BANGOR DAILY NEWS • January 16, 2023
The landmark six-year pause on new federal whale regulations give Maine’s multimillion dollar lobster fishery a chance to gather itself after years of fighting new restrictions aimed at protecting the rapidly disappearing North Atlantic right whales. Patrick Keliher, Maine’s Department of Marine Resources commissioner, is hoping that the dawn of “dynamic management” in Maine is here. The Gulf of Maine would be monitored, with listening devices in the water and planes in the sky, for right whales. If signs of right whales are detected, fishermen would have to clear their traps out of the area. But dynamic management’s use in something as massive as the Gulf of Maine lobster fishery hasn’t always landed well with conservationists or federal regulators. The monitoring system needs to detect right whales effectively, which can be a challenge because they spend long times underwater and may not always be in range of a monitoring device.