NEWS

Environmental groups sue for new right whale protections

Steve Patterson
spatterson@jacksonville.com
A 2013 photo recorded four right whales traveling together near St. Augustine, including one who had been entangled earlier in commercial fishing rope. A lawsuit filed Thursday argued the federal government hadn’t correctly considered the risk to the endangered whales from gear used in the lobster fishing industry. (File photo, Katharine Nicolaisen/Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission)

Three environmental groups sued the U.S. Commerce Department on Thursday to get tougher protection of endangered right whales, arguing the agency hasn’t done enough to prevent deaths from commercial lobster fishing.

“Right whales could disappear forever if they keep getting tangled up and killed in fishing gear,” Kristen Monsell, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in an announcement about the lawsuit the group filed with Defenders of Wildlife and the Humane Society of the United States.

The groups asked a federal judge in Washington to overturn a 2014 finding by the government, called a biological opinion, that said commercial lobster fishing wasn’t likely to put the whales’ future in jeopardy.

The lobster fishery reaches generally from New England to North Carolina, but what happens there affects whales people see near Jacksonville, because the animals there migrate in winter to the Florida and Georgia coasts to give birth and raise youngsters.

There are fewer than 500 right whales still alive — maybe just 450 — and last year that population suffered from a cluster of 16 deaths in a few months off the American and Canadian shores.

The lawsuit pointed out that the 2014 opinion from Commerce’s National Marine Fisheries Service said that three and sometimes four whales each year could be expected to be seriously hurt or killed by getting entangled in ropes from fishing gear. On a population as small as the right whales, it argued the opinion couldn’t say those injuries and deaths didn’t pose some threat to the species, and that the agency should be ordered to consider steps to reduce the risk of entanglements.

Steve Patterson: (904) 359-4263