Though the slogan "Save the Whales" has, these days, something of a sepia-toned sound to it, we aren't doing a terribly good job of it, a new study
suggests. In the last 40 years, the study says, humans were implicated in the majority of whale deaths with known causes. Researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution looked at government reports of whale strandings, fatalities, and necropsies along the Eastern coast of the US and Canada from 1970 to 2009. Their sample included 1762 deaths involving eight species of whales. Of all those deaths, 502, or 28 percent were attributable to "human interaction," with 323 whales mortally entangled in fishing gear and 171 whales hit by boats. 248 whales died of natural causes. The cause of death was only known in under half the cases (43 percent). (A cause of death would be unknown if, for example, a whale was spotted floating ...
