During the season when the weather in Cape Cod is forgiving, David Casoni drives his GMC truck with a small lobster puppet tied onto the grill to the Sandwich Marina. “Lobster, good food, plain and simple,” one of the stickers on his truck wrote. He loves being a lobsterman.
His fishing boat, Margaret M, was tied up at the quiet dock. It is a white wooden boat decorated with mint color. After decades of service, she shows some signs of age compared to the fiberglass vessels around her.
“I just got a new engine,” Casoni said.
The cabin on his boat is simple. A rusty steering wheel, throttle polished by days of using, and a gauge cluster framed in wood. GPS and radio systems were added later overhead to help navigate in the ocean. For him, the equipment for lobster fishing has almost remained the same for the past fifty years.
However, the recent change in policy brings many alterations to his career. Like many other lobstermen, he felt left out when the government made these changes.
New Policies for Protection
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), in Aug, 2021, announced the closure of several areas of the federal ocean in particular months from lobster fishing with gears with ropes. The limited water outside of Maine was supposed to be closed from Oct. 18 to January. From Feb. 2022 to Apr. 2022, two larger regions outside of Massachusetts will join in the ban.
The NOAA explained in the newsletter that it will be “the first in a series of phases to reduce the risk of entanglement to endangered right whales.”
However, the ban in Maine was halted under a federal judge’s ruling on Oct. 18.
Meanwhile, in the Commonwealth, the State issued a ban on lobstering in the water north and west of Cape Cod from February to April this year. The same ban also required the lobstermen to fish with ropes that are designed to break at 1,700 pounds of force to allow marine animals like right whales to escape once being entangled.
North Atlantic Right Whale, an endangered species:
The North Atlantic right whales have been listed under the endangered species act since 1970. With less than 370 individuals remaining according to NOAA, right whales are a rare sight to see for people living along the east coast of the continent.
They commonly calve in winter in the near-shore water of the southeast coast of the U.S. In summer, they migrate to the water between New England and Newfoundland to feed.
According to NOAA, climate change has significantly reduced the food availability for the species. It resulted in a dip in birthrate and forced them to migrate further north chasing their food source.
With the help of preservation, the number of right whales saw a gradual increase to almost 500 individuals. However, the number took an abrupt downturn during the past decade.
Certainties and uncertainties, are lobstering gears a major threat to the Right Whales?
Since 2017, NOAA has documented 34 abnormal mortality of right whales in the United States and Canada. The location where these animals were found spread along the east coast of the continent with two significant clusters: one to the south of Cape Cod, the other in the Gulf of St. Laurence.
NOAA noted that the number of carcasses found might be far less than the actual number of deaths of the whales each year. In some cases, the carcasses are too decomposed to perform a necropsy. Many more cases do not have a definite cause of death. In fact, only 8 out of 34 cases had a definite cause of death.
Most cases of death in Canada were attributed or suspected to be vessel strikes, and entanglement comes in second. Whilst in the United States, entanglement is the major cause of death.
The NOAA identified entanglement in commercial fishing gear as one of the major threats to north Atlantic Right Whales.
Beth Casoni, the Executive Director of Massachusetts Lobstermen Association, also the niece of David Casoni, argued that these entanglements are not likely to be caused by lobster fishing gears.
There is currently no study on how far these carcasses could have been traveled with the Gulf Stream before being found by people. However, in 1987, the carcasses of 14 humpback whales that were dead from poisoning were washed ashore to a relatively small region of coastline in Cape Cod. The finding suggests that these whales were found approximate to their location of death.
Amy Knowlton, a senior scientist of the Kraus Marine Mammal Conservation program, studied the North Atlantic right whale entanglement by analyzing the photos of the whales since 1980. Knowlton noted that 82.9% of the whales she examined bear scars due to entanglement and 59% of them were entangled more than once.
NOAA’s data shows that among 16 seriously injured cases documented, 14 of them were caused by entanglement. The origin of these gears is unknown.
A report written by Emily Greenhalgh from Anderson Cabot Center mentioned that entanglement typically does not kill the whales immediately. Instead, it reduces the survivability of whales by exhausting and slowly starving them.
Casoni visited the NOAA’s gear shed with several Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association Board members and examined the gears that tangled the whales’ carcasses and noticed that all the majority of ropes had a diameter over half inches. She explained that the ropes Massachusetts commercial lobstermen use commonly have a diameter no greater than 3/8 inches. The rule did not make it into the Commonwealth’s Law until Feb. 2021.
