President Macron of France may not have realised it, but he walked into another fishing war earlier this month when he and 200 other guests were treated at the White House to butter-poached Maine lobster accented with American Osetra caviar and garnished with celery crisp.
At issue was the lobster, currently subject to a court ruling designed to prevent Maine’s lobstermen from trapping the crustacea in baited pots marked by lines that can fatally entangle feeding North Atlantic right whales. There are now just 340 such whales, with only about 100 breeding females, making the species one of the most endangered on the planet.
The Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative celebrated the choice, saying it was “proud” that the guests were “enjoying the delicious taste of Maine lobster”. The international advocacy group Oceana countered that “lobster on their menu cannot be considered sustainable by any definition”.
The dispute between Maine’s $1bn lobster industry, which employs more than 10,000 lobstermen, the White House and new protections issued by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has deep roots.
The right whale population has dropped from 500 a decade ago while Maine’s lobster industry has boomed. The industry disputes that its vertical lines attached to buoys are to blame. Some point to ship collisions, others to gillnets.
The right whale was one of the first whale species to gain protections in the 1930s, but US wildlife authorities now warn that it could be gone in 40 years. Most recently, in September, a right whale named Snow Cone was sighted entangled in new fishing gear and in “extremely poor health”.
“There are very few whales and a lot of gear in the water,” says Michael Moore at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and author of We Are All Whalers. “We’re not managing to avoid lethal entanglement or entanglement that’s detrimental to their health. For whales to reproduce and for their numbers to recover, they have to be fit, fat, healthy.”
The issue is intensifying. Last month, a US federal judge ordered a two-year extension before new anti-entanglement regulations take effect. Meanwhile, the Whole Foods chain has removed lobster from its stores after California-based Seafood Watch added US and Canadian lobster fisheries to its “red list”.
This week, the Marine Stewardship Council’s suspension of certification awarded to Maine’s lobster industry goes into effect. The council called whale entanglement a “serious and tragic situation”.
“They’re really susceptible, much more so than other whales,” says Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan, “and it’s pretty sad and kind of crazy that this happening off the shores of the richest democracy on Earth.”
But as the ocean warms, they are moving north from their typical winter feeding area off Cape Cod, in search of copepods (a tiny type of zooplankton), where they encounter Maine’s intensive lobster industry and encounters with lobster lines and buoys, which they don’t see.
“They’re surprisingly flexible animals, and they twist and turn and their flukes get entangled,” Hoare says. “The lobster lines can then tighten around their caudal peduncle – the tail stock – causing it to necrotise.” It is, he adds, “a horrible slow death …”
According to Moore, the issue comes down to consumerism. At one time, whales were hunted for oil and baleen; now they are harmed by our demand for goods. “It’s all driven by climate change and the direct impact of the things we do to extract the resources and things we want.”
But no one, as the White House attested, is discounting the power of that demand as an economic driver and political force. “It’s a glorious mismatch that comes down to what we really care about,” Moore says. “In some ways the right whale is a totem for all the different pieces of biodiversity collapse we’re seeing.”
Within this is the wonder of the whale itself, often called the urban whale because it lives so close to shore. “These are huge, very strange animals,” Hoare says, known for, among other things, “very long sessions of foreplay of three or four hours”.
Males possess the biggest testes of any animal on the planet, and the mating often involves several males and a single female – a “socially active group” in scientific terms. “You see them rolling around in shallow water in a very sensual way, stroking each other with their flippers. There are a lot of animals involved, and it’s clearly erotic. They seem so caught up in the moment”.
For the right whale, getting mixed up in human affairs has never been good. But there is, perhaps, a glimmer of hope if the lobster industry adopts “ropeless” lobster pots that can be triggered by acoustic signals to rise to the surface.
Until that happens, the situation for the right whale looks bleak. “You can’t protect the whale and have lobstering,” Hoare says. “It’s as simple as that and it’s freaking out the lobstering industry. They can see it coming.”
