A man has been given a warning letter for harassing a sperm whale that died while languishing off Florida's Pompano Beach two months ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Thursday.

In the written warning issued earlier this month, NOAA's Office of Law Enforcement told Anthony Armento that he violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which prohibits people from harassing, capturing, hunting or killing whales and other marine mammals.

The alleged harassment occurred the morning of Dec. 16 in the waters off Pompano Beach, when a man was seen getting on top of a sperm whale by a witness, who photographed the bizarre encounter from afar.

The whale, pronounced dead hours later that day, was thought by marine scientists to have been ailing at sea long before the whale was harassed. Still, responding to reports of the man harassing the whale, NOAA's Office of Law Enforcement investigated and said it identified Armento as the violator.

Video on NBCMiami.com: NOAA slaps warning on man for harassing whale

Armento couldn't be reached for comment Thursday, despite a visit to a listed address. The letter stated that he was eligible to appeal the finding within 30 days of receiving the letter, NOAA said.

The Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), enacted in October 1972, was established to protect and conserve marine mammals, according to Erin Fougeres, a marine mammal scientist with NOAA.

"The MMPA is the primary mechanism that we have to manage and conserve marine animals in the United States," Fougeres said. "It does make it illegal to harass, hunt, capture, kill or attempt to do any of those things to a marine mammal."

Also on NBCMiami.com: NOAA to look into report of swimmer getting on whale that died

Violations can result in a civil penalty up to $11,000, as well as criminal penalties up to $100,000 and imprisonment of up to a year or both. Violators include those who approach the marine mammals too closely to watch, feed or swim with them.

"We recognize that these are important animals in the marine environment, and also animals that the public enjoys seeing in the wild," Fougeres said. "And the act is really primarily to protect them so that we have them around for future generations."

Also on NBCMiami.com: Dead sperm whale towed out to sea from Deerfield Beach

Despite people's fascination with marine mammals, they should not near them for everyone’s safety, Fougeres said.

"You want to make sure that as you're observing them, you're observing them from a safe distance and in a manner that would not change their natural behavior," Fougeres said.

In Armento's case, the purpose of NOAA's issuing him a written warning was to document the violation, NOAA said. It also could be used to justify a more severe penalty if any future violations involving him occur, NOAA said.

"When proceeding with investigations and prosecutions, NOAA considers such things as the violator's intention or state of mind, the effect of a violation on the resource, the need for specific and general deterrence, etc.," NOAA said in a statement. "In this case, after considering the facts of the case, NOAA determined that a written warning was an appropriate outcome."

Photos provided to NBCMiami.com by a witness showed two swimmers nearing the whale the day of the incident, though only one person was seen in a picture on top of the whale. NOAA on Thursday did not say whether the second swimmer was cited.

The day of the incident, witness Margie Casey told NBCMiami.com that she saw two swimmers twice go up to the whale. She said she watched them from her fifth-floor balcony and snapped photos of the one swimmer getting on the whale.

Casey said the whale had been drifting north along the shore, just south of a stretch of beach near the Northeast 14th Street Causeway. Casey said she considered the whale to be alive at the time, because it was flapping its tail. Perhaps the whale was on its "last leg," Casey said in a Dec. 16 interview. "So sad."

A specialist went into the water later that day and determined the sperm whale had died, officials said. The next day, the dead whale washed up around Deerfield Beach's fishing pier. It then was towed more than five miles out to sea to dispose of its carcass, officials said.

The Pompano Beach whale case is among the latest in a series of cases in Florida involving the harassment of animals.

Sunday, a Fort Pierce, Fla., man was arrested on the charge he violated Florida law by illegally playing with and handling a manatee calf, then posting Facebook pictures of the encounter, authorities said. And in November last year, a St. Petersburg, Fla., woman was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of violating state law by riding a manatee, officials said.

NOAA encourages anyone who sees possible violations of the Marine Mammal Protection Act to report it to NOAA's enforcement hotline at 1-800-853-1964. Anyone who sees a stranded, injured or entangled marine mammal may report it to the Southeast Regional Marine Mammal hotline at 1-877-942-5343.

U.S. Department Of Energy

The disposal facility for mixed and low-level radioactive waste at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state is shown in an aerial image.

