Whale killed by watchers' liner

The 45ft humpback whale, christened Snow by biologists because of its unusual markings, was four to five months pregnant when it was found dead with head injuries near the Glacier Bay National Park in 2001.

Princess Cruises, the owners of the 1,950-passenger Dawn Princess, pleaded guilty to failing to operate the ship in a slow or safe manner and was fined $755,000 (385,000) in an unprecedented and long-running court case finally settled this week in Anchorage.

"Our marine mammals are national treasures to be preserved for future generations," said Nelson Cohen, the US state attorney for Alaska. "We must protect them from criminal and negligent acts committed by individuals or large corporations."

The company never admitted that its ship hit the whale, which was found dead four days after the vessel's visit to Glacier Bay, a popular cruise destination.

A statement from Princess at the time said: "While we have no clear evidence that our ship and a whale came into contact, we cannot exclude this possibility either." But Peter Ratcliffe, the chief executive officer, said Princess Cruises regretted its part in the incident and had ordered its captains to travel slower and be more aware of their surroundings in waters with endangered wildlife.

"We take our responsibility to be good stewards of the environment very seriously," he said.

More than two thirds of the fine will be given to US National Park Foundation to support conservation efforts in Glacier Bay, on Alaska's south-eastern coast. There are estimated to be only about 5,000 to 6,000 humpback whales in the north-eastern region of the Pacific Ocean, from a global population of about 20,000.

Last August, a 30ft humpback was struck and killed by the cruise ship Celebrity Summit in Alaskan waters near Yakutat. The ship arrived in Anchorage with the dead whale pinned to its bow, but the ship's crew was cleared of any blame.

Publicity surrounding both cases has reopened the debate over the plight of the great whales, which are protected from commercial whaling by international law but which are at an ever-increasing risk of ship strikes, among other dangers.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported 198 whale fatalities from 292 ship strikes in US waters from 1975 to 2002 and estimates that at least another 20 whales have been killed in collisions along the east coast of the United States in the past five years, among them a rare 66ft sei whale near Baltimore last April.

"When I first started this 20 years ago, it was pretty simple to save the whales, you had to stop commercial whaling" said Iain Kerr, the Scottish-born vice-president and senior researcher for the Massachusetts-based Ocean Alliance and Whale Conservation Institute.

"It's not a happy time for whales right now. They face greater and more diverse threats than ever. They get tangled in fishing nets, struck by vessels, bombarded or deafened by acoustics and affected by greater levels of pollution than ever before."

Mr Kerr is also worried about the growing push from countries such as Iceland, Japan and Norway to resume commercial whaling, which has been banned since 1986. Those countries argued at the International Whaling Commission meeting last summer that stocks had recovered sufficiently to resume hunting, although the one-vote majority in favour of overturning the ban was short of the required margin.

Even so, Japan says it will hunt and kill 50 humpback whales this year, using a loophole that allows whaling for scientific rather than commercial purposes. Its tally will also include 935 minke whales and ten fin whales, which are on the World Conservation Union's 'red-list' of most threatened species.