For the North Atlantic right whale, extinction is not some distant or theoretical possibility. It is a very real prospect, potentially no more than a decade away.
Only around 380 of these extraordinary whales remain, including approximately 70 reproductively active females. There has been some fragile progress, with 23 calves recorded during the most recent breeding season and the population showing modest growth since 2020. Yet scientists are warning that proposed changes to the way the United States applies its Endangered Species Act could swiftly reverse those gains.
At the heart of the controversy is a new interpretation of the word “take”. For more than half a century, the Act has prohibited actions that kill or injure endangered animals, including deaths caused incidentally through otherwise lawful activity.
Under the proposed interpretation, an offence would generally occur only when someone deliberately set out to kill or capture a protected animal. A vessel striking a whale would not necessarily count if the collision was unintended. Nor, potentially, would a whale becoming trapped and killed in fishing gear.
But “unintentional” is not the same as “unavoidable”, and it certainly does not mean that nobody is responsible. Travelling too fast through known whale habitat increases the likelihood of a collision. Continuing to use dangerous fishing gear in waters frequented by critically endangered whales makes an entanglement foreseeable. These deaths may not be deliberate, but neither are they simply acts of chance. When the risks are understood and practical measures exist to reduce them, recklessness cannot be excused as “just one of those things”.
As marine ecologist Mark Baumgartner told WBUR, very few people intentionally kill whales in the United States. Removing protection from unintended deaths would therefore remove it from the very circumstances in which right whales are most likely to die.
The wider context is equally alarming. The US administration has already moved to exclude habitat destruction from the Act’s definition of harm, while regulators are reconsidering vessel speed restrictions intended to protect migrating right whales. Fishing interests have also pressed for further delays to stronger entanglement safeguards.
Each proposal is presented as a technical adjustment or an attempt to reduce regulatory burdens. Taken together, however, they represent something far more profound, a transfer of risk from industries and ocean users to a species already living on the edge of survival.
More than 85 per cent of North Atlantic right whales have been entangled in fishing gear at least once. Since 2017, at least 46 have been confirmed dead or seriously injured through entanglement, although NOAA Fisheries estimates that the true number may be closer to 100. Vessel collisions remain another leading cause of injury and death.
There is no biological margin for further failure. A population this small cannot absorb preventable deaths simply because nobody intended them to happen.
The warning comes just days before governments gather in Hobart, Australia, for the 70th meeting of the International Whaling Commission, running from 27 September to 2 October. The IWC’s modern responsibilities extend far beyond regulating deliberate whaling. Entanglement, vessel strikes, underwater noise, habitat disruption and climate change now shape the survival prospects of whales around the world.
Governments attending IWC70 should recognise what is unfolding in the United States as a warning. Laws protecting whales must address the ways whales actually die, not merely the vanishingly rare occasions when somebody openly sets out to kill one.
North Atlantic right whales have survived centuries of commercial whaling. It would be an appalling indictment of our generation if, having stopped hunting them, we allowed them to disappear through preventable deaths that we chose to call accidents.
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