October 4, 2019 — Federal fisheries regulators are taking heat from both sides of the debate over protections for the endangered North Atlantic right whale.
The latest salvo comes from a conservation group representing public employees, which says the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) ignored its own scientists when it reopened groundfishing areas that had been closed for decades.
Earlier this year, NMFS reopened 3000 square miles of ocean south of Nantucket to groundfishing, allowing the use of gillnets and rope. The agency said that based on previous regulatory reviews and some more recent scientific articles, it could not find sufficient evidence to conclude that fishing gear alone causes a decline in the health of large whales — and that further review was not necessary.
Conservationists say the agency cherry-picked the evidence.