June 27, 2005
Setting a trap | Lobstermen say new rules intended to save endangered whales could hurt the industry
By Taylor Smith
Bar Harbor native Jon Carter has been fishing Maine's waters for 36 years. He's seen boom times in the region's groundfishing industry, and then watched it collapse in the late 1990s as fish stocks dried up and fishing areas closed. Through it all, Carter relied on his ace in the hole: lobstering.
These days, Carter fishes 800 traps, traveling as much as 20 miles out to sea to collect his catch. But during the past decade or so, he's had to contend with an increasing number of rules established by the National Marine Fisheries Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NMFS has been spurred into action by a series of lawsuits from environmental groups concerned about endangered species such as whales and other marine mammals. The suits in part fingered the fishing industry for its role in whale deaths due to entanglement in lobster ropes and other fishing gear.
According to Laura Ludwig, Maine whale plan coordinator for the Maine Department of Marine Resources in West Boothbay, 17 entangled whales were reported on the East Coast last year. That tally included three right whales, a severely endangered species that whale experts say has an estimated global population of roughly 300. And because of the dwindling numbers of right whales ˆ and because of a hue and cry from environmentalists ˆ NMFS during the past nine years has implemented a number of new regulations in hopes of reducing unnatural whale deaths and heading off the problem of fisheries-related whale entanglements. During that time, many environmentalists have criticized NMFS for not going far enough to protect endangered marine species like the right whale. Meanwhile, many fishermen have found the regulations to be at best a nuisance and, at worst, a threat to their livelihood.
Every few years, Carter says, a new rule has been put into place that requires him to change the way he fishes for lobster off Bar Harbor. He's spent thousands of dollars for breakaway gear for his lines, which ostensibly make it easier for tangled whales to extricate themselves from lobster traps. He's spent valuable fishing time on shore, re-rigging his 800-plus buoys and floats to make his gear pass regulation. "It takes a lot of time to do this stuff," says Carter. "You can't paint and re-rig all the buoys in one day."
In early June, however, NMFS released two proposed rules that would do much more than require Maine lobstermen to add breakaways to their gear or splice tracers into their ropes. Both rules include provisions that would significantly change the types of gear used by fishermen on the Atlantic coast. By the end of the year, the agency is expected to trim that list to one rule, which will go into effect in 2008.
Whether the current round of NMFS regulations will satisfy environmental groups like the Humane Society of the United States remains to be seen. But policy watchers and members of Maine's fishing industry already are estimating that the state's lobster industry will experience a heavy and sustained impact if those regulations force the lobstermen to change the way they fish Maine's waters. And that's big news for an industry whose product has become synonymous with Maine ˆ as well as making up nearly 70% of the state's $300 million fishing industry.
Time and money
The two rules announced by NMFS came from a list of six alternatives to the current fisheries regulations put in place to protect whales. The six rules were drafted in a series of meetings of the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team, a group of nearly 60 representatives from the fishing industry, environmental groups, the scientific community and regulatory agencies. Among other changes, the two proposed rules chosen by NMFS include provisions banning the use of floating lines, since whale experts say marine mammals tangle more easily in them than they do in sinking lines. In most cases, floating lines connect a series of lobster traps and can hover four meters or more off the ocean floor (see illustration, above).
Except for an exemption for coastal fisheries stretching just a few miles from shore, Maine lobstermen like Carter would be forced to uniformly overhaul the type of gear they use on a daily basis. For the average lobsterman, that potentially means replacement costs in the thousands of dollars and lots of lost fishing time, as miles of line need to be scrapped and replaced with line that sinks to sit among the lobster traps on the bottom of the ocean. "I think we're all cognizant of the fact that it's going to require some changes, and those changes won't be cheap," says Sharon Young, who works out of Sagamore Beach, Mass., as the marine issues field director for the Humane Society of the United States. "But the Endangered Species Act is blind to cost. The [right whale] species is in critical shape."
In addition to the expense in time and money, many Maine lobstermen say the potential rule change will make it much harder ˆ and potentially cost-prohibitive ˆ to lobster in the state's waters. That's because the terrain of Maine's ocean floor where they fish is, as DMR's Ludwig puts it, "like Cadillac Mountain underwater."
