February 14, 2020 — Maine officials said that the National Marine Fisheries Service’s rejection of its submitted right whale plan didn’t take enough of the state’s efforts into account.
The NMFS rejected the state’s plan via letter earlier this week. According to NMFS, the state’s plan only reduces risk to right whales by roughly 52 percent, short of the 60 percent that the Take Reduction Team was aiming for.
January 13, 2020 — The Maine lobster industry is expected to have another year with more than 100 million pounds landed, a significant number during a year fraught with bait shortages and other challenges.
Maine Department of Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Keliher gave the estimate to Maine Public’s “Maine Calling” radio show. More precise numbers are typically made available in March, during the state’s annual Fishermen’s Forum.
January 10, 2020 — Maine’s top fisheries official says lobstermen likely landed about 100 million pounds of the state’s signature crustacean in 2019, which is about 16 percent less than the year before but not as bad as had been predicted.
“Earlier in the season it looked like it could be bad,” said Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Keliher on Maine Public’s “Maine Calling” radio show. “They caught a lot of lobsters in the last few months of the year and made up a lot of ground.”
Keliher told the show’s hosts that initial landing reports suggest the lobster industry would finish 2019 with a 100 million-pound harvest. If that number holds, it would be 16 percent lower than 2018’s 119.6 million pounds landed, and nearly 15 percent less than the five-year average.
That year-end lobster harvest would be the lowest Maine has recorded since 2010, when fishermen landed 96.2 million pounds of lobster. The catch every other year of the decade has surpassed 100 million pounds, with a peak harvest of 132.6 million pounds in 2016.
January 8, 2020 — Nearly 10 months ago, Department of Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Keliher shocked Maine lobstermen with an announcement that the National Marine Fisheries Service had determined that right whale mortalities resulting from interactions with fishing gear would have to be reduced by 60 to 80 percent.
In late spring, the fisheries service proposed rules recommended by its Large Whale Take Reduction Team that would force lobstermen to reduce the number of vertical buoy lines in the water by as much as 50 percent and use weaker rope.
Those rules raised safety and practicality concerns within the fishing community and many lobstermen said they would have little or no impact on whale mortalities in the Gulf of Maine.
Last week, DMR submitted a detailed counterproposal to the federal fisheries agency that, according to Keliher, addressed those issues.
“This proposal is the result of a rigorous analysis of data combined with critically important input from industry,” Keliher said Friday. “The outcome is a plan that will not only protect right whales, but will also safeguard the lives and livelihoods of Maine fishermen.”
January 6, 2020 — Maine is making its voice heard as a federal effort to stop right whales from dying takes shape.
On Friday, the state’s Department of Marine Resources released a plan it says protects the endangered whales and lobstermen, whom the feds say need to do more to prevent traps and lines from killing the whale.
Maine’s suggestions include having lobstermen use ropes with weak points the whales could easily break and calls for a 25% reduction in the amount of vertical trap lines.
“It’s been a really difficult process, no question about it,” said Patrick Keliher, commissioner of Maine’s DMR. “We spent a lot of time with the industry, we made some people happy and some people mad.”
January 3, 2020 — Maine has finalized a proposal to protect endangered right whales from entanglement in lobster fishing gear, but it also gives state regulators the freedom to adopt alternative protections to keep lobstermen and their regional fishing practices alive.
The heart of the state plan is similar to one panned by the lobster industry last fall – cutting the number of buoy lines that could entangle a whale by setting a minimum number of traps fished on each line and requiring the use of lines with weak points to help entangled whales break free.
New to the plan is Maine’s bid to get federal approval for flexibility to allow alternative forms of fishing restrictions in cases where the statewide application of federal whale protections would put lobstermen in physical danger or run needlessly afoul of regional fishing practices.
That flexibility is the cornerstone of Maine Department of Marine Resources’ plan, said Commissioner Pat Keliher. Careful use of alternative protections that achieve the same conservation benefit could help protect whales, fishermen and the state’s $485 million a year industry, Keliher said.
