(CN) — 27 large whales were entangled by United States fishing gear off of the coasts of Washington, Oregon, California or off the coast of other countries like Mexico in 2023, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service in its annual West Coast entanglement report.
According to the service in its report released Friday, humpback whales continue to be the most common species of whale entangled in fishing gear off of the West Coast, with 16 separate confirmed entanglements last year. Nine gray whales and two transient killer whales were also confirmed to be entangled in West Coast fishing gear.
Each year, the service's West Coast Region collects, verifies, documents and responds to reports of large whale entanglements along the West Coast. It receives reports from a variety of sources including boaters, fishermen, law enforcement, marine resource agencies and the public.
All confirmed entanglement reports were associated with live whales, except two cases of dead stranded gray whales with fishing gear still attached. In addition to the confirmed entanglements, one live humpback whale and three dead stranded gray whales in California were documented with wounds consistent with previous entanglement. Those were not included in the data in the report, however.
The 27 whales entangled remains above the number of reported entanglements prior to 2014, but continues a pattern of fewer reported entanglements since the high point of 2016, when the service reported that more than 50 whales had become trapped.
According to the service in its report, seven whale entanglements could be tied to California state commercial Dungeness crab fisheries, while Oregon and Washington had one reported instance each.
Most reports of entangled whales came from the Golden State. Gray whales were more likely to be entangled in the waters off of southern California, while humpback whales were more commonly entangled off the coasts of central California.
The service notes in the report that whale entanglement response teams in Mexico successfully disentangled humpback whales from California and Oregon commercial Dungeness crab fishery gear, and a gray whale from California commercial Dungeness crab gear.
The whales are typically ensnared by gear used by commercial fisheries to catch Dungeness crab, halibut and sablefish. Environmental groups have criticized the traps used by commercial fisheries — sometimes in critical habitat for turtles and whales — which can wound and drown various marine animals, including whales and sea turtles.
Environmentalists are pushing fisheries to adopt pop-up fishing gear, a technology that reduces or eliminates the use of vertical lines while fishing. Instead of connecting a trap on the ocean floor to a buoy at the surface with a rope, pop-up gear stores the rope and buoy with the trap on the ocean floor until the fisherman is ready to retrieve it — reducing the risk of entanglement to whales and turtles and allowing fishing to continue in areas that would otherwise be closed to protect vulnerable species.
“Technological solutions like pop-up fishing gear already exist and can't be implemented fast enough," Catherin Kilduff, a senior attorney representing the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement.
"The annual report represents only a small fraction of entangled whales humans happen to come across in the vast ocean, and we know there are far more entanglements based on the number of whales who live and bear the scars of their suffering. This data sugarcoats a decade-long problem that the government hasn't begun to adequately investigate or describe," she added.
The Center for Biological Diversity sued the National Marine Fisheries Service in December, claiming that the service violated the Endangered Species Act when it failed to protect endangered Pacific leatherback turtles from sablefish pot traps off of the West Coast.
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