Meet the man trying to build a better lobster trap — and save some whales

HALIFAX—In the southern regions of Nova Scotia, well before the sun sees fit to call a start to the day, thousands of fishers are streaming out of their home wharfs on boats laden with traps and bait this week, as two of the country’s largest and most lucrative lobster fisheries begin their seasons.

They’ve been doing just this for more than 150 years, in almost the same fashion, generation after generation, a cyclic, almost respiratory rhythm along the coastline. Exhale: fleets of fishing boats spilling out of coves and wharves to their fishing grounds. Inhale: they return home with crates full of their catch. Exhale. Inhale.

The boats have changed, naturally, as has the hauling gear along with them.

But the humble lobster trap — despite a change from the picturesque bowed wooden traps of yesteryear to the modern, metal, rectangular version — has remained fundamentally the same.

In a quiet warehouse in an industrial park outside of Halifax, Sean Brilliant is trying to help change that, and maybe save some whales along the way.

He and his team at the Canadian Wildlife Federation are trying to figure out if there’s a way to build a better lobster trap.

And he’s trying to do that while balancing available technology with the needs of Atlantic Canada’s fishers.

“We’re trying to protect whales,” says Brilliant. “But what we know is we can’t do that unless we work with the people who are the source of the conflict … So, this is how we do that: we make sure we give them the tools they need that let them keep fishing, and at the same time, we’re not killing whales by mistake.”

The current traps themselves are not so much the issue. They sit on the ocean floor, largely out of the way. The problem, especially from a marine life-conservation viewpoint, is what connects them to the surface of the water — hundreds of kilometres of vertical rope attached to buoys.

And those ropes — tens of thousands of them — pose an entanglement hazard to marine life, in particular, to whales.

Of specific concern is the North Atlantic right whale, which typically ranges the North American coast from Florida to Newfoundland and Labrador. It’s been deemed at risk of extinction. It’s estimated there are only 336 left.

The leading causes of death for the right whale are being hit by ships and entanglement in fishing gear. In 2017, an unprecedented 17 right whale incidents — 12 deaths and five entanglements — took place in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

By the next year, Fisheries and Oceans had mitigating measures in place, including requiring large ships to cut their speed moving through the gulf and closing fisheries in areas where right whales had been spotted.

In 2020, then-federal fisheries minister Bernadette Jordan announced a requirement for whale-safe gear — specifically lower-breaking-strength gear — to be used in all fisheries by 2022. Due to COVID, that deadline was extended to 2023, but the gear in question is still in the process of being tested to see what’s feasible in the various fisheries and regions.

Canada’s approach to protecting whales has been largely centred around monitoring and closures. When a right whale is detected in Maritime waters, 2,000 square kilometres surrounding that sighting are closed to fisheries. Harvesters have to get their traps out of the water. If a whale continues to linger in that area, or others are spotted, fisheries remain closed, or, in the case of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, are closed for the season.

Those are big problems for fishers. This year, a right whale sighting closed the snow crab fishery off of Prince Edward Island for virtually the whole season. That left crab harvesters in Tignish — with a relatively short season and too much distance to cover to find an area where they could fish — looking at the prospect of being shut out of a fishing season that was worth $300 million overall in the gulf last year.

Desperate for an alternative, they turned to Brilliant.

The walls of his warehouse are lined with possible whale-safe solutions. On one side, shelves hold colourful spools of “low-breaking-strength” rope, designed to part rather than entangle whales, along with breakaway elements that can be spliced into existing rope.

On the other side, shelves hold ropeless trap systems designed to eliminate vertical ropes in the water, by keeping the buoys at the bottom until they’re called for.

He’s got 75 of the latter, made by seven manufacturers, in various states of production. Most of those were loaned to the P.E.I. fishers.

With no vertical ropes in the water, Canadian Wildlife Federation was able to help fishers get permits in the waters off Tignish that would have otherwise been closed to them for the season.

