Book Review - Entanglements: The Intertwined Fates of Whales and Fishermen

Book Review
Entanglements: The Intertwined Fates of Whales and Fishermen

By Tora Johnson
University Press of Florida
312 pp., 29 illustrations
www.entanglements.net

Reviewed by Lori Valigra

Tora Johnson's new book, Entanglements: The Intertwined Fates of Whales and Fishermen, could not have been more appropriately titled. It speaks to the centuries-old ties between humans and whales on many levels, including the right to survival in the ocean of both the fishermen who earn their living there and the whales that get caught in their gear.

On a more personal level, the book shows the author's understanding of the complex and emotion-laden conflict. A former commercial fisher and now a researcher and teacher at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, Johnson manages to stay bipartisan while ably telling a story that reflects what in actuality is a global conflict between the needs humans have from the environment and nature's capacity to support those needs. The book also is beautifully illustrated by Johnson, and contains a detailed reference section.

While several types of whales get caught in fishing gear or have collisions with ships that result in death, the whale of most interest is the North Atlantic right whale, one of the most severely endangered whales in the world. Once thousands swam along the Atlantic coast of North America, but now only 300 to 400 are believed to remain. More than two-thirds of them have scars from entanglements in fishing gear. The whales' plight even has garnered celebrity: in the summer of 2001 the public watched as a whale dubbed Churchill traveled from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia, dying slowly of infection despite several well-publicized attempts to disentangle fishing gear embedded deeply into his jaw.

Many whales that collide with fishing gear end up with rope wrapped around their flukes, flippers or mouth, and they may carry that rope for months or years and often sustain injuries. The big concern is reproductive whales: since November 2004 five such whales have been found dead, two of them pregnant females. At least two were killed by human activities, one from a ship collision and one from rope entanglement. A comparable death rate among humans would be 140 people per 10,000 in a six-month period.

The fishing gear of most concern is fixed fishing gear, such as lobster trawls with a floating ground line that can rise an average of 16 feet into the water column between traps - enough to get a whale into trouble. If a whale gets the rope wrapped around its head or in its mouth, it will have trouble eating, and the rope is particularly hard to remove. Lobstermen, especially in Maine, already follow strong conservation practices for lobsters to preserve pregnant females and other lobsters, and that has led to a thriving lobster industry. But sweeping regulations recently proposed by the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service to help protect the whales would cost New England lobstermen more than $10 million, or thousands of dollars per individual. Massachusetts fishermen already have been voluntarily changing their fishing gear to protect whales since the mid-1990s. But the added cost is drawing resistance by many of those who already have invested dearly in fishing gear.

The whales aren't the only ones at risk: fishermen could lose their gear or have it damaged by a whale collision, and this hurts their livelihood. Under U.S. federal law, if one right whale is killed by fishing gear, the courts could shut down that fishery, putting potentially thousands of lobstermen out of work. This hasn't happened so far, but if more whales die it will become a risk for fishermen.

There are no easy answers to the predicament. It's tough to disentangle a whale: Johnson says whale scientists estimate that less than ten percent of right whale entanglements are reported, and few of those that are can be successfully disentangled, partly because it's dangerous to be too close to the large mammals. Cordoning off areas for the whales isn't a solution, either, as whales roam quite a bit, as noted from satellite data sent from tags placed on some whales.

Johnson issues a challenge at the end of her book to people on all sides of the issue. Any resolution will likely have to come, she says, from people talking to each other, gaining trust and thinking about the future.

After all, the question isn't which to save: fish, fishermen or whales. They all inhabit the same ocean and all depend on it. But people working together still have a chance to make decisions that will contribute to the demise or return of the whales and fisheries in the North Atlantic.