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It was a blessedly calm day as Scott Landry’s team set out in their inflatable boat to scan the glistening waters of Great South Channel between Rhode Island and Massachusetts for an endangered whale affectionately known as Wart. They were on a mission to save her life.

The group, from the nonprofit Center for Coastal Studies located in nearby Provincetown, had spent the better part of three years monitoring Wart after an aerial team spotted the North Atlantic right whale with a large piece of rope lodged in her mouth.

Instead of coming loose on its own, the fishing rope slowly tangled itself deeper into Wart’s baleens, hindering her ability to eat and reproduce. Finally, Landry’s team decided to take a more hands-on approach—a dangerous but necessary last resort.

“The first thing that people need to realize is that the animals do not know that we’re trying to help them out,” said Landry, the director of the center’s Marine Animal Entanglement Response Program. “These are just wild animals that we are approaching at a moment in their life that is quite horrible.” 

That meant his team had to rig up a tool that could slice the rope at a distance—essentially a crossbow with an arrow like a throwing star. Eventually, Wart came up for air close enough to Landry’s dinghy for him to get a single clean shot. He took a breath and fired. The whale immediately dove underwater again, leaving the team in suspense. A few minutes later, she popped back up, revealing the knife had cut right through the chunky rope. 

“You really have to want it. After dealing with this case for three years, we really wanted it,” Landry said, recalling the raucous cheers on the boat that day in 2010. Landry has been helping disentangle ocean animals from fishing gear and debris for more than two decades, but celebrations never last long in this job. Wart’s case is a rare bright spot in the pervasive problem of rope entanglements, one of the leading causes of death for whales.

An estimated 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises die every year from entanglements. The day before he recounted Wart’s travails to Inside Climate News in June, a dead humpback washed up off the coast of Maine with a massive fishing net wrapped around her tail. “Her blood was still warm yesterday morning,” he said. 

The situation is particularly dire for North Atlantic right whales like Wart, with only around 350 left in the wild. Found along the East Coast of North America, the whales’ migratory paths overlap with highly productive lobster fishing areas in Maine and Massachusetts, where scientists say the whales struggle to dodge copious amounts of gear and traps. A growing body of research shows that climate-fueled ocean warming compounds the problem as whales follow food to new places or arrive at unexpected times of the year when there may be no protections for them. 

Scientists and conservationists are scrambling to find a strategy to reduce entanglement risk without threatening the lobster industry, which is facing its own struggles with climate change. In recent years, a seemingly simple approach has taken center stage: getting rid of the rope. 

The traditional lobster traps that sit on the seafloor are connected to the surface by a line of rope attached to a floating buoy. But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is working with manufacturers and partners to help develop different high-tech traps that they can sink to the seafloor without the rope tethered to the surface—in hopes of giving whales an unobstructed path through fishery waters. Then lobstermen can use a device to call these wireless traps back up to the surface with their catch. 

Officials say this “ropeless” on-demand gear could help people continue to work during seasonal fishing closures. Enacted by the federal government in New England over the past decade, these restrictions limit lobster harvesting at different times of the year during the whales’ migration season. As whale populations struggle to bounce back, more potential closures loom. 

In 2023, the federal government invested more than $82 million toward right whale recovery. More than 20 percent of these funds are dedicated to perfecting on-demand gear to help avoid major economic losses to lobstermen during closures. 

The problem? Many lobstermen don’t want it. 

Choppy Research and Development  

Rob Martin’s lobster boat carved through the gray waters off Cape Cod’s Sandwich Marina this May, temporarily transformed into a gear testing laboratory. NOAA scientists and tech experts had squeezed in alongside Martin, a Massachusetts lobsterman, and his crewmate, former lobsterman Marc Palombo.

Martin brought the boat to a halt once they were far enough out in the bay, and the team dropped on-demand traps into the water, which quickly sank to the seafloor. Several minutes later, Martin activated the gear using a device onboard. Almost every head whipped toward the water in anticipation. “It’s over there!” someone yelled over the loud grumble of the diesel engine. A few yards away, a bright yellow buoy that had been underwater a moment before now bobbed in the water. 