“We want to develop a process that would allow us to mix and match regulatory changes to achieve the same risk reduction for whales while taking into account fishermen safety, traditional fishing practices, and fleet diversity,” Keliher said. “It would be a blend of giving and taking that achieves the same goal.”
November 14, 2019 — Efforts to find consensus over how to protect endangered North Atlantic right whales from entanglement in fishing gear without decimating the Maine lobster industry took a blow last week.
The Maine Lobstermen’s Association (MLA) announced that it would not support a plan developed by the Department of Marine Resources “because it seeks reductions that exceed the documented risk posed by the Maine lobster fishery” and “creates unresolved safety and operational challenges for some sectors of the lobster industry,” MLA Executive Director Patrice McCarron said in an email Saturday.
The MLA decision came late last week after DMR Commissioner Patrick Keliher held a series of meetings with lobstermen in Ellsworth, Waldoboro and South Portland.
The meetings were held to present the department’s response to a proposal by the National Marine Fisheries Service that would require a 50 percent reduction in the number of vertical endlines, which connect lobster traps to buoys on the surface, used by Maine lobstermen.
The goal, according to NMFS, was to reduce the risk of right whale entanglement in fishing gear by 60 percent.
Throughout the summer, DMR developed an alternative plan that called for many Maine lobstermen to “trawl up” by fishing more traps in strings attached to one or two endlines.
November 8, 2019 — “I don’t like this,” isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement for a government proposal — particularly when those words are coming from the head of the state agency making the proposal.
But that’s what Maine Department of Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Keliher told lobstermen at a meeting in Ellsworth Monday night, where he outlined the department’s new plan to reduce the risk posed to endangered North Atlantic right whales from Maine lobster gear.
While Keliher’s presentation may have lacked enthusiasm, it included a healthy dose of pragmatic reality.
A couple of fishermen did signal a willingness to give the state proposal a try, but frustration seemed the prevailing response Monday night. Keliher clearly shared some of that frustration, but correctly pointed out that the industry and the state find themselves facing pressure from the federal government and in the courts, where conservation groups are suing for stronger action to protect the endangered right whale.
The state plan is a counter offer of sorts to a federal proposal that would require a 50 percent reduction in the vertical lines in the water that connect to lobster traps. Keliher said the state plan would amount to a 25 percent line reduction.
November 7, 2019 — The U.S. state of Maine’s lobster industry, in addition to some state officials, are pushing back against proposals requiring fewer vertical lines in the industry in order to protect the endangered North Atlantic right whale.
At a meeting on 6 November, Maine’s Department of Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Keliher called the state’s counter-proposal – using weaker rope and more traps per line in deep waters – the “line in the sand,” according to the Portland Press Herald. The state has been fighting back against the federal government’s proposal to reduce lines by 50 percent, a proposal that the state’s governor, Janet Mills, called “foolish.”
November 6, 2019 — Calling a state proposal to reduce the amount of rope lobstermen use “a line in the sand,” Maine’s top fisheries official said Monday that he hoped the state plan generates data that absolves Maine’s lobster fishery from blame in right whale deaths.
Patrick Keliher, commissioner of the Maine Department of Marine Resources, told a group of fishermen Monday in Ellsworth that the state’s proposal for reducing the risk to whales of getting tangled in lobster fishing gear does not meet federal regulators’ goal of cutting the number of vertical buoy lines in the water by half. But he said the state’s plan focuses its fishing line reductions in deeper waters offshore, where whales are more likely to come into contact with fishing gear.
“The further offshore you go, the higher the [risk] goes up,” Keliher told roughly 100 people, most of them lobstermen, at The Grand Auditorium. “The way I look at it, this is Maine’s line in the sand.”
Monday’s meeting was the first of three the state is holding about its response to expected new federal regulations that would require lobstermen to use less fishing line and weaker rope from which entangled whales could more easily break free.