PORTLAND — Entanglement in a morass of fishing gear killed an endangered right whale spotted off Boothbay Harbor and brought ashore in Portland last month for a necropsy, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Jennifer Goebel, a spokeswoman for NOAA’s Greater Atlantic Region in Gloucester, Mass., said last week that scientists from the fisheries service had determined that “chronic entanglement was the cause of death” of the 45-ton, 43-foot-long animal.
Goebel also said that the New England Aquarium had identified the whale as No. 3694 in its North Atlantic Right Whale Catalog. According to Goebel, the whale was a female, believed to be about 11 years old, with no known calves.
The whale was first sighted by researchers in 2006. Since then, the whale has been sighted along the Atlantic Coast 26 times, most recently off Florida in February of this year.
According to Goebel, passengers on a Boothbay Harbor-based whale watching boat spotted the dead whale floating about 12 to 13 miles off Portland wrapped in fishing gear. Rope was reportedly wrapped around the whale’s head, in its mouth and around its flippers and its tail.
The animal was first taken under tow by a Marine Patrol boat and then towed into Portland by the Coast Guard. There, the carcass was hoisted by a Portland Yacht Services Travelift onto a flatbed trailer and taken to a Gorham farm for a necropsy.
Goebel said that authorities had not yet determined how or where the whale might have become entangled.
“We have the rope,” Goebel said. “We still haven’t identified which type of [fishing] gear it is or where it might have happened.”
Goebel added that she didn’t know when the gear, and potentially its owner, might be identified.
“I hope it’s soon,” she said.
The federal Endangered Species Act prohibits the “take” of endangered or threatened marine mammals in U.S. waters and the high seas, and the Marine Mammal Protection Act deals specifically with harm to creatures such as the right whale.
Violations of the MMPA can result in civil penalties up to $11,000 or criminal penalties up to $100,000 plus one year of imprisonment. Those kinds of sanctions are unlikely, though, except in cases of deliberate or clearly negligent conduct.
NOAA is more likely to use the death of whale No. 3694 to educate the public about threats to the endangered animals.
According to NOAA, there are only about 500 right whales currently living in the western North Atlantic. Over the past several years, NOAA Fisheries and a diverse group of stakeholders including, among others, the Maine DMR and representatives of the Maine lobster industry, have developed plans to significantly reduce the number of the vertical endlines that connect lobster traps to their marker buoys that are in the water. Lobstermen also are required to use a variety of devices, including weak links in their buoy lines and sinking groundlines between traps, to reduce the likelihood of whale entanglements.
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