Martin and Palombo fished the float out of the water, revealing a cage with a string of lobster traps attached to it. 

Other on-demand techniques use similar processes to unlock a traditional buoy from the seafloor or unspool a line that fishers can grab onto. Manufacturers such as Massachusetts-based company EdgeTech and engineering nonprofit SMELTS are developing different designs. None of the technologies are truly rope-free, but every design minimizes the amount of time rope hangs in the water, directly in a whale’s swimming path. 

Since 2020, NOAA has been working with local lobstermen to test these technologies on an experimental basis since the gear is not yet legal for these fishers to use without government permission. That includes several trials in seasonal restricted fishing areas off Massachusetts and Rhode Island. 

Martin was brought on as a paid gear specialist with NOAA to advise the agency on how ropeless and breakaway lines—designed to snap at certain points if a whale pulls on it—could work in practice for fishers. 

This year, fishers from 19 vessels participated in restricted area trials using on-demand equipment borrowed from a NOAA-run “gear library” located in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Under a special permit, the participants are allowed to keep and sell their catches throughout the winter and spring months. During this year’s trial across three restricted areas, harvesters completed 900 hauls using on-demand gear, with an 85 percent success rate. Unsuccessful attempts were primarily due to mechanical issues and the gear getting tangled up with other fishing equipment. 

The end goal for these ropeless gear efforts is to give lobstermen an option to get back out on the water during seasonal fishing closures or restrictions. That includes one in place since 2015 across a stretch of Cape Cod Bay every February to April. The federal government is likely to establish new large closures in just a few years to prevent right whales from going extinct.

“What we’re trying to do now is get these different types of systems into the hands of fishermen,” said NOAA’s Henry Milliken, who runs the gear library. 

However, this May expedition on the Cape wasn’t for fishing. Rather, the crew was looking to help solve one of the biggest challenges with on-demand technology. Ropeless gears’ ability to hide on the seafloor without a line connected to a buoy at the surface may prevent entanglements with whales, but it also makes the equipment invisible to fishers. This can instead lead to entanglements with other fishing gear, known as gear conflict. 

Joining the lobstermen and NOAA scientists on the small boat was a team from a technology nonprofit, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Last year, the institute received one of 18 grants from the New England Gear Innovation Fund—an $18.3 million program created by NOAA, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and the oil company Shell to support development of new products that minimize rope risk. 

The institute is building a user-friendly app for fishers to digitally mark and share the location of their gear, and avoid the traps around them. That includes tools from other fisheries such as scallopers and bottom-trawling boats, which tow a net along the ocean floor to catch bottom-dwelling fish like sea bass and Atlantic cod. 

“It’s not often that you’re faced with something like this where you could look at it and say, ‘Yeah, we can fix that,’” said Jes Lefcourt, director of conservation technology at the Allen Institute. The group has already integrated available data onto an existing platform called EarthRanger, which was originally created to help rangers in Africa monitor wildlife and report potential poaching incidents. They say the app will launch in mid-November.

But fixing the gear conflict problem may not be as simple as it seems. To update gear location and broadcast to other users, the app relies on some form of internet connection, which can be unreliable at sea. It took Martin a few tries to connect to a hotspot on his iPad while initially trying to mark and retrieve the gear. 

Waves and changing tides, meanwhile, make the ocean a place of near-constant movement. As a result, lobster traps and pots don’t always land right where they are placed on the surface, leading to inaccuracies on the app. Additionally, wireless signals move differently through water than in the air. That means fishers cannot simply stick an AirTag tracker on their gear and watch it move, like with a lost phone or pair of car keys. 

Not being able to pinpoint exactly where on-demand gear is located could be particularly problematic for fisheries with a lot of traps in a condensed area such as Maine, according to Mark Baumgartner, a scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “Those guys need to have some sort of better positioning system,” he said.

That’s where something called acoustic communication comes into play. The same type of modem device that activates an on-demand trap down below could be used to ping their exact, real-time location. The scientists at Woods Hole are working on possible methods to build out this open-source communication system. However, Rob Morris, a product line manager at Edgetech, does not think this system is necessary and believes it could make the gear too complex for fishers. These processes could also hike up the price of ropeless gear—something that fishers are already concerned about.

