A Race to Extinction: Right Whales or Maine Lobstermen?

 

By David K. Shipler 

              A significant struggle, invisible to most Americans, is occurring along the northern New England coast to save both an endangered species of whale and an endangered way of life. It is a clash of priorities, values, and even basic facts, that could leave both North Atlantic right whales and Maine lobstermen as victims. You can see the high stakes when tough men of the sea have fear in their eyes.

              New federal regulations, enacted and in the works, are being challenged by Maine officials and lobstermen as unjustified. And the private sector has now escalated the conflict with a call to boycott lobsters. Issued from the other side of the country by the Monterey Bay (California) Aquarium’s Seafood Watch, it is based on information that is far from conclusive about the danger posed to the whales by ropes used in lobstering. The move seems wildly excessive, has undermined the conservationists’ credibility, and has further polarized the players in an effort that cries out for sensible solutions.

Also, by the way, boycotting lobsters won’t save the whales.

              The problem looks clearcut on its face. The estimated number of North Atlantic right whales has declined precipitously from about 480 in 2010 to under 350 today. Their mortality rate is high, mostly because of interaction with humans: many are struck by ships, and many others are entangled in rope from both gillnets and lobster gear, which can open wounds and lead to lethal infection. The demise of females has led to a decline of newborn calves below the 50 per year needed for the population to recover. Fifteen have been born so far in 2022.

              From here, the problem gets complicated. Climate change contributes, because as the Gulf of Maine warms faster than any other part of the earth’s oceans, the whales have followed their main food source—the tiny shrimplike calanus finmarchicus—northward into Canadian waters, notably the Gulf of St. Lawrence, a shipping area where collisions are likely.

A speed limit of 10 knots in certain areas has been imposed on vessels over 35 feet by both Canada and the United States. Right whales are notoriously slow—and maybe a little dumb—one reason they were easy targets for whalers in the old days: the “right whales” to harpoon and also pick up, since they float after death. I once watched several swimming so ponderously off the Canadian island of Grand Manan that they’d obviously have no chance of getting out of the way of a big cargo ship or a fast boat.

In full disclosure, this is an appropriate place to confess my competing biases. I love to go whale-watching. When the Gulf of Maine was cooler, I occasionally took my boat out to Mt. Desert Rock, about 18 miles offshore, where minke and humpback whales liked to roam before they mostly moved north.

I’ve watched whales from Alaska to Antarctica, from offshore near Washington State down to the coast of California, from eastern Canada down to Cape Cod Bay. So, like everyone else—including lobstermen, I might add—I’m partial to whales. There might be nothing on this planet as majestic as two gargantuan humpbacks out in the Gulf of Maine breaching together in the early twilight, propelling themselves completely out of the water in unison, dancers in an ancient pageant.

I’m also partial to the lobstermen I’ve grown friendly with during the part of each year I live on an island off the coast of Maine. They are flinty individualists—about 5,000 altogether in the state—who own their own boats, go to sea hours before the rest of us know that a new day is dawning, and take on weather that should make a mortal tremble. The gender walls are gradually breaking down, with some men encouraging their daughters to go lobstering, and more and more women setting out.

Like farmers, they’re at the mercy of elements they don’t control. Some years are good, and they make big bucks. Some are lean. The catch rises and falls, and the market is fickle. Last year, in a post-pandemic surge of demand, lobstermen were getting $7 to $8 a pound at the boat; this summer, it was down to $3.25 or so. The costs of bait and diesel fuel have soared, so just to break even each day, they have to haul a lot of traps with a lot of pounds. Some fishermen were taking days off to save on the expenses.

The gear is expensive, too. A three-foot trap goes for nearly $90, a buoy around $10, plus swivels, bait bags, and thin rope (called “pot warp,” priced by the pound), all adding up to some $150—more if you have multiple traps on each trawl, as the federal government is now requiring. So losing all that to a whale is no delight for either party.

Lobster traps sit on the bottom, and the pot warp that runs up to buoys on the surface is the alleged culprit. Those vertical lines can entangle whales, including those that spend summers in Canadian waters but migrate south along the Maine coast to breeding grounds off the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida.