“We were able to provide them with about 50 units of ropeless gear. We trained them up on it. They went and fished with it for six weeks. They landed more than 370,000 pounds of snow crab, did more than 150 hauls with this stuff,” he says.

The ropeless systems that Brilliant sends out for fishers to test fall into two categories.

In one system, buoy lines are held at depth until someone on the surface sends an acoustic signal to a device, which releases the buoy. The buoy floats to the surface, where it’s spotted by fishers and the line is used to pull up the attached traps.

In the other system, the signal from the surface triggers an air tank on the bottom to inflate a lift bag, which lifts the unit to the surface with a rope attached, which fishers can use to pull up their line of traps.

“These things work. It’s not science fiction,” says Brilliant. “Fishermen are understandably skeptical of them. They’ve been fishing the same for 400 years. And now this represents a real different change.”

But the ropeless gear has some other challenges, chief among them being that when a fisher drops a line of traps into the water and doesn’t have a buoy marking the spot, other harvesters won’t know where those traps are and might lay theirs over top.

But the main problem is the price tag. Right now one of the ropeless units might cost $4,000, each of which could be used with a line of about 20 traps.

With some fishing boats laying out as many as 375 lobster traps, that cost is prohibitive for most, but Brilliant envisions that the future of the technology would be in a “gear library,” where, if a particular fishing region was closed because of a whale sighting, rather than take their gear out of the water, harvesters could replace their vertical buoy ropes with borrowed ropeless units and continue fishing as the Tignish crab harvesters did.

Hubert Saulnier, now 68, has been fishing in Nova Scotia’s Lobster Fishing Area 34 — its largest — since he was 15. When the season opens in LFA 34, he’ll be heading out from the wharf in Saulnierville with his boat and his traps — but without any of the ropeless gear he’s been testing for Brilliant for more than a year.

To be fair, in that region, so far, it’s largely unnecessary. Right whale sightings are rare in the Bay of Fundy. Typically, by the time the lobster season opens up in the areas in the south and west of Nova Scotia, the right whales have already made their way further south.

But Saulnier says though it’s not an issue now, closures like the one that happened off P.E.I. this year might happen where most of Nova Scotia’s lobster harvesters are fishing, and they need to be prepared for that. There need to be systems in place, he says, whereby fishers can keep fishing.

The Tignish crab fishers’ usage this year tells him these systems can work, but using them in the Bay of Fundy is a different story altogether. The lobster season there starts in late November, so fishing occurs in much worse weather. The number of lobster traps being deployed is much higher than those of crab traps. And they have to contend with ferocious Fundy tides.

In fact, that’s one of the practical problems he’s found with the units he’s been testing. If the tides are running and the buoy for the ropeless units surfaces too far from the boat, the current can pull that buoy under before the harvesters get to it.

If you’d asked him five or 10 years ago about the prospect of using ropeless gear, he says, he might have said the same things many of the other fishers he’s talked to: “It’s not going to work. It’s not feasible. It costs too much.”

Having tested variations of the gear, he’s changed his mind on some parts, but not others: It does work — though it’s not without its flaws, he’s learned. But also, it does cost too much.

Practically, he says, it’s still a few years away from being ready for prime-time Bay of Fundy fishing.

But the motivation, at least for him, to keep an eye on its development is there.

“I don’t think anybody is impressed when they see an entangled whale, full of rope and balloons that they’re dragging around,” he says. “Nobody can be.”

That, combined with rising public — and international — marketplace pressure to fish in a whale-friendly manner, is enough of a reason to entertain the idea of the use of the new gear — when it’s ready.

“If we want to prevent whales encountering fishing gear, the best thing to do is to not fish where there’s whales,” says Brilliant. “That’s what those closures do. Canada closes something like 30-40,000 square kilometres of fishing grounds every year to protect right whales.

“The fisheries closures are the solution to the whale entanglement. This gear is the solution to those closures.”

SHARE: