November 26, 2019 — A panel of scientists gathered in Woods Hole, Mass., last week to evaluate a controversial “decision support tool” used by NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service to design proposed rules aimed at protecting endangered North Atlantic right whales and other large marine mammals from entanglement with fishing gear.
Last spring, the NOAA Fisheries Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team (TRT) recommended that the fisheries service adopt new rules that would, among other requirements, force Maine lobstermen to remove from the water 50 percent of the vertical lines used to connect traps on the bottom to marker buoys on the surface. The team includes fishermen, scientists, representatives of conservation organizations and fishery management officials from the federal government and from every state from Maine to Florida.
When the fisheries service made its decision last spring on how best to reduce the risk to whales, it relied on a “Decision Support Tool” based on a poll of TRT members rather than extensive data collected over the years as to where the whales are found and how much interaction there has been between them and Maine lobster gear.
Data collected by NOAA show that since the beginning of 2017 70 percent of right whale deaths attributable to human-related causes (21) have occurred in Canadian waters while just 30 percent (nine) have occurred in U.S. waters. Not all of those deaths were clearly attributable to entanglement with fishing gear.