Right whales headed in wrong direction
April 16, 1996
Web posted at: 5:15 p.m. EDTFrom Correspondent Christine Negroni
NEW YORK (CNN) -- Some of the world's last remaining North Atlantic right whales live off the coast of the American Northeast, and marine biologists fear they are being forced into extinction by an increasingly urban ocean. (536K QuickTime movie)
Statistics attribute nearly 30 percent of right whale deaths to collisions between the whales and ocean-going vessels. Pollution and fishing nets that sometimes ensnare the whales add to their problems.
It is this growing clash between the whales and humans who occupy the same ocean, coupled with the whales' declining birth rate, that is placing the species in danger, biologists say.
Scott Kraus of the New England Aquarium predicts that if people don't do something to protect the whales, they will be gone in 30 years. (162K AIFF sound or 162K WAV sound)
A particular concern is that the migratory pattern of right whales takes pregnant females along a busy shipping corridor and past two U.S. Navy installations.
The Navy is not unconcerned. "We've moved those exercises even further away and to the extent that we shoot guns, we shoot the guns further toward the east so that's even farther away from where the whales could be," said Navy spokesman Steve Honigman.
But marine biologists' remain worried. Those worries have led them to petition Congress for more research money to study the whales.
Right whales, which can reach more than 50 feet in length, were named during America's early years because they were the "right" whales to hunt for blubber. And hunted they were. Unfortunately for them, finding the right way to keep them from the brink of extinction may not be so easy.
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