Saving Seafood

Lobstermen don’t need all the traps they use, research claims

May 29, 2020 — New research suggests that the U.S. lobster industry could place fewer traps in the water and still gain just as much profit. And that finding could play a role in the debate over what should be required of Maine lobstermen to reduce entanglements with endangered North Atlantic right whales.

The study was published this week in the peer-reviewed Marine Policy Journal. Lead researcher Hannah Myers, a graduate student at the University of Alaska’s College of Fisheries and Ocean Studies, examined landings and other data from lobster-fishing territory that crosses the international Hague Line between Nova Scotia and Maine.

Myers’ research might help to end an impasse between animal-rights activists who are looking to reduce entanglements injurious, if not fatal, to the whales and have said that Maine fishing lines are at least a statistically-significant threat to the creatures. Maine lobstermen criticize activists and researchers as advancing poorly-researched and economically damaging arguments to their way of life. A plan recently advanced by Maine fishermen was criticized by researchers as not going far enough, while Maine’s federal and state government leaders have called on the federal government to back down on encroaching upon Maine lobstermen.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

Conservation groups seek vertical line ban off Massachusetts coast

May 19, 2020 — The conservation groups that filed a federal lawsuit two years ago to force the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to do more to protect endangered right whales from entanglement with fishing gear have asked U.S. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg to ban lobster fishing gear with vertical buoy lines off the coast of Massachusetts.

The affected area would be south of the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.

According to the Center for Biological Diversity and several other plaintiff conservation groups, the area “has increasingly become important right whale foraging and socializing habitat in recent years.”

The conservation groups filed their request last Friday, three weeks after the judge ruled that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) violated the federal Endangered Species Act when it continued to allow lobster fishing with gear that used fixed vertical buoy lines in which whales could become entangled.

As a practical matter, a ban on the vertical lines that connect traps on the sea floor to marker buoys on the surface would amount to a total prohibition against lobster fishing in the area south of the two Massachusetts islands.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American

Lobstering group wants to raise $500,000 for legal defense fund

May 7, 2020 — The Maine Lobstermen’s Association has launched a campaign to raise $500,000 to fund its legal efforts to protect the state’s most valuable fishery from the consequences of a recent federal court ruling that calls for more government protections for the endangered right whale.

Last month, a federal judge found the National Marine Fisheries Service had violated the U.S. Endangered Species Act by its authorization of the U.S. lobster industry – including Maine’s $485 million-a-year fishery – because it failed to report the fishery’s harmful impacts on the endangered right whale.

“This case could lead to closure of the world’s most sustainable fishery,” said executive director Patrice McCarron, whose association is the oldest and biggest lobstering group in Maine. “We cannot let that happen. Right whales are not dying in Maine lobster gear.”

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Maine Lobstermen’s Association Asks For Public Donations To Help ‘Save’ The Industry

May 7, 2020 — The Maine Lobstermen’s Association is calling for a half-million dollars in public donations to help it “save” the state’s lobster industry from potential extinction.

The MLA says the money would go to its legal defense of the fishery in a federal court case brought by conservationists who want better protections of the endangered North Atlantic right whale.

The whales can be injured or killed by entanglement with rope used to tend trap-pot gear, such as lobster traps. But the MLA’s Executive Director Patrice McCarron says there is no proof that the whales are actually interacting with traps set by the Maine fleet.

Read the full story at Maine Public

Lobstermen launch campaign to save Maine industry; new threats on the horizon

May 6, 2020 — The Maine Lobstermen’s Association is fighting a federal ruling that threatens the demise of the fleet, according to Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association.

In early April, Judge James Boasberg of the Federal District Court for Washington, D.C., ruled that NMFS violated the ESA in permitting the lobster fishery. The judge’s opinion states that “Congress enacted the ESA in 1973 to halt and reverse the trend toward species extinction, whatever the cost.”

“The MLA has launched a campaign to raise $500,000 to save Maine’s lobster industry,” McCarron said. The MLA is an intervenor in the court case and is the only organization in Maine that has been granted standing to participate in the case.

Whale entanglement data collected by NMFS show that no right whale deaths or serious injuries have ever been documented in Maine lobster gear. This is in stark contrast to the death of 10 right whales in Canada last year.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

In another significant ruling for right whales, a federal judge rules that Massachusetts is violating the Endangered Species Act

May 4, 2020 — In another shot across the bow of the lobster industry, a federal judge ruled Thursday that state regulators have violated the Endangered Species Act by licensing lobstermen to use fishing gear that entangles North Atlantic right whales.

The ruling requires Massachusetts officials to obtain a permit from the National Marine Fisheries Service to license vertical buoy lines, the ropes that connect lobster traps on the seafloor to buoys at the surface.

