87 



The development of a good monitoring plan for the right whales, their resources, and the 

 habitat will require, therefore, haste, commitment, coordination, and funds, and the 

 encouragement of officials from federal, state, and private agencies. 



The Bays ecosystem - Massachusetts and Cape Cod Bays - presents us with a perfect example 

 of the collision that occurs between various environmental issues and human activities. With 

 the' essential guidance of our congressional delegation, Stellwagen Bank has recently been 



declared a national marine sanctuary with the interest of many citizens and scientists, we 



have recognized the importance of Cape Cod Bay to the northern right whale but, also, 



with the acquiescence of some agencies and individuals in the past, toxics were disposed in 

 quantities and at locations in northwestern Massachusetts Bay, fouling the ocean \i\ ways 

 which we cannot monitor. Apparently, the collision cannot be avoided or, perhaps, 

 controlled. My concern is that, if we also do not monitor the collision between human use of 

 the sea and our need for a healthy sea, we will never have any hope of protecting the habitats 

 so critical to the well being of the people and the precious right whales of Massachusetts. 



The sewage outfall project reviewed by NMFS is an example of this collision - and the issue 

 of monitoring is critical. The outfall is designed to dispose of hundreds of millions of 

 gallons of treated effluent into a habitat seasonally occupied by three species of endangered 

 whales, one of which, the right whale, has been the center of my research for the past eight 

 years. 



The future of the last right whales probably depends on our careful stewardship of the Bays - 

 for it is to Cape Cod Bay each year that numbers of right whales still come, the last of what 

 must have been an extraordinary migration before our ancestors began to hunt them. Today, 

 although many of their habitats have been lost over the centuries and their numbers 

 drastically declined, the right whales still continue to feed and socialize in the Bays. The 

 relationship, habitat to whale, is profound: if the food resources decline or otherwise are not 

 acceptable, it is likely that the whale will be severely impacted, for we How that the whales 

 are lured to the Bays each winter not by chance but by unusual concentrations of 

 microscopic food organisms which the whales filter from the sea by the hundred pound lot. 

 We have studied the rich patches of tiny shrimp-Uke creatures, the zooplankton, on which the 

 right whales depend and have determined some of the basic characteristics of the association 

 between the food and the whales' behavior. We can say with certainty that the Bays' 

 ecosystem provides what the whales need to make a living in the winter and early spring, but 

 we also believe that the resources are marginal, that finding the small patches (thin layers 

 perhaps no more than 200 yards across and ever changing in the flow of the currents) is 

 difficult. Our data suggest that the success of the whales in the Bays, the only known winter 

 and early spring feeding ground for the species, may indeed be marginal, though presently 

 acceptable - that densities in the food patches are high but so variable and apparently 

 susceptible to change from natural and anthropogenic influences that the dynamic relationship 

 between the zooplankton food and the feeding right whale is always tenuous. 



The present plans to abate the pollution problems of Boston Harbor, where, incidentally, I 

 imagine right whales in better times once visited, place the sewage effluent - up to 1.3 billion 



