A fishermen's group in Hawaii is trying to get the Pacific humpback whale removed from the federal list of endangered species, citing growing population levels over the past decades, but some are leery the move could interfere with the species' successful population rebound.
The motive of the Hawaii Fishermen's Alliance for Conservation and Tradition Inc.to renounce the whale's endangered status does not seem rooted in a desire for fishing, but more as a check on the system of federal power in regulating wildlife populations.
Philip Fernandez, the group's president, said that because the government is constantly seeing petition from various environmental groups to add species to the list of endangered animals, the government should acknowledge the humpback whales population growth since the 1940s and remove the mammal from the endangered species list in order to maintain balance, according to an Associated Press report.
"You cannot add species after species after species without evaluating whether there are species that should come off," Fernandez said to the AP by telephone from Kailua-Kona on Hawaii's Big Island.
The group is first asking the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to declare the North Pacific whales a distinct population, once the distinction of this population of humpback whales is clear, the group then wants the NOAA to remove the distinct population from the endangered list. The move would ensure humpback whales that dwell outside of the North Pacific would not lose their endangered status.
Globally there are more than 60,000 humpback whales, with about one third of them falling into the North Pacific classification. The region had about 1,400 in the mid-1960s, according to the AP report.
According to the NOAA the some of the biggest threats to humpback whales are entanglement in fishing gear, ship strikes, whale watch harassment and habitat impacts.
Fishing of humpback whales began being regulated in 1946 and by 1970 the mammals were designated as endangered, the NOAA reports.
Miyoko Sakashita, a San Francisco-based attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, said the petition to removed humpback whales from endangered lists "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," according to the AP.
The last time the NOAA removed an animal from the endangered species list was in 2008, when the agency determined the Caribbean monk seal had gone extinct, the AP reported.
In 1994 the North Pacific population of grey whales was removed from the endangered species list after a population rebound.
The full report of the Hawaii Fishermen's Alliance report to delist the North Pacific humpback is here.