Talking about right whales, lobsters and the art of science

First published in the MLA Newsletter, January, 2012.

The MLA newsletter continues its series of articles on endangered whales and the laws in place to protect them. New whale rules to reduce the risk of entangling endangered whales in vertical lines will go into effect in 2014. In late November, Heather Tetreault visited the Coastal Studies for Girls campus in Freeport to talk with the students about MLA’s efforts to work with lobstermen on changing whale rules and regulations.

Getting high school students excited about science isn’t always an easy task. But when Heather Tetreault, Whale Projects Coordinator at Maine Lobstermen’s Association, gave a presentation about North Atlantic right whales, the Maine lobster industry and the MLA’s interactions with scientific and fishing communities, she had no problem keeping her audience engaged.

The Coastal Studies for Girls program, a residential science and leadership semester for girls in tenth grade, is the only one of its kind in the country. This semester fifteen girls with a passion for science are taking part in the program. As Tetreault spoke about lobstering and right whales, the girls took notes and asked questions, a lot of questions.

“How hard is it to get a lobster license?” one girl asked after learning that Maine issues more than 5,300 commercial lobster licenses. Tetreault talked about the apprentice program that people must complete before getting a license. The girls initially were surprised to learn that multiple lobstermen must leave a zone for one new lobsterman to enter. When they realized this was a way to limit the amount of gear in the water and therefore reduce the risk of whale entanglements and to conserve the lobster population, the girls concluded that the process made sense.

Tetreault showed pictures of whales bearing scars from entanglement in fishing gear. The students asked about the cause of death for some of those whales. Between November, 2010 and November, 2011, there were twelve fisheries-related entanglements and two right whale deaths related to gear entanglements. Tetreault talked about the amount of drag that rope wrapped around a whale causes in the water, especially if a lobster trap is still attached. She said that once a right whale is slowed down by the weight of gear, it becomes susceptible.

“Right whales have no natural predators,” Tetreault explained, “but once they have been slowed down so much by gear, they attract predators like great white sharks.” Other whales die from starvation, infection or drowning. “The rope can cut right through a whale’s skin. It’s even been found to cut through bone,” she said. “Imagine having a big cut like that and no antibiotics.”

Tetreault talked about her work with lobstermen along the Maine coast to document when, where and how they fish. The students wondered how willing lobstermen were to discuss those things. Tetreault explained that when lobstermen realized she wasn’t looking to push management at them, they were very helpful. “Once the data were collected, they were plugged into a Geographical Information System (GIS) that gives us a picture of gear patterns,” Tetreault said. Without GIS, the data are just numbers, but through the GIS, those numbers can be used as layers for a map. “GIS is a very useful tool in science,” she said, encouraging the girls to learn about GIS and to explore the many ways it can transform data into comprehensive maps.

Toward the end of her talk, Tetreault mentioned possible ways to decrease the amount of rope in the water column in order to protect right whales. She talked about maximizing the number of traps per endline, minimizing the length of floating groundline between traps and minimizing the use of knots and coils on vertical lines that can be caught in a whales’ baleen. Other possible changes include reducing gear density, use of stiff or taut line and reducing ghost gear, a practice the students had recently learned about from Laura Ludwig of the Gulf of Maine Lobster Foundation.

The girls were fascinated by the idea of ropeless lobster fishing, a concept proposed by some scientists. Tetreault cautioned that it would be nearly impossible for commercial lobstermen to fish without rope. The room was soon full of other ideas as the girls wondered if some sort of electronic device could activate a buoy to inflate and pop to the surface with a rope attached to the trap or if a magnet could be used. Tetreault reminded the students that any changes to gear need to be done with the lobstermen in mind. “Lobstering is a huge industry in Maine and very important to the state’s economy,” she said. “We want to find a way to reduce whale entanglements that allows people to continue to fish.”