Unlike the relatively flat, sandy bottom in many parts of Cape Cod Bay, where Massachusetts fishermen have been required to use sinking rope since 2003, the underwater terrain in Maine gets progressively more difficult to manage as you move farther downeast. Sharp ledges, rocky outcroppings and strong tidal shifts in the waters downeast make sinking rope a virtual impossibility, according to many Maine lobstermen.
"During the last nor'easter, guys lost 16 out of 20 trap trawls where they chafed off the bottom, and they had floating rope on them," says Carter. "We just have too rocky a bottom. We can't survive without rope that can stay off the bottom. It would literally put us out of business in the eastern part of the state."
Though some might discount Carter's rhetoric as woe-is-me hyperbole, Tora Johnson says he's right on the money; she expects a number of lobstermen to go out of business if sinking-line regulations go into effect. Johnson, an adjunct professor of human ecology at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, in February published Entanglements: The Intertwined Fates of Whales and Fishermen (University Press of Florida), which looks at the issue of whale entanglements from her varied perspective as a conservationist, commercial fisher and biologist. "It's an economic issue," she says. "Folks in near-shore waters will probably do okay, but folks who have made the shift to offshore ˆ purchasing bigger boats and heavier gear ˆ have lots more money out there sitting on the bottom. And more of them are going to lose if they have to shift to sinking gear. It's not the end of everything, but some people will be truly injured by this."
Keeping a low profile
Johnson figures NMFS will require Maine's fishing industry to get rid of floating line by 2008, when the current rules are expected to go into effect. But how Maine's fishing industry will react at that point remains to be seen. Some fishermen have stated publicly that if push comes to shove, they'd rather eschew regulations than give up their livelihood. "I think it will be a train wreck," says Johnson. "I think the fishermen are going to go berserk, and there may be some kind of civil disobedience. The downeast fishermen are going to be very angry."
Peter Inniss, a Falmouth-based fisherman who operates out of Portland Harbor, says the general consensus among his peers is that if the new regulations push the lobster industry to the breaking point, then the industry won't be afraid to push back. But Inniss, who sits on the ALWTRT and has spent years debating these regulations, believes the best bet for the continued viability of Maine's fishing industry will be to figure out how to operate within the regulatory guidelines. "It's a progressive thing," he says. "Polio wasn't cured overnight. The industry needs time to complete this, because the answer will be found."
One of the answers, says Inniss, could be in the development of new fishing gear, such as low-profile rope that wouldn't get caught on rocks and ledges, but that also wouldn't pose an entanglement danger to whales. He has worked on his own rope designs, and also has assisted DMR in testing low-profile fishing lines. Laura Ludwig has spent nearly two years devising workarounds for the floating rope problem. In 2003, she helped launch an $85,000 project with a Rhode Island company to use an underwater remote vehicle to film lobstermen's gear, and she spent time on lobster boats showing fishermen how high their inter-trap lines extended into the water column.
Meanwhile, she also filmed the performance of prototypes of low-profile ropes. She's worked with a handful of manufacturers, including Nova Scotia-based Polysteel Atlantic, to develop new ropes. Meanwhile, Ludwig recently hired a new gear specialist, Steve Robbins III, to assist in evaluating new ropes. "It's still a work in progress," she says. "But we're confident we can make a rope that the fishermen can use. I think that with the work we're doing, there will be an acknowledgement that there will be a suitable low-profile replacement."
Others aren't so sure. Carter, for one, isn't banking on low-profile ropes materializing as a saving grace for the industry ˆ especially given some fishermen's experience losing traps that were rigged with floating line. Instead, he'd like to see more support for the state's fishing industry from Maine politicians. (Sen. Susan Collins, who chairs the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Fisheries and Coast Guard, released a statement June 14 attacking NMFS's proposed regulations. The agency, she says, "needs to recognize the tremendous burden and difficulty these regulations would place on Maine lobstermen." She also argues that sinking groundlines are "simply not an option for our lobstermen.")
Carter also would like to see NMFS and the environmental groups that are pushing for rule changes take a step back and let the current rules work themselves out. "They don't give anything else a chance to work before they're looking for something else," he says.
