Saving Seafood

Conflicting proposals will greet regulators looking at right whale protections

October 2, 2018 — To save the endangered right whale, advocates are proposing major changes that would upend the New England lobster fishery.

Proposals to close the fishery in the western Gulf of Maine south of Cape Elizabeth during April, cut the number of seabed-to-surface lines that can entangle whales, and become a ropeless fishery by 2020 are among the ideas that will be discussed next week in Providence, Rhode Island, by the team of scientists, fishing groups and animal rights activists tasked with saving the right whale from extinction.

The Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team will spend the week reviewing seven whale protection proposals and a dire new technical report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that outlines the grim recovery challenges facing the right whale, whose population has been in decline for eight years. A new population estimate is due out later this year, but scientists believe that fewer than 450 right whales remain.

The report underscores the threat to a species that has been on the brink of extinction before, like when whalers hunted them down to double digits a century ago.

“At the current rate of decline, all recovery achieved in the population over the past three decades will be lost by 2029,” the NOAA report said.

Read the full story at the Sun Journal

NOAA Memorandum on Whales Lays Basis for Much Stricter Regulation of Trap Fisheries

September 28, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — A recent technical memorandum from NOAA on right whale recovery in 2018 could push the agency to require new limits on trap fishing technology.

In short, the memorandum says that the measures adopted to reduce the number of rope lines in the water have backfired.

Although the number of lines to individual buoys have been reduced, the remaining trawl strings have more traps and stronger rope.

The result is that whales are suffering more for entanglements than they were before the new rules were introduced.

The memorandum says that “stronger rope contributed to an increase in the severity of entanglements.”

“Knowlton et al.(2012) showed that nearly 85% of right whales have been entangled in fishing gear at least once, 59% at least twice, and 26% of the regularly seen animals are entangled annually. These findings represent a continued increase in the percentage of whales encountering and entangling in gear, which grew from to 61.5% in 1995 (Hamilton et al. 1998), to 75.6% in 2002.”

“Rough estimates are that approximately 622,000 vertical lines are deployed from fishing gear in U.S. waters from Georgia to the Gulf of Maine. Notably until spring of 2018, very few protections for right whales were in place in Canadian waters. In comparison to recent decades, more right whales now spend significantly more time in more northern waters and swim through extensive pot fishery zones around Nova Scotia and into the Canadian Gulf of St. Lawrence (Daoust et al. 2018).

Taken together, these fisheries exceed an estimated 1 million vertical lines (100,000 km) deployed throughout right whale migratory routes, calving, and foraging areas.”

“Each vertical line out there has some potential to cause an entanglement. With a 26% annual entanglement rate in a population of just over 400 animals, this translates to about 100 entanglements per year.”

The problem is that sub-lethal entanglements can impact the reproductive success of the population.

“While serious injuries represent 1.2% of all entanglements, there are often sublethal costs to less severe entanglements. Should an entanglement occur but the female somehow disentangles and recovers, it still has the potential to reset the clock for this “capital” breeder. She now has to spend several years acquiring sufficient resources to get pregnant and carry a calf to term, the probability of a subsequent entanglement is fairly high, and this will create a negative feedback loop over time, where the interval between calving becomes longer. This is certainly a contributing factor in the longer calving interval for females, which has now grown from 4 to 10 years.

The implication of this technical report is that substantial reductions in entanglements will be necessary if the long term decline in the population is to be reversed, and under the endangered species act, NOAA will be required to evaluate any actions that increase harm or fail to mitigate harm to the right whale population.

This story originally appeared on Seafood News, it is republished here with permission.

 

Unprecedented experiment with Canadian military provides new insights on right whales

September 27, 2018 — North Atlantic right whales began making headlines the summer of 2017 when a record number of the whales died after getting tangled in fishing gear or hit by ships.

Before the die-off and since, Dalhousie researchers have collaborated with a number of partners in Canada and the United States to gain as much insight as possible on the endangered species. After a significant number of the whales began deserting other habitats off the coast of Nova Scotia in favour of a location in the southern region of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, experts recognized the lack of scientific evidence required to best inform marine management measures in this newly identified habitat.

