Ask Lookout: What’s the status of humpback whales in Monterey Bay and Dungeness crab fishing gear entanglements?

For the past six years, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) has delayed the opening of Dungeness crab fishing season to prevent entanglements with humpback whales. Now, new regulations, growing awareness and an endangered humpback whale population in Monterey Bay could make these delays permanent.

While humpbacks have been feeding in Monterey Bay’s nutrient-rich waters for decades, warming seas have pushed the mammals closer to shore — straight into crab-fishing zones. 

And while it was long thought that there was little overlap between the humpback’s summer feeding season and the winter peak of Dungeness crab fishing, that, too, has changed. Researchers have found that many of the whales are sticking around through the winter instead of migrating to winter breeding grounds off Mexico and Central America. For instance, Ted Cheeseman, a member of the Cascadia Research Collective and co-founder of a citizen science identification program called the Happy Whale Project, said the group documented more than 40 individual whales lingering in Monterey Bay last winter. 

The current dynamic came to a head in 2016, when a record-breaking marine heatwave forced the humpbacks to move to the shallower waters in the bay where food was more abundant and right where crab fishers worked. And the warmer waters unleashed an unprecedented algae bloom that released a toxin known to both poison Dungeness crabs and harm human health if consumed. So the crabbing season was delayed.

When crab fishing finally opened that March, a record 19 entanglements occurred. And that led to the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit organization that advocates for endangered species, to file suit against the CDFW to get the state to do more to protect the whales. 

In reaction to the suit, the state made drastic changes in its regulations and operations. It set up a program to monitor whales more closely through satellite imagery and surveys by boat and plane. It began delaying the crab fishing season more often. And the public became far more aware of the entanglement issue. 

Fishers see the situation differently

“That was a freakish year,” Tim Obert, a Santa Cruz fisher, said of 2016. “We didn’t know we had a whale problem.  But, that one freak year changed our whole fishery for the years to come.

“It’s a hard one for fishermen … because it’s a problem that most of us don’t feel like is a problem and is something that is being blown up to look like it’s a bigger issue,” Obert said. “Every entanglement we get, they just assume it’s with an endangered whale when it’s not. [The population as a whole] is doing extremely well.”

And this is where the whole issue gets even trickier. Monterey Bay has two populations of whales: the group that normally migrates to Mexico, which is doing better and is now considered only threatened; and another group that usually migrates to Central America, which is not doing well and is still endangered. 

“When I started studying humpback whales in 1986, we estimated about 500 humpback whales in the population,” said John Calambokidis, senior researcher at the Cascadia Research Collective. “And now our best estimates are over 5,000. We’ve seen a tenfold increase.” 

But Ryan Bartling, the CDFW’s senior environmental scientist supervisor, says the group that migrates to Central America is still in serious trouble.

Adding to the dilemma is that the Monterey Bay numbers could be skewed. The bay reports the highest number of entanglement incidents, but that is because spotting of entangled whales in the bay is easier: the waters are relatively calm; it has a year-round whale-watching industry; and there is high public environmental awareness. Other areas of the Pacific Ocean, particularly off the coasts of Oregon and Washington, have less public awareness, less of a whale-watching industry and rougher seas.

But Calambokidis said the reports represent just a glimpse into the scope of the issue: “Reports are really valuable, but they only represent a small portion of the true entanglements. A vast majority of entanglements, we believe, go unreported.” 

Because whales can survive for long periods after being harmed by fishing gear, he said, by the time the report is documented it might not reflect the actual location where and season when the original entanglement occurred. He also notes that there is a surprising proportion of humpback whales with scars from entanglement. He says the evidence outweighs the number of entanglements accounted for in official reports. 

“We see quite a bit of variation up and down the coast in where entanglements are reported,” Calambokidis said. “I think that plays a particularly important role in interpreting and looking at what’s going on in Monterey today.” 

Gearing up for solutions?

The federal Endangered Species Act obligates the CDFW is obligated to monitor the whales and take action to protect them; that was the basis for the activists’ suit in 2016. The primary action has been to delay the crab fishing season; CDFW takes that action if there is a single entanglement or 20 whales spotted in a single risk assessment survey of a fishing zone.

With season delays becoming the new normal in Monterey Bay, many fishers are struggling to survive. Many smaller fishing operations depend on the winter months to sustain themselves financially and rely on the extra income that comes from the holiday markets. So the Dungeness crabbing industry is advocating for additional solutions to help end the years of season delays.

The CDFW, California Ocean Protection Council, National Marine Fisheries Service and fishers formed an advisory board called California Dungeness Crab Fishing Gear Working Group, to find solutions to whale entanglements. The group is pushing for innovations such as ropeless gear and lost gear retrieval programs to help minimize the gear-related whale injuries. 

Obert, a member of the working group, says there are challenges in these potential solutions. For instance, ropeless gear provides no visual cue of a surface buoy, which increases the chance that fishers could unknowingly set gear on top of someone else’s traps — losing gear and profits. The gear also requires technology to help track where a fisher’s traps have been placed. For many fishers, that may be an enormous transition.

“It’s a blue-collar, hard-working, non-technology-based industry,” Obert said. “It’s not going to be accepted with open arms.” 

The CDFW is also implementing a new program in 2025 that is a little easier to accomplish: color-coded fisheries gear lines. This method will help officials track where the entanglement occurred more easily, Bartling said. 

Working with the CDFW might be the best way forward for fishers like Obert. “Fishermen and the conservation side, as well as CDFW, are starting to work more together than they have in the past in understanding the concerns of the other group,” he said. “It’s very important that we find balance in the industry as a whole.” 

A middle ground?

But Obert says he he still believes that because there is seemingly a more stable population there should be more flexibility. While they work to minimize as much harm as possible, some fishers believe there should be an acceptable number of whale entanglements a year.

“It’s not a realistic part of our lives as human beings,” said Obert. “We have accidents, we have death, we have mistakes. And as fishermen, all we can do is learn from the mistakes and try to avoid them at all costs.” 

Conservationists counter that even one whale entanglement is too great a risk to go back to the way things were, raising the possibility of a permanently altered crabbing season.

“When the season’s fully open and all the active vessels are fishing, you can have over 100,000 traps, which have their own vertical lines that go to the surface,” said Bartling. “So you imagine that’s a lot of lines in the water.”

And Bartling has a sobering thought for fishers: “The future of this fishery, and this is no secret to the fishermen, is that the delays are probably a reality that will continue, So, we’re probably looking at a permanently shortened season.”

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.