The fishery service's new regulations are expected to be in place by the end of the year, and most policy watchers don't expect a radical reversal from the proposed rules released in June. But if they go ahead as planned, says Carter, Maine's fishing community will bear the brunt of the impact. "We may become the endangered species here," he says.
These days, Carter fishes 800 traps, traveling as much as 20 miles out to sea to collect his catch. But during the past decade or so, he's had to contend with an increasing number of rules established by the National Marine Fisheries Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NMFS has been spurred into action by a series of lawsuits from environmental groups concerned about endangered species such as whales and other marine mammals. The suits in part fingered the fishing industry for its role in whale deaths due to entanglement in lobster ropes and other fishing gear.
According to Laura Ludwig, Maine whale plan coordinator for the Maine Department of Marine Resources in West Boothbay, 17 entangled whales were reported on the East Coast last year. That tally included three right whales, a severely endangered species that whale experts say has an estimated global population of roughly 300. And because of the dwindling numbers of right whales ˆ and because of a hue and cry from environmentalists ˆ NMFS during the past nine years has implemented a number of new regulations in hopes of reducing unnatural whale deaths and heading off the problem of fisheries-related whale entanglements. During that time, many environmentalists have criticized NMFS for not going far enough to protect endangered marine species like the right whale. Meanwhile, many fishermen have found the regulations to be at best a nuisance and, at worst, a threat to their livelihood.
Every few years, Carter says, a new rule has been put into place that requires him to change the way he fishes for lobster off Bar Harbor. He's spent thousands of dollars for breakaway gear for his lines, which ostensibly make it easier for tangled whales to extricate themselves from lobster traps. He's spent valuable fishing time on shore, re-rigging his 800-plus buoys and floats to make his gear pass regulation. "It takes a lot of time to do this stuff," says Carter. "You can't paint and re-rig all the buoys in one day."
In early June, however, NMFS released two proposed rules that would do much more than require Maine lobstermen to add breakaways to their gear or splice tracers into their ropes. Both rules include provisions that would significantly change the types of gear used by fishermen on the Atlantic coast. By the end of the year, the agency is expected to trim that list to one rule, which will go into effect in 2008.
Whether the current round of NMFS regulations will satisfy environmental groups like the Humane Society of the United States remains to be seen. But policy watchers and members of Maine's fishing industry already are estimating that the state's lobster industry will experience a heavy and sustained impact if those regulations force the lobstermen to change the way they fish Maine's waters. And that's big news for an industry whose product has become synonymous with Maine ˆ as well as making up nearly 70% of the state's $300 million fishing industry.
Time and money
The two rules announced by NMFS came from a list of six alternatives to the current fisheries regulations put in place to protect whales. The six rules were drafted in a series of meetings of the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team, a group of nearly 60 representatives from the fishing industry, environmental groups, the scientific community and regulatory agencies. Among other changes, the two proposed rules chosen by NMFS include provisions banning the use of floating lines, since whale experts say marine mammals tangle more easily in them than they do in sinking lines. In most cases, floating lines connect a series of lobster traps and can hover four meters or more off the ocean floor (see illustration, above).
Except for an exemption for coastal fisheries stretching just a few miles from shore, Maine lobstermen like Carter would be forced to uniformly overhaul the type of gear they use on a daily basis. For the average lobsterman, that potentially means replacement costs in the thousands of dollars and lots of lost fishing time, as miles of line need to be scrapped and replaced with line that sinks to sit among the lobster traps on the bottom of the ocean. "I think we're all cognizant of the fact that it's going to require some changes, and those changes won't be cheap," says Sharon Young, who works out of Sagamore Beach, Mass., as the marine issues field director for the Humane Society of the United States. "But the Endangered Species Act is blind to cost. The [right whale] species is in critical shape."
In addition to the expense in time and money, many Maine lobstermen say the potential rule change will make it much harder ˆ and potentially cost-prohibitive ˆ to lobster in the state's waters. That's because the terrain of Maine's ocean floor where they fish is, as DMR's Ludwig puts it, "like Cadillac Mountain underwater."
Unlike the relatively flat, sandy bottom in many parts of Cape Cod Bay, where Massachusetts fishermen have been required to use sinking rope since 2003, the underwater terrain in Maine gets progressively more difficult to manage as you move farther downeast. Sharp ledges, rocky outcroppings and strong tidal shifts in the waters downeast make sinking rope a virtual impossibility, according to many Maine lobstermen.
