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On Friday, a federal appeals court sided with lobstermen, ruling that a federal agency went too far in imposing restrictions meant to protect an endangered whale species.
Governor Chris Sununu celebrated the decision as a win for New Hampshire’s lobster industry. The state has hundreds of commercial and recreation trappers, according to his office, which has previously said it will do all it can to protect the state’s most important fishery.
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“I’m thrilled that the D.C. Circuit Court ruled in favor of New England’s lobstermen after New Hampshire supported their lawsuit against the National Marine Fisheries Service,” he said in a statement on Friday afternoon.
“We were not going to sit and watch as the federal government choked the lobster industry to death with draconian and arbitrary regulation,” he said. “New Hampshire backs its fishermen, and today’s victory helps keep them in business.”
According to the opinion, the stricter rules could cost fishermen $50 million to $90 million over the first six years. Those rules were put in place in 2022, after five whales were killed in U.S. waters and 12 others were killed off of Canadian shores in 2017.
Federal regulators began requiring lobstermen to mark their ropes, use weaker ropes, and increase the number of traps per trawl. But it’s hard to know exactly why whales are dying or where they have died. Given this uncertainty, the decision found that the National Marine Fisheries Service cannot give the benefit of the doubt to an endangered species by relying on worst-case scenarios or pessimistic assumptions.
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“It is not the province of a scientific consultant to pick whales over people,” according to the opinion. The endangered species in question is the North Atlantic right whale — a baleen whale with a huge mouth, a stocky black body, and no dorsal fin.
Right whales are migratory animals. They range the coastal waters of the eastern United States, including New Hampshire, and reach as far north as Norway and Iceland. The Gulf of Maine has been deemed a critical habitat because it’s the traditional foraging ground for the creatures, who birth their calves in warmer waters off the southeastern United States.
The right whale has been endangered for almost as long as the United States has kept track of animals at risk of extinction, and it’s one of the world’s most endangered large whales, according to NOAA, with estimates that only around 350 are left.
Their name comes from the fact that they float and were therefore considered the “right” whales to hunt, but by the late 1890s they had been hunted to the brink of extinction.
After whale hunting was outlawed, right whales never recovered, and humans are still the biggest threat they face, although now that threat is in the form of entanglement in fishing gear and getting hit by boats. But the judge said federal regulators have to look at likely scenarios when protecting endangered species, and not at the worst-case scenario.
The opinion said that while the Service found that as many as 46 whales could be killed by fisheries in a decade, there were only two documented right whale deaths from fisheries in the U.S from 2010 to 2018.
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“If, as the lobstermen claim, the federal lobster fishery is not the problem, then the phase one rule is not the solution,” the opinion said.
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Amanda Gokee can be reached at amanda.gokee@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @amanda_gokee.