September 5, 2019 — It’s not just that proposed federal rules intended to protect endangered right whales from entanglement with fishing gear will be expensive and difficult to implement, industry representatives say. It’s also that they won’t work.
That’s the argument Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, made in a letter sent to NOAA Fisheries on Friday.
The proposed rules came from a meeting in April of a federal stakeholder group, the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team, which includes McCarron and four other Maine lobster industry representatives. That Maine delegation is now withdrawing support from the “near-consensus” plan, McCarron wrote.
“The Agency’s current rulemaking does not address the full scope of known human causes of the decline in the species and will be insufficient to reverse the right whale population’s downward trend,” she wrote.
At the April meeting, McCarron notes, the full group recommended that NOAA Fisheries “revisit the Team’s recommendations if revisions to the model suggest … a distinctly different understanding of risk” to the whales.