Biologists measure the carcass of a North American right whale calf killed in a collision with a boat off St. Augustine in 2022. The same boat killed its mother, too. Photo by Tucker Joenz/Florida FWC, taken under NOAA permit 18786)
The most famous fictional tale about a whale is, of course, Moby Dick. Captain Ahab is obsessed with finding and killing the rare creature that took his leg. Ultimately, his pursuit leads to Bad Things happening to everybody except the narrator — you can call him Ishmael.
Captain Ahab’s self-destructive obsession pales in comparison to the people who were angry about a federal agency’s attempt to protect one of the rarest whales in the world.
There are fewer than 400 right whales left in the wild. Like manatees, they’re vulnerable to being clobbered by boats. In 2021, for instance, one boat called the About Time clobbered two of them off St. Augustine — a mama whale and its new calf. Both died.
Neither the captain nor the owner suffered any legal consequences. Federal rules have speed limits for big boats, such as tankers. But there are no such rules governing smaller boats such as the 54-footer that hit the two whales.
That collision is far from the only one to take out a right whale. “Since 2020, at least 16 critically endangered North Atlantic right whales have been killed or injured by blows from boats and ships,” Oceanographic magazine reported recently. “In 2024 alone, four right whales — including two females and two dependent calves — have died as a result of vessel strikes in U.S. waters.”
The federal agency in charge of managing water-borne endangered species, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had proposed making those smaller boats slow down too. The owners, users, and manufacturers of such boats were not happy.
“The service received over 90,000 public comments on the rule change,” The New York Times reported last week.
The paper didn’t say, but I gather that roughly 89,000 of those comments were some variation on “How DARE you try to make me slow down?” Under such an onslaught of angry opposition, the folks at NOAA waved a white flag. Last week, the agency withdrew the proposal.
Why? The feds explained that NOAA “does not have sufficient time to finalize this regulation in this administration due to the scope and volume of public comments.”
In other words, they were blaming the change of administrations. But that makes no sense to me, because the one candidate who talked about whales during the presidential race was the eventual winner, Donald J. Trump.
Batty for whales
Generally speaking, Trump is regarded as an enemy of special protections for endangered species. That’s certainly been true here in Florida. Last time he was in the White House, his administration took actions that hurt manatees and tried to hurt Key deer.
That said, he’s apparently got a soft spot for whales.
Perhaps you’ve forgotten this, because the news about him lately has been all about his comments on seizing Greenland, changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico, and turning Canada into the politest American state.
Several times during his campaign, during the portions of his speeches he dubbed “the weave” (named, perhaps, for his elaborate hairstyle), Trump talked about his great concern for the mighty leviathans of the ocean.
It started in 2023, when he claimed that windmills built off the Atlantic coast to generate electricity are making the whales insane. As a result, he told the crowd, dead whales are washing ashore “on a weekly basis.”
“The windmills are driving them crazy,” he told a crowd in South Carolina. “They are driving the whales, I think, a little batty.”
Scientists said Trump was the one who was batty.
“There is no scientific evidence whatsoever that wind turbines, or surveying for wind turbines, is causing any whale deaths at all,” a whale biologist from the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission told the British newspaper The Guardian.
Instead, the scientist said, the main cause for whale deaths is being hit by boats and becoming entangled in fishing gear.
“In Europe, where offshore wind has been developed for more than three decades, national agencies also have not found causal links between wind farms and whale deaths,” the Associated Press reported in 2023.
So sure, the Trumpster Fire was either lying to his audience or totally delusional. Sure, he was employing these “alternative facts” to undermine alternative energy with a bizarre argument involving a sea creature. But clearly, the guy cares as much about the fate of the whales as he does about the price of eggs!
As a Florida resident, he should care the most about right whales, which started visiting our state even before he did.
Marine mammal snowbirds
Like a lot of Florida residents, right whales are only here part-time.
Part of the year, they’re found off Canada and New England. Then — not unlike the snowbirds who invade our state around Thanksgiving and drive us all batty with their driving — some of them head south to Florida.
From November to April, they swim about 1,000 miles down to warmer waters off Georgia and Florida.
Their presence is cause for lots of rejoicing in Florida beach towns. Fernandina Beach even has a Right Whale Festival every November. No, they do NOT let you ride the whales, but last year’s festival featured a right whale-themed beer.
The reason for the whales’ visit is not to hit the festival circuit or play pickleball in warmer weather. This is where the females give birth to their calves. Once their calves are strong enough, they all swim back north.
There used to be thousands of right whales making these annual visits to Florida. But in the 1800s, whalers nearly wiped them out to harvest their oil for use in lamps.
That’s how “Eubalaena glacialis” got its common name. They were the “right” whale to hunt, because they moved slowly, migrated near shore, and remained afloat even after death.
Now a coalition of federal, state, and nongovernment scientific agencies collaborate to keep an eye on the right whales while they’re calving. The calves are important to ensuring this species has a future. Biologists say the population is so tiny, the loss of even a single whale — especially a breeding-age female — pushes the entire species closer to extinction.
The feds have known for years about the dangers posed by speeding boats. Research going as far back as the 1990s shows that.
