In today's newscast:
Marine mammal monitoring
A grey whale is still rolling in the surf off the Santa Cruz County coastline after washing up in Wilder Ranch State Park earlier this month.
Robin Dunkin, director of the Marine Mammal Stranding Network at UC Santa Cruz, says that’s preventing researchers from learning the cause of death.
"We've been going out and checking it every day, sometimes twice a day to see if it comes in far enough that we could actually conduct a necropsy on it," she said.
They do know that he was a male and does not appear to have been killed by orcas.
"Beyond that, we can't really say what the cause of death was," Dunkin said.
The Marine Mammal Center responds to strandings in the San Francisco Bay area and has reported nine gray whales in the past few months. One was confirmed to be from a ship strike. The causes of death for the others remain unknown.
Partly in response, several California members of Congress—including local Democrats Jimmy Panetta and Zoe Lofgren—introduced the “Save Willy Act.” It would establish a U.S. Coast Guard whale monitoring program to help vessels avoid strikes.
"It would be communicating all of the sightings out to mariners on the water," said Kathi George, Director of Cetacean Conservation Biology at the Marine Mammal Center.
She says a program like this could work in other areas, too.
"This is definitely something that could be scaled and expanded to other parts of the state," George said. "I think it could be scaled nationally and internationally as well."
The Trump Administration has been dismantling these types of long-term monitoring programs. But George and Dunkin say they’re crucial for conserving whales and entire food webs that marine mammals and humans depend on.