OLYMPIA, Wash. -- A tank that holds radioactive liquids is leaking at the nation's most contaminated nuclear site, Wash. Gov. Jay Inslee said Friday, raising concerns about the integrity of other storage facilities at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

The U.S. Department of Energy said liquid levels are decreasing in one of 177 underground tanks at the nuclear reservation. Monitoring wells near the tank have not detected higher radiation levels, the agency said. Inslee said the leak could be in the range of 150 gallons to 300 gallons over the course of a year.

"I am alarmed about this on many levels," Inslee said at a Friday afternoon news conference. "This raises concerns, not only about the existing leak ... but also concerning the integrity of the other single shell tanks of this age."

The tanks hold millions of gallons of a highly radioactive stew left from decades of plutonium production for nuclear weapons.

Inslee said the state was told such problems had been dealt with years ago and were under control.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the federal government must not waiver in its commitment to clean up the highly contaminated site, Inslee told reporters.

The tank in question contains about 447,000 gallons of sludge, a mixture of solids and liquids with a mud-like consistency. The tank, built in the 1940s, is known to have leaked in the past, but was stabilized in 1995 when all liquids that could be pumped out of it were removed.

Inslee said the tank is the first to have been documented to be losing liquids since all Hanford tanks were stabilized in 2005.

At the height of World War II, the federal government created Hanford in the remote sagebrush of eastern Washington as part of a hush-hush project to build the atomic bomb. The site ultimately produced plutonium for the world's first atomic blast and for one of two atomic bombs dropped on Japan, effectively ending the war.

Plutonium production continued there through the Cold War, but today, Hanford is the nation's most contaminated nuclear site. Cleanup will cost billions of dollars and last decades.

Central to that cleanup is the removal of millions of gallons of a highly toxic, radioactive stew — enough to fill dozens of Olympic-size swimming pools — from 177 aging, underground tanks. Over time, many of those tanks have leaked, threatening the groundwater and the neighboring Columbia River, the largest waterway in the Pacific Northwest.

Construction of a $12.3 billion plant to convert the waste to a safe, stable form is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. Technical problems have slowed the project, and several workers have raised lawsuits in recent months, claiming they were retaliated against for raising concerns about the plant's design and safety.

AP file

This image provided by the National Park Service shows a gray wolf in the wild.

MINNEAPOLIS -- The Humane Society of the United States and other animal welfare groups filed a lawsuit Tuesday to restore federal protections for gray wolves in the western Great Lakes region that were lifted last year.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the District of Columbia against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and its parent agency, the U.S. Department of the Interior, said the decision to take wolves in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan off the endangered list threatens the animals' recovery throughout most of their historic range. At one time, the animals roamed nearly all of North America.

The Humane Society of the United States provided a copy of the lawsuit to The Associated Press before its public announcement. The other plaintiffs include Born Free USA, Help Our Wolves Live and Friends of Animals and Their Environment.

Hunters and trappers in Minnesota and Wisconsin killed 530 wolves combined during those states' recently concluded seasons — 413 in Minnesota and 117 in Wisconsin. The Michigan Legislature voted in December to authorize wolf hunting, which could resume as early as this fall if the state's Natural Resources Commission approves.

"In the short time since federal protections have been removed, trophy hunters and trappers have killed hundreds of Great Lakes wolves under hostile state management programs that encourage dramatic reductions in wolf populations," Jonathan Lovvorn, chief counsel for animal protection litigation at the HSUS, said in a statement. "This decision rolls back the only line of defense for wolf populations, and paves the way for the same state-sponsored eradication policies that pushed this species to the brink of extinction in the first place."

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokeswomen did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment, nor did officials with the Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan Departments of Natural Resources.

It's been more than 40 years since the federal government imposed protections to prevent wolves from going extinct in the lower 48 states. Gray wolves recovered to more than 4,000 combined in the western Great Lakes and northern Rocky Mountain states by the time the government took them off the list in those areas in January 2012. That action followed several years of court battles and turned responsibility for managing their populations back to the states.

The latest lawsuit calls the Fish and Wildlife Service's 2011 decision to take wolves off the list "biologically reckless" and contrary to the Endangered Species Act. It says "the existing regulatory mechanisms in the Great Lakes region are anything but adequate," and that allowing hunting and trapping in the western Great Lakes when wolves don't exist in 95 percent of their former range runs counter to the goals of the act.

