Killing a porpoise can haunt a man - even a fisherman accustomed to life and death at sea.
Erik Anderson, who has fished New England's waters for 30 years, would haul up his gill net and occasionally discover a harbor porpoise, entangled and dying, trapped in the mesh along with his harvest of cod and flounder.
Every time it happened, six or seven times a season, Anderson worried. Each death of a porpoise heralded deep trouble for fishermen.
Up to 2,000 of the animals were drowning in gill nets in the Gulf of Maine each year - enough to eventually wipe out the species. And if nothing was done soon to stop it, the already struggling fishery would be shut down by federal authorities.
To avoid that fate, fishermen - first in New England and now in harbors around the world - decided to take matters into their own hands.
Following a hunch about acoustics from a Canadian whale behaviorist a few years ago, Anderson and some of his colleagues started experimenting with their nets.
At RadioShack, they purchased a batch of the devices that sound a beep on school buses when they back up. They tied the bulky boxes onto their gill nets, and set them into the Gulf of Maine. It was decidedly low-tech, and risky at that. But amazingly, porpoises heard the low-frequency alarms and avoided swimming into the nets. Rarely were they ensnared.
Now, word is spreading around the globe, fisherman to fisherman. Ping, ping, ping can be heard in ocean waters from South Africa to the Irish Sea.
Called "pingers," net alarms are considered so successful in protecting marine mammals that a federal order recently mandated them on drift nets off California and Oregon and sink nets in New England.
Deaths of whales and dolphins have dropped by two-thirds on the West Coast - with 90 common dolphins dying in 1997, compared with a past average of 271 annually. Killings of some whale species, including sperm, humpback, beaked and killer whales, dropped to zero. On the East Coast, porpoise deaths in the Gulf of Maine have declined by more than 90%. "You just can't be a fisherman these days without being attentive to these other conservation issues," said Anderson, who spent $3,000 equipping the gill nets on his 40-foot vessel with pingers. "Ultimately the fishing industry has the solutions to these problems right at their fingertips."
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