The measures, which primarily affect lobster fisheries, seek to reduce the threat to endangered North Atlantic right whale.

PROVIDENCE — Fishermen across New England are facing new restrictions after a panel of experts convened by the federal government agreed on Friday to a plan to step up protection of the endangered North Atlantic right whale.

The group of federal and state officials, scientists, fishermen and environmental advocates, created by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, capped a four-day meeting in Providence by reaching consensus on a plan to reduce entanglements in fishing gear, which is the leading cause of injuries to the whale and deaths. The measures, which include using weaker ropes or breakaway ropes and reducing the number of vertical lines in the water, will primarily affect the region’s lobster fisheries.

While the plan agreed to by the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team sets an overall goal of reducing whale deaths caused by fishing gear by 60 percent, each state will meet that target through a combination of different measures.

In Rhode Island, lobstermen will cut the number of end lines — the ropes that run vertically from traps on the ocean bottom to buoys on the surface — by 18 percent over the next three years and, on the remaining lines, use rope sleeves that would break apart under enough force. In Massachusetts, the reduction in vertical lines will be 30 percent and in Maine 50 percent.

With the whale's population numbering fewer than 411 individuals, of which only about 100 are breeding females, nearly everyone on the team supported the plan as an effective response to prevent the extinction of a species whose recent decline started in about 2010.

“This is the best step that I have seen taken since I’ve been on the team,” said Scott Landry, director of the Marine Animal Entanglement Response team for the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Patrice McCarron, director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, pointed to the reduction in vertical lines in the water column as key.

“It’s an incontrovertible benefit to the whales,” she said.

But others said that the measures don’t go far enough by, for example, failing to consider a seasonal closure in waters south of Cape Cod that in recent years has become a popular gathering place for the whale.

“I don’t consider this sufficient,” said Sharon Young, marine issues field director for the Humane Society of the United States.

There are other questions surrounding the plan. They include the use of weaker ropes, which adult whales should be able to break through but, according to critics, not calves or juveniles. The reduction team also didn’t seriously consider traps that don’t need ropes and could be brought to the surface using remote devices, said Erica Fuller, senior attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation.

She described such ropeless traps as “the best long-term solution” to prevent whale deaths.

“That technology is not perfect, but unless it gets into the hands of fishermen it will never be perfected,” she said in an email.

Between 2012 and 2016, about five right whales died annually on average because of entanglements with fishing gear. Fisheries officials estimate that about half can be traced back to Canadian fishermen and the other half to those in the United States. To meet the goals of the federal law that protects the species, the mortality rate would have to be brought down to about one whale a year.

“The urgency of this situation cannot be underscored enough,” said Francine Kershaw, project scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Marine Mammal Protection Project. “The survival of right whales depends on ending all types of entanglement.”

Greg Mataronas, president of the Rhode Island Lobstermen’s Association, said that it’s not just up to the U.S. fishing industry to make concessions to protect the right whale, but also requires work by Canadian fishermen, and by the regulation of offshore wind development in Southern New England.

“If they’re not being held accountable as well, then I don’t think you’ll see industry back at the table,” he said.

Maine lobsterman Michael Sargent said the plan will require him to remove nearly 11 miles of vertical line for his traps, which he described as “scary.”

But he added, “I think it’s a realistic number. It’s something I can do.”

— akuffner@providencejournal.com

(401) 277-7457

On Twitter: @KuffnerAlex