On-demand gear is still in the research and development phase, which means that prices are high. Ropeless tech can cost thousands of dollars per unit, a steep difference from the roughly $200 traditional lobster pots and traps on the market. NOAA scientists and manufacturers are working to bring down costs. 

“We want to identify the problems, work with the manufacturers … and then also buy systems from different companies [to] get the competition going, so that the prices will come down,” Milliken said. 

But after years of adapting to new laws and requirements surrounding right whale conservation, a large group of lobstermen across the East Coast see ropeless gear as another threat to their industry instead of an opportunity. 

​​“Personally, I don’t think there’s anything that they’re going to be able to do to make it viable to do away with the gear conflict and to deal with the financial burden,” said Cape Cod lobsterman Jeff Souza, whose house is the collateral for a loan he took out a few years ago to build a new boat. He has not tried the gear and doesn’t plan to. He looks at it as an impending obstacle from the government, just like closures. “We’re just trying to still do our jobs and coexist to a point that we’re happy [and] everyone’s happy, but every year we give a little bit of an edge and then they keep taking a mile.”

He added: “I just want to keep being able to fish and not go broke.”

A Complicated New England Delicacy 

Souza—who lives near Landry, the whale rescuer—is a fourth-generation lobsterman. He bought his own fishing business when he was 18. 

“It’s been my whole life,” he said in his thick New England accent. Lobstering “has been my family’s way of making a living forever.”

Many families share similar backgrounds across New England, where lobster is deeply woven into the identity of the region. Countless restaurants lining the cobblestone streets of Boston and Portland, Maine, fight for the title of best lobster roll. Lobstermen bond through yawns during early morning fishing and pass down precious knowledge about where to find the best catches. In August, tens of thousands of people attended the 77th annual Maine Lobster Festival in Rockland, where kids could pose next to a massive sculpture of the crustacean before participating in the “International Great Crate Race”—a precarious run across a string of bobbing wooden lobster crates floating atop the frigid bay.

This popularity has made lobster a crucial economic resource in the region. Maine is hands down the largest lobster producer in the U.S., with roughly 100 million pounds harvested each year that contribute around half a billion dollars to the state’s economy. 

“The coastal islands, the peninsulas, the small communities up and down the coast of Maine just full-on depend on the lobster resource,” said Jeff Putnam, a lobsterman from Chebeague Island, Maine. “That’s provided a decent enough living for folks like myself to be able to stay in this beautiful area of the world.”

The crimson shellfish represents a smaller but still significant chunk of Massachusetts’ economy. In 2021, lobster fishing there brought in around $125 million. This revenue is particularly important for small coastal communities in Cape Cod. 

But the nutrient-rich waters that attract lobsters to the Gulf of Maine make it an ideal feeding ground for North Atlantic right whales each spring. Every day, these ocean giants must dine on more than 2,000 pounds of plankton and tiny crustaceans known as copepods.

“How do you, as a 50,000-pound animal, make a living on that just by opening up your mouth and driving around?” said Baumgartner, the Woods Hole scientist, as he showed off a container about the size of a peanut butter jar that was holding hundreds of thousands of copepods. “Right whales rely on the ocean to sort of aggregate the prey, put them into patches.” These patches are particularly large in the waters off Cape Cod, presenting an all-you-can-eat buffet for the endangered whales. 

Despite the abundance of food, it’s not been easy for North Atlantic right whales to make a living along the East Coast. By the time commercial hunting of the species was banned in 1935, they were on the cusp of extinction. Their numbers slowly rose to as many as 483 in 2010 but took another nosedive over the past decade, mainly due to two human-driven factors: vessel strikes and entanglements. 

Since 2017, at least 15 North Atlantic right whales have been killed by boats, while 10 have died from entanglements, according to NOAA. There have been 41 total total deaths in that timeframe, many with undetermined causes. These are only the recorded losses—models suggest the numbers are far higher. 

Though vessel strikes have claimed more right whales recently, death often isn’t immediate for the individuals wrapped in discarded gear or debris. Over the past seven years, NOAA has documented 33 cases of serious injuries and 53 illnesses from entanglements, which can cause a cascade of negative impacts that can eventually lead to a whale’s demise. 

