Federal fisheries regulators want to know what it would actually take to put ropeless gear on American lobster and crab boats. The answer they are getting from the fleet, well before the comment window closes, is that most of it does not want to find out.
The National Marine Fisheries Service published a request for information on ropeless fishing in the Federal Register on 16 July, running seven pages and 52 questions across safety, successful retrievals, premature releases, gear marking, gear conflict, law enforcement, training and data governance. Responses are due on or before 14 October. The agency says it will summarise what it receives and publish that summary. The Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy flagged the notice to small operators on 4 August.
The legal clock behind it matters. The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 paused the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Plan until the end of 2028 and requires NMFS to have new whale-protection rules for lobster and crab gear in place by 31 December that year. The consultation is aimed at the Greater Atlantic region, though NOAA says it will take comment from anywhere the gear is in use.
Ropeless systems, more precisely called on-demand gear, leave the rope and buoy coiled on the seabed and release them acoustically when the boat returns. Removing the persistent vertical line removes the thing that entangles North Atlantic right whales, a species down to roughly 356 animals with fewer than 100 females of breeding age.
NOAA has been testing it for years, not theorising about it. In its June science bulletin the agency reported that between 1 February and 30 April this year, fishermen conducted 832 hauls on 17 vessels using three different on-demand gear brands, in state and federal waters otherwise closed to static vertical lines. It was the fourth year of fully on-demand testing in restricted areas and the sixth year of on-demand testing across the region.
Across the border, Canada has committed. Its Whalesafe Fishing Gear Strategy, released on 3 February, would designate areas where ropeless or weak-rope gear is standard practice rather than a permit-only last resort, backed by a C$258.1 million whale-protection package.
"We believe this is going to be part of a modern fishery going forward. It's a tool critical to allow harvesters to fish while whales are present," said Brett Gilchrist, director of national programs at Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
In Maine, which lands roughly 90 percent of the nation's lobster, the reception is nothing like that. The Maine Lobstermen's Association puts industry-wide transition costs at $45 million at minimum and argues the running expense would push the fleet away from its owner-operator structure.
"Because of the expense of running a system, we are afraid that it's going to force some consolidation of our fleet," MLA executive director Patrice McCarron told Maine Public in May. "The key to success of the Maine lobster fleet has been that we're owner-operators... that the money we're earning is being spent in our local, rural, coastal communities."
The New England Fishermen's Stewardship Association's objection is about safety first. Dustin Delano, a former lobsterman and the group's executive director, told National Fisherman that a traditional endline is often the only thing that recovers a crewman who goes over the side.
"If somebody gets tangled in ropeless gear and goes overboard, you're not going to get them back," Delano said. He is equally blunt about relocating gear that has no surface marker: "For that to work, the accuracy would have to be a small fraction of a mile. And our plotters are not perfect."
That opposition has political cover. When the New England Fishery Management Council took up an alternative gear-marking framework last September, Representative Jared Golden called it "premature and unnecessary" in a letter to executive director Cate O'Keefe, arguing it would defy the moratorium Congress had just enacted. The council voted unanimously to delay.
"Forcing unproven ropeless gear onto our industry without reliable testing, interoperability or regard for safety would devastate small operators and coastal communities," Delano said at the time.
Ginny Olsen, executive liaison and political director of the Maine Lobstering Union Local 207, framed the timing problem the same way. "There are still so many questions about this technology, but there's one thing we know for sure: If we had to adopt it today, it would put Maine fishermen out of business," she said.
In April, Senators Susan Collins and Angus King wrote to NMFS assistant administrator Eugenio Pinero Soler urging the agency to weigh those objections seriously and to keep exploring alternatives such as dynamic area management with the Maine Department of Marine Resources. "A single, uniform solution, particularly one that mandates technology that is not yet proven at scale, is not the right path forward for this fishery or for the conservation goals we share," they wrote.
One piece of research complicates the cost argument rather than settling it. A University of Maine study published in Marine Resource Economics found consumers would pay an average of $3.42 more for a lobster roll when told the lobster was landed with ropeless gear, with whale-welfare messaging the most effective framing.
Lead author Qiujie "Angie" Zheng, associate professor of business analytics at UMaine's Maine Business School, was careful about what that does and does not mean.
"These findings do not suggest that Maine's lobster industry needs to change its current practices," Zheng said. "Rather, they provide insight into how consumers might respond if ropeless technology were adopted."
She added: "Right whale conservation is a collective effort. In addition to the fishermen, regulators and scientists, consumers play a role, so we hope this research helps understand consumer preferences and evaluations."
The gap the consultation has to close is not really about whether the hardware works. It is about who carries the cost, whether a dozen manufacturers' systems can talk to each other, and whether a boat can find gear it cannot see. Comments close 14 October.