“When we got off the shed, the gear specialist said, ‘we don’t get the gear off all of them, so we don’t know,’” Casoni recalled. “The unknown entanglements are what is hurting the most for the U.S. fishery as we share a 50:50 responsibility with Canada.”
Casoni explained that the lobstermen are the “low hanging fruit” in the right whale protection. She believes that the federal government is overly harsh on the commercial lobstermen for whale protection whilst ignoring other factors like the shipping companies whose vessels struck the whales.
The New England Aquarium declined the request for an interview.
Efforts to prove innocence
Disagreeing with the state and federal rules, lobstermen unions and associations are eager to prove that their fishing gears are not the cause for entanglement. New England lobstermen marked their own gears with different colors by state starting from this year. Massachusetts will be red; New Hampshire is yellow, and Maine to be purple. Casoni explained that the new color coding will be implemented no later than May 2022. She hopes the new marks will help the officials to determine the origin of the fishing gears and make changes accordingly.
Besides the color-coding, the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association is hoping to contract commercial lobstermen during the state waters closure from Feb. 1 to Apr. 30 for a state-wide marine debris clean-up, making sure that there are no vertical lines left in the water.
In addition, Casoni doubts if the new bans will be effective. Without concrete data models in support, only time will tell if the ban is effective.
Rope-less gears, a solution still out of reach
NOAA mentioned that the closed water will still be open to lobstermen for fishing with rope-less traps. These newly designed traps have wire and buoy attached to them that will not be released until the lobstermen need to collect them from the ocean.
The new device will significantly reduce the chance of marine animal entanglement if put in practice, hence protecting the endangered right whales as well as many other marine lives.
However, many lobstermen are pessimistic regarding this new technology.
Beth Casoni said the greatest problem of all is the cost. Currently, each unit of devices costs almost $4000, whilst a traditional trap only costs a few hundred dollars. Since one commercial lobsterman will have multiple traps, the cost can add up to an enormous number for the lobstermen who commonly work alone.
“Now if you start to lose them, they become very expensive marine debris. Then, what if people start to steal them? It’s just not thought through properly,” she said .
Lobstermen also put the practicality of the new traps in doubt. Damon Frampton is a lobsterman in New Hampshire with more than thirty-five years of experience. He stands firmly with his “non-negotiable” objection to the new device.
Rope-less traps like the Desert Star System uses an app to show the traps around the user to prevent them from laying their traps on top of each other.
However, Frampton is in doubt if the marking is accurate enough to be of practical use. Frampton thinks lobstermen in New Hampshire must lay each unit of their traps barely ten feet apart during the peak season. The lobstermen currently rely on buoys and trot attached on traps to determine if the traps are set parallel to their neighbor’s.
“I welcome everybody. I welcome as many people as I can on my boat. I will show you that you cannot go lobster fishing with a buoy less trap. It’s impossible to do.”he said.
David Casoni is one of the earliest lobstermen who tried out the gears. He thinks that the ropeless trap will become the dominant option in the future, but it will take many years to have the business adapt to it. His greatest concern is learning to use advanced digital equipment. Even with the presence of experts from the development team, Casoni took a much longer time to set and retrieve the traps compared to the traditional ones.
Up until today, Casoni still uses his iPhone 4. He only uses it to send text messages and make phone calls. For a business in which the average age of the workers is over the age of fifty, Casoni addressed the concern that many lobstermen will need far more training to be able to use these computer-driven systems.
“There’s no education, there are no policies, there’s no funding or anything that helps everybody to get used to these new things,” he said.
So far, they just try to keep fishing
When the law of using weaker ropes was passed in Massachusetts, Beth Casoni worked with local fishing gear manufacturers to send new ropes to as many commercial lobstermen in the Commonwealth as she could.
“No matter how hard it is to work with, you have to make it work because this is going to keep them fishing, and it’s working,” she explained.
Right now, David Casoni is working on his last few catches of the year with the new red rope. Due to the many restrictions and the weather of Cape Cod, he only fishes five to six months each year.
He had the chance to stay in the business because he does not have any debt and the business still pays off for him whilst the uncertainties in earning drive young blood away from lobster fishery. According to the data from MLA in 2019, less than 900 commercial lobstering permit holders in Massachusetts reported being active in fishing, more than 100 less than the number of people reported in 2012.
He does not know what the future of lobstering will be. “It’s like any other job. Things evolve and it changes when you come into it.”
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