Ropeless gear gains new urgency in bid to save right whales

By Doug Fraser 

Posted Nov 1, 2020 

The sight of a field of brightly colored lobster buoys bobbing on an otherwise featureless ocean is as ironically New England as a lobster roll. These buoys number in the millions, and are each connected by a line to the traps below creating a maze, in some areas a kind of wall, that whales, including the world’s most endangered great whale, must navigate in its search for food.

With over 80% of North Atlantic right whales bearing scars of entanglements in fishing line, the task is formidable, and eliminating some, if not all, of these buoys and lines has been the subject of lobster management and litigation.

For the past two years, it has also been the subject of intense research as scientists in the U.S. and Canada race to find an affordable and reliable technology that will allow lobstermen and other fixed-gear fishermen to find and retrieve their gear without running a line from the surface to the bottom.

Before the first ropeless buoy workshop in 2018, fishing without a buoy line was considered fantasy or science fiction, said Sean Brillant, manager of marine programs for the Canadian Wildlife Federation.

Brillant, the current chairman of the Ropeless Consortium, was speaking via a videoconference link from the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium’s annual meeting last week.

“Most of us were being laughed at in the face when we talked about ropeless technology,” Brillant said. “The distance we’ve come between now and then is very impressive. It is no longer fantasy or science fiction, but a reality.” 

That featureless ocean can hide a lot, and the challenge is to reliably mark the spot where fishermen can deploy their gear, be able to find it again and retrieve it. Layered onto that is the problem of competing fishermen and fisheries. How can fishermen let others know their gear is on the bottom so that they will not put down pots on top of others or tow a net or scallop dredge through the pots destroying them?

Research by scientists and manufacturers into buoy technology has divided into two camps: a bag resting with the lobster pots on the bottom that inflates on command and rises to the surface, and a trap mechanism that releases a buoy when it receives a signal from a vessel overhead. 

Gear location technology has also separated into two camps. One is an automatically recorded GPS location triggered when a fisherman deploys his gear that is shared to a database that can be downloaded by other fishermen, fisheries enforcement and others. The problem with that system, according to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution senior scientist Mark Baumgartner, is that gear moves with ocean currents and storms.

The second system being tested is one where the gear locates itself, communicating with navigation systems on passing vessels, much like a cellphone finds its location based on signal strength between cell towers, Baumgartner said.  

All of these technologies, and variants, are being tested in both the U.S. and Canada, and are beginning to be used commercially by snow crab fishermen in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Brillant said the number of trials of various technologies was now approaching 1,000. 

WHOI researcher Michael Moore said a $900,000 grant from Seaworld Busch Gardens Conservation Fund helped create a gear cache where offshore and inshore lobster fishermen could borrow ropeless technology to try it for themselves.

“Last year, at the same consortium, only a handful had used this technology and only a few times,” Baumgartner said. “To get to the number of trials that have gone on in the last 12 months is extraordinary.”

“I feel like the snowball is beginning to roll downhill,” Brillant said.

 There is also the matter of cost, perhaps the biggest challenge to widespread use. 

“Cost is the first thing fishermen mention,” said Baumgartner, who is the incoming chairman of the ropeless consortium. 

Brillant and Baumgartner thought it was critical that the technology be standardized, like cellphone technology, so that one standard device could find and identify gear on the bottom automatically and to allow more manufacturers access to drive down price.

Both agreed that the real driver of innovation and acceptance would be the need for widespread closures of fishing grounds as right whale populations continued to decline. Fishermen would be allowed into these areas only if they could prove they wouldn’t cause any harm.

“Closure drives acceptance in Canada,” Brillant said. “Fishermen are innovators, problem solvers. They are all about getting back out on the water, all about gaming the system, and they are going to find a way to do it.”

Fishermen quickly divide into two camps, Baumgartner said.

“Guys who are dealing with closures now are the ones who want to try it and see if it will work, and guys who aren’t (faced with closures) are saying they are not going to try it and it’s never going to happen,” he said. “We can do a lot of outreach to fishermen who aren’t closed down, but it’s not going to be real to them until a closure comes along.”

That possibility is becoming more real as the region struggles to save the right whale from extinction. The latest estimated population numbers were unveiled at the  consortium meeting last week, and many were shocked to find it had dropped by more than 40 individuals in just a year to 356 animals believed alive at the end of 2019.

“I was alarmed by the numbers,” said Philip Hamilton, a research scientist at the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life at the New England Aquarium.

Hamilton manages the right whale photo identification catalog that attempts to track every living right whale from birth to death through photographs submitted by whale-watch vessels, researchers and other mariners using unique identifying marks like the patterns created by white lice living on patches of hardened skin.

Hamilton went to the catalog and searched for photos of reproductive aged females that were seen alive since 2017, the year that 17 animals died from ship strikes and entanglement. Researchers believe there are fewer than 100 females left in the population, and Hamilton could find only 68. 

While Baumgartner and Brillant think more closures are inevitable, Moore countered that it’s getting harder to find right whales to enact closures as climate change warms the Gulf of Maine, altering the traditional feeding grounds. 

“If we rely solely on closures, and opening (closed areas) to such things as ropeless (technology) we won’t achieve the dramatic turnaround we have to achieve,” Moore said. “In the short, medium, and long term we need to broaden the efforts that both countries are making to slow vessels down and reduce entanglement risk. Without that, it’s too little, too late.”