrated south, approximately 1,300 miles, while pregnant and entangled in heavy rope, to give birth to her second calf. And even with rope still clearly embedded in Snow Cone’s jaw, the calf is observed to be healthy and growing.
In April of 2022, researchers sighted Snow Cone and her new calf in Cape Cod Bay, a miraculous feat considering the rope was literally weighing her down as she traversed another migration north. However, the physical cost of nursing a baby right whale into a yearling, nearly doubling in length from 15 to 28 feet, and from 1 to 20 tons, is too great with the added toll of her injuries.
In July of 2022, Snow Cone is spotted again off the coast of New Brunswick, without her calf and still entangled. She and her calf are never sighted again.
A Common Tragedy
Snow Cone’s story isn’t unique. Nearly 86% of the entire population of North Atlantic right whales have been entangled at least once, and many whales have been entangled multiple times. We know because of the scars the ropes leave behind on their bodies. And those are the lucky whales. Of the 23 females from last year’s calving season, all but one of them have been entangled at least once in their lifetime, and 20 of them have been entangled more than once. Harmonia has survived 10 recorded entanglements, and both Boomerang and Slalom have survived 7 recorded entanglements.
And for these lucky females who survive entanglement, there is still a cost. The calving interval for North Atlantic right whales has increased from a healthy three to four years between calves to seven to 10 years, or no calves at all. This decrease in the calving rate is due in large part to the stress and physical toll of surviving these human-caused entanglement injuries.
What We Can Do
Fishing gear entanglements are an existential threat to North Atlantic right whales. It’s also entirely avoidable, with reasonable steps like selective timed closures of certain fisheries when whales are expected or detected and expanded voluntary use of innovative on-demand fishing gear during these times and in these areas. This reduces the lines that entangle whales while keeping fishermen on the water at the same time.
Now, Congress could push North Atlantic right whales closer to extinction. Join us in making sure stories like Snow Cone’s and others are a thing of the past by calling on Congress to oppose any attempts to delay critical protections for North Atlantic right whales.
