Saving Seafood

A guide to understanding the fight over whales and lobster gear in the Gulf of Maine

November 26, 2021 — Right now, lobstermen are hauling their gear out of a 967-square mile stretch of ocean, roughly 30 miles offshore, in the Gulf of Maine.

Lobstermen don’t want to vacate the area, especially during the lucrative, deep-water, winter fishing season but federal courts and lawsuits are forcing them to do so.

Last week, the Federal First Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated a seasonal prohibition by the National Marine Fisheries Service on lobstering with buoys and lines in that area. The closure, running October through January, is an attempt to protect critically endangered North Atlantic right whales from deadly entanglements in lobster gear.

Read the full story at Bangor Daily News

 

As Vineyard Wind Moves Forward, Fishermen and Scientists Raise Questions About Impact

November 23, 2021 — The Biden administration has approved America’s first large-scale, offshore wind power project – Vineyard Wind off the coast of Massachusetts. But for every supporter of the project, there are detractors raising questions. Lisa Fletcher looked at the pros and cons of ‘reaping the wind’ on “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”

Ms. Fletcher examined what the project could mean for New Bedford, Massachusetts, the nation’s top grossing fishing port, and its valuable scallop harvest, which averages around $400 million a year in landings.

“The amount of wind farms they’re proposing will displace fisheries,” said Ron Smolowitz, the owner of Coonamessett Farm in East Falmouth, Massachusetts and a former fishing captain who worked with NOAA. “The fish will adapt, the fishermen can adapt, but they’ll need funding.”

Mr. Smolowitz said that current funding proposed by Vineyard Wind to compensate fishermen for their losses is “nowhere near enough.” The proposed funding would average roughly $1 million a year over the 30-year life span of the project, Mr. Smolowitz said, while one scallop vessel alone can gross $2 million annually, and there are 342 scallop vessels. “And that’s just one fishery,” he said.

Ms. Fletcher also examined other obstacles for the project, including the potential threat to critically endangered North Atlantic right whales.

“The industrial activity will increase shipping markedly both during the construction phase as well as during the maintenance phase,” said Mark Baumgartner, senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Mr. Baumgartner said he and his team are working on deploying acoustic monitoring, with funding from Vineyard Wind, to help prevent ship strikes with right whales.

Watch the full story here

Industry, politicians deplore reinstatement of lobster fishing closure

November 19, 2021 — As lobster fishermen face an immediate requirement to remove their traps from a swath of offshore waters, the Maine Lobstermen’s Association on Wednesday said the seasonal closure will create economic hardship for many Mainers who have invested in gear, rigged up and are already fishing in the area.

Gov. Janet Mills also said the sudden closure will cause significant economic hardship for Maine’s lobster industry, “will cost hundreds of fishermen millions of dollars, and will have a profound impact on businesses that rely on landings during the lucrative late fall and winter months.”

The statements responded to the newly enacted seasonal closure on 967 square miles of lobstering territory in the Gulf of Maine. The closure was reinstated Tuesday when the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stayed a preliminary injunction by a lower court preventing the shutdown from going into effect.

The closure is part of a plan, issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service on Aug. 31, that aims to protect the endangered North Atlantic right whale by creating new requirements affecting Maine lobstermen. In addition to the October-through-January closure, the plan includes mandates for additional gear marking and gear modifications.

Read the full story at Mainebiz

Court OKs limits on Maine lobster fishing amid challenge

November 18, 2021 — The United States can impose seasonal limits on lobster fishing methods in part of the Gulf of Maine while the fate of the restriction is being challenged, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled.

The Tuesday ruling reverses a lower court decision that paused the new rule, which restricts the use of lobster fishing lines in an effort to protect North Atlantic right whales from deadly entanglement in the gear.

Alfred Frawley, a lawyer for a lobstering union and lobster harvesters who sued the National Marine Fisheries Service over its regulation, said the plaintiffs are analyzing the ruling.

Maine’s lobster industry is the biggest in the country. Its lobster fishery caught about $400 million worth of the sought-after crustacean last year, state data shows.

Read the full story at Reuters

Lobstermen’s group launches $10 million fundraising push to ‘save’ industry jobs

November 17, 2021 — The Maine Lobstermen’s Association announced a three-year, $10 million fundraising campaign Tuesday to raise money for the fishery’s fight against impending regulations that industry members say could “eliminate the fishery and end Maine’s lobstering tradition.”

It named the fundraising campaign “Save Maine Lobstermen” and created a website at savemainelobstermen.org.

Earlier this year, the National Marine Fisheries Service released a 10-year plan, known as a biological opinion, to help protect the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale from deadly entanglements in fishing gear.

The first phase of the plan, released in August, adds requirements that include state-specific gear marking, weak points in rope to allow entangled whales to break free, and a 967-square-mile seasonal closure off the coast of Maine to reduce risks to whales by 60 percent this year and 98 percent over 10 years.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Endangered whales off US coast at center of fierce fight

November 16, 2021 — A judge ruled in favor of Maine’s multimillion-dollar lobster industry, pushing back on efforts to protect endangered species and limit how much fisherman can capture marine life.

