The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is mandated by the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) to reduce the mortality and serious injury of North Atlantic Right Whales (NARW) caused by commercial fishing to below its Potential Biological Removal (PBR) level. To achieve this, U.S. commercial fisheries need to continue to decrease entanglement risk. In areas of high co-occurrence between whales and surface marking systems, seasonal closure areas have been implemented to enforce separation of whales and fishing gear. More recently, closures in the Greater Atlantic Region (Northwest Atlantic from Virginia to Maine) have been modified to be closures to the use of surface marking systems rather than closures to the harvest of lobster, crabs, and other species targeted with fixed fishing gear traditionally marked and retrieved by buoy lines. On-demand fishing, which uses acoustic signaling to communicate with fishing vessels instead of surface marking systems, offers a way to allow fishers to continue to fish without endangering large whales.
Tufariello et al. (Tue,) studied this question.