That’s why members of the Whale Habitat and Listening Experiment (WHaLE) team in Dalhousie’s Department of Oceanography have been working tirelessly to fill the knowledge gap. In one experiment this past summer, they helped bring together a number of federal agencies in an effort to collect the most multi-faceted dataset on the North Atlantic right whales yet.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

Right Whale Rules May Have Worsened Fishing Gear Entanglements

September 26, 2018 — A report by federal scientists says it’s time for a new look at regulations that aim to protect the endangered North American right whale — because they aren’t working and may have made things worse.

Over the last decade, regulators required lobstermen to change their gear and reduce the overall number of traplines in U.S. waters. But the new 30-page National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration technical memo finds that a 2015 rule requiring fewer trap lines in the water — with more traps per line in some areas — meant lobstermen had to use stronger lines to accommodate the increased loads. The tougher rope may have unintentionally contributed to an increase in the severity of potentially deadly entanglements with right whales.

They also find that as lobster seek cooler waters farther offshore, lobstermen are following them, right into likely whale travel lanes. Meanwhile, right whales are changing their patterns, too, swimming longer distances to forage for increasingly unpredictable prey species.

Read the full story at Maine Public

Another Whale Carcass Spotted in Massachusetts Has Scientists Alarmed for Population

August 30, 2018 — The second right whale death of 2018 has been recorded near Martha’s Vineyard.

North Atlantic right whales are one of the most endangered marine mammals with an estimated population of 450.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the young whale was first reported floating off Tom’s Neck Point, Martha’s Vineyard, on Sunday. The carcass of the 30-foot whale again was spotted Monday and the agency began planning to tow it to shore to perform a necropsy.

On Tuesday, however, the U.S. Coast Guard and two staff members of the NOAA Fisheries Woods Hole Laboratory sailed to the carcass and determined it was too decomposed to bring to shore. The crew attached a satellite tag and took tissue samples. If the whale carcass does make it to land, they will collect more samples.

Read the full story at NH1

BETH CASONI: Canada needs to do more to protect right whales

August 28, 2018 — For generations, Massachusetts lobstermen have been part of a revered tradition of marine coexistence that has sustained a proud New England fishing industry and protected an ecosystem for marine mammals. Now, that coexistence is threatened and international action is needed.

The North Atlantic right whale is critically endangered and faces extinction within our lifetime. For centuries, these enormous and majestic animals have migrated through New England waters, but largely due to unintentional human harm from ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear, today the right whale population is estimated to be down to as few as 435. And the last year has been especially disastrous, with 17 confirmed right whale mortalities and no new calves sighted in the most recent calving season.

Now is the time for cooperative international intervention to turn this situation around and head off the preventable tragedy of extinction of this species.

For decades, the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association has worked in concert with conservation organizations like the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the International Fund for Animal Welfare to be good stewards of the ocean and marine mammals. Facing serious concerns about how to make a living and keep businesses going, we work to find middle ground between our industry and the efforts of conservationists to advance the shared aims of all.

Over the years, regulators have imposed restrictions on U.S. Atlantic Coast fisheries in an effort to reduce harm to endangered species including the right whale. The MLA is proud of our history of adopting and complying with these requirements. To name a few: Vessels, aircraft or other approaches must be restricted within 500 yards of a right whale; and, all vessels 65 feet or longer must travel at 10 knots or less in certain locations along the East Coast of the United States at certain times of year to avoid collision with right whales.

Read the full opinion piece at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Scientists and fishermen team up to help save North Atlantic right whale

August 23, 2018 — Whale researchers and fishermen are out at sea together on a two-week mission, combining efforts to help save the endangered north Atlantic right whale.

These two worlds have usually stayed far apart, but for the first time scientists are onboard a crab boat to do their field work.

It’s been a controversial fishing season in northern New Brunswick.

Whale protection efforts caused many fishing areas in the Gulf of St. Lawrence to be closed off, angering fishermen who saw it as an attack on their livelihood — some even taking to protest.

