The Issue
Gear location technology is critical if fishing without buoy lines is to become a viable remedy to lethal entanglements of whales, sharks and turtles.
Issue: Entanglement in Buoy Endline
A live, entangled North Atlantic right whale that later died from its injuries. Rope can been caught in the mouth and wrapped around each flipper.
Trap fishing gear with several traps configured in a trawl. A traditional trawl consisting of two surface buoys, buoy lines, traps, and ground lines.
Solution: Buoyless Gear Location
A “buoyless” trawl consisting only of traps and ground lines, as well as a device to retrieve the trawl (in orange; e.g., spooled rope or lift bag) and a device to mark the location of the trawl on the sea floor (in yellow). Here, the device is represented as an acoustic modem that can communicate information with a corresponding acoustic modem on a nearby boat.
A depiction of a chart plotter on a boat that displays the location of all buoyless fixed fishing gear on the sea floor, including single traps (single filled yellow circles) and trawls (filled yellow circles connected by yellow lines).
The Urgent Need for Gear Location Technology
Establishment of this fund is motivated by the urgent need to significantly reduce or eliminate buoy line entanglements of the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale as well as humpback whales, grey whales, sea turtles and other vulnerable marine wildlife. The development of mechanisms to physically retrieve fishing gear from the sea floor without the use of buoy lines is progressing rapidly, yet complementary methods to locate this “buoyless” (or “ropeless”) gear have lagged. Without a means to locate the gear, (1) fishers are likely to deploy their gear on top of other fishers’ gear, thus entangling both sets of gear, (2) trawlers will drag nets through fishing gear on the sea floor, thereby moving and possibly destroying that gear, and (3) law enforcement will not be able to detect and inspect fishing gear at sea. Gear location technology is critical if fishing without buoy lines is to become a viable remedy to fishing gear entanglements.
While regulators in both the United States and Canada are increasingly acknowledging that buoyless gear may be the best solution to eliminating entanglements of marine wildlife, there is currently no government mandate for buoyless fishing. In the absence of these regulatory requirements, there is no market for buoyless gear and little incentive for companies to develop the needed technology for locating gear. The Fishing Gear Location Marking Fund is designed to jumpstart the development of prototype devices through philanthropic support. Successful testing and demonstration of these devices will encourage government regulators to establish buoyless-only fishing areas, which in turn will create a market for buoyless fishing technologies and the appropriate profit incentive for companies to advance their prototypes into commercial products.
The Fund will also play a crucial role in encouraging the adoption of standards and protocols by participating companies that will ensure interoperability among manufacturers’ devices as well as healthy commercial competition to keep the cost of buoyless fishing gear as low as possible.
The commitment of the Fund to interoperability means that no awards can be granted from the Fund until open standards and protocols for interoperable gear location marking are created and adopted by the appropriate federal agencies. Moreover, funds will only be awarded to companies that pledge to develop devices that conform to those open standards and protocols.
The Fund anticipates that government agencies of the U.S. and Canada will ultimately certify gear location marking devices that conform to the adopted standards and protocols (as they do for Vessel Management System, or VMS, devices) to ensure that gear conflict is minimized, and our intention is to support the rapid development of devices that are designed to pass the government certification process.
Resources to Learn More
Ropeless Consortium - www.ropeless.org
Consortium for Wildlife Bycatch Reduction - www.bycatch.org
Background articles:
Commercial Fisheries News article on right whales:
https://ropeless.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/112/2018/01/cfn_January2018.pdf
Sea Technology article on the need for buoyless fishing:
https://ropeless.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/112/2019/05/ST_Urgent-Need.pdf
Report on a 2018 workshop entitled: "Overcoming development, regulatory and funding challenges for ropeless fishing to reduce whale entanglement in the U.S. and Canada”:
https://ropeless.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/112/2018/03/Ropeless_Workshop_Report.pdf
Report on the first Ropeless Consortium meeting:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308597X19301575?via%3Dihub
National Fishermen article on buoyless fishing:
https://www.nationalfisherman.com/boats-gear/pop-up-pots-and-the-search-for-whale-safe-gear/