We Are All Whalers with Michael Moore
Wednesday, June 15 at 5:00: We Are All Whalers, author talk with Michael J. Moore, Senior Scientist at WHOI.
NOTE: Virtual. Relating his experiences caring for endangered whales, a veterinarian and marine scientist at WHOI shows we can all share in the salvation of these imperiled animals. The image most of us have of whalers includes harpoons and intentional trauma. Yet eating commercially caught seafood leads to whales’ entanglement and slow death in rope and nets, and the global shipping routes that bring us readily available goods often lead to death by collision. We—all of us—are whalers, marine scientist and veterinarian Michael J. Moore contends. But we do not have to be.
Drawing on over forty years of fieldwork with humpback, pilot, fin, and, in particular, North Atlantic right whales—a species whose population has declined more than 20 percent since 2017—Moore takes us with him as he performs whale necropsies on animals stranded on beaches, in his independent research alongside whalers using explosive harpoons, and as he tracks injured whales to deliver sedatives. The whales’ plight is a complex, confounding, and disturbing one. We learn of existing but poorly enforced conservation laws and of perennial (and often failed) efforts to balance the push for fisheries profit versus the protection of endangered species caught by accident.
Michael J Moore, Vet. M.B., Ph.D., has a veterinary degree from the University of Cambridge in the UK, and a PhD from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA. He has been based at WHOI in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, since 1986 where he is now a Senior Scientist. He is Director of the WHOI Marine Mammal Center and provides veterinary support to the Marine Mammal Rescue and Research division of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, supporting their work with stranded marine mammals on Cape Cod. His research encompasses the forensic analysis of marine mammal mortalities, especially in regard to the accurate diagnosis of perceived human impacts and the prevalence of zoonotic agents, large whale health assessment at sea using unmanned aerial systems, the interaction of natural and man-made impacts on fish and marine mammal stocks, pathophysiology of marine mammal diving, and development of systems to enhance medical intervention with large whales and technologies to reduce large whale entanglement. Virtual. Email tthorpe@clamsnet.org to receive the Zoom invite.
Free. Sponsored by the Martha’s Vineyard Public Libraries. 508-645-3360