Mitch Sanders is a professional fisherman living on the Central Coast of New South Wales, in Terrigal and Pretty Beach. He heads up a key national effort to address the sad issue of whale entanglements in fishing gear. Sanders works alongside Australian fishers and international counterparts from the US, Canada, and New Zealand. In tandem, they join an innovative program operated by Oceanwatch Australia to help prevent entanglements from occurring in the first place.
Whale populations are recovering rapidly. Humpbacks along Australia’s east coast rebounded from a couple hundred in the 1960s to about 40,000 now! This growth comes with challenges. Over the past five years, the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service has received an average of 32 reports of entangled whales annually. Over 80% of these incidents are caused by angling line and tackle. This troubling trend should be of deep concern to marine conservationists and fishers.
Nor we do want entanglements, we lose our gear, it’s a waste of our time, it’s a waste of our money to have to retrieve the gear. We need to be proactive in working with the whales because they’re not going anywhere. So let’s do all we can to avoid entanglements and protect our futures, Sanders said in a tweet.
To address this concern, Sanders is piloting new technologies. One of these is a ropeless alternative to traps, which was initially developed here in the US. These devices are designed to reduce risk of entanglement as much as possible while maintaining fishers’ capacity to conduct their operations effectively. According to Dr. Olaf Meynecke, a marine scientist at Griffith University, the implementation of these technologies has its challenges.
Even though mitigation technologies are effective, they can be cumbersome and time-consuming for fishers,” Dr. Meynecke further explained. He stressed that a more coordinated approach is necessary in order to tackle whale entanglements in the best way possible. The varying fishing regulations across Australia complicate this goal, making it difficult to establish consistent practices that can be adopted by all fishers.
Sanders recognizes the steep price tags on these innovative gadgets as yet another hurdle for Aussie anglers. “The fishermen are very aware of the number of whales increasing over many years. We’re very much looking at co-existence; we want the whales to migrate safely while ensuring fishers have safe passage,” said Lowri Pryce, a representative from Oceanwatch Australia.
In December of last year, a young humpback whale washed up dead on a New South Wales beach, entangled in fishing rope and floats. These all-too-frequent incidents further underscore the need for action on this front. Dr. Meynecke noted that it was evident from footage of the deceased whale that it had suffered significantly before its death.
“It was quite obvious to see from the footage that this was an animal that has really starved over a couple of weeks. It was quite thin and covered in sea lice,” he remarked.
Fishers and marine scientists are collaborating to minimize the risk of serious entanglements. They work to educate the fishing community. Sanders said he’s optimistic that heightened awareness about recent whale entanglements will result in improved preventive action going forward.
It’s prohibitive and I think most people, including a lot of scientists, don’t understand how many whales entangled gear. Together, these circumstances create ethical and animal welfare quagmire.
The potential for innovative solutions remains vast. Sanders and his team are trying out floats with different shapes that would slide off a whale if the whale became entangled. “We use polystyrene floats so if a whale is entangled on the side of the fin or something like that, we found that the float breaks in half and allows the whale to swim free,” he explained.
Dr. Meynecke pointed out a worrying issue. While there are continuing efforts to reduce whale entanglements, so far there has been no concerted effort to address the growing problem on a large scale. He concluded with recommendations for increasing research to make mitigation technologies available to fishers and for promoting cross-border collaborative efforts.
“
