Transport Canada has once again asked navigators using the Gulf of St. Lawrence to limit their speed in order to ensure better protection of right whales.
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The right whale will return next spring. If the species is in decline, the measures put in place by the federal government are beginning to bear fruit since no right whale has died in the gulf for two years.
The right whale population, however, continued to decline despite efforts. Nearly 500 whales were counted at the beginning of the century, compared to 350 species in 2022.
If the situation has improved in Quebec, this is not the case everywhere on the American east coast, where collisions with ships still occur. The birth rate is also declining due to human activity.
“American colleagues did a study and made the correlation between the species that survived these collisions […] and the more frequent these incidents are, the less frequently a female will succeed in reproducing,” explained Robert Michaud, scientific director at the Group for Research and Education on Marine Mammals.
“Instead of giving birth to a calf every two or three years, now the average is around 10 years,” he added.
Reference-www.journaldequebec.com