"During the last nor'easter, guys lost 16 out of 20 trap trawls where they chafed off the bottom, and they had floating rope on them," says Carter. "We just have too rocky a bottom. We can't survive without rope that can stay off the bottom. It would literally put us out of business in the eastern part of the state."
Though some might discount Carter's rhetoric as woe-is-me hyperbole, Tora Johnson says he's right on the money; she expects a number of lobstermen to go out of business if sinking-line regulations go into effect. Johnson, an adjunct professor of human ecology at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, in February published Entanglements: The Intertwined Fates of Whales and Fishermen (University Press of Florida), which looks at the issue of whale entanglements from her varied perspective as a conservationist, commercial fisher and biologist. "It's an economic issue," she says. "Folks in near-shore waters will probably do okay, but folks who have made the shift to offshore ˆ purchasing bigger boats and heavier gear ˆ have lots more money out there sitting on the bottom. And more of them are going to lose if they have to shift to sinking gear. It's not the end of everything, but some people will be truly injured by this."
Keeping a low profile
Johnson figures NMFS will require Maine's fishing industry to get rid of floating line by 2008, when the current rules are expected to go into effect. But how Maine's fishing industry will react at that point remains to be seen. Some fishermen have stated publicly that if push comes to shove, they'd rather eschew regulations than give up their livelihood. "I think it will be a train wreck," says Johnson. "I think the fishermen are going to go berserk, and there may be some kind of civil disobedience. The downeast fishermen are going to be very angry."
Peter Inniss, a Falmouth-based fisherman who operates out of Portland Harbor, says the general consensus among his peers is that if the new regulations push the lobster industry to the breaking point, then the industry won't be afraid to push back. But Inniss, who sits on the ALWTRT and has spent years debating these regulations, believes the best bet for the continued viability of Maine's fishing industry will be to figure out how to operate within the regulatory guidelines. "It's a progressive thing," he says. "Polio wasn't cured overnight. The industry needs time to complete this, because the answer will be found."
One of the answers, says Inniss, could be in the development of new fishing gear, such as low-profile rope that wouldn't get caught on rocks and ledges, but that also wouldn't pose an entanglement danger to whales. He has worked on his own rope designs, and also has assisted DMR in testing low-profile fishing lines. Laura Ludwig has spent nearly two years devising workarounds for the floating rope problem. In 2003, she helped launch an $85,000 project with a Rhode Island company to use an underwater remote vehicle to film lobstermen's gear, and she spent time on lobster boats showing fishermen how high their inter-trap lines extended into the water column.
Meanwhile, she also filmed the performance of prototypes of low-profile ropes. She's worked with a handful of manufacturers, including Nova Scotia-based Polysteel Atlantic, to develop new ropes. Meanwhile, Ludwig recently hired a new gear specialist, Steve Robbins III, to assist in evaluating new ropes. "It's still a work in progress," she says. "But we're confident we can make a rope that the fishermen can use. I think that with the work we're doing, there will be an acknowledgement that there will be a suitable low-profile replacement."
Others aren't so sure. Carter, for one, isn't banking on low-profile ropes materializing as a saving grace for the industry ˆ especially given some fishermen's experience losing traps that were rigged with floating line. Instead, he'd like to see more support for the state's fishing industry from Maine politicians. (Sen. Susan Collins, who chairs the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Fisheries and Coast Guard, released a statement June 14 attacking NMFS's proposed regulations. The agency, she says, "needs to recognize the tremendous burden and difficulty these regulations would place on Maine lobstermen." She also argues that sinking groundlines are "simply not an option for our lobstermen.")
Carter also would like to see NMFS and the environmental groups that are pushing for rule changes take a step back and let the current rules work themselves out. "They don't give anything else a chance to work before they're looking for something else," he says.
The fishery service's new regulations are expected to be in place by the end of the year, and most policy watchers don't expect a radical reversal from the proposed rules released in June. But if they go ahead as planned, says Carter, Maine's fishing community will bear the brunt of the impact. "We may become the endangered species here," he says.
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