November 2, 2022 — If you’re looking for a resolution to an escalating clash between advocates for right whales and the Maine lobstering industry, your best bet these days could be something called the Ropeless Consortium.
The one-day event, held Oct. 24 at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts, seems like one of few arenas these days where fishermen, scientists, regulators, environmentalists and business representatives can get together and find common ground.
“What everyone is trying to do,” says Michael Moore, a marine veterinarian at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and a major proponent of ropeless fishing gear, “is to enable the lobster fishery to survive and the right whale to survive. We have to allow both to prosper.”
At the Ropeless Consortium, those in the industry discussed ropeless gear, an innovative new lobster fishing system that uses acoustic signals to activate a trap on the bottom of the ocean. At the signal, a buoy inflates and carries a line stored on the bottom up to the surface so the lobsterman can haul their trap.
The new ropeless technology has some in the industry optimistic because it would drastically lessen the odds that it would become entangled with right whales. That’s a start, because everywhere else – like the courts, the waterfront, the research labs and the political sphere — has seen the issue get pretty hopeless.
Lobster fishing and right whales have been coming into increasing conflict in recent years, both in the waters of the North Atlantic and in federal courts of law. Most Maine citizens probably would like to support both the Maine lobster industry and the North Atlantic right whale, but the lobster-whale wars have tended to force people to take sides – lobstermen and politicians on one side, scientists, regulators, conservationists and the courts on the other.
“I would completely agree” that all parties have to allow both species to prosper, says Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association. McCarron said there “could be a place” for ropeless technology in certain areas, but doesn’t see lobstermen using it everywhere without a federal mandate requiring them to.
“Maine fishermen really do care deeply about the right whale. They are working hard to do the right thing, but they are worried our fishery will be regulated out of existence.”