Canada to take steps to protect vanishing North Atlantic right whales from ships
The whale is the North Atlantic right whale, which numbers only about 370. The whales give birth off the southeastern U.S. in the winter and spring and migrate north to New England and Canada to feed.
Along the way, the whales face dangers including ship strikes and entanglement in commercial fishing gear. Environmental groups have long faulted the U.S. and Canadian governments for not doing enough to protect the critically endangered animals.
Canada is enforcing mandatory protection measures for the whale this summer, Transport Canada said in a June 27 statement. All vessels of 42.7 feet (13 meters) in length or more must comply with speed restrictions in designated areas of the ocean to avoid whale strikes, the agency said.
Transport Canada said it is also requesting voluntary slowdowns in other parts of the ocean. The restrictions reflect the agency's commitment 'to the protection and conservation of endangered North Atlantic right whales,' the agency said.
'Transport Canada has been taking action to help protect this iconic species from vessel collisions in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, a high-traffic area where right whales are often seen,' the statement said.
The restrictions are being enforced at a time when scientists are voicing concern about a lack of right whale reproduction. The New England Aquarium in Boston said earlier this year that this year's calving season produced only 11 mother-calf pairs. U.S. government authorities have said the whales need to have at least 50 calves per season to start recovering the population.
The U.S. government decided earlier this year to withdraw a proposal that would have required more ships to slow down in East Coast waters to spare the whale. The move came in the final days of President Joe Biden 's administration and federal ocean managers said there was no way to implement the rules before President Donald Trump took office in January.
The whale was once abundant off the East Coast, but it was decimated long ago during the commercial whaling era. It has been protected by the U.S. Endangered Species Act for decades, but has been slow to recover.
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The Guardian
3 hours ago
- The Guardian
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The Independent
8 hours ago
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'(N)otwithstanding the sufferings of your loyal Colonists during the course of this present controversy, our Breasts retain too tender a regard for the Kingdom from which we derive our Origin to request such a Reconciliation as might in any manner be inconsistent with her Dignity or her welfare,' the sometimes obsequious petition reads in part. The American Revolution didn't arise at a single moment but through years of anguished steps away from the 'mother' country — a kind of weaning that at times suggested a coming of age, a young person's final departure from home. In letters and diaries written in the months before July 1775, American leaders often referred to themselves as children, the British as parents and the conflict a family argument. Edmund Pendleton, a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress, urged 'a reconciliation with Our mother Country.' 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The 1775 declaration was drafted by Thomas Jefferson, who a year later would be the principal writer of the Declaration of Independence, revised by Dickinson and approved by the Congress on July 6. The language anticipated the Declaration of Independence with its condemnation of the British for 'their intemperate Rage for unlimited Domination' and its vows to 'make known the Justice of our Cause.' But while the Declaration of Independence ends with the 13 colonies 'absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown,' the authors in 1775 assured a nervous public 'that we mean not to dissolve that Union which has so long and so happily subsisted between us, and which we sincerely wish to see restored.' 'Necessity has not yet driven us into that desperate Measure, or induced us to excite any other Nation to war against them,' they wrote. John Adams and Benjamin Franklin were among the peers of Dickinson who thought him naive about the British, and were unfazed when the king refused even to look at the Olive Branch petition and ruled that the colonies were in a state of rebellion. Around the same time Dickinson was working on his draft, the Continental Congress readied for further conflict. It appointed a commander of the newly-formed Continental Army, a renowned Virginian whom Adams praised as 'modest and virtuous ... amiable, generous and brave." His name: George Washington. His ascension, Adams wrote, "will have a great effect, in cementing and securing the Union of these Colonies.'