Those lines are vital to the fishery but have been the leading cause of death of right whales over the past decade, accounting for more than half of all known causes. In the past three years, 30 right whales have died, reducing their population to around 400.

In her ruling, Judge Indira Talwani of the US District Court in Boston said the continued use of buoy lines was likely to cause further harm to right whales, which scientists say could become functionally extinct within the next 20 years.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

MASSACHUSETTS: Lobster season opens on time after right whales move out of Cape Cod bay

May 1, 2020 — Lobster season for the South Shore will begin as planned after endangered right whales, spotted in Cape Cod Bay, moved out of the area.

The Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies estimated five whales, including two mother-and-calf pairs, were feeding in Cape Cod Bay, following an aerial survey on April 25. On Wednesday, another aerial inspection over the area found the whales had moved out of the bay and adjacent waters, the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries said in an announcement Thursday afternoon.

The Division previously extended the opening of the season to May 8 because the whales were spotted, spokesman Craig Gilvarg said in a statement. North Atlantic right whales are an endangered species and vulnerable to buoy entanglement and getting hit by boats, because they feed near the surface.

“Everybody is anxious to go,” John Haviland, president of the South Shore Lobster Fishermen’s Association, said. “They’ve been standing around for three months, basically in quarantine.”

Read the full story at The Patriot Ledger

NOAA extends protection zone for rare whales off Cape Ann, Boston

April 29, 2020 — Federal ocean managers are asking mariners to continue slowing down east of Boston and Cape Ann because of sightings of rare right whales in the area.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said it is asking mariners to go around the area or travel through it at 10 knots or less until May 9.

The group of whales was spotted on April 24. Right whales number only about 400 and are one of the rarest large ocean animals. Their population was decimated by whaling, which is now illegal. Their population remains in jeopardy because of recent high mortality and poor reproduction.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

CAROL SMITH: Maine lobstermen are not a threat to right whales

April 27, 2020 — U.S. District Court Judge James Boasburg’s recent ruling is the latest blow to Maine’s billion-dollar industry. Boasburg’s decision that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration violated the Endangered Species Act by authorizing the American lobster fishery despite its potential to harm the North Atlantic right whale population comes on the heels of new regulations imposed on fishermen last year. With many fishermen just starting to mark their fishing gear according to the new regulations, Boasburg’s ruling has left them in a state of uncertainty. Will this be the end of the industry as they know it?

Maine’s lobster industry provides an estimated 5,500 jobs throughout the state, according to a study conducted by Colby College and Maine Lobster Dealers’ Association in 2016. In a state with a population of 1.3 million, 5,500 jobs may seem expendable. However, the fishermen themselves are often the main source of income for their households. In Washington County, where unemployment is the highest in the state, households dependent on lobster fishermen rely on the fishery for an average of 77 percent of household income, according to a 2012 study by the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. The death of the fishery would throw many into poverty, and others would be forced to leave their coastal homes to find work.

To add insult to injury, Boasburg’s ruling represents a mere stripe in a pattern of striking injustice. Since June 2017, right whale mortalities have been on the rise, a pattern that has been declared an Unusual Mortality Event by NOAA. However, according to current statistics from NOAA Fisheries, 21 of the 30 dead stranded whales for the UME were found in Canada. Of the nine found in the U.S., only five were confirmed or suspected of entanglement, and not a single one was found in Maine waters. Furthermore, NOAA has only documented Maine lobster gear on three live entangled whales, most recently in 2004. None has been documented on a dead right whale.

Read the full opinion piece at the Bangor Daily News

North Atlantic right whales are in much poorer condition than their Southern counterparts

April 27, 2020 — The following was released by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution:

A new study by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientists and their colleagues reveals that endangered North Atlantic right whales are in much poorer body condition than their counterparts in the southern hemisphere. The international research team, led by Fredrik Christiansen from Aarhus University in Denmark, published their findings April 23, 2020, in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.

Using drones and a method called aerial photogrammetry to measure the body length and width of individual right whales in four regions around the world, the team compared body condition of individual North Atlantic right whales with individuals from three increasing populations of Southern right whales: off Argentina, Australia and New Zealand.

From aerial photographs, the researchers estimated the body volume of individual whales, which they then used to derive an index of body condition or relative fatness. The analyses revealed that individual North Atlantic right whales—juveniles, adults and mothers—were all in poorer body condition than individual whales from the three populations of Southern right whales.

“For North Atlantic right whales as individuals, and as a species, things are going terribly wrong,” says WHOI researcher Michael Moore, a coauthor of the paper. “This comparison with their southern hemisphere relatives shows that most individual North Atlantic right whales are in much worse condition than they should be.”

Read the full release here