The dispute is this: When a whale is found dragging rope, or with scars showing a past entanglement, whose rope is it? Where did it come from? Canada? Maine? Massachusetts? Maine was not a location of any observed incidents of death or serious injury from 2017 to the present, listed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Twenty-one of the 33 dead right whales in that period were found in Canada, and the remaining 12 scattered in waters off Massachusetts, Virginia, New York, New Jersey, North and South Carolina, and Florida. The same with seriously injured whales: eight in Canada and 12 from Massachusetts to Georgia.

 The lack of solid proof of Maine involvement is cited by the Maine Lobsterman’s Association, backed up by Maine’s governor, two senators, and two House representatives—Democratic, Republican, and Independent—to assert that not a single death of a right whale has ever been attributed to Maine lobster gear, and that no entanglements with rope from Maine waters have been documented in the last 18 years.

Yet the lobster fishery has been hit with a series of federal regulations aimed at reducing the prevalence of those lines and to require breakaway rope that releases more easily, at 1700 pounds, with more restrictions to come that will make lobstering even more difficult, risky, and costly. Areas offshore totaling 1,000 square miles are being closed from October 1 to January 31, and 5, 10, 15, 20, or 25 traps per trawl are being mandated in various Maine areas to reduce the amount of vertical line.

Splicing in breakaway line is labor intensive, and large numbers of traps on a trawl are expensive, since it’s too dangerous to have 25 traps aboard at once without extra hands. When the traps are cast off and sink fast, the line whips out with them; a lobsterman can get an ankle caught and be dragged overboard; it happens. So, where a captain once hired a single sternman, he would now need two for safety, and sternmen get a percentage of the take.

Then, there is talk of ropeless technology to be used in areas otherwise closed. It is not yet perfected: The trap would have a buoy bound to it on the bottom, to be released when the lobsterman activates a coded sonar signal.

This sounds clever, but lobstermen give lots of reasons why it won’t work. One explained to me the other day that buoys tell him where other traps are located; without them, he might set his on top of somebody else’s: a reasonable concern, since multiple lobstermen tend to set traps near one another in promising areas. Also, who will pay the added cost of the gadgetry?

These regulations make many Maine fishermen feel as entangled as the whales, and as threatened. One of my friends, out on his boat this summer while I came alongside to talk, told me how glad he was that his son was not following in his footsteps.

But what are the facts? I put the question to NOAA—citing the lack of hard data—and got an interesting answer from a spokesperson, Katie Wagner.

First, she said in an email, “in most years, only one third of right whale mortalities are observed,” according to a Duke University mammal density model. So the causes of death are not known.

Second, when dead or injured whales are spotted, determining who owned the rope has been nearly impossible. “Entanglement injuries are often observed without gear remaining on the whale,” Wagner wrote, noting that 85 percent of all right whales have scars from the lines. “When gear is remaining it is rarely retrieved. In those rare cases when gear is retrieved, it usually carries no area-specific marking and can only be identified to a geographic area fewer than half the time.”

 NOAA’s conclusion?

“We cannot dismiss the likelihood that Maine buoy lines, which make up the majority of buoy lines in waters where right whales occur, are responsible for some of the serious injuries and mortalities.”

Not dismissing the likelihood is not proof. It’s what a court might call circumstantial evidence, which is sometimes used to convict someone of a crime—but sometimes produces wrongful convictions.

Wagner went on to provide a significant fact that strengthens the case, though. In the last two years, Maine lobstermen have been required to use purple and green line inserts or paint to identify their trawls. Since then, although no right whales have been found entangled in such rope, other large species have been.

“In 2021, a humpback whale was disentangled from gear fished by a Maine fisherman in Federal waters (purple and green marks),” she said. “In 2020 and 2021, two dead minke whales in rope with purple marks, and two disentangled minke whales in rope with purple marks were documented. Given the low number of right whales, documented entanglements are more rare, but even one serious injury or mortality exceeds” the level at which eventual extinction can be avoided.

              The Seafood Watch boycott has so infuriated Maine’s congressional delegation that Sen. Angus King and Representative Jared Golden have introduced a bill to block federal funding to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which has received almost $197 million since 2001. My requests to the aquarium for detailed evidence to support their position on lobstering went unanswered.

              In the end, though, global warming might kill lobstering before boycotts or right-whale regulations do. Lobsters like cold water. South of here, lobstering has declined. Several years ago, when an environmental lawyer lectured at the local library on right-whale regulations, he ended by warning that the lobstermen in the audience should be more worried about climate change. That is where I saw fear in their eyes.