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Susan Young is the Bangor Daily News opinion editor.
I hate to say it, but with nearly 3 million lobster traps and miles of rope in the waters off the coast of Maine, it felt inevitable that a whale would die after getting entangled in this gear.
It has, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A dead North Atlantic right whale was found washed ashore on Martha’s Vineyard on Jan. 28. The young whale had fishing rope tightly wound around and embedded in its tail.
That rope, NOAA has determined, was “consistent” with rope used in Maine’s lobster fishery. It was marked with purple, the color designated to Maine as part of a gear marking program.
The agency estimates that there are approximately 360 North Atlantic right whales currently alive, and only 70 females that are likely to breed calves. The whale that washed up in Massachusetts, known as #5120, was one of these females. So was another right whale that was found off the shore of Georgia. It was killed by a collision with a ship.
These whale deaths are not only violations of the Endangered Species Act, but dampen the hope that right whales can make a recovery from the population decline that necessitated the listing in the first place.
Maine lobstermen had long said that they didn’t pose a danger to right whales. Many lobstermen said they had never seen one of the whales. And, they frequently said, there had not been an entanglement for decades and no right whale had been known to die because of Maine fishing gear.
With the death of whale #5120, and the purple marked rope, that has now changed.
As the Bangor Daily News editorial board wrote earlier this week, the death of one right whale entangled in Maine lobster gear is not a trend. But it is a reminder that more serious conversations and more serious evaluations remain overdue. Both on the part of lobstermen and fisheries regulators, who are responsible for ensuring the health of lobster stocks and of endangered species.
Lobstermen, along with Maine’s congressional delegation and many state lawmakers, have long been frustrated that federal fisheries regulators continue to seek stringent new restrictions on the lobster industry to protect right whales.
I share that frustration. Essentially, in the absence of clear information on where the endangered whales and lobster gear overlap, NOAA has repeatedly proposed stricter rules for all of the lobster fishery. These rules have been repeatedly rejected by federal judges, not because better protections for whales aren’t needed, but because federal regulators have failed to show that the restrictions they propose will actually make enough of a difference to justify the potential economic harm to lobstermen and their communities.
This is likely an oversimplification, but it is also likely that right whales are more common far off the coast of Maine, where a small group of lobstermen fish in federal waters. The bulk of Maine’s lobstermen fish in state waters closer to shore, where, it seems to me, that right whales are less likely to be.
Without clear data on where the whales are, NOAA has proposed new gear requirements and some seasonal closures on all lobstermen. This is too broad and too simplistic an approach.
To be fair, some lobstermen have fought federal efforts to collect more and better data on their fishing efforts. Still, it is incumbent upon regulators to have a better idea of where both right whales and fishing gear are so that they can tailor restrictions to protect endangered species without penalizing fishermen who truly may pose no threat depending on where they fish.
At the other extreme, Maine’s congressional delegation successfully added a provision to a spending bill that prohibits new federal restrictions on lobster fishing until 2029. Like NOAA’s sweeping rules, this prohibition is too broad, especially in light of new examples of the risks lobster rope can pose to right whales. Without the ability to apply and enforce new restrictions to protect right whales, the species is likely to be in much worse shape in five years. This could then require NOAA to propose rules that are much more draconian than what it has already proposed.
In other words, this provision may have bought the lobster industry some time to operate as usual, but unless that time is used to help better understand and protect right whales that doesn’t translate into long-term sustainability.
I don’t want lobstermen to go out of business. But, I also don’t want to see more stomach-churning photos of whales with fishing rope embedded in their bodies. If we can put encyclopedias worth of information on a device that fits in my pocket, if companies can know what I might buy before I do, surely smart people can figure out how lobsters can be caught without entangling right whales.
