FISHERYNATION.COM

January 21, 2021

The twelve-month project will evaluate fishing, legal, regulatory, technological challenges and opportunities of alternative lobster gear, which could reduce whale entanglements.

The Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF) has launched a comprehensive scoping project to assess ‘ropeless’ fishing gear in the New England lobster fishery. A first of its kind on an accelerated timeline, the project will interview dozens of fishermen, technologists, policy experts, and scientists to fully evaluate the challenges and opportunities of the new gear type. The project is funded in part by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the federal agency that manages our nation’s fisheries in federal waters.

‘Ropeless’ gear is a type of fishing gear that uses high-tech alternatives to the traditional buoy line equipment used in lobster, crab , and fish pots, and some groundfish fisheries. Most types of ropeless gear are designed to prevent entanglements with marine mammals including North Atlantic right whales using submerged buoys activated by time-release mechanisms or signals transmitted from the surface. While the body of prior research on ropeless gear has focused on the mitigation of risk to endangered marine life, there is still much to learn about the technological, legal, and regulatory ecosystems of ropeless gear as well as operational and economic unknowns for the region’s fishermen and coastal communities. DMF’s project will build our knowledge on each of these issues and produce a set of recommendations for future policy development and possible implementation.

“Ropeless gear represents a sea change for the fishermen who would use it or interact with it on the fishing grounds,” said Daniel McKiernan, director of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries. “As with any proposed experimental fishing gear type, ropeless gear warrants a thorough analysis, and the urgency of this important conservation and economic issue is motivating our agency to act quickly. Our project will close the loop on the subject by analyzing previously unaddressed opportunities, challenges, and requirements for the use of ropeless fishing gear, while taking the feedback of fishermen, conservationists, and all stakeholders seriously. This project puts the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in a central leadership role advancing marine mammal conservation and fisheries management in an intelligent, equitable, and collaborative manner.”

For more details about this project please click here or send an email to [email protected].

DMF’s On-Demand Fishing Gear Economic Modeling Report Released

The second phase of a multi-year project evaluating the operational, technological, legal/regulatory, and socioeconomic challenges and opportunities of alternative lobster gear is complete.

The Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF) has completed the second phase of a two-year project, funded by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to develop the first-of-its-kind evaluation of the operational costs of on-demand fishing gear technology by Massachusetts lobster fishermen.

On-demand fishing gear, commonly known as ropeless fishing gear, replaces traditional vertical buoy lines, which can result in entanglements with marine mammals including North Atlantic right whales, with new gear retrieval and marking methods. Most on-demand fishing gear systems consist of submerged buoyancy devices that are activated using time-release mechanisms or acoustic signals transmitted from the surface.

Previous economic studies focusing on on-demand gear have assessed the costs of purchasing the equipment, determining that outfitting the Massachusetts fishing fleet with the gear could cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. In our new report, Estimating the Costs of Using On-Demand Gear in Massachusetts Lobster Fisheries, we took a deep dive into the financial impacts of using the gear onboard lobster fishing vessels. The report, authored by DMF contractor Noah Oppenheim of Homarus Strategies LLC, Dr. Robert Griffin of SMAST, and Dr. Andrew Goode of the University of Maine, presents a new model that can be used to estimate these operational costs, providing important information that will assist in the consideration of fishery management scenarios involving entanglement risk-reducing fishing gear.

Because some types of on-demand gear require significantly more time to operate than traditional vertical line gear, the costs of using it were shown to be as high as the purchase price of the gear itself in many cases. The study estimates that a full transition to on-demand gear in Massachusetts lobster fisheries in the second half of the last decade would have resulted in a $40 million decline in lobster fishery revenue each year, or 3.5 million fewer pounds of lobster landed. The most significant cost impacts would be felt by the smallest fishing vessels operating closest to shore.

The Healy-Driscoll Administration, Massachusetts DMF, the Massachusetts Legislature, and the US Congress have each invested significant time, energy, and resources into studying on-demand fishing gear and achieving right whale conservation targets. As additional types of on-demand gear are developed and systematically tested, our new economic model will provide valuable information to assess costs and benefits to keep our iconic lobster fisheries sustainable and prosperous.

If you would like to learn more about this project, please contact [email protected]. For more information about DMF’s on-demand gear research and other protected species conservation programs, click here.

Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries (617) 626-1520  |  Contact Us  |  Find a Location

Maine’s lobstermen begin 2022 with a unique opportunity to fundamentally solve the whale entanglement issue. Throughout history technology has been used to improve our lives and solve complex problems. Invention has brought us cell phones, computers, satellites, and soon, self-driving cars and a base on the moon.

Technology can end the mortality of whales in the lobster fishery and simultaneously make the fishery more efficient, safer, and reduce gear conflict and gear loss. NOAA has granted the lobster fishery a ten- year time frame to substantially reduce risk to critically endangered right whales. Instead of spending millions on trying to litigate their way out of this, fishermen can innovate their way out of this.

