The Maine Lobstermen’s Association announced Monday, 27 September, it has filed a lawsuit against the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Secretary of Commerce in U.S. District Court to challenge new regulations intended to protect endangered North Atlantic right whales.
The new regulations are in response to the ongoing decline of the highly endangered whale species, which is undergoing what NOAA has dubbed an “unusual mortality event.” The rule is intended to reduce interactions between fishing industries and right whales to avoid entanglement-related incidents.
Those rules, the MLA said, are “draconian and fundamentally flawed,” and will “all but eliminate the Maine lobster fishery yet still fail to save endangered right whales.”
“NMFS got it wrong. The science does not support the agency’s plan,” MLA Executive Director Patrice McCarron said. “Using worst case scenarios that hold Maine lobstermen accountable for right whale deaths occurring in Canada won’t help protect right whales, but it will decimate Maine’s lobster industry.”
The MLA said that the science points to the Maine lobster fishing industry having almost no impact on the right whales, especially when compared to other industries. The Canadian snow crab fishery has been accused of having an impact on the whales, to the point that U.S. senators have called on Canada to increase its efforts to curtail entanglements in the fishery. At one time, U.S. conservation groups even called for an import ban on Canadian snow crab.
In addition to the snow crab fishery, ship-strikes are another issue that both Canada and NOAA have acknowledged, but an Oceana study found significant gaps in compliance with voluntary slowdowns in Canada.
MLA President Kristan Porter, who fishes for lobster out of Cutler, Maine, said the reason lobstermen are being targeted by regulations is because “it is easy.”
“We’re a bunch of small, owner‐operated businesses. Taking on Canada and the shipping industry is hard,” Porter said. “Maine lobstermen understand the need to protect right whales, but if NMFS really wants to save right whales, they should be going after the things we know are actually killing them rather than dismantling our fishery piece by piece.”
The MLA complaint said Maine's lobster industry has very little, if any, quantifiable impact on right whales.
“NMFS’s mandate ignores the reality that the Maine lobster fishery already has an extremely low incidence of interactions with right whales due, in part, to a suite of mitigation measures that have been implemented for many years,” the complaint said. “Reducing its already low impact by another 98 percent is not possible without driving most of Maine’s harvesters out of business permanently.”
The announcement of the lawsuit comes after the Maine Department of Marine Resources said it planned to get involved with an existing lawsuit against the regulations. The MLA is also an intervenor in the lawsuit, the association said.
Photo courtesy of Dan Logan/Shutterstock
