The U.S. lobster fishery and the National Marine Fishery Service has gained another two years to work on a new set of regulations that better take the protection and preservation of North Atlantic right whales into account, in a ruling issued on an ongoing lawsuit from U.S. District Judge James Boasberg.
The lawsuit, Center for Biological Diversity v. Raimondo, was the source of a July 2022 ruling that found new NMFS regulations did not meet the standards required for the fishery to remain legal under the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act. Fishery representatives and regulators have been grappling on interpretations of the new rules, which were intended to protect the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale…