Two things are “in jeopardy.” One is a species of mammal that took three billion years of evolution to evolve into its present form; a creature that can weigh over 154,300 pounds and has brains at least comparable in complexity, and much larger than, our own. The other is an industry that has been around a few centuries, generating income and providing food we don’t need, but many of us like.
My money’s on the industry – the lobster and crab industry – although my heart and effort is on the side of the mammal – the North Atlantic right whale, arguably Canada’s most endangered wildlife species. Put simply, as mentioned here before, individual whales are dying faster than they can reproduce.
It was Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientist Mark Baumgartner who recently said “I feel the industry is in jeopardy.” Why? Because a major impediment to right whale survival has been entanglements with gear used in lobster and snow crab fisheries. Already, Canada has restricted some of its own crab fishery, but animals don’t build borders and walls at national boundaries, and both Canada and the U.S. are failing to protect the whales as they enter the cold waters off of our east coast and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Maine is famous for its former cod fishery and one theory has it that lobsters thrived as the commercial cod fishery wiped out once enormous cod stocks, since cod are major predators of young lobster. But, an examination of very early records show that there were, at the time of North American first colonization by Europeans, enormous numbers of both giant lobsters and giant cod, not to mention whales, seabirds, and other marine life, now existing, if at all, at a fragment of former population sizes.
Americans are blaming Canada, since the whales are closer to shorelines and crab and lobster fishing grounds in Canadian waters than when migrating off the U.S. east coast. Canada does seem to have a more aggressive research and development effort to invent gear less damaging to whales, but absolutely can and should do much more.
But, no matter what is done, a finite resource – our fisheries – cannot infinitely sustain a growing demand – the people who eat snow crab and Atlantic lobster, especially as climate change throws an unpredictable monkey wrench into a mix of complexity that already defies our understanding.
I don’t need to eat lobster or snow crab, so I don’t. Do you?
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Barry