Feds issue new lobster fishing rules in effort to save whales

PORTLAND, Maine — America’s lobster fishing industry will face a host of new harvesting restrictions amid a new push from the federal government to try to save a vanishing species of whale.

The new rules, which have loomed over the profitable lobster industry for years and were announced Tuesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, are designed to protect the North Atlantic right whale. The whales number only about 360 and are vulnerable to lethal entanglement in fishing gear.

NOAA said it expects the new rules will result in a reduction in nearly 70% of the risk of death and serious injuries the whales can suffer from entanglement. Among other changes, the rules reduce the number of rope lines that link buoys to lobster and crab traps, NOAA said.

The rules also require the use of weaker ropes so whales can more easily break free if they do become entangled, the agency said.

The annual cost of compliance with the new rules could range from about $10 million to more than $19 million, according to documents released by NOAA.

The rules also expand the areas of ocean where fishing with trap rope is prohibited or limited.

“The new measures in this rule will allow the lobster and Jonah crab fisheries to continue to thrive, while significantly reducing the risk to critically endangered right whales of getting seriously injured or killed in commercial fishing gear,” said Michael Pentony, regional administrator of NOAA’s Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office, in a statement Tuesday.

The Maine Lobstermen’s Association has been one of the lead groups arguing in favor of whale protections the industry can live with.

The group’s executive director, Patrice McCarron, said in July that the industry was “very anxious to know what the rules actually say” because they will result in changes to lobster fishing.

The new rules make a 950-square-mile area of the Gulf of Maine, a key fishing area, essentially off limits to lobster fishing from October to January. That puts lobstermen at risk, said Crystal Canney, executive director of Protect Maine’s Fishing Heritage Foundation. She said the rules could also make lobster fishing more dangerous by requiring more traps per trawl.

“Instead of saving right whales, what this decision has done is endanger not only the livelihoods of many of our lobstermen and women, but also their lives,” Canney said.

Right whales were once abundant off the East Coast, but they were decimated by hunting during the commercial whaling era. They’ve been listed as endangered since 1970, and conservationists have sounded the alarm about high mortality and low reproduction in the remaining population in recent years.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3t0Fa6E