June 21, 2023 — We don’t mean to sound like a broken record, but a federal court ruling last week reiterated a point that we’ve been making for years — more complete data are needed for federal regulators to justify stringent regulations on Maine’s lobster fishing industry.
On Friday, a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals rejected the plan, called a biological opinion, that undergirded recent rules from the National Marine Fisheries Service aimed at making lobster and crab fishing safer for endangered North Atlantic right whales.
The court ruled that, in the absence of definitive information that right whales are being trapped in lobster and crab fishing gear, the agency couldn’t use a worst-case scenario to justify a suite of new rules on the two fisheries. The agency had called for changes in fishing gear and put parts of the ocean in New England off limits to lobster and crab fishing for several months a year.
Technically, the rules remain in place as the appeals court remanded the case back to a district court to vacate the biological opinion. But the practical impact is that fisheries service will likely have to go back to the drawing board to write a new biological opinion and any rules that stem from it.
In addition to the lawsuit, filed by lobster and crab fishing groups and the state of Maine, Congress had already granted the fisheries a six-year reprieve from new, stricter regulations through a provision added to the federal omnibus bill passed in December.