Farewell to Heather, MLA Whale Projects Coordinator

First printed in the MLA Newsletter, November, 2012.

The MLA bids farewell to a staff member Heather Tetreault, 32, has spent many a long hour in her car traveling along the coast of Maine as the Maine Lobstermen’s Association Whale Projects Coordinator. “I would say that the worst day was when I was due at a National Marine Fisheries Service meeting and my car broke down [after a meeting with lobstermen]. A guy loaned me an old car to get there, but that car broke down in Belfast. It started gushing gas all over the place. I didn’t have a cell phone. And then it started to rain.”

Heather worked with lobstermen throughout Maine to identify and describe the ways lobster gear was configured and set. She began her position in January, 2010, with funding support from the Consortium for Wildlife Bycatch Reduction and later, the Maine and Woods Hole Sea Grant programs. Since then she has been the key staff person for the MLA responsible for collecting fishing industry data to help mitigate whale entanglements in lobster gear and conducting outreach with lobstermen.

Heather first came to the MLA in 2003, as student from Southern Maine Community College in South Portland. There she had worked with Professor Jim Manning building ocean drifters to better understand currents in the Gulf of Maine. Jim Manning and MLA executive director Patrice McCarron were collaborating on the fledgling eMolt program, attaching temperature and salinity recording probes to lobster traps. “Jim recommended me to Patrice so I worked on a three month contract [on eMolt data] that summer. It was a perfect segue to going off to the University of Maine at Orono,” Heather recalled.

Heather completed her B.S. at UMO in marine sciences with a double major, in physical oceanography and marine geology. She also worked at the university’s aquaculture center on tropical fish breeding and cultivation. “I had a lot of interests and got to explore them there,” Heather explained. “It was a really fun time in my life.”

She jumped right into the thick of things when she started her position with MLA three years ago, traveling throughout the coast to interview lobstermen about the different ways they configure and fish their gear. “We held 38 meetings in different harbors and then [conducted] I don’t know how many one-on-one interviews with lobstermen. It was just so much fun though. I was immersed in the culture and the industry,” she said.

One result of Heather’s efforts is “Lobster Gear in the Gulf of Maine” report, the first-ever study of how lobstermen arrange and set lobster traps in Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Prior to the report, scientists and resource managers had only anecdotal information about the variety of lobster gear configurations, which skewed views of the lobster industry in general. “It was great to see it come to fruition,” Heather said. “It was lots of hard work but it’s one of a kind.”

Heather’s research was also critical to the development of a new model to assess the risk of right whales becoming entangled in lobster gear along the Maine coast. Heather led small groups of Maine lobstermen through an exercise to map their fishing territories on NOAA charts, indicating where they fish and how intensely they fish, completing the first ever complete mapping of the Maine lobster fishery. Documenting the lobster fishery at such a fine scale will allow managers to appropriately size future management measures to strategically address problem areas, rather than imposing industry-wide regulations.

More recently, Heather has been working in several different projects involving gear modifications aimed at lessening the possibility of North Atlantic right whale entanglement.

The latest project, which she completed this fall, came about as a result of lobstermen’s concerns about the causes of chafing of sinking groundline. The MLA partnered with the Consortium to mount an underwater video camera on a trap to document the occurrence of sinking groundline chafing in various regions of the coast. “We listened to lobstermen’s concerns [about sinking groundline] and turned it into a project and executed it,” Heather said. “And the video is super cool!”

“Heather’s work on behalf of the Maine lobster industry has given our industry a lot of credibility in the management arena. For years we have talked about the majority of our fishery taking place close to shore, away from where whales transit offshore. Now we have real data to prove it,” explained, Patrice McCarron, MLA executive director. “Heather has done a tremendous job on behalf of Maine lobstermen. We are really going to miss her.”