For example, The Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries in Stonington is working through their skipper’s program to experiment with underwater “reflectors” on traps – permitting them to be located quickly on depth sounders. In unison, they are developing a list of “best practices for grappling up gear”, with the hope that these innovations would allow fishing without fishing lines in the new Maine closure.

In 2020, we tested “ropeless” gear systems produced by Edgetech and SMELTS, in the waters of Frenchman’s Bay and Mount Desert Rock. Ropeless fishing is a new technology that removes the buoys and end lines that entangle whales and replaces them with an acoustic release that when triggered brings up a stowed line and buoy or fills an airbag. During nine days of testing, we conducted over 60 deployments and had nearly 100% success in retrieval.

This year we established a ropless testing program with eight Maine lobster and gillnet fishermen, in partnership with the Northeast Fisheries Science Center and gear manufacturers. These pioneering fishermen are testing ropeless from Eastport to Kennebunkport, in 28-foot tides and 35 miles offshore, and are proving that these systems work in Maine.

Teledyne, a giant high-tech company who recently purchased FLIR and Ray Marine for $8 billion are one of over a dozen groups globally that are designing and engineering advanced ropeless and tracking systems. These groups are producing hull mounted acoustic transducers, smart buoys, sub-sea gear marking, and working to seamlessly integrate all this into fishermen’s chart plotters.

Society is willing to pay for this conversion because society wants fishermen and whales to co-exist. The greatest risk for whales has been 10 miles and more offshore so we should focus on federal license holders that make up 25% of the Maine fleet. Fishermen offshore use strings of traps with two end-lines and two buoys. We could remove one vertical line and replace it with a ropeless system and immediately get a 50% entanglement risk reduction.

In Canada, the Acadian Snow Crab fishermen are on the verge of going fully ropeless. This winter Massachusetts fishermen will be fishing ropeless in the right whale closed area. The Maine legislature could provide funding for innovation and testing. If we roll up oursleeves and work together, we can solve this conundrum and enhance Maine’s lobster fishery for generations to come.

Zack Klyver is the Science Director for Blue Planet Strategies and based in Bar Harbor. He grew up in a Maine fishing family and worked as a whale watch naturalist for 30 years.

For Immediate Release March 30, 2021
Misguided AB 534 ‘Pop-Up Crab Gear’ Will Hurt Whales, Fishing Families, Coastal Communities

Data Show Whale Populations Soaring, Virtually No Interactions with Crab Gear Crescent City, CA – Recently, Assembly Member Bonta of the California Legislature introduced a bill – AB 534 – that, if passed, would require faulty and failure prone ropeless fishing gear, as determined by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW), to be used when taking any species of fish for commercial or recreational purposes when using a trap.

That’s why a large, diverse coalition of fishery groups have mobilized in recent weeks to oppose AB 534. A letter signed by all the major fishing and seafood processing trade associations has been sent to Assembly Member Bonta and the Water and Parks Committee members who will vote on the legislation. A petition opposing the bill is being circulated widely on social media fishing pages and already has over 4,000 signatures.

AB 534 promotes an unproven and unviable fishing method that presents significant operational and safety risks to West Coast fisheries and that will result in more harm to marine life. The bill is an end-run around existing state and federal regulatory processes that are already addressing fishery interactions with humpback whales,” said Ben Platt, President of the California Coast Crab Association (CCCA).

“The commercial crab industry has worked tirelessly for more than a decade to mitigate interactions between our fishery and Endangered Species Act (ESA) listed animals, including Humpback whales, Blue whales, and Leatherback turtles. These measures have reduced marine mammal interactions with fishing gear to practically zero,” continued Platt. “While the optics of extremely rare interactions with existing crab gear are upsetting, the real danger to a robust and rapidly growing whale population is the so-called ‘ropeless’ gear being proposed by AB 534.That’s because as much as 20
percent of this gear is lost or irretrievable, which litters the ocean and greatly increases, NOT decreases, the risk of entanglement for whales and turtles.”

The proposed bill is more restrictive than even the most protective marine mammal laws in the nation, the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) and the ESA. It would require the state to unnecessarily regulate commercial fishing, taking an end run around the regulatory process by mandating through statute an unworkable new technology which has zero support in the fisheries.

Humpback whales, the only ESA-listed marine mammal which has any potential co-occurrence with the crab fishery, are a robust and thriving population. The only significant non-naturally occurring mortality to whales off the CA coast is caused by large ship strikes. These cruise and cargo ships kill between 50-150 whales a year, yet the Humpback whale population is still expanding at a rate of 8-10 percent annually, according to the Cascadia Research Collective (CRC). That means 575 new animals will be added to the population just this year.

“When the Center for Biological Diversity first sued CDFW in 2018 over the interaction issue, there were thought to be 2,200 Humpback whales, but recent official revisions to the population count shows more than 7,200 migrating off the West Coast,” said Platt.

