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Gray Whale
Eschrichtius robustus
Gray Whale Conservation
The
Gray Whale is an oft-told conservation success story of
overharvesting by the whaling fleet followed by recovery following
protection in 1937. The Gray Whale was removed from the US
government’s list of endangered species in 1994. The current
northeast Pacific population is estimated to be about 17,000
individuals, down slightly from the 22,000 recorded in the late 20th
century (Breiwick 1999).
The
tendency for this species to forage in shallow waters occasionally
brings it into contact with coastal fisheries. From an examination
of reported entanglements, Baird et al. (2002) estimated that 27% of
the dead gray whales reported in British Columbia died incidentally
in fisheries mostly from salmon drift gillnet, salmon seine,
longline and trap fisheries. One individual entangled and drowned in
a herring net pen, and another entangled in a herring set gillnet.
The authors recognized the biases in their sampling methods but
concluded that estimated mortality levels were small.
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