“[Rope] could be wrapped around the upper jaw of the whale for, say, two months and then come free,” said Michael Moore, a scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. In that time, he said, whales must use extra energy to pull along the weight from the trap tangled in their mouth, a literal drag on their health.    

“They’re very resilient. But you can’t be bleeding the population to death.”

— Michael Moore, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientist

Rope injuries can cause infections, increased stress, chronic starvation and damage to whales’ blubber, muscle and bone. A study published in March found that even minor entanglements can reduce a female whale’s ability to breed, a threat to the species’ future viability. And whale calves are unlikely to survive if their mother dies while they are still nursing. 

“They’re very resilient. But you can’t be bleeding the population to death,” said Moore. He published a book in 2021 titled “We Are All Whalers” about how strategies like ropeless fishing and the acoustic tracking of whale migrations can help protect remaining right whales. 

Starting in the late 1990s, the federal and Massachusetts state governments have implemented a variety of mandatory measures to reduce entanglement risk. Those include banning floating rope at the surface in certain areas or requiring fishers to use breakaway lines and weak rope. 

However, officials continued to spot whales wrapped in rope throughout the region. In 2015, NOAA took a more drastic step. It announced that lobster fishing would be banned every February to April across more than 3,000 square miles of Cape Cod Bay as whales migrate through the region. 

“It was a big bang,” said Lori Caron, a Massachusetts local who attended the meeting when the closure was announced. She had recently started dating a lobsterman, and launched a wholesale retail business selling lobsters at local farmers markets. “We did not see it coming.” 

Many lobstermen swiftly spoke out against the decision. The small group who fish year-round and would be most affected were particularly upset. 

But even more closures loomed.

An Unexpected Massacre

In 2017, disaster struck. An unprecedented 17 North Atlantic right whales died that year, five in the U.S. and the rest in Canada. Many scientists believe climate change played a role. Copepod abundance in the Gulf of Maine has plummeted in recent years as ocean warming changes water circulation. Likely following their food, the whales have been moving into areas of Cape Cod and the Gulf of St. Lawrence near Canada where they were rarely seen in the past—and had little to no protection from fishing gear and ship traffic, according to a 2022 study.

“It was like a bloodbath,” said Baumgartner.

The Canadian government swiftly paused operations in parts of its snow crab fishery in the region after several of the whales succumbed to their entanglements from the gear. 

Later in 2017, NOAA reconvened a preexisting 50-member panel with representatives from every state on the East Coast, conservation groups and industry leaders to figure out a solution. Over the next four years, the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team developed a plan to reduce entanglement risk in U.S. waters by about 60 percent through several measures, including two new large fishery closures across Maine and Massachusetts and gear restrictions that required the use of weak rope. 

In July 2022, a federal judge ruled that the plan did not go far enough to protect the whales. The Take Reduction Team met again later that year to update the regulations, settling on policy recommendations that would have included “a lot of large seasonal closures, particularly in the offshore [areas] where weak rope doesn’t work,” said NOAA’s Coogan, a leading member of that team. 

It seemed like there was a plan. And two groups monitoring seafood sustainability issued warnings about Maine lobster over threats to right whales, amping up consumer pressure for solutions. But at the end of 2022, Congress unexpectedly intervened to block new regulations.

Maine’s congressional delegation and Democratic Gov. Janet Mills were able to insert a provision in the federal omnibus funding budget to restrict new whale-related regulations on the lobster industry through Dec. 31, 2028. However, the provision did authorize $20 million “to support the adoption of innovative fishing gear deployment and fishing techniques to reduce entanglement risk to North Atlantic right whales.”

There were “some people calling it a pause, but we saw it as a directive, really, from Congress to develop innovative gear that would allow fishermen to fish while protecting right whales,” Coogan said of the 2022 provision in the budget bill. “So anticipating there might be large-area closures in the future, they wanted to make sure that the gear was ready to allow fishermen to fish if they wanted to fish in those seasonal closure areas.” 

“We’ve lost friends, you know? We don’t understand why. We thought we were being helpful.”

