As the lobster industry continues to deal with the changeover of their floating groundline to less durable and more expensive sinking line, they are also looking at the possibility of restrictions to their vertical endlines.

The sinking groundline requirements of the Final Whale Rule went into effect in April 2009. Sinking groundlines are required in many areas to comply with the federal regulation aimed at reducing the entanglement potential for large whales.

Later in April, the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team met to pursue the question of endlines. The team agreed to a five-year planning process to better define the risk of endlines to whales and develop ways to reduce that risk.

Groundline regulation was hastened by an increase in the number of injuries and mortalities to large whales, particularly right whales, which triggered a provision in the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act to provide additional measures to reduce the risk of entanglement.

The process for drafting a groundline regulation was starved for data, said David Gouveia, a NMFS Northeast Regional Office planner in Gloucester, Mass.

“We were a little under the gun,” said Gouveia.

With the groundline rule now in place to lessen the risk of entanglement, it is expected that the team will have enough time to develop a better informed rule for endlines.

“Unlike groundlines, we have a little more time to move forward,” he said.

The timeline has the team developing a proposed rule by early 2013, with final implementation scheduled for early 2014.

The team, made up of fishermen, state managers, scientists, and conservationists, is tasked with helping the National Marine Fisheries Service to develop measures to reduce risk to large whales from vertical lines.

NMFS is trying to avoid a blanket rule for endlines for the East Coast, and is focusing on the possibility of developing endline restrictions for the smaller, discreet areas where there is a high occurrence of both endlines and large whales.

“The only thing contingent on the five-year process is if there’s an entanglement that is clearly linked to one of the fisheries we manage,” Gouveia said. “That would put us on an accelerated process.”

NMFS conducted meetings for the Northeast Sub-Group and the Mid- and South-Atlantic Sub-Group of the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team in April, with the objective of brainstorming possible approaches to reducing risk associated with vertical lines.

The team agreed there are significant data gaps related to vertical line concentration, whale distribution and entanglement locations. NMFS said they would take steps to develop better information both for the Northeast and the Mid- and South-Atlantic.

NMFS representatives also said they hope to avoid a one-size-fits-all solutions.

The schedule for now includes the development of vertical line and whale distribution co-occurrence overlays in time for the team’s next meeting in April 2010 for the Northeast and April 2011 for the Mid- and South Atlantic. There will be discussion and refinement of possible management options and associated steps between May 2010 and April 2012; and identification of preferred option and proposed rule between May 2012 and April 2013, with a published final rule in place no later than April 2014.

Work to date has focused on the lobster, gillnet and other trap/pot fisheries in the Northeast, but the intention is to more fully map the co-occurrence along the full Eastern Seaboard in the next few years.

The co-occurrence map, being undertaken by Industrial Econo- mics in Cambridge, Mass., will be used as a base for layering in other risk factors – such as whale species, age, behavior and residency time, season, water depth, habitat/ oceanography, density of vertical lines, and gear type and modifications – to paint a more accurate picture of high-risk areas.

According to the team’s April report, team members recommended that NMFS take stock of the impact of recent changes in fishing practices – from market forces and management actions to sinking groundline implementation – when assessing the risk associated with vertical line concentrations. This was seen as particularly important given the recent reductions in traps both in coastal and offshore waters.

Team members agreed that states must, at a minimum, provide information on the total number of trips fished; total number of endlines; traps per end line; line depth; monthly data; independent verification/auditing to confirm accuracy of data; and enough geographic specificity to meaningfully support the co-occurrence model.

Northeast team members focused much of their discussionon

Maine because of the extent of fishing effort here as well as the gaps in current data collection.
A wide range of possible management options to address vertical line reductions were discussed. They included full or seasonal closures, gear modifications/markings and effort caps, education/outreach, revisions to problematic state regulations and longer trap lines.

Both sub-groups recommended approaches that tap into fishermen’s creativity and avoid top-down requirements.

The report says that fishermen strongly suggested that future NMFS actions be focused on “hot spots.”

There was discussion about the viability of glow rope and other sonar or visual markings, bottom link breakaways, and the possibility of opening up the Great South Channel, a restricted area presently seasonally closed to trap/pot fisheries, to fishermen willing to experiment with line-free fishing techniques.

The team has heard some “pie in the sky” ideas, said Gouveia, such as lineless fishing that uses an acoustic release to bring up gear.

The technological and economic feasibility of such out-of-the-box ideas is unknown, but everything is on the table, he said.

The five-year process might fall by wayside, he said, if there are more large whale entanglements.

That partly depends on how well the sinking groundline works.

“We believe the sinking groundline will hugely reduce risk, but no one knows how big an effect it will have,” Gouveia said. “What’s afforded us the time here is that we haven’t had a new entanglement linked back to the lobster fishery. But if we do, we’ll have to expedite our rule-making. It will force us to move a lot quicker, and it won’t afford us the time to collect the data we need.”