Posted on 12/10/2024 11:35:34 AM PST by nickcarraway
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife announced on Friday that the California commercial Dungeness crab fishery will be closed until at least Dec. 31.
This is to prevent the entanglement of whales from crab gear. Dungeness crab traps will also stay off-limits off the central coast.
The CDFW has reported that four humpback whales have been entangled in Dungeness crab traps so far in 2024. Nine other entanglements have been confirmed from unknown fishing gear.
“We support the Department’s decision to further delay opening the crab season, especially with whales still feeding off our shores and the alarming number of whale entanglements this year. Stronger measures are needed to bring entanglement numbers down and prevent this ongoing and unacceptable wildlife tragedy along the West Coast,” said Dr. Geoff Shester, Oceana’s California campaign director and senior scientist.
Dungeness crab season delayed for the 7th year in a row The next risk assessment will be conducted on Dec. 20, 2024. The assessment will determine if a commercial fishery opener on or around Jan. 1, 2025.
Instead of ‘closing the season’ for 7 years in a row to accommodate the whales, why not just MOVE the season to accommodate the whales?
Or are the crabs gone by then? Are they leaving the area on the backs of whales? ;)
that bites...
I charter fished clients in SE Alaska for 30 years.
At the beginning of that career I would cease fishing operations (well, depending on the clients) and observe any whales we would chance see during the day, almost uncommon and a novelty.
At the end of my fishing years, at any one point during peak season it was not uncommon to see 50-100 whale spouts at any given time.
This area was Dixon Entrance, at one point exceedingly rich in biomass sans Humpback
Whales and Steller Sea Lions.
Do the math, figuring 1.5 tons of needlefish, krill and herring a day per whale.
How long do you figure the other species which also eat those foods will make it (think all the money fish IE Chinook, Coho and Sockeye salmons, Pacific Halibut etc….)
The whale population has INCREASED exponentially. The herring stocks and needlefish are down.
Read between the lines.
I smell something, and it ain't whale sh!t.
It doesn’t look like they’re canceling, just delaying the opening.
I don’t know much about the crabs, but I’d think that they aren’t fished during molting times (?)
I thought “save the whales” was so-o-o 90s.
Only three of those folks are still alive...
But some of them are still brains in jars?
They had to save to whales after the Soviets killed off most of them with indiscriminate whaling.
The Most Senseless Environmental Crime of the 20th Century
https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-crime-of-the-20th-century-russia-whaling-67774/
Dieter Geoff Shister
And how many whales beached themselves off the east coast due to the wind turbines and not a tear was shed?
OK nature lovers, I'm one of you, so don't jump all over me. But unless crab gear is invisible to echo location, why are whales getting tangled up in it? Heck, back in the 70s, some believe whales were more intelligent than people.
The traps are suspended on lines that are attached to floats. The whales seem to get caught in the lines somehow.
The gov’t rarely gets it right. I think it was Oregon that had its clam population over-fished so the legislators passed a law saying the maximum you could take was 12 (that number might be wrong...I’ve slept since then). A couple of years later, they found that the clam population was still declining. What they found out was that clammers were catching their quota but continued clamming, replacing the smaller clams with any new clams that were larger. The smaller clam was discard, often dying on the beach.
Back in the 60’s in India, any male who agreed to a vasectomy was given a free transistor radio (a novel new item back then). After several years, the population growth was unchanged even though millions of men had be sterilized. A deeper dive on the data shown they had almost sterilized 95% of the males over 65. You would think...
Did any whales vote for Kamala?
Ropes kind of are invisible to echo location.
"The first recorded incident of overfishing was reported in the early 1800s when humans decimated the whale population in their efforts to harvest oil from whale blubber. Today there are policies and laws in place to protect the whale population in some areas; however, the long- term sustainability of the global whale population remains uncertain."
Source: Overfishing and its Effects on the Oceans Oceaneos
"This burgeoning industry was founded on humanity's love of light — and the fact that a whale's body contained an abundance of oil to fuel the production of light. "The main use of whale oil, for most of the history of American whaling, was for illumination," Dolin said. This oil, as Nordhoff's writing made so vividly clear, derived from whale blubber that was stripped from hunted whales and boiled down, often onboard ships, in huge copper cauldrons. "That would go into outdoor street lighting, which was a very, very important thing for civilization — the idea that the streets would be lit at night," said Michael Dyer, curator of maritime history at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts, a place that was a regional hub of whaling in the 18th and 19th centuries."
Source: Why was whaling so big in the 19th century? Live Science, 22 February 2020
"In July 2019, Japan resumed commercial whaling for the first time in more than three decades, coinciding with its withdrawal from the International Whaling Commission (IWC). This decision has stirred controversy because many whale species are classified as endangered, and has led to pushback from various humanitarian organizations concerned about whaling methods. Yet,there has not been a significant response from the international community, showing the inadequacies of the current global system in dealing with these types of crises."
Source: A Whale of a Problem: Japan’s Whaling Policies and the International Order Harvard, 23 October 2019.
"Published in July 2024 in the Journal of Applied Ecology, the team used whale abundance data from bowhead, gray and humpback whales, focusing on populations with long-term studies that covered a wide range of abundance levels from low to high. The collaborative research team was comprised of Dr. Yu Kanaji (Fisheries Resources Institute, Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency), Dr. Rob Williams (Oceans Initiative), Dr. Alex Zerbini (Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean and Ecosystem Studies (CICOES) at the University of Washington, NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center, and Marine Ecology and Telemetry Research), and Professor Trevor Branch (University of Washington School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences). They demonstrated that recovery levels are more rapid than previously thought. Before now, the prevailing thought was that population growth slows quickly as populations rebuild."
Source: Rapid increase rates in large whale populations continue until they near carrying capacity School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, 26 August 2024.
Have a whale of a good time reading more.
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