Endangered Whales Get Lifeline From High-Tech Lobster Traps

Mr. Martin is one of more than two dozen lobstermen now testing new, ropeless fishing gear designed to protect the North Atlantic right whale, a docile giant whose numbers in recent years have plunged, from an estimated 481 individuals in 2011 to 340 in 2021. The endangered whales can have trouble feeding or breathing—sometimes with deadly results—after becoming entangled in the ropes that secure the lobster traps to the buoys. 

The hope is that the ropeless gear will help ensure the whales’ survival while keeping the fishing industry afloat. 

Several kinds of ropeless gear are being evaluated in the program, which includes a total of 30 lobstermen actively testing the gear and 20 who are waiting to join their ranks. The program aims to identify which gear works best and might be scaled up for broad commercial use. 

The program is funded by the federal government, conservation groups and philanthropies and managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration with lobstermen from the mid-Atlantic to Maine. It has been lending gear to lobstermen since late 2019 and is expected to continue for another two years, at which point federal authorities could decide to make ropeless traps mandatory during times of the year when the whales are present in the area.

The effort has continued amid a four-year legal battle pitting conservation groups against federal officials and the fishing industry. A federal judge ruled in July that NOAA hadn’t done enough to protect the right whale and in a subsequent ruling gave agency officials two years to come up with a plan to reduce whale deaths by 90 percent. 

“NOAA Fisheries is aware of the decision and will review the judge’s ruling with the Department of Justice,” a NOAA spokeswoman said.

Lobster industry groups in Maine and Massachusetts dispute scientists’ findings that entanglements are the primary cause of whale deaths and have said they plan to appeal the judge’s ruling.

“Maine lobstermen are not driving the right whale toward extinction, but we are being punished by unsound federal rules that will wreck this industry but won’t recover the whale,” Kristan Porter, president of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, said in an Oct. 11 statement.

As the legal fight continues, lobstermen like Mr. Martin are working with scientists and engineers to find middle ground. 

The ropeless gear program complements a similar effort at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in nearby Woods Hole, Mass. There, scientists and engineers are developing technologies that could protect the whales from another threat: being struck by ships.

One Woods Hole team has devised a shipboard thermal-imaging system that detects whales by heat from their spouts and alerts ship captains to their presence. Another has created a network of eight moored buoys and two underwater drones along the East Coast that listens for whale sounds and then beams information about the whales’ locations to ships in the area. 

“It’s kind of like a school zone with flashing lights for whales,” said Mark Baumgartner, a senior scientist at Woods Hole who is involved in the effort.

The acoustic-sensor buoys pose little threat of entanglement because there are few of them and because the stout lines that moor them to the seafloor are nearly rigid and thus unlikely to ensnare whales, according to Dr. Baumgartner. Lobster-trap lines are thinner.

Lobstermen have long used buoys to mark the location of their traps. The ropeless systems are designed to limit whales’ risk of entanglement by keeping the buoys and their ropes stowed underwater on the traps until it is time to check the traps. 

An acoustic signal triggers the yellow buoy to rise to the surface. Mr. Martin tracks the traps using a GPS app.

Mr. Martin demonstrated one of the systems on a recent trip aboard his boat, Resolve. He navigated to the general location of his traps using a GPS app, then sent an acoustic signal 50 feet down via a device mounted on the boat’s hull. The signal triggered the release of a pair of buoys, which then rose to the surface trailing their tethers. Once he hooked the lines, he used a winch to hoist the traps onto the boat.

Mr. Martin, who is also a paid consultant to NOAA, said he has become comfortable using ropeless gear and is using his expertise with it to advise other lobstermen. But even when the gear works as expected, he said, its cost might be prohibitive for many. Ropeless gear made by EdgeTech, a West Wareham, Mass., manufacturer, costs $4,600 for the acoustic release unit on the lobster-trap line, plus another $4,000 for shipboard electronic equipment that includes a portable acoustic transducer that can be dunked in the water. A hull-mounted transducer costs an extra $4,500, according to the company’s sales manager, Rob Morris. All the ropeless gear is now paid for by federal funds and donations from conservation groups

Another challenge that could stand in the way of broad use of ropeless gear involves alerting other fishermen to the presence of lobster traps—whose location, in the absence of buoys, can be harder to identify. Conflict between lobstermen with fixed gear and fishermen who drag nets along the seafloor has long been a problem along the New England coast, federal officials said.

Computer scientists at the Allen Institute for AI—a Seattle-based nonprofit research organization founded by late

Microsoft

co-founder

Paul Allen

—are developing an app to share the location of ropeless gear with other fishermen and regulators, according to Henry Milliken, supervisory research fishery biologist at NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole.

“Everybody wants to see a solution to this problem,” Mr. Milliken said. “They want to keep the fisherman fishing and the whales protected.”

Mr. Martin, 57 years old, said lobstermen have always adopted new technologies to make a living on the water and that ropeless gear was just the latest example. “I don’t like change, but you are kind of forced to change,” he said. “If you don’t adapt, you are all done.” 

Write to Eric Niiler at [email protected]