‘Ropeless’ fishing has promise to protect whales but adds costs, complications to industry

Text from article by Mary Lhowe in ecoRI News.

A handful of Rhode Island lobster fishermen are working this season with federal regulators to use and study some complex and early stage equipment that is intended, eventually, to greatly reduce entanglements and deaths of whales.

The experimental equipment for this so-called “ropeless” fishing would eliminate the vertical ropes — or “lines” — running down the water column from buoys on the surface to lines connecting a series of traps on the seafloor. The existing function of buoys and vertical lines — to find and retrieve traps — would be replaced under a new system by computerized acoustic signals from boats to the seafloor and geopositioning via cell signals or satellites.

Using federal experimental fishing permits, three Port Judith-based lobstermen are struggling to use the new gear, borrowed from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), a branch of NOAA Fisheries.

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