[Whale spout blows]
When we started doing the work, in the first couple of disentanglements,
we were trying to figure it out ourselves.
The first real organized effort was one that
David Mattila and I undertook on Thanksgiving Day in '84.
We were confronted by a whale we knew,
an animal that had spent a lot of its life on Stellwagen,
that I named, whose mother I named, so in a sense was kind of a friend.
And she was clearly lethally entangled.
So we started to work on freeing her.
How do you do it? You have to figure out two things.
How do you stop them and how do you get close enough without losing your life.
Charles "Stormy" Mayo.
I am senior scientist at the Center for Coastal Studies
and I direct the North Atlantic Right Whale Ecology Program
here at the center.
The center started with just three of us PhDs
who were anxious to kind of drop out and come to Cape Cod
and really without a plan, we started teaching simple courses.
And that was the beginning of it, but it was a very humble beginning to be sure.
We had no budget and made no money
but the institution grew and it grew around my interest in whales.
So we still have a big presence in the study of whales.
We know now, although we didn't in the beginning,
that entanglement and fishing gear is a big issue.
It's maybe for right whales one of the biggest issues.
They have to swim.
Eventually they starve.
On that memorable first effort,
We actually had worked on this whale Ibis earlier but without success.
We didn't really know what to do.
So when we got this last chance, my father was the captain of our research vessel.
We were kind of scratching our heads. He said "keg 'er."
He was one of the last people to take a whale in Provincetown.
He used kegs to act as floats
to drag the whales, to slow them down.
We didn't have a keg but we had big orange floats.
David came up with the idea of using the anchor we had aboard the boat.
We threw that in the trailing gear.
The whale, she was very weak.
She'd been tangled and tortured for probably a whole summer.
So she quit and we were able to free her.
Now I no longer do disentanglements.
I'm happy to say my sons eight years ago told me to get out of the bow of the boat.
And they were right.
It was in fact a lot more dangerous than I had thought.
Decision-making is critical.
Make the wrong decision, maybe at best you make a fool of yourself.
We now have a full-on disentanglement program
and they continue to develop and train.
It's still an expanding work-in-progress.
Stellwagen, Middle Ground as we called it,
was an area of particular richness for marine mammals.
It struck me that this was an area that deserved some attention.
And I was aware that the marine sanctuary program was
developing a list of places for designation.
Made a lot of sense to me.
My lord, a marine protected area, and looked to me like Stellwagen made sense.
And I called around and found out that Stellwagen had been thought of,
but from what I understood, it was not being vetted.
Thanks to whale watching and our first research vessels,
we had a huge amount of data.
I wrote a lot of material to try to substantiate the value of the place and
I'd like to think that our data, well, made all the difference.
And it got reconsidered and eventually considered for designation,
and eventually of course named.
In the case of right whales, the situation I've described it as grim.
We don't know for sure where the story is going
but we do know in the last two years,
we've had a minimum of I think 17 or 18 mortalities
and a maximum of five births.
So the arithmetic is bad, and it is simple arithmetic.
People ask me why I now talk about extinction.
The arrow at the end of the trajectory is pointing at zero.
The underpinning, the foundation of the population, is in dire shape.
The thing that I think makes the sanctuary program
and particularly Stellwagen sanctuary important
is that it does take a holistic approach.
We have at last come to understand that
although whales are an outstanding part of the story,
barnacles are pretty damned important.
Incidentally, they're eaten by right whales,
so I have a love for barnacles.
That understanding and that willingness
to not just look at the megafauna, the charismatic ones,
but also at these essential underpinnings, is crucial.
I wish Stellwagen were five to ten times as large as it is.
Because the ocean system doesn't act as a box
and it is crucial if we're going to protect our marine resources.