Crab fisherman Martin Noel, captain of the Jean-Denis Martin boat in Shippagan, agreed to take scientists out in the gulf to help them carry out their research this year.

“We don’t want to be called whale killers,” Noel said. “We want to be called fishermen that are implicated in the solution.”

All season, fishermen begged Ottawa to involve them in fisheries management. They felt the federal government was imposing overly strict measures without consultation with industry.

Read the full story at CBC News

 

Ropeless lobster trap creators aim to save money, whales

August 13, 2018 — Ashored Innovations, based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, has joined the parade of companies focused on improving lobster fishing.

But Ashored isn’t looking to build a better lobster trap. Driven by new regulations to eliminate the entanglement threat to the North Atlantic right whale, Ashored is focused on developing a reliable, submersible buoy that goes down with the lobster trawl, is geo-trackable, and retrieved via acoustic release technology.

“We’re not reinventing the lobster trap. It’s the buoys we are redesigning,” CEO Aaron Stevenson told SeafoodSource.

After meetings with lobstermen, Stevenson and his partners realized replacing the current-style lobster trap “was going to be a losing battle against fishermen because the cost to replace them would be astronomical.”

“We initially had that notion, but shifted pretty quick to a smart buoy concept,” he said.

Stevenson said a major concern of fishermen about this new, non-visible technology involved not knowing where another fisherman’s traps and lines were and which direction they were laid. Fishermen didn’t want to lay their traps and lines on top of others – or have others on top of theirs.

Ross Arsenault, Ashored’s COO, said they are working to have “the ability to recognize that someone else’s buoys are there, but not recall them. You will only recall your own by using a proprietary signal or a security code.”

“[While] acoustic release technology has existed for a long while, we’re working to develop a modified one and have a few other release mechanisms as our active retrieval release,” Arsenault said. “But the acoustic element is the standard at the moment and we are experimenting with ways to adapt away from that to perhaps find cost savings for the fishermen.”

Theirs isn’t a one-buoy-fits-all solution. In recognition of the various types and depths of waters that lobstermen fish in, Ashored is developing four prototype buoys.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

MASSACHUSETTS: Whale safety cited as state Senate votes to ban plastic bags

July 16, 2018 — The Massachusetts Senate went on record again in favor of a statewide ban on single-use plastic bags with sponsors pointing to the harm such bags have done to whales.

The Senate then rejected a proposal that Minority Leader Bruce Tarr of Gloucester said was intended to reduce the risk of sea mammal entanglement.

Debating an environmental bond bill Thursday, the Senate adopted a Sen. Jamie Eldridge amendment to ban stores from providing single-use carryout bags to customers at the point of sale starting in August 2019. Speaking on the amendment, Eldridge mentioned a whale that died in Thailand in June and was found to have 80 plastic bags in its stomach.

“There is no need for our sea life or wildlife to have such an ending of their lives,” Eldridge said.

Sen. Cynthia Creem also spoke in favor of the amendment, holding up a photo of a whale and pointing senators to the internet to find examples of other animals dying as a result of plastic bag waste.

“If we care not only about our environment but we care about those that live in the ocean and we care about our children and our future, we cannot have these plastic bags strewn around,” Creem said.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

Sen. Markey pushes for $5M in grants to save right whales

July 12, 2018 — U.S. Sen. Edward Markey is co-sponsoring Senate legislation mandating the U.S. Department of Commerce appropriate $5 million in grants annually over the next decade to help rebuild the populations of the imperiled North Atlantic right whales.

The Senate bill co-sponsored by Markey and other senators closely mirrors a bill U.S. Rep Seth Moulton has filed as a primary sponsor in the House of Representatives.

If voted into law, the legislation would require the U.S. commerce secretary to provide competitive grants for projects aimed at the conservation of the endangered right whales. Marine scientists estimate there are fewer than 450 of the marine mammals left alive.

Both the House and Senate bills carry a non-federal matching requirement of 25 percent for successful applicants. They also authorize in-kind contributions as part of the matching requirement.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times