— Lori Caron, Massachusetts local

Since then, on-demand gear has been the main feature in policy plans, news reports and conservation campaigns about the North Atlantic right whales’ survival. But NOAA’s “road to ropeless” plan has been a bumpy one—for reasons beyond new-tech hitches. Martin, the lobsterman on the May expedition, knows that all too well. 

He’s part of a group of five fishers publicly working with scientists and manufacturers to improve ropeless gear and other tools to mitigate entanglement risk. They call themselves the “Pioneers for a Thoughtful Co-existence,” but their efforts have made it hard to co-exist with their fellow fishers at times, said Caron, who helped start the group. 

“We’ve been working with them against many industry members’ desires,” she said. “There’s some days where it’s really hard. We’ve lost friends, you know? We don’t understand why. We thought we were being helpful.”

When the group first requested permission in 2021 to test ropeless gear in the closure area, nearly 20 other commercial lobstermen, including Souza, voiced their opposition at a town hall hearing. Their main concern was that if the gear malfunctioned and somehow ended up wrapped around a whale, the entire fishery would face the consequences—a sentiment still echoed today. 

“If they’re lost in a storm, then there’s gear out there that could deploy, and to allow a handful of fishermen to access an area when there’s right whales potentially present—because that’s when they are using this gear—is of great concern,” said Beth Casoni, executive director of the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association. “We don’t support the ropeless fishing right now.” 

The group is working on its own gear to reduce entanglements that would require lobstermen to use a grappling hook to retrieve buoyless gear, rather than wireless activations, though this approach can be time consuming. At the same time, lobstermen are fighting against closures. Earlier this year, the association won a case against NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service, blocking a rule closing a 200-square-mile swath of ocean at the intersection of state and federal waters. The judge ruled that this closure would have violated the provision in the appropriations bill, a decision now under appeal. 

“I think rather than us arguing about, you know, whether we should allow ropeless into these closure areas, we have to go back and fight against the actual closure areas,” said Maine’s Putnam, who sits on the state’s Department of Marine Resources Lobster Advisory Council. 

Industry members have long contended that Maine gear hasn’t been linked to a right whale death since 2004. However, environmentalists argued that was because officials did not require Maine gear to be uniquely labeled—until a new policy was enacted in Maine in 2020 requiring lobstermen to mark their gear using specific colors. 

This January, a dead North Atlantic right whale washed ashore on Martha’s Vineyard, with rope from a marked Maine lobster trap twisted around her tail. The situation sparked swift backlash—and conspiracy theories. A report from The Provincetown Independent analyzed dozens of comments responding to a NOAA Fisheries’ Facebook post on the dead whale and found several that alleged the agency put the ropes on the whale after it washed ashore, or that the whale was instead killed by offshore wind activities. After an extensive necropsy and diagnostic testing, NOAA confirmed on Oct. 2 that the whale had died due to the chronic entanglement.

Blaming someone else for whale deaths is a regional occupation, in part because there’s plenty of risk to go around. Mainers say Massachusetts has more whale migration through its waters. Massachusetts lobstermen say Maine has far more traps. Both states argue that Canada poses increasing threats.  

“It’s just really easy to want to point the finger, so I get it,” said NOAA fishery biologist Christin Khan, who studies North Atlantic right whales and was on the boat during the Cape Cod expedition in May. “On the other hand, that does not represent all fishermen. There are plenty of fishermen … in support of this technology and in support of doing whatever it takes to save the North Atlantic right whale.” 

Last year, Maine received two grants totaling $5 million from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to build out a ropeless gear program in the state. State lawmakers also passed a bill that will establish a $1 million fund to compensate lobster fishers willing to test out the new tech. 

Currently, Canada has some of the strictest fishing regulations in the world to avoid entanglements with North Atlantic right whales, with dynamic closures put in place if an animal shows up during the snow crab season. The country is also working on its own ropeless gear strategy alongside the U.S., with a gear library in Nova Scotia. 

“We have a long ways to go here in Canada as well,” said Sean Brillant, the manager of marine programs at the nonprofit Canadian Wildlife Federation, who runs that gear library. “But we’ve not yet run into the obstructions that I’m seeing in the U.S. Both countries need to get their act together if we’re going to save this animal and actually change the way we use the oceans.” 