In 2008, the agency passed a regulation limiting the speed of big cargo vessels in areas along the Atlantic coast where right whales are known to swim. But it hasn’t done the same with vessels smaller than 65 feet — in other words, boats the size of the “About Time,” which killed the pair near St. Augustine.
In its cargo ship rule (which has been deemed successful, by the way), NOAA said it would “continue to consider means … to address vessel classes below 65 feet should it become clear these vessels warranted regulation.”
Agency officials took until 2022 to come up with such a rule. That’s the one that started 90,000 people screaming at them like they were Taylor Swift walking onstage, only with a lot less goodwill.
Manatee flashbacks
Among the most vehement opponents was a Georgia congressman named Earl “Buddy” Carter, who in 2023 co-sponsored a bill to delay funding for the proposed speed restrictions.
“We all want to protect the right whale from extinction, but this is the wrong way to do it,” Carter said in a press release. He contended that making the boaters slow down would endanger harbor pilots, not to mention harm recreational fishing.
This was the point at which I started having flashbacks to the 2000s, when there were raging controversies around Florida about new speed zones to protect manatees from speeding boats.
Some of the arguments sounded ridiculous. One opponent said speed limits would mean the end of water skiing, ending “wholesome family time.”
And one state legislator warned that limits on boating would produce “a lost generation who cannot pass on to their descendants the experience of fishing, skiing, boating, or diving. Florida’s waters will be perceived once again as forbidden, alien territory.”
Twenty years later, though, Florida has more registered boat owners than any other state. Meanwhile, the speed limits helped the manatee population rebound to around 6,000 — until there was a huge, pollution-fueled manatee die-off in recent years.
In another echo of the manatee speed zone controversy, some boating advocates argued that the proper solution for saving the right whales was a technological one. Surely, they said, there must be a way to detect the presence of such big creatures in the water before a boat hits them.
Turns out that’s like claiming we don’t need parking spaces anymore because everyone now owns a George Jetson flying car that folds up into a briefcase. It’s just a tad premature, because those techno-solutions don’t exist yet.
“We don’t rely on collision avoidance warnings in cars to protect kids going to school,” Jane Davenport of Defenders of Wildlife, told Georgia Public Broadcasting in 2023. “We protect them with mandatory slow-down zones.”
A prologue to the end
I contacted several marine biologists who have done research on the rapidly diminishing number of right whales to see what they made of all this.
I made sure to check in with Barb Zoodsma, who for years was NOAA’s right whale recovery program coordinator in the Southeast. Now retired, she said she wasn’t surprised her former agency backed down.
“There was a tremendous amount of misinformation that was spread around out there (surprise!) and a lot of political blowback — apparently, too much to overcome given current events,” she told me via email.
The opponents all had a lot to say about how her agency should do its job, she pointed out.
“There were many vocal politicians, boaters, industry groups, etc. that claimed they cared about right whales; however, they said, the rule was not the right way to help the whales,” she told me. “Well, now they have the opportunity to demonstrate their concern and implement their (better) plans for protecting the species. Let’s see what they choose to do with this opportunity.”
(So far, I haven’t heard boo from those folks, although I tried contacting them.)
“We know unequivocally right whales are in a vulnerable position and humans are the cause,” Zoodsma said. “So, if right whales go extinct, we’ll have failed at one of our most fundamental responsibilities — and the failure will have come as the result of apathy, not lack of knowledge or inability.”
I should add Zoodsma’s observation that the female right whales are having fewer calves these days, averaging seven or eight years between calving intervals instead of 3 or 4 years. Meanwhile, they appear to be dying prematurely. They could live to be 60, 70, 80. Instead they’re dying in their 30s. Neither of those are healthy signs for the future.
“Do I believe we are in the middle of their extinction now?” she asked. “No, but I do believe we’re presently writing a type of prologue. … The question is: What type of book do we want to write and how do we want it to end.”
I also contacted Michael Moore — no, not the “Roger & Me” filmmaker, but the one who’s director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute’s marine mammal center. He told me the agency’s actions left him “disappointed but not surprised.”
I asked him what the loss of such an iconic species would mean for the fate of our oceans. He said it would be “symbolic of future widespread loss of marine and terrestrial biodiversity that will ultimately make the globe unlivable for humans.”
The last person I talked to was Julie Albert, director of the Blue World Research Institute’s Cocoa-based Right Whale Sighting Network. Extinction “is something we’ve started talking about,” she said. The estimated date for the last right whale to expire is now 2035, she said.
When I asked what we’d lose if the right whales weren’t around anymore, she explained something I’ve never heard before. She said whales are considered “the gardeners of the ocean.”
Their poop, she explained, fertilizes the phytoplankton that forms the base of the entire marine food chain. Those plants also pull a lot of our destructive carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
“Whales are a HUGE part of combating climate change,” Albert told me. So, if you eliminate them, you’re helping to eliminate us humans, too.
Obviously, we can’t tell our new chief executive THAT, since he contends climate change is a hoax. Instead, I think the solution here is to remind him how much he loves whales. Then, to curry his favor, we’ll offer to rename these endangered creatures. They’ll now be the Right-WING whales. And future whale rescues will be tagged as the Try Recovering Unusual Mammals Program, or TRUMP for short.
After all, he seems obsessed with having his name on things.
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