Sedation at Sea of Entangled North Atlantic Right Whales (Eubalaena glacialis) to Enhance Disentanglement

Competing Interests: With regards to Dr. Brunson's current employment at Pfizer Inc., Dr. Brunson was an employee of the University of Wisconsin Veterinary School for the duration of his primary involvement with the project from 1998 to 2002. His mailing address in the manuscript is given as Pfizer, as that is his current place of employment. Since he has been at Pfizer, the choice of drugs for procurement and deployment for the second right whale case were made by other authors, primarily at the University of Florida (Drs. Walsh and Bailey). No drugs have been procured from or donated by Pfizer. There are no products in development at Pfizer related to this research and employment. The current and likely future source of drugs for use in the methods described in this paper will be from ZooPharm (http://www.zoopharm.net/), a division of Wildlife Pharmaceuticals, with which none of the authors have any relationship. Christopher Slay is an employee of Coastwise Consulting. He does not have any pending patents or marketed products related to this work. This does not alter the authors' adherence to all the PLoS ONE policies on sharing data and materials, as detailed online in the guide for authors (http://www.plosone.org/static/policies.action#sharing). Funding: This work was funded by Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Technology Innovation Program (WHOI), North Pond Foundation, Sloan and Wick Simmonds, Northeast Consortium, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies, Coastwise Consulting, the Atlantic Large Whale Disentanglement Network, and Aquatic Animal Health Program, University of Florida. NOAA was centrally involved in the permitting and undertaking of the work. The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 demands that this be so. The paper was drafted by all of the authors with no influence from NOAA as an agency in terms of how it was written. Coastwise Consulting provided logistic support for the 2009 field work. Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies provided support for ballistic technology development. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution funded initial concept development. University of Florida funded drug acquisition. Despite some of the authors being employees of the above sources of funds, the administrators of the funds so granted had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Pfizer Inc. had no financial involvement in the project.