Minnesota had an estimated 3,000 wolves before they came of the endangered list, while Wisconsin and Michigan had about 850 and 700. The three states' management plans would allow a 50 percent decline in the region's population if hunting and trapping took it down to the minimum levels allowed under their plans, the lawsuit says.

"This drastic population decline would not only threaten the Great Lakes population, but it would prevent this population from serving as a source of dispersing wolves that could repopulate unoccupied portions of the wolf's range," the lawsuit says.

Environmentalists also have gone to court to try to restore federal protections to wolves in Wyoming.

Wildlife managers predicted before the inaugural seasons in Minnesota and Wisconsin that hunters would face stiff challenges in bagging the wary predators. It turned out not to be quite as difficult as expected. Minnesota and Wisconsin slightly exceeded their hunting-and-trapping targets of 400 and 116, respectively, but officials said those were just goals, not firm quotas, so exceeding them was not cause for concern. 

Jayne Belsky / AP file

In this photo provided by Jayne Belsky via the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, a gray wolf is seen roaming a wooded area near Wisconsin Dells, Wis.

Minnesota Department of Natural Resources

Researchers tag a moose in Minnesota, part of a $1.2 million effort to track down why moose are disappearing in the state.

Published at 5:22 p.m. ET: Moose are missing — and the state of Minnesota doesn't want hunters to find them.

Minnesota officials banned moose hunting indefinitely on Wednesday because of a dramatic drop in the animal's numbers.

The number of moose in the Gopher State has fallen by 52 percent since 2010, for reasons no one can figure out, although the Department of Natural Resources said hunting had nothing to do with it.

It cited a variety of possible explanations, including a tick-borne disease and Minnesota's recent unusually hot summers, which moose don't handle well.

"The state's moose population has been in decline for years, but never at the precipitous rate documented this winter," said Tom Landwehr, Minnesota's natural resources commissioner. 

The 2013 hunting season was canceled, and Landwehr said in a statement that his department wouldn't consider opening any future seasons until the moose population recovers.

"It's now prudent to control every source of mortality we can as we seek to understand causes of population decline," he said.

In an aerial survey in January, state officials calculated that only 2,760 moose were left in Minnesota, down by 35 percent from last year and 52 percent from 2010. 

In response, the state last month launched what it's calling the largest and most high-tech moose research effort ever, fitting 92 moose in northeastern parts of the state with satellite tracking and data-collection collars designed to help root out the causes of rising moose mortality.

The idea is to be able to get to a moose within 24 hours of its death, said Ron Moen, a research associate at the University of Minnesota who is working with the program.

"The thing about determining cause of death is that moose bodies are very well insulated with hair, and they are very large," Moen told NBC station KBJR of Duluth. "If you don't get there quick enough, then you have tissue degradation."

The state is putting $1.2 million toward the program, but everyday Minnesotans are getting in on the rescue effort, as well.

In Edina, a baker named Robin Johnson pledged to donate $1 from every cupcake she sold to the state Wildlife Health Program's Gift Account for Moose.

"This beautiful symbol of Minnesota wilderness is being direly threatened," Johnson told NBC station KRII of Chisholm, Minn.

Watch US News videos on NBCNews.com

Related:

• Feds want to list wolverine as endangered species, stop trapping, citing climate change
• Lone wolf continues to roam California after a year, searching for a pack

Steve Kroschel / US Fish and Wildlife via Reuters

A wolverine is seen in a 2009 photo.

BILLINGS, Mont. -- The tenacious wolverine, a snow-loving carnivore sometimes called the "mountain devil," could soon join the list of species threatened by climate change — a dubious distinction putting it in the ranks of the polar bear and several other animals the government says will lose crucial habitat as temperatures rise.

Federal wildlife officials Friday proposed Endangered Species Act protections for the wolverine in the Lower 48 states. That's a step twice denied under the Bush administration, then delayed in 2010 when the Obama administration said other imperiled species had priority.

It likely means an end to trapping the animals for their fur outside Alaska.

But federal officials said they won't use the animal's status as a means to regulate greenhouse gases blamed in climate change. And other human activities — from snowmobiling and ski resorts to timber harvest and — would not be curtailed because they do not appear to be significant threats to wolverines, officials said.

There are an estimated 250 to 300 wolverines in the contiguous U.S., clustered in small, isolated groups primarily in the Northern Rockies of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and Washington. Larger populations persist in Alaska and Canada.

