PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • October 16, 2021
A federal judge in Maine on Saturday blocked a seasonal ban on traditional lobster fishing in a stretch of offshore waters in the Gulf of Maine that regulators say is needed to save the endangered North Atlantic right whale from extinction. In his 28-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Lance Walker said regulators had relied on “markedly thin” statistical modeling instead of hard evidence to show the nearly thousand-square-mile area they had planned to close was really a hot spot for the imperiled whale. If the closure had gone into effect, many of the Maine Lobstering Union members would have lost their primary winter fishing grounds, resulting in a loss of 4 million pounds of union-harvested lobster every year – a loss that the union believes could have put it out of business.