Endangered North Atlantic right whales known to migrate along the Space Coast soon will benefit from a local connection involving the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary and the Marine Resources Council’s monitoring program.
Each winter, female right whales swim south to calve in the warmer waters off Florida and Georgia, returning home each summer – possibly to offshore Canada and New England, scientists aren’t exactly sure. Human activities such as commercial fishing-gear entanglements and vessel strikes are right whales’ greatest threats. This year, 16 right whales died, with seven of these deaths attributed to human activity, leaving the total number of right whales left estimated at 451. In August, the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration declared this “an unusual mortality event,” triggering a federal investigation.
The Marine Resources Council of East Florida has been training and mobilizing a volunteer network of whale spotters along the Atlantic coast for more than two decades. MRC staff recently trained 37 Coast Guard Auxiliary volunteers to spot and identify whales during their regularly scheduled patrols both at sea and by air, making for a brand new way to search new areas for right whales, said monitoring program director Julie Albert, who conducted the training.
The important connection came about when Indialantic resident Coast Guard Auxiliary member Bill Cox was assigned to be the public affairs officer for Central Brevard’s Flotilla 17-6.
His outreach efforts to add to the ranks of its 90 members involved joining the Melbourne Regional Chamber of Commerce, where Cox met Steve Sharkey, operations director with the MRC. Cox later was elected to the MRC board and selected as board secretary.
“It was a win-win kind of epiphany as these two organizations discovered each other. We discussed how auxiliary capabilities could support the MRC’s scientists and research, and vice versa,’’ he said.
Cox started coordinating with the Coast Guard’s Living Marine Resources (LMR) Team to define auxiliary processes and procedures for whale support.
The result was the auxiliary agreeing to LMR mission support which, because of the aerial component, should lead to new and additional sightings of healthy and injured right whales and humpback whales also spotted here.
The training included: whale identification, population counts and trends, behavior, and the important information that needs to be carefully observed by spotters and then reported. Data reported by volunteers and catalogued by the MRC are not only used to alert naval and commercial ships when whales are on the move, but can also help track individual whales, as right whales carry distinct markings.
Training will be provided to a number of auxiliary units, boating organizations and yacht clubs, and even a session of active-duty Coast Guard pilots/crew scheduled for April at USCG Air Station in Savannah, Ga.
“I loved the idea of getting the Coast Guard Auxiliary involved. They are utilizing our waters for their missions and it only makes sense to give them the knowledge they need to identify whales and report any sightings,’’ said Albert, MRC’s right whale conservation program coordinator for the past 18 years.
The biggest improvement will be aerial observations which already take place in Northern Florida down to St. Augustine, but have never occurred along Brevard County beaches, she said.
“Considering we don’t know where much of the population goes in the winter, any knowledge gained by searching offshore in areas not previously searched contributes to our knowledge of North Atlantic right whale migration, even if we don’t find anything at all,’’ she said.
Whale spotter training by MRC is available to the public upon request. For more information, call 1-888-979-4253 or email whales@mrcirl.org.
The Coast Guard Auxiliary is the uniformed civilian component of the U.S. Coast Guard and supports the Coast Guard in nearly all mission areas. The auxiliary was created by Congress in 1939. For more information, please visit www.cgaux.org.
