For many fishermen, the 2018 snow crab fishery in the Gulf of St. Lawrence will probably be filed away as one to forget.
The 2018 season was delayed in opening by the presence of heavy ice in the bays and ports of the region. And once the fishery finally opened, catch rates were much lower than 2017.
However, the biggest disruption to the valuable fishery was the closure of crab fishing areas due to the arrival of right whales in the Gulf. At least 18 North Atlantic right whales had been found dead in 2017 — 12 found in Canadian waters and six in U.S. waters.
Necropsies found many of the whales had become entangled in fishing gear or were struck by ships, resulting in strict closures of fishing areas and speed limitation on vessels.
At one point in June, nearly three dozen crab zones in the southern Gulf had fishing suspended due to the presence of right whales.
Along with the fishing area closures, DFO also introduced a series of new management measures in 2018 to further minimize the risks of interactions with the North Atlantic right whale, including:
- Earlier season start and closing dates
- The use of a vessel monitoring system (VMS) with five-minute reporting intervals
- New gear requirements
- Minimal rope floating on the surface of the water
- Requirement to mark rope with orange-coloured markings
- Additional identification of buoys
- Requirement to report lost gear
As well, the all-important Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certificate for the Southern Gulf of St. Lawrence snow crab trap fishery was also suspended due to the whale issue. In an expedited audit, the MSC concluded that based on the 2017 right whale mortalities in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the fishery no longer met the MSC Fishery Standard related to Endangered, Threatened and Protected species.
As a result of the MSC certificate suspension, when the 2018 fishery opened in April, the landings from crab fishing areas 12, 12E, 12F and 19, could not be sold as MSC certified or bear the MSC label, decreasing the marketing appeal.
And if the season could not get any worse, snow crab fishermen also faced quota cuts — the 2018 southern Gulf quota was set at 24,613 tonnes, down from 40,000 tonnes in 2017 — a drop of 38 per cent.
So once the dust settled on what could be one of the most turbulent Gulf crab fisheries ever, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) declared that no North Atlantic right whales were found dead in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 2018. Overall, two North Atlantic right whales were found dead in 2018 — both in U.S. waters.
So, what’s next? Will DFO call last year’s extreme conversation measures and sweeping closures a success and simply carry them over for 2019?
The federal government is under extreme pressure from conservation groups to maintain such harsh measures to prevent the 2017 level of whale fatalities. It has said such tough measures ensured Canada met U.S. marine mammal protection legislation and helped maintained access to United States markets for Canadian seafood producers.
But remember that 2019 is an election year and the governing Liberals would certainly like to hang on to its electoral riding juggernaut in Atlantic Canada.
As with almost every contentious issue in the fishery these days, this will probably come down to compromise. And that appears to be the direction DFO is heading.
Federal Fisheries Minister Jonathan Wilkinson told an October roundtable of industry, environmentalists and academics in Dartmouth, N.S., that his department will be examining “different pathways” for the next crab fishing season — both in the Gulf and Bay of Fundy.
Some of these options will certainly involve the feasibility of ropeless fishing technology, as well as pilot projects, such as one being undertaken by lobster fishermen on New Brunswick’s Grand Manan Island.
Among the steps of that pilot project is a requirement for fishermen to cut the trailing buoy upon sighting a right whale to reduce rope in the water.
The president of the Grand Manan Fishermen’s association, Brian Guptill, told the roundtable group that he hopes the pilot will avert what happened in June when a single right whale transiting their fishing area led to an automatic 15-day shutdown.
“Long before the closure ever went in place, that whale was gone. It is a knee-jerk reaction set in motion because of events that happened the year before in the Gulf. It was millions of dollars, it had serious consequences,” Guptill explained.
But despite the hint of compromise, it is still hard to predict how much Ottawa will relent on the whale-related restrictions. The plight of the right whale continues to be a major issue in the U.S., where the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently released a research paper on why the western North Atlantic right whale population is growing far more slowly than those of southern right whales, a sister species also recovering from near extinction by commercial whaling.
NOAA concluded that preserving the lives of adult females in the population is by far the most effective way to promote population growth and recovery, adding that most of the whale deaths are attributed to entanglement in fishing gear and collisions with ships.
“Had North Atlantic right whales increased at the annual rate that we show they are capable of, the population number would be almost double what it is now and their current situation would not be so dire,” said Peter Corkeron, who is lead author of the paper and heads the large whale research effort at NOAA Fisheries’ Northeast Fisheries Science Center.
For now, the future of the multi-million-dollar Gulf and Fundy snow crab fisheries still appears to be up in the air. This issue is more than a question of socioeconomic survival of Atlantic Canadian fishing communities versus survival of a species. All stakeholders are in agreement about the importance of protecting the whales. Crab fishermen are not the ones to be vilified in this scenario — cooperation and compromise have to be the keys to a successful resolution going forward.
