PORT ANGELES -- A new genetic study could result in restrictions on where the Makah tribe can hunt for gray whales, prompting a review of the results by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is now conducting its own, new, gray-whale research.

The study by two Canadian scientists suggests that approximately 200 of the behemoths, which annually feed during summer in areas that include the Washington state coast, including Strait of Juan de Fuca and Clayoquot Sound off Vancouver Island, "have a separate genetic identity" from the rest of the gray whale population, the authors said in a June 21 five-page summation of the study.

Since the mid-1990s, when the cetacean was removed from the endangered species list, the Makah have asserted their right to hunt whales off the Washington coast under the 1855 Treaty of Neah Bay, hunting and killing one whale in a legal hunt in 1999.

"In practice, this means that any examination of potential impacts on this population starts with a pool of 200 whales . . . rather than the approximately 20,000 whales in the eastern Pacific population overall," said study authors Jim Darling of Tofino, a biologist, and geneticist Tim Frasier of St. Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

To read the rest of this article, click here.