Last year, there were 36 whales entangled with commercial fishing gear off the coasts of Oregon, Washington and California, or found entangled with West Coast fishing gear off the coasts of other countries. That’s the highest number of whale entanglements in the West Coast region since 2018, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
More than eight years ago, scientists at Oregon State University began collaborating with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, the commercial Dungeness crab fishery and environmental nonprofits to reduce entanglements of endangered humpback, fin and blue whales off the Oregon Coast.
OSU scientists boarded research vessels and U.S. Coast Guard helicopters for surveys at sea and air to map the distribution of whales and their overlap with Dungeness crab fishing locations.
The scientists found that the risk of entanglement in fishing gear is greatest for whales in April when they gather near shore to feed off the Oregon Coast, and the crab fishing season is still underway. That observation and discussions with stakeholders led to best practices and regulations adopted by ODFW to limit the risk of entanglement by, for example, reducing crab pot limits at the end of the season.
Today, OSU scientists are expanding this work to include the risk of entanglement from other commercial fisheries, including rockfish and sablefish. They’ve also been analyzing scars on humpback whales’ tails and fins to better estimate how many whales are getting wrapped up in nets, lines, pots and buoys.
Leigh Torres is an associate professor at the Marine Mammal Institute and Oregon Sea Grant Extension at Oregon State University. She joins us to share the latest with this award-winning effort to reduce whale entanglements off the Oregon Coast and beyond.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Last year, at least 36 whales got entangled with commercial fishing gear off the coasts of Oregon, Washington and California, or were found entangled with West Coast fishing gear off the coasts of other countries. It was the highest number of these entanglements since 2018, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And it came eight years after scientists at Oregon State University began collaborating with regulators, crabbers and environmental nonprofits to reduce these entanglements.
Today, OSU scientists are expanding their work to include other commercial fisheries. Leigh Torres is an associate professor at Oregon State University within the Marine Mammal Institute and Oregon Sea Grant Extension. She joins us with an update on her work. It’s great to have you on the show.
Leigh Torres: Thanks, thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me.
Miller: What exactly is a whale entanglement and how do they happen?
Torres: Great question. An entanglement is basically when a whale gets wrapped up in fishing gear that’s in the water. Many different types of fishing gear are in our coastal oceans that overlap with where whales feed and travel, so they can get wrapped up in lots of different gear, lots of different ways. How exactly they happen, we still don’t know. But essentially, we think that they’re feeding, traveling, the lines get hooked around their fins or flukes, and then get wrapped up. And they can really be awful, cause deep wounds, traumatic injuries to them. They basically can limit their ability to move and feed in the ocean, so they can get weak and prone to predation. They can be long-suffering injuries that eventually cause death or drowning, so it’s a pretty awful traumatic thing that would be fantastic to not have happen anymore.
Miller: How common are these entanglements?
Torres: Another good question. It’s such a hard thing to quantify because most entanglements go undetected and unreported. So the numbers that you reported at the beginning of the segment are true, but they’re likely a high underestimate of the actual number of entanglements because whales occupy parts of the ocean that humans never go to – they could die and never be detected, of these entanglements. And those that are reported sometimes only get seen once, and then they disappear and we never see them again, so we don’t know what the survival rates are either.
Miller: Your work was initially funded, at least in part, by the Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission. Why was this important enough for them to put up some of their money?
Torres: Yeah, I was so impressed with how the industry was the first to get behind this project and support it. Basically, what ended up happening is in about 2014, 2015, 2016, there was high rates of entanglements along the whole West Coast, much more than had been detected previously. That caused the Dungeness crab fishery to be shut down in California and that caused a lot of concern among the fisheries up here in Oregon.
So Oregon Sea Grant convened a working group in 2017 that was really great. It brought together fishermen, the Dungeness Crab Commission representatives, scientists like myself, environmental NGOs and managers from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. And we all sort of discussed this issue and how to get ahead of it so that it didn’t impact our whales here or the fishery.
But pretty early on in those discussions, everybody recognized that the big knowledge gap was a better understanding about where and when whales occurred in Oregon waters. We really didn’t have a good grasp of that, so any management effort to protect whales was fraught with knowledge gaps. We couldn’t target our management effectively. So it was after those discussions that I pitched this idea that we could actually go out and collect that data, get a better understanding about where whales are in Oregon waters and when, and then that would help the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife develop strategies that are tailored to reduce entanglement risk.
Full credit to the Oregon Dungeness Crowd Commission, they were the first one to see the value in the project and really supported it right away. We got off the ground – literally, in helicopters – quite quickly after that.
Miller: And it really does seem like what motivated them, among other things, was an existential fear, the worst case scenario would be a closure and having some kind of data driven policies that would stop short of that was way better.
Torres: Yeah, that’s exactly right. The Oregon Dungeness crab fishery is an incredibly important fishery to Oregon. It’s the most valuable single species fishery in the state and [brought] in about $94 million in 2023, I think. So shutting down that fishery would have dire consequences to individuals and their livelihoods, to our coastal communities. We all really wanted to avoid that scenario and avoid whale entanglements. Nobody, including the fishermen, wants to entangle a whale.
So exactly, getting better data that could allow the managers to to develop thoughtful, effective regulations, rather than any sort of broad scale shutdown of the fishery. That’s what everybody was after.
Miller: You mentioned getting off the ground and literally getting into the air in helicopters. What did you do? What was the work like in terms of trying to figure out which whales were where, when?
