Whale-friendly fishing: Crab fishers are testing new gear to help right whales
Ropeless traps and high-tech equipment could mean fewer tangled whales
Each summer, North Atlantic right whales risk becoming entangled in fishing gear around the waters of the Bay of Fundy, Gulf of St. Lawrence and the New England coast. So how do you stop whales from getting tangled up? Lose the ropes.
Forward-thinking crab fishers like Martin Noël are getting high-tech in an attempt to solve the problem. Noël is featured in Last of the Right Whales, a documentary from The Nature of Things..
Traditional crab fishing involves dropping a line of traps down to the sea floor. The traps are attached to a long rope that's connected to a buoy floating on the surface. They're left out to collect crabs and recovered at a later date.
Those long lines and buoys can be in the path of right whales as they swim through their habitat.
"When they find a whale entangled in the gear, and it's in the gulf, and it's in the snow crab gear, [people] say, 'Well, it's the snow crab's fault.' And it's hard to say it's not," Noël says in the documentary.
Noël is testing a solution that avoids the use of floating ropes and buoys entirely. He begins by dropping a line of crab traps to the sea floor without a rope that reaches the surface — so there's no risk of ensnaring passing whales.
When Noël is ready to reel in the crab traps, he simply selects a trap via an app on his phone and waits. A capsule on the sea floor releases floating buoys connected to a line that rises quickly to the surface. His crew can then reel in the line and empty the traps.
"At first, when we heard about those pop-up buoys, we said, 'Hey, impossible, you know, push a button and a few seconds after, you see a buoy? Can't work,'" recalls Noël.
Crab fishers like Noël are committed to trying out innovative new solutions, especially if they make the waters safer for other creatures.
"The next step is for us to see if we can work safely and efficiently with those mechanisms."
Watch Last of the Right Whales on The Nature of Things.
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