[Animal] Landmark Law Saved Whales Through Marine Industries Change

[NesT_YT]

 

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — On a breezy spring day, scientists and conservationists methodically conducted experiments near 15 North Atlantic right whales that occasionally spouted and surfaced in a bay south of Boston.

The pod of adults and calves is about 4% of the worldwide population of a marine mammal that almost disappeared from the planet after many decades of commercial whaling. There now are only a few hundred of the behemoths, which can weigh 70 tons (63.5 metric tons) and subsist on small ocean organisms.

Although right whale numbers are dwindling, conservationists attribute their continued survival to the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

The landmark federal law — a half century old this year — has forced the fishing and commercial shipping industries to take important steps to help protect the critically endangered whales. And it's spurred government agencies and scientists to undertake research.

David Wiley, research ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was part of the crew that spent late March and early April testing the water off Cape Cod for the presence of a naturally occurring chemical that could help predict where right whales will congregate.