Maxing out at 40 pounds and tough enough to stand up to grizzly bears, the animals will be no match for anticipated declines in deep mountain snows female wolverines need to establish dens and raise their young, scientists said.

In some areas, such as central Idaho, suitable habitat could disappear entirely, officials said.

Yet because those losses could take decades to unfold, federal wildlife officials said there's still time to bolster the population, including by reintroducing them to the high mountains of Colorado.

"This is a species there is still time to do something about," said Mike Thabault, ecological services director for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's mountain-prairie region.

Wildlife advocates, who sued to force the government to act on the issue, said the animal's plight should be used by the Obama administration to leverage tighter restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions.

As with the polar bear, the government is sidestepping that thorny proposition with the wolverine, and said in Friday's proposal that listing the animal as threatened "will not regulate greenhouse gas emissions."

Thabault said the agency would be on tenuous scientific grounds if it tried to draw a link between specific emission sources and impacts on wolverines.

Advocates expressed disappointment, with Noah Greenwald from the Center for Biological Diversity saying the administration "should not be exempting greenhouse gas emissions from the Endangered Species Act."

A Washington, D.C., attorney, John Martin, who represented the energy industry during litigation over polar bears, said he expects no change in the administration's policy against using endangered wildlife to regulate emissions.

Friday's proposal also allows Colorado's wildlife agency to reintroduce an experimental population of wolverines that eventually could spill into neighboring portions of New Mexico and Wyoming.

It would shut down wolverine trapping in Montana, the only one of the Lower 48 states where the practice is still allowed an annual quota of five animals.

This year's trapping season was blocked by a state court order, but Montana officials hoped to restore trapping next year.

Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks spokesman Ron Aasheim said the state will review the federal proposal and had not settled on a response.

Once found throughout the Rocky Mountains and in California's Sierra Nevada mountain range, wolverines were wiped out across most of the U.S. by the 1930s due to unregulated trapping and poisoning campaigns, said Bob Inman, a wolverine researcher with the Wildlife Conservation Society.

In the decades since, they have largely recovered in the Northern Rockies but not in other parts of their historical range.

While reintroducing the animals further south might seem counterintuitive, Inman said Colorado's abundance of 14,000-foot mountains would make it well suited as a refuge for the animals as warmer temperatures set in at lower elevations.

Only one wolverine currently inhabits the state, a male that wandered down several years ago from northern Wyoming's Teton Range, about 500 miles away. Inman said Colorado has enough high-mountain territory to support up to 100 more of the animals.

"That's like a 30 percent increase in their population size," he said.

Any reintroduction into Colorado would require approval from state wildlife commissioners and the Legislature, Colorado Parks and Wildlife spokesman Randy Hampton said.

Representatives of the state's ski and agriculture industries in the past have raised concerns that bringing wolverines back could hurt their industries. Hampton said no decision has been made and it could take years to work out all the details.

Other areas where wolverines once roamed also could serve as future refuges.

Those include portions of Utah, Oregon's Cascade Range, Wyoming's Big Horn Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, said Shawn Sartorius, a biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service based in Montana.

Related story: Wolverines' winter food caches at risk to warming

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Alaska cleanup crews last year found some beaches covered with polystyrene foam that floated across the Pacific from the 2011 Japanese tsunami and threatens wildlife, a state official told legislators on Tuesday.

A main concern of environmentalists and officials is that the lightweight specks, which have been broken down by storms and waves, will harm small animals. They could choke or die slowly from malnutrition if pieces block their intestinal system, officials say.

So far, no dead birds have been found on the beaches, Elaine Busse Floyd, acting environmental health director for the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, told lawmakers in her report. But officials are on the lookout for animals harmed by the ingested foam, she said.

Polystyrene foam accounted for 30 percent of the weight of the total debris, compared to the usual 5 percent rate before the tsunami, she said. Considering that it is so light, "it's a huge volume."

Closed-cell extruded polystyrene is often referred to as Styrofoam, a trademarked name owned by Dow Chemical Co., which manufactures it for insulation and crafts, among other uses. It is not biodegradable because it resists breaking down in sunlight, so it can in theory last forever.

Scattered bits of foam are difficult to retrieve from the environment and are easily mistaken by animals for morsels of food, Floyd told a legislative committee in Juneau.

