Months after Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch, a sustainable seafood advisory list, red-listed American lobster fisheries in the U.S. and Canada due to the risks they pose to the endangered North Atlantic right whales, Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF) director Dan McKiernan struck back by calling the decision “counterproductive.” The Times reached out to McKiernan in September but he did not provide comments after initial email correspondence.
“This unfortunate decision is counterproductive to ongoing efforts by DMF and the industry to further reduce entanglement risk. Throughout this past November, state and federal officials working with teams of fishermen met to devise plans to further reduce entanglement risk as mandated by recent federal court decisions. Then, in early December, the federal Large Whale Take Reduction Team met for two days to review and combine these into regional strategies affecting all East Coast fixed gear fishermen,” McKiernan wrote in a statement.
Seafood Watch advises consumers on what seafood should be avoided or purchased based on whether procurement practices posed a risk to endangered marine life. For right whales, a species with an estimated 340 individuals left and fewer than 100 breeding females, a concern related to fishing includes entanglements from ropes.
However, McKiernan wrote that advising consumers not to buy lobsters, crabs, and fish caught with buoyed fixed fishing gears is “a colossal mistake.”
“As fishermen are adjusting to new regulations and making personal sacrifices, they need our support. Fishing will become less profitable due to the costs incurred by the need to comply with complex regulations to protect right whales,” McKiernan wrote. “This is not the time to strip the industry of much-needed revenues for their hard and honest work delivering seafood. This is not the time to turn our backs on these small-scale, owner-operated, family businesses. If consumers heed the call to boycott these fish and shellfish, our local fisheries may not survive. The economic, cultural, and historic value of these fisheries would be lost.”
American lobster fishing is a livelihood source for a number of Vineyarders and a popular summertime food.
Wes Brighton, an Island lobsterman, told The Times regulations cut the number of traps with lines in the water by half.
“Independent family fishing businesses contort to each new demanding rule required in the name of doing our part to be sure our gear is safe for right whales, and yet it seems to be never enough,” he said.
Brighton said “the inconvenient truth” was that vessel strikes cause more harm than fishing gear in U.S. waters. However, he said the shipping lobby was “too powerful to alter its impact.”
“It is far easier to vilify a 400-year-old fishery with limited advocacy and righteously devalue lobster so that our ability to remain viable and continue to improve and innovate expensive fishing gear is more difficult to afford and or to remain in business,” Brighton said, adding that Seafood Watch’s red-listing was “yet another destructive aggression to our humble fishery.”