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.