“The California Dungeness crab fishery has had zero confirmed interactions with Humpbacks in the current 2021 season, and only one confirmed interaction with a whale during the 2020 season, and that whale was released unharmed. Our fishery has zero impact on the species, and in fact, we are hopeful Humpbacks will soon be removed from the Endangered Species List.

“This is a huge success story, and in light of it, AB 534 constitutes a solution in the absence of any problem,” continued Platt. “And because the crab fishery is our most widely shared and economically important fishery, the new bill threatens the continuation of the entire West Coast commercial fishing industry. Most fishermen and seafood buyers will not be able to stay in business without a viable crab season. The long-term effects on the rural coastal communities of California, which rely heavily on the crab industry, will be devastating.”

“I’ve been buying and selling live crabs for more than a decade, including year-round delivery to many Asian restaurants and seafood markets in Assembly Member Bonta’s own district, and I can tell you his bill will make it extremely challenging for all of us to survive economically,” said George Lay, owner of Ocean King Fish. “The Asian community is all about traditions, especially live Dungeness crab; it’s at every family gathering. AB 534 will price live crab out of reach for a lot of families, essentially killing this tradition and many businesses in the process.”

Further, the cost for the three ropeless gear types being most aggressively pushed range between $720 and $2,500 per device. This means that a permit owner with a 500-trap tier allotment must spend between $360,000 and $1,255,000 to switch from the existing gear to “pop-up” gear. By comparison, a 500-trap allotment today, including all traps, lines, buoys, and bait jars, will cost between $80,000 and $125,000.

“Even the most successful crab boat owners will not be able to afford to switch to ‘pop- up’ traps,” said Pratt. “This is a total non-starter for this fishery, and crabbers are not interested in wasting time and money on a gear type that won’t work and will bankrupt them.”

For further evidence that AB 534 is unneeded – and indeed dangerous – the successful rules and practices developed over the past decade were in partnership with Director Bonham and the CDFW, Chairman Crowfoot and the Ocean Protection Council, Senator Mike McGuire and his Joint Committee in Fisheries and Aquaculture, and stakeholder groups including the Dungeness Crab Task Force, the Whale Working Group, the California Coast Crab Association and other stakeholders.

These measures include strict trap limits which "cap" the number of traps which can be deployed in the fishery; a Whale Working Group to assess risk and recommend in- season management measures to avoid interactions with the fishery; an enforceable Safe Practice Guideline for crab gear; a coastwide, enforceable Lost Gear Retrieval Program; and, most recently, a CCCA boat-based whale surveying pilot project to help reduce cost and manpower burden on CDFW, while increasing coverage of critical marine life concentration reporting to avoid co-occurrence with the fishery.

“Unfortunately, California regulators so far have not been willing to change the regulations to reflect the higher whale population numbers or push back seriously against the NGO attacks on our coastal fishing communities. The only gear type they have seriously considered is ‘pop-up’ gear, which has proven to be extremely cost prohibitive, impractical, and ineffective, and results in more risk to marine mammals, not less,” said Platt.

“There is already an existing process underway under Section 10 of the ESA to implement a Conservation Plan to protect ESA-listed species along California’s coast. That plan will also comply with the MMPA. The ESA and the MMPA are the ‘gold standard’ for the protection of marine mammals. It is not helpful—and not protective for marine mammals—for the state to have to deal with unnecessary and ill-advised distractions from completing those federal processes,” said Ryan Steen, attorney with Stoel Rives LLP who represents CCCA and specializes in the ESA and MMPA.

About the California Coast Crab Association

The CCCA is a non-profit 501(c)(6) trade organization composed of individual crab boat owners, hired captains and Dungeness crab buyers. The CCCA board of directors is made up of nine member fishermen and crab buyers with a combined 240 years of experience in the crab fishery. Our diverse membership includes the smallest operators with skiffs up to the largest crab boats on the West Coast, and our member-buyers range from small live crab peddlers to the largest distributor of seafood on the West Coast.

The CCCA was formed in May of 2019 after the disastrous out-of-court settlement agreement in CBD vs Bonham, which created new, highly restrictive, and unfair restrictions for the California Dungeness crab fishery. Dungeness crab is the most widely shared and economically important fishery to the West Coast commercial fishing industry, but the new ESA mandates created by CBD vs Bonham are threatening the viability of the fishery and the economic health of California's coastal communities.

Since formation, the CCCA has been working hard with the crab fishing industry and the CDFW to find workable solutions to meet the mutually shared goals of protecting our most valuable fishery and minimizing interaction between marine mammals and our
fishing gear. In recent years, the commercial fishing fleet has been proactive in addressing important issues by initiating legislation through our Dungeness Crab Task Force to create new rules, including tiered trap limits, a Whale Entanglement Working Group, a statewide Lost Gear Retrieval Program and Safe Practice Guidelines for fishermen. More information at www.cacoastcrabassociation.org.

Media Contacts:
Ray Young
Razor Sharp PR
916-505-4245
[email protected]

Ben Platt
President, CCCA
707-367-0385
[email protected]