Codfish Press

Whale-rescue program in trouble

Whale-rescue program in trouble

by Greg O'Brien

This article originally appeared in the Providence Journal on Sunday, August 31, 2008

It is 5:30 P.M. on a stunning late August day here, and the sun is low on the horizon, presaging the end of summer with an inky blue sky and a golden reflection on the water. Not far from MacMillan Wharf, just down from Town Hall in a stately clapboard home on Bradford Street once owned by renowned industrialist and art collector Walter B. Chrysler Jr., Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies Executive Director Rich Delaney sits at his desk, pondering the future of this world-class scientific research and public-education center and its expanding vision. Its vision, he notes, has morphed beyond the center’s foundational study and preservation of endangered right whales and humpback whales. But today, he’s all about whales.

“We’re a nexus between good science and proper management,” declares Delaney, no stranger to either, given his previous tenures as former Massachusetts assistant secretary of environmental affairs and former director of the Massachusetts Coastal Zone program. “It’s science with a deadline!”

The deadline that most concerns Delaney, named last year as head of the coastal-studies center founded 32 years ago, is the pending depletion in December of $450,000 in federal grants for the center’s distinguished Whale Disentanglement Program. This program covers a wide swath of ocean, from the Bay of Fundy, in Canada, to Key West, Fla.

The deadline that most concerns Delaney, named last year as head of the coastal-studies center founded 32 years ago, is the pending depletion in December of $450,000 in federal grants for the center’s distinguished Whale Disentanglement Program. This program covers a wide swath of ocean, from the Bay of Fundy, in Canada, to Key West, Fla.

In partnership with the National Marine Fisheries Service, under the domain of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the center oversees a network of more than 800 scientists and volunteers called the Atlantic Large Whale Disentanglement Network (ALWDN), which responds to whales caught in debris and fishing gear — the mammals’ prime cause of death, along with ship strikes. Since 1984, when the highly publicized effort began, the not-for-profit Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies has freed more than 97 large whales from life-threatening entanglements, as it has such other marine animals as dolphins, porpoises, seals and sea turtles. It is the only organization federally authorized to disentangle large, free-swimming whales.

“Without an infusion of additional monies now being sought, the program is in jeopardy,” says Delaney, noting that most, if not all, of the surviving 350 North Atlantic right whales, up to 56 feet long, will have migrated to Cape Cod Bay by January, and will remain in local waters until May, when migrating humpback whales, up to 50 feet long, arrive and stay through October.

“On their migration up from Florida in the fall, the right whales will run thorough an obstacle course of entangling fishing nets and debris, ” says Delaney, noting that coastal-center teams disentangled eight right whales last year, most from January through April. The right whale was so named in 18th Century days because it was the “right whale” to catch — “slow, right for the picking, plenty of whale oil and they floated after being harpooned,” says Delaney, noting that the species is now closely monitored under the coastal center’s Right Whale Habitat Studies program.

“The principle disentanglement technique,” adds Delaney in a reference to the center’s Web site ( www.coastalstudies.org), “is a modification of an old whaling practice called kegging, involves attaching large floats, or kegs, to the gear entangling the animal. The floats add buoyancy and drag to the animal, making it difficult for it to dive, eventually tiring it out. The desired result is a relatively immobile animal that is safer to cut free.” The kegging system, he adds, is designed for swift release should the rescue attempt fail; in those cases, a transponder or small buoy is attached to track the whale for a more appropriate time to disentangle.

In early July, for example, a Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies team responded to a nine-year-old female humpback whale that was reported severely entangled with one-inch line. After seven hours of fighting strong southwest winds, the rescue team succeeded in removing much of the life-threatening entangled rope, but the whale’s long-term health will not be known for months. The young humpback, known to researchers as Estuary, had been identified earlier as part of the center’s Aerial Photo Identification Program and catalogued in a research consortium with Boston’s New England Aquarium.

Such rescue efforts — often splashed on front pages of newspapers across America or on the evening news — are in as much peril as the whales themselves, if additional funding is not obtained by December.

The pending funding cut in the whale-disentanglement program, representing close to 25 percent of PCCS’s annual operating budget and half of its federal grants, would deeply damage the program. Additional private funding and/or an emergency federal supplement are being urgently sought.

“Hopefully with our congressional delegation’s help, money will be allocated in the ’09 budget, but with a new administration and a new Congress, next year’s budget won’t take affect for least three months, and perhaps six to nine months,” says Delaney, noting that Congressman William Delahunt, of the 10th Congressional District, and Massachusetts Senators John Kerry and Edward Kennedy were working diligently to restore the funding. “At the moment, no money is available for this program in January, and we don’t want to be in the position of having to dismantle it, even temporarily.”

Concedes Delahunt’s chief of staff, Mark Forest, “We’re facing a crisis for the disentanglement program. Congress has significantly cut funding while demands have grown.” Forest, however, is hopeful that the funds ultimately will be restored. Delahunt, he said, has won initial approval for a $500,000 disentanglement-fund earmark in the House Appropriations Committee’s draft of the fiscal ’09 budget. But earmarks — appropriation requests outside the line-item federal budget — can be politically contentious, particularly in an election year when the divisive topic of such earmarks is sure to be debated again. Meanwhile, Delahunt is also speaking with top NOAA officials about “reprogramming” funds for whale-disentanglement efforts while the federal budget is being vetted, Forest said

Acknowledging the uncertainty of politics and a new presidency, Forest noted, “The coastal center’s disentanglement program is highly regarded, and we are confident that in the long term we will resolve the problem. Unfortunately, the budget will not get resolved until some time next year. Meanwhile, we need to throw out a lifeline to keep this program alive.” Let’s hope they get it.

Greg O’Brien is editor and president of Stony Brook Group, a publishing and political/communications strategy company based in Brewster, and the author/editor of several books about Cape Cod and the Islands.  Read Greg's blog, Codfish Press here on CapeCodToday.com.