A handful of Rhode Island lobster fishermen are working this season with federal regulators to use and study some complex and early stage equipment that is intended, eventually, to greatly reduce entanglements and deaths of whales.
The experimental equipment for this so-called “ropeless” fishing would eliminate the vertical ropes — or “lines” — running down the water column from buoys on the surface to lines connecting a series of traps on the seafloor.
