Went to an Interesting Presentation Last Night on Humpback Whales

[Dogbreath]

Headed up Oak St last to a church basement where Nature Vancouver has meetings.

Last night was a talk by Christie McMillan a Whale researcher with a varied background and all kinds of experience.

She had some slides of different Humpback and showed us how they can be ID'ed and then spoke about how often they're caught up in commercial fishing gear.

It's a sad story we've all heard but some progress is being made in some areas-she spent a couple years studying & doing research in the eastern USA and brought back a lot of knowledge and ideas that are applicable here-one of which is the formation and deployment of Whale Disentanglement Response Units.

This ties in with the The Marine Mammal Incident Reporting Hotline which many here know about.

She's also started Mersociety.org -an education effort.

When someone pointed out that there needed to be more coordination between Govt & small efforts she agreed and then pointed out that it took folks on the eastern US seaboard 30 years to get to where they are now with mobile response units and we have yet to see anything like it- this is all the early days.

 

[marula]

Funny you brought that up, i was just reading an interesting article in the local rag about a group trying to raise funds to pull up the old nets here. Here is the link http://www.saanichnews.com/news/138793684.html and the text in case the link goes dead. Was an interesting read, sounds like we are years behind our Washington friends in this field.






Monsters are lurking deep beneath our coastal waters and it doesn’t take a cryptozoologist to identify the beasts.

As many as 20,000 abandoned fishing nets have set a deadly trap around southern Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands. Each net is capable of killing about 20,000 animals and, without any cleanup programs in the region, the numbers are only going up.

Cetus Research & Conservation Society, a Victoria-based non-profit group aimed at public education, stewardship and marine mammal response, hopes to turn that around with a derelict gear removal program. While Cetus’ public education work is government-funded, the society relies solely on public support for additional programming, such as gear removal – a project expected to run an initial cost of $15,000, considering the labour involved in identifying and safely removing nets from the seafloor. Pulling up some of the estimated 1,500 unused crab traps in the waters between Sidney and Victoria is also within the project’s mandate. Labeled nets and traps are returned to their rightful owners.

“When you see (lost gear) enough, you realize there’s a lot out there,” said Linda McGrew, Cetus administrative director, noting the group’s involvement with the Marine Mammal Response Network at the Vancouver Aquarium.

Their staff continue to respond to calls of whales entangled in lost fishing nets.

“It’s going to take a lot of research and visiting other countries where they do this kind of work, because we don’t have anything like this in Canada right now,” McGrew said.

She suggests a 10-year timeline is needed to bring Vancouver Island up to speed with Washington State where a similar program has been underway for a decade within Puget Sound. Maintenance measures would still be needed for the long-term, McGrew added.

Cetus is hosting a three-course dinner at 6 p.m., Feb. 26 at the Olive Grove, 4496 West Saanich Rd., to help fund the program. The evening includes a trivia game, door prizes and cash bar.

Tickets are $30 and available at the Olive Grove, Cetus Research & Conservation Society (920 Johnson St.), or online by contacting info@cetussociety.org.

 

[GLG]

Perhaps the people that are responsible for putting the nets down there should be the ones that are paying to have them removed. If they don't like it then by all means switch to a net that will rot if left in the ocean.
GLG