Animals are already munching on tsunami polystyrene foam, said Chris Pallister, president of the nonprofit Gulf of Alaska Keeper which conducted most of last year's beach cleanups.

"We have personally seen plenty of animals eating it, pecking at it, playing with it," Pallister said.

Cleanup crews have spotted foam bits in scat from bears and other animals, he said. "The question is, are animals metabolizing that or is it breaking down and being released into the environment?"

Pallister's group worked from May to October to clean up about 300 miles (483 km) of beaches in outlying coastal areas. Other groups conducted more short-term cleanup projects.

Already, Gulf of Alaska Keeper is preparing for next summer's cleanup. "It's a pretty amazing sight when you go out to the coast and see nothing but Styrofoam as far as you can see," he said.

The material that has washed ashore in Alaska from the 2011 tsunami in Japan includes foam buoys and insulation ripped from people's homes, officials said.

Debris from the tsunami has also washed ashore in other U.S. states on the Pacific Ocean, including in Washington and Oregon where a Japanese dock turned up on the coast.

But the problem is particularly acute in Alaska because it has a longer coastline than other states, and many beaches are remote which makes cleanup difficult and expensive, Floyd said. 

Richard Drew / AP

An injured dolphin surfaces in the Gowanus Canal in the Brooklyn borough of New York, on Jan. 25.

An injured dolphin that became stranded in Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal died Friday, a marine foundation said.

The Riverhead Foundation confirmed to NBC News the dolphin passed away Friday evening. No other details about the mammal's death were immediately available.

Earlier Friday, live helicopter video from NBCNewYork.com showed the sea mammal bobbing up and down in the canal's murky water — which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared a Superfund site in 2010 because it contained a "century's worth" of pollutants.

The dolphin appeared to be stuck in one section of the canal, coming up occasionally for air as a New York Police Department crew worked to figure out a rescue plan. It was unclear how the creature got into the predicament. The NYPD told NBC News the dolphin was stuck in the vicinity of Union Street, between Bond Street and Nevins Street, which is at least a mile into the canal and away from the Gowanus Bay.

Authorities were hoping the dolphin would be able to escape by itself during the Friday evening high tide, but if not, were planning on helping it out on Saturday, police told The Associated Press.

A senior biologist at the Riverhead Foundation told NBCNewYork.com rescuers were waiting to see if the dolphin would leave on its own: "The best course of action is to see if that when the tide comes back in the animal will move back out," Robert DiGiovanni told NBCNewYork.com. "It’s giving the animal time to work the problem out before you introduce stress by intervention."

The Northeast Regional Office of the NOAA Fisheries Service confirmed to NBCNewYork.com this mammal was a short-beaked common dolphin, which is known for a dark gray cape on its back.

Witnesses had said the animal appeared to be bleeding from its dorsal fin, the New York Daily News reported.

"He keeps going up and down and going from side to side and people are saying we don’t know what’s taking so long to go in there and save him," Brooklyn resident Cathy Ryan told the Daily News. "He’s in bad shape. You can tell. A dolphin is gray, but he's black right now. He was starting to swim toward the middle of the canal. But it doesn't look good."

Michael Heiman / Getty Images

Officials stand on the side of the Gowanus Canal as the dolphin comes up for air after getting stuck on Jan. 25, in the Brooklyn.

Eight-year-old Anabell Blaine told NBCNewYork.com she had hoped they got the dolphin out: "Dolphins are so beautiful."

The Gowanus Canal is in Brooklyn, flanked by the Park Slope, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens and Red Hook neighborhoods, according to NBCNewYork.com. It empties into New York Harbor.

The Environmental Protection Agency says storm water runoff, sewer outflows and industrial pollutants have made it one of the most extensively contaminated water bodies in the U.S.

Manufactured gas plants, mills, tanneries and chemical plants are among the many facilities that operated along the canal, according to the EPA.

The EPA said the contamination in the canal poses a threat to the nearby residents who use the canal for fishing and recreation.

Bystander Vinny Internicola told the Daily News on Friday he can smell the water from his vantage point: "I can’t imagine being in there."

A day earlier, a WNBC news helicopter spotted a minke whale swimming in Gowanus Bay.

NBCNewYork.com's Gus Rosendale contributed to this story.