A Florida-based captain and yacht owner are challenging federal vessel speed rules aimed at protecting North Atlantic right whales from collisions.
The complaint asks a Tampa court to block the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from imposing fines on the captain and owner for exceeding the 10-knot speed limit in seasonally restricted areas on the East Coast.
Attorney Erica Fuller said the Conservation Law Foundation and other groups are asking to intervene, because the plaintiffs are also seeking a judgement declaring that the government lacked the authority to issue ship speed limits in the first place.
"The agency was on solid footing to implement this rule, and we'd like to see them do even more as soon as that's possible," she said. "But the worst thing that could happen for the species is if they have no protections at all from vessel speed rules. And if this one goes away, they have nothing."
The existing ship speed limits, which have been on the books since 2008, require large vessels not to exceed 10 knots in certain areas along the East Coast at specific times of the year. NOAA also notifies mariners if aggregations of right whales have been spotted in certain, but those slowdown warnings are largely voluntary.
Conservation groups have been asking NOAA to impose stricter speed limit rules for more than a decade. Days before President Donald Trump took office in January, NOAA announced it would drop a tougher ship speed proposal that had been languishing in the federal rulemaking process for more than two years. The agency said it didn't have time to review more than 90,000 comments about the proposed rules before the Biden administration left Washington.
Fuller noted that while conservation groups presume that the Trump administration will defend the ship speed rules in court, she acknowledged that "our political situation is a little bit different."
"It would be a worst-case scenario if they didn't defend the rule at all," she said. "It's hard to know."
Ship strikes and entanglements in fishing gear are the two leading causes of death and injury to North Atlantic right whales. In the last two years, there have been at least four right whale deaths and five serious injuries due to vessel strikes.
