On August 13th, NOAA Fisheries announced that it has awarded $9 million to four organizations to develop and test technological advancements that will reduce the number of ship strikes and fishing gear entanglements on North Atlantic right whales along the U.S. eastern seaboard.
Of the $ 9 million, nearly $7 million was awarded to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission to develop and test the removal of buoy lines in fisheries that create an entanglement risk to large whales. For fixed gear pot and trap fisheries, the only effective technology to remove vertical lines is through the use of on-demand, also known as ropeless, systems.
On-demand fishing does not have a vertical line in the water column when harvesters are not hauling the gear. Therefore, it entirely eliminates entanglement risk to large whales since there is no line to swim into. When harvesters are ready to check the traps, they use an acoustic device that sends a command to the on-demand system which then either releases a buoy line or fills up a lift-bag. These can then be retrieved by the crew along with their traps.
The three other organizations (Duke University’s Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab, Marine Ecology and Telemetry Research, and The Flamming lab at the New Jersey Institute of Technology) were awarded a combined $2.8 million to develop new tagging and population modeling methods that will improve our understanding of whale movement and distribution patterns. Through increased accuracy in movement models, fisheries and maritime transport managers can design more refined spatial management measures to more effectively avoid interactions of large whales, particularly North Atlantic right whales, with fishing gear and ships.
To read more about the funds allocation, visit the NOAA Fisheries press release below.
To learn more about the current state of the large whale entanglement problem and on-demand systems, visit our Pot and Trap Gear Innovation Page.