Saving Seafood

Federal appeals court reinstates lobster gear restrictions off Maine’s coast

November 17, 2021 — A federal appeals court is reinstating restrictions on fishing gear in a nearly 1,000 square mile swath of ocean off Maine’s coast. It’s a blow to Maine’s lobstermen and a victory for advocates for the endangered North Atlantic right whale.

In October, in an effort to protect the roughly 340 right whales remaining on the planet from potentially deadly entanglements with fishing gear, the federal government imposed a four-month restriction on the use of trap-rope in the area. Lobstermen consider the area prime winter fishing grounds, but the rope-ban would effectively bar 60 or more boats from fishing there. Before the restrictions took effect, the Maine Lobstering Union won a stay from a U.S. district judge in Bangor.

But late Tuesday, a federal appeals court in Boston ruled that the lower court overstepped its authority. The court said that while the stakes are high on both sides, Congress had “placed its thumb on the scales” for endangered species such as the right whales.

Read the full story at WBUR

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

 

NOAA appeals restraining order that kept offshore closure open

November 2, 2021 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has appealed a Maine judge’s order from last month that allowed traditional lobstering to continue in an area of offshore fishing grounds in the Gulf of Maine.  

Two days before 967 square miles of fishing ground was supposed to be closed to lobstering to protect the endangered North Atlantic right whale, Maine U.S. District Court Judge Lance Walker granted the Maine Lobstering Union, Stonington-based Damon Family Lobster Co., and a Vinalhaven lobster dealer a temporary restraining order that allowed fishing in the planned closed area.  

Last week, the federal government, who had come up with the rules, appealed that restraining order, arguing that the Trenton-based union, Damon Family Lobster Co., and the third plaintiff had “utterly failed” to meet the burden needed to necessitate the halt of the closure.  

NOAA argued that the union and lobster dealers did not provide any evidence of irreparable harm and said that the National Marine Fisheries Service complied with the law and rationally based its decision on the best available science.  

Read the full story at the Mount Desert Islander

 

Right whale population drops to lowest estimate in nearly 20 years

November 2, 2021 — Researchers last week said the North Atlantic right whale population dropped to 336 in 2020, an 8 percent decrease from the previous year. 

The latest population figure for the critically endangered species dipped from 366 individuals in 2019 and is the lowest population estimate in nearly 20 years, according to the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium. The organization has been studying right whales since the 1980s and announced the estimate at its annual meeting last week.   

“We are obviously discouraged by this estimate, but quite frankly, not surprised,” said Heather Pettis, an associate scientist in the New England Aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life and the executive administrator for the consortium. “The right whale research and conservation communities know that while widespread efforts to change the trajectory of the species have been undertaken, they have not been enough.” 

The species, which migrates up and down the east coast, was generally rebounding until 2011, when the downward trend started. That prompted new regulations on Maine’s lobstermen and other fisheries. At that time, there were an estimated 481 whales, but since then the population has declined by 30 percent.  

Read the full story at the Mount Desert Islander

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

New population estimate for right whales at its lowest in 20 years

October 26, 2021 — A new estimate of the number of endangered North Atlantic right whales left on the planet puts the population at 336, the lowest in nearly 20 years.

The figure, which represents the 2020 population, is down eight per cent from the previous estimate of 366 in 2019, and is far below the peak of 481 in 2011.

The North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium, a partnership of nearly 40 organizations with an interest in protecting the species, said the cause of the decline is clear.

“There is no question that human activities are driving this species toward extinction,” Scott Kraus, the chair of the consortium, said in a news release Monday morning.

Entanglements in fishing gear and vessel strikes are among the biggest threats to the survival of the North Atlantic right whale.

Read the full story at CBC

Federal rules are sinking Maine’s lobster industry

October 25, 2021 — As a lifelong Maine lobsterman, I understand the inherent dangers of my job. I keep watch on the forecast knowing that sudden weather changes can make the difference between a successful day at work and putting my crew’s life at risk. These days, however, the hazard posed by Mother Nature does not compare with the perfect storm of regulations coming out of Washington that threaten my job, our way of life and may eventually sink a fishery that has supported communities and generations of families here in Maine.

In May, National Marine Fisheries Service released a nearly 1,000-page document outlining a 10-year plan that mandates a seemingly unreachable goal to reduce risk from our industry to the endangered North Atlantic right whale by 98 percent. This not only affects me, but nearly 10,000 other men and women who make their living hauling traps.

The fisheries service rolled out the first phase of this plan in August, requiring new gear modifications to add more traps to each buoy line while simultaneously making each line weaker. These measures reduce risk by removing a lot of rope from the ocean and help any entangled right whale to break free from the lines that remain, but they will most certainly make a lobsterman’s already dangerous job even more so.

Recently, a federal judge in Bangor temporarily delayed a seasonal closure of more than 950 square miles of prime lobstering ground off Maine. While we are relieved with this decision, the proposed closure reflects just one in a long line of decisions in the government’s plan that is supposed to protect right whales. The problem is this misguided plan takes aim at the wrong target and may destroy our industry while doing little to help protect the whale.

Read the full opinion piece at the Bangor Daily News