NWMB floats narwhal solution

DENISE RIDEOUT

IQALUIT — The sudden shutdown of the narwhal harvest in Qikiqtarjuaq last fall has caused the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board to call for more measures to reduce the number of narwhal struck and lost during hunts.

The wildlife board released a report last week recommending that the Qikiqtarjuaq hunters and trappers organization set up harvest guidelines to prevent over-hunting.

In October 2000, fisheries officers closed the Qikiqtarjuaq narwhal fishery out of fear that too many narwhal were being struck and lost.

There’s no quota on Qikiqtarjuaq’s narwhal harvest. In 1999 the annual quota of 50 narwhal was lifted and replaced with a community-based management system. Under that system, the HTO is to keep a close watch on the harvested to ensure the stock isn’t jeopardized.

But when officers from the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans went into the small Baffin community last fall, they didn’t like what they saw: 127 narwhal had been landed, 40 had been struck and sunk, while another 79 had been wounded and escaped.

The fisheries officers closed the hunt one week before it was scheduled to end.

The early closure disappointed hunters, many of whom profit from the lucrative sale of narwhal tusks.

Now, after reviewing the details of the closure, the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board says it can neither confirm nor deny that Qikiqtarjuaq harvesters were over-hunting narwhal.

The board says the problem is that there have been no studies to show whether the narwhal population has increased or declined.

“Despite the ongoing uncertainty over narwhal population levels, as well as the very recent concerns raised over stock delineation, the Qikiqtarjuaq stock does not appear to have been in immediate jeopardy as a result of the 2000 harvest,” the NWMB says in its report.

The board says it sees no reason to keep the harvest closed, so Qikiqtarjuaq hunters will be allowed to head out on the water in search of narwhal again this fall.

But the NWMB is recommending the following be in place before the start of this year’s hunt;

• Appropriate measures to cut down on the number of narwhal struck and lost;

• Guidelines developed by the DFO, NWMB and NTI on how to deal with situations that could lead to the closure of a fishery;

• Better communication between all groups involved in the co-management of the fishery;

• Studies conducted on the population and reproductive rates of the Baffin Bay narwhal stock, using both scientific and Inuit traditional knowledge.

No communication, no studies

After reviewing the circumstances leading up to the closure, the board concluded there was little communication between DFO and the HTO before the harvest was shut down.

In particular, the wildlife board discovered there were few written documents explaining the reasons for the closure. That sparked the board to call on groups involved in managing the harvest to come up with a better communications policy.

The NWMB also discovered there’s much mystery surrounding the narwhal stock. Scientific data on the animals is scanty, with little known about how many narwhal there are and how often they reproduce.

The most comprehensive study of the stock size in Baffin Bay was done more than 20 years ago, in 1979.

The board says the study is too old to guide HTOs on how many narwhal can be harvested without harming the stock.

In August the NWMB will release another report that gives more specific solutions for avoiding further fishery closures and ensuring narwhal harvests are sustainable.