MONHEGAN ISLAND, Maine : An emerging technology to fish for lobsters virtually ropeless to prevent whale entanglements is exciting conservationists, but getting a frigid reception from harvesters worried it will drive them out of business and upend their way of life.
"My guess is for a lot of Maine lobstermen it is just a really scary idea," said Matt Weber, a lobsterman from Monhegan Island in Maine."And it is all the more scary because none of us feel it is going to help ." To address the problem, the U.S. and Canadian governments have imposed new regulation on lobster and crab fisheries in recent years, including the use of weak links in rope that break if a whale swims through, color-coded rope for tracing, adding more traps per buoy line, and zone closures during whale migration.“It doesn’t look like the solutions we’ve come up with are effective,” said Charles Mayo, senior scientist at the Center for Coastal Studies in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
But lobstermen, particularly in Maine where 80 per cent of U.S. lobster is caught, are not enthusiastic. Lobstermen say they are concerned about the high overhead costs of switching to ropeless equipment, and fear inevitable technical glitches that could result in tens of thousands of dollars of traps lost at the bottom of the sea.