The seafood industry is a huge part of Maine’s economy; in 2018 the state’s lobster fishery alone was valued at more than $400 million and brought in approximately 119 million pounds of lobster. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), American lobster was the most valuable single species harvested in the U.S.

But all that harvesting has affected marine life. The North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium (NARWC) announced in October that the North Atlantic right whale population dropped to 336 in 2020, an 8 percent decrease from 2019. The group said 2020 was the lowest number for the species in nearly 20 years.

The federal government had attempted to protect endangered right whales, with Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo authorizing a partial closure of a fishing zone along the Maine coast that would have prohibited the use of buoy lines that many marine life are hurt or killed by. It was intended to restrict commercial lobster fishing for four months and was the first step in a 10-year plan to protect North Atlantic right whales.

Read the full story at The Hill

Lawsuit over whale protections off Maine’s coast to proceed

November 15, 2021 — A federal judge has declined to throw out a lawsuit against the federal government seeking tougher rules to protect critically endangered North Atlantic right whales from collisions with ships.

The lawsuit, filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, Conservation Law Foundation and other environmental groups in 2012, seeks to force the National Marine Fishery Service (NMFS) to take aggressive steps to protect the right whale population by setting a speed limit for vessels to prevent collisions.

The groups filed a new petition to the court last year accusing the federal agency of dragging its feet on responding to their request for new whale protection rules.

The Biden administration had asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit, but U.S. District Court judge Amit Mehta ruled on Wednesday that the federal agency “cannot ignore its obligation to fully and properly consider a petition for rulemaking.”

Read the full story at The Center Square

Floating Wind Farms are About to Transform the Oceans

November 5, 2021 — Alla Weinstein did not invent the floating wind turbine. This is something she wanted to make clear early in our Zoom call, as if she were worried I’d give her too much credit. “I don’t need to invent. There are plenty of inventions,” she said. “But a lot of inventions die on the grapevine if they aren’t carried through.” What Weinstein does is carry them through.

For that, she does want credit. When I asked if she’d put the idea of floating offshore wind generation in the minds of California’s energy commissioners, she bristled cheerfully. “I would put it more strongly than that,” she said, shaking her auburn curls. “I didn’t give anyone ideas. I basically told them, ‘This is what needs to be done.’” The state needed clean energy, she reasoned, and she knew a couple of inventors with the technology to produce it: a floating platform designed to support a wind turbine on the surface of just about any large water body in the world.

If you haven’t been following the tortured saga of offshore wind power—or even if you have—you may not recognize how completely floating offshore wind technology stands to alter the global energy landscape. Just 10 years ago, installing offshore wind in the Eastern Pacific Ocean was technologically impossible: Conventional wind turbines typically sit atop giant steel cylinders called “monopiles,” which have to be driven into the ocean floor and rarely sink deeper than 100 feet. Other structures, known as “four-legged jackets,” can go as deep as 200 feet. But the continental shelf off California breaks fast and steep, dropping to depths of more than 600 feet not far from shore. Floating platforms, meanwhile, can sit on the surface of oceans thousands of feet deep, and can be assembled onshore and towed to their various destinations—as far out as transmission cables buried in the seafloor can extend back to land.

Read the full story at The Atlantic

 

Government, conservation groups file appeal to reinstate seasonal lobstering ban

November 1, 2021 — The federal government and a group of conservation organizations filed an appeal this week of a recent court decision that stopped a planned seasonal closure to traditional lobstering in an area of the Gulf of Maine.

The closure, which would have gone into effect Oct. 18, was intended to help protect the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale and would have made traditional, rope-and-buoy lobstering off-limits in the lucrative 967-square-mile zone from October to January.

The Maine Lobstering Union, Fox Island Lobster Co. of Vinalhaven and Damon Family Lobster Co. of Stonington filed a joint lawsuit against the fisheries service last month in an effort to block the closure, arguing that regulators used flimsy science to justify the restricted area.

In his ruling, issued just two days before the closure would have been implemented, U.S. District Judge Lance Walker sided with the lobstering groups and said regulators had relied on “markedly thin” statistical modeling instead of hard evidence to prove the area they had planned to close was really a highly traveled area for the imperiled whale.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

 

The state of the whales: 4 takeaways from this year’s Right Whale Consortium meeting

October 28, 2021 — The annual meeting of the North Atlantic Right Whale consortium started with a gut punch: there are now only about 336 North Atlantic right whales left in the world, the lowest number in nearly 20 years.

And not many people know about it: A Pew survey released in April found that only 29% of people living along the east coast had ever heard of the North Atlantic right whale.

The two-day meeting gathered researchers, industry representatives, government officials and conservation managers to share updates on regulations, research, and efforts to educate the public. The goal: to reduce the dramatic decline in the whale population.

Read the full story at WBUR