Alaska - Cook Inlet Beluga Populations Collapsing - Down By 50%+ Since 1994 - Reuters

[hatrack]

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Beluga whales were once so thick in the waters along Alaska's biggest city that boaters had to take care to avoid bumping them. But now Cook Inlet's population of small white whales, beloved by locals and tourists, may be headed for extinction, according to a report from government biologists last week.

A new count by the National Marine Fisheries Service puts the Beluga whale population at 302, less than half the number in 1994 and well below the 1,000 to 2,000 believed to have been swimming in earlier years in the glacier-fed channel that runs from Anchorage to the Gulf of Alaska. "There's basically a one in four chance that this population is going to become extinct in 100 years," said Bruce Smith, a National Marine Fisheries Service biologist studying the belugas.

The Cook Inlet belugas, a genetically distinct population already listed as a "depleted" and meriting special management under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, are candidates for new safeguards under the Endangered Species Act.

Biologists say the reason for the precipitous decline since the 1990s was simple -- overharvesting by the area's Alaska Natives, mostly Athabascan Indians, who are entitled by law to pursue their traditional whale hunts.

EDIT

http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/39854/story.htm

[Deja Q]

1. Overhearvesting? What happens if we tell them to stop?

:(

[Nihil]

2. Why is there a debate on this? JFDI.

Since when do "legal rights" granted by one country's desire for
political correctness over-rule the global need to preserve the species?

Insanity.

Maybe someone needs to start "harvesting" some of the native tribes ...
only down to 100 though so they don't become "endangered" ...?