The “Range-Wide Gray Whale Science Symposium” sponsored by OSU and the Marine Mammal Commission this week at OSU’s Marine Science Center in Newport, intentionally avoids the critical policy question before us all – what can we do to help gray whales survive?
As some of the best of the best marine scientists convene in Newport to present their research findings on gray whale biology, astonishingly there is not one item on the agenda directly addressing this critically important policy question. Symposium organizers concede this is an intentional omission.
Gray whales barely survived extermination from commercial whaling in the 19th and 20th centuries, and now they face another human-caused calamity, climate change. In addition, they face new risks from ship strikes, oil spills, seabed mining, undersea noise, continued direct killing, entanglement, harmful algal blooms, pollution, and disturbance in nursery lagoons…