Torres: Yeah, it took an incredible amount of survey effort, basically, a lot of time staring at the ocean either from a helicopter or from vessels. We managed to develop this amazing partnership with the U.S. Coast Guard, where they support us to fly in their helicopters four times a month along four different set transect lines along the Oregon Coast. So we’ve been doing those surveys since 2017 and continued today, which is just an amazing data set. The other really important thing about that is it allows us to collect data throughout the winter months. The Dungeness crab fishery actually is most intensive in those winter months, but it’s really hard to get on the water during those months. The helicopters allow us to collect that data, as well as all the other months of the year.
And then we’ve also partnered with other scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that run the Northern California research cruises. We actually go on their big white ships and survey the ocean for whales, and then also on OSU research vessels. So all in all, since 2016 to 2024, we’ve spent 395 days at sea, covering 43,000 miles of the ocean, which is actually almost twice around the circumference of the Earth. So it’s really an incredible amount of survey effort looking for whales, recording when we see the whales and what species, but also when we’re not seeing the whales because that’s equally important to understand when they’re not in our oceans.
Since we’ve started, we’ve detected over 4,000 individual whales. We’ve accumulated this amazing data set through these partnerships with the U.S. Coast Guard and with NOAA vessels. Very powerful to be able to have this better understanding about where whales are in our waters here in Oregon.
Miller: And I imagine, like a lot of scientific conversations we’ve had over the years, other researchers who are not focused specifically on entanglements, they could use this data in other ways you may not even be thinking about at this moment.
But to stick with entanglements, how much did this research inform the regulations that Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife adopted in 2020?
Torres: Yeah, it directly informed their new regulations that they proposed then and that are still in place now. After the Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission supported the project, we got major funding from NOAA through their Section 6 awards that support state level management of endangered species. The partnership really was directly with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. Basically, they also saw that if they could get better information on where the whales are, they could better tailor their regulations.
So after a few years of us collecting the data on whales, they put in these new management regulations that basically said that after May 1 – which is when we end up here in Oregon having higher abundance of whales in our waters – there was a 20% reduction in the pot limits across the whole state, and also there’s no commercial crabbing in waters deeper than 40 fathoms. Both of those measures were put in place based on our early data that said that that’s where we expected more whales. Basically, just trying to reduce the number of lines in the water that overlap with where the whales could be to reduce entanglement risk.
Miller: But then, as I mentioned in my intro, the numbers for known entanglements last year were the highest since 2018, according to NOAA data. So what’s happening?
Torres: It’s frustrating for everybody involved, for sure. We’d love to see the rates of entanglements going down.
There’s lots of different things going on. I think here in Oregon, the numbers of whales are increasing as their populations rebound since whaling. For both humpbacks and blue whales, their populations are recovering, and fin whales. And also climate change and just changing environmental conditions. I know, through our data, we’re seeing more and more whales using our Oregon waters. So the potential for overlap between whales and the fishing gear in the water is increasing.
Miller: So at a time when regulations have reduced, based on certain times of year or places, the likelihood of entanglements, there are more whales themselves. So whale traffic is increasing and that could be partly behind this increase in entanglements?
Torres: Yeah, I think that is part of the problem. And then also, we still have gear in the water and there’s still the risk of entanglements. With our new data that we’ve collected recently and our new analysis, I think there’s gonna be more potential to tailor regulations even further, to make them more effective but also more fine scale. And hopefully that will reduce entanglements further.
It’s really hard to judge how effective the regulations have been because basically here in Oregon, we have between one and three or four entanglements in Oregon gear every year – which really isn’t a lot, that’s just what’s detected and reported. If it goes down to two reports a year, is that actually an effect of the regulations? It’s very hard to know.
One thing that we did, in partnership with fishermen actually, was look at thousands of photographs of humpback whales to look for evidence of scarring for entanglements. There are many whales that show historic scars from being entangled previously in their lives. They’re very distinct wrap markings and scars where the lines have sort of dug into their skin, but then somehow the whales have managed to shake the gear. But through looking at photographs captured in Oregon waters between 2005 and 2023, we did see that about 20% of humpback whales do show signs of scar from entanglement. I do have to caveat that by saying that we don’t know where the whales were entangled, what gear they were in or when those entanglements happened. But we can say with some level of confidence that about 20% of humpback whales that were in Oregon waters do show signs of entanglements.
Miller: Is this something that crabbers or fishermen, if they see a whale that’s entangled, could they themselves disentangle these huge marine mammals?
Torres: No, is the answer. It’s really best if they don’t. And I know it’s hard because you see this animal struggling and you wanna help immediately, but really there’s many reasons why it’s best not to engage and try and disentangle one. One is that it’s very risky, for safety. People have died trying to disentangle whales. Because they’re huge, strong animals, one whack from their fluke and that could be it. There are people that are highly trained in how to disentangle whales, so it’s best to call; NOAA has hotlines and ODFW has hotlines that you can call and report the whale entanglement..
And the other thing is that we get a lot of information from documenting whale entanglements, so taking photos of what gear it is. That’s really important because a lot of times people report entanglements, but we don’t actually know what gear it is, so we don’t know even if it’s Dungeness crab gear or Oregon Dungeness crab gear. It could be from a different fishery or from a different state, because the whales can carry gear with them for months, almost years at a time across large, large areas. So taking photographs and videos of how the whale is wrapped up and in what gear is really important.
So when people disentangle whales without documenting, that’s a huge loss in terms of us better understanding this problem in order to better solve the problem.
Miller: Leigh Torres, thanks very much.
Torres: You’re very welcome.
Miller: Leigh Torres is an associate professor at Oregon State University within the Marine Mammal Institute and Oregon Sea Grant Extension.
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