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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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