North Pacific Humpbacks No Longer Face Endangered Numbers: Fishing Group

A fishermen's group in Hawaii is lobbying for the removal of the North Pacific humpback whale from the federal list of endangered species.

Citing the whale's growing population levels over the past decades, the Hawaii Fishermen's Alliance for Conservation and Tradition Inc. argues that because the government is constantly entertaining petitions from various environmental groups to add species to the endangered animal list, it should as well acknowledge the significant rise in humpback numbers since the 1940s --- and remove the mammal from the list keep a proportional balance, according to a report by the Associated Press.

"You cannot add species after species after species without evaluating whether there are species that should come off," said the group's president, Philip Fernandez, during a telephone interview with the AP.

The group wants the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to clearly determine the North Pacific humpback whales are a distinct population, to officially declare it as such and then remove the specific species from endangered list.

That approach would ensure humpback whales dwelling outside of the North Pacific don't lose their endangered status.

It's estimated there are now more than 60,000 humpback whales globally, with about one third of them included in the North Pacific classification. The region had about 1,400 in the mid-1960s, according to the AP.

Some of the biggest threats to humpback whales are entanglement in fishing gear, collisions with ships, harassment by whale watchers and the encroachment of human development on natural habitat impacts.

International regulations for fishing humpbacks were first introduced in 1946 and by 1970 the whales were designated as endangered, NOAA reports.

Miyoko Sakashita, a San Francisco-based attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, said the petition to remove the whales from endangered roster "could be an important success story for humpback whales, but NOAA should really proceed with caution because of the overarching threats to make sure the gains aren't unraveled."

Some whale advocates worry taking the species off the endangered list could interfere with its successful rebound.

In 1994 the North Pacific population of grey whales was removed from the endangered species list after its own population recovery.

NOAA last removed an animal from the endangered species in 2008, when the agency determined the Caribbean monk seal had gone extinct.