Entangled Fates

The morning after the seasonal closures lifted across Massachusetts in May, excited lobstermen stacked dozens of traps atop their boats at MacMillan Pier in Provincetown, located at the extreme tip of Cape Cod. The closure had been extended an extra week as a precaution after right whales were spotted in the bay, but aerial surveys confirmed the animals were continuing their journey to Canada. 

There’s no getting away from whales here, though, even out of their season. They’re almost as ubiquitous in town as the lobster. Whale-watching tour stands line the harbor’s main strip, just a block away from the beloved Lobster Pot restaurant that draws diners from around the world. Tourist shops display knit “Cape Cod” sweatshirts adorned with lobsters and whale tails. Both are prized in the region. Their long-term fate is entangled—literally. 

“The whale versus fisherman’s story is not a new one. It’s been on-again, off-again for a long time,” said John Pappalardo, CEO of the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance. “Fishermen are a big part of the solution. They’re not the villains that folks make them out to be.” 

Like many others in the lobster industry, Pappalardo’s group urges caution and time for the government to perfect on-demand fishing gear and make it affordable for the average fisher, or explore other options. This week, representatives from research and conservation organizations, independent contractors, shipping and fishing industries, and U.S. and Canadian government agencies will meet in Providence, Rhode Island, to discuss the latest innovations in right-whale recovery efforts. 

But there may not be much time left—before the omnibus bill’s 2028 pause lifts, or the right whale species faces extinction. 

“I have concerns that if we keep thinking, ‘Oh, we need to get this information before we manage’ … the species doesn’t have that amount of time,” said Amy Knowlton, a scientist at the New England Aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life who studies human impacts on right whales. “If we don’t start putting in broad-scale measures for both entanglements and vessel strikes, we could lose the species altogether.” 

In 2025, the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team will gather to work on a proposal for new protections. The plan will be different from the one they formalized in 2021, but could include large seasonal closures and requirements for fishers to use certain types of weak rope, according to Coogan. 

There’s still a lot for the group to figure out, including where exactly whales will be each year as climate-fueled ocean warming continues to impact their habitats. This summer, scientists from the Cabot Center spotted more than 82 North Atlantic right whales—around a quarter of the entire population—in an unusual feeding area about 70 miles south of Long Island, New York. The area is also packed with ships and boating vessels, and there are no speed rules in place to help prevent collisions with the whales. 

In August, the Biden administration announced $2.8 million in funding toward partnerships to better track right whale movement. Regardless, changing migration routes could easily outpace bureaucracy and upend fisheries. 

“If they do change a lot, it is very hard for us to change our regulations,” said Coogan, adding that pulling gear out of the water can take weeks or even months. 

Measures to protect right whales could also be affected by next month’s presidential election. In 2019, the Trump administration enacted several provisions weakening the regulatory power of the Endangered Species Act. Biden has since reinstated protections, but experts say the conservation law could be under threat if Donald Trump is elected again. Emails between NOAA scientists, obtained by the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, show that the Trump administration also temporarily held back an announcement about a whale entanglement in 2020 to avoid bad publicity.

In the fight to pull right whales back from the brink of extinction, there is a bright spot. Last year, NOAA released the annual population estimate for the species using the most up-to-date data, and found that the rate of their decline is slowing down, likely due to the regulations protecting them. Research suggests that ropeless gear could further help. 

“Two good years is great, but we need 10 good years,” Coogan said. “We can keep working on reducing human impacts, but a lot of the other things, probably partly climate change-driven, that are reducing calving rates, are things that are a lot harder for us to fix.”

Despite regularly disentangling whales like Wart throughout his career, Landry is optimistic that the species can make a comeback. But that’s only possible, he said, if fishers and right whales both get the support they need to survive. 

“The fishermen cannot do it alone … so it’s a societal problem,” he said. Landry thinks whales can deal with “some level of challenge that we throw at them, but, you know, it’s pile upon pile. There’s the changing of the prey, there’s the rope, there’s the boats. You’re asking a lot of a population of 350 animals.”