Photo: National Marine Sanctuaries | Wikimedia
Sean Brilliant and his team at the Canadian Wildlife Federation are trying to build a better lobster trap and protect whales, while balancing available technology with the needs of Atlantic Canada’s fishers. The vertical ropes attached to buoys that connect the traps to the surface pose a hazard to marine life, in particular, to the nearly extinct North Atlantic right whale. Canada’s approach to protecting whales is largely centered around monitoring and closures but that causes problems for fishers. Brilliant is testing possible whale-safe solutions - including ropeless trap systems that keep buoys at the bottom until they’re needed. While ropeless gear is expensive, Brilliant envisions a “gear library,” where, if a fishing region was closed due to a whale sighting, harvesters could replace their ropes with borrowed ropeless units and continue fishing. But fishers who have tested the ropeless units say it is still a few years away from being ready for Bay of Fundy lobster fishing. “The fisheries closures are the solution to the whale entanglement,” says Brilliant. “This gear is the solution to those closures.”
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