PROVINCETOWN — The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) — the part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration charged with stewardship of the nation’s ocean resources and their habitats — withdrew a proposed update to the North Atlantic Right Whale Vessel Strike Reduction Rule on Jan. 15.

The tighter and more complex version of the rule was designed to protect the federally endangered North Atlantic right whale but had drawn criticism from ferry companies and both state and local government officials, who worried about its effects on ferry service.

The population of North Atlantic right whales has dropped to around 370 individuals including only 70 reproductive-age females, according to the fisheries service (also called NOAA Fisheries). Vessel strikes are one of the two leading causes of mortality in the species, along with entanglement in fishing gear. In 2024, the agency logged five right whale deaths and four calf disappearances, the highest numbers since 2019. Three of the five right whales died from vessel strikes, the agency said.

The vessel speed regulation that now stands was implemented in 2008. It established a speed limit of 10 knots for vessels over 65 feet traveling through “seasonal management zones” — that is, the speed limit is only in force in specific areas during certain times of the year. For Cape Cod, the limit applies from Jan. 1 to May 15 in Cape Cod Bay and from March 1 to April 15 on the back shore.

The new regulation would have made the speed limit apply to all boats larger than 35 feet and collated all seasonal management zones into four large zones; the one that included the waters around Cape Cod would have been active from Nov. 1 to May 30. The proposed rule change would also have established mandatory “dynamic management zones,” 400-square-nautical-mile areas with a 10-knot speed limit. Those zones would change locations based on sightings of North Atlantic right whales when the seasonal management zones were not active.

Withdrawing the proposed update just five days before the end of President Biden’s term, the agency cited insufficient time to finalize the regulation in this administration “due to the scope and volume of public comments” it had received. The agency received approximately 90,000 public comments on the rule, the withdrawal notice said. It added that withdrawing this proposed change “does not preclude NMFS from taking future action.”

A Problem for Ferries

Had the update been enacted in its proposed form, it would have prevented ferries from running from May 15 to May 30. Michael Glasfeld, owner of Bay State Cruise Company, which operates three round-trip ferry services between Boston and Provincetown daily in the summer, told the Independent last April that a lack of ferry service in May would mean the loss of about half of his business’s annual profits. Due to the high cost of year-round expenses like insurance and mortgages, he said, “every week we operate is critical for paying down all that money.”

Glasfeld was especially concerned about the mandatory dynamic management zones that the update would have established. Right whales typically depart Cape Cod Bay by mid-May, according to the Center for Coastal Studies, but were a right whale to appear in the bay in the summer, the dynamic management zone would be nearly the size of the entire bay.

A 10-knot-per-hour speed limit would turn a 90-minute one-way trip into a 4.5-hour trip, according to Glasfeld, which he said would make operating impossible and put all Provincetown ferries out of business.

When the update was first proposed in 2022, Provincetown officials brought up similar concerns during the public comment period, with the select board signing a letter to NOAA Fisheries to encourage the agency to move the end date for the proposed slow period to May 15 to allow ferry service to begin at that point.

Town Manager Alex Morse submitted a similar letter, noting that each ferry-based day-tripper spends $450 in town, and a week-long visitor spends $6,500, tourism dollars that would be lost without the ferry service, he argued.

After NMFS withdrew the proposed update, Glasfeld told the Independent that “there’s some relief that I know that we’ll be able to live another day.” He said that around Cape Cod, “the well-being of the right whale population and that of the economy are not mutually exclusive,” adding that he hoped appropriate measures could be taken to keep the species alive.

A Future for Right Whales?

According to Daniel Palacios, director of the Right Whale Ecology Program at the Center for Coastal Studies, the risk of vessel strikes to right whales is significant. “Measures to decrease any kind of collision throughout their range” would be valuable, he said.

Erica Fuller, a senior attorney at the Conservation Law Foundation, said she had expected NOAA Fisheries to withdraw the update, and blamed the Biden administration for moving too slowly on it. “We were disappointed and outraged at all of the time the Biden administration had to finalize this rule and never got it done,” she said.

Fuller said that the Biden administration’s ability to tackle right whale entanglements was hindered by a rider in the 2022 federal omnibus spending bill that prevented any new fishing gear regulations from being introduced to protect right whales, though no such excuse existed for preventing vessel strikes, she said.

Fuller said that her organization supported shifting the end date back to May 15 and exempting Nantucket and Vineyard Sound from the speed limits to allow ferry service to continue in those areas. “Right whales do not use those areas,” she said. “It was unfortunate that the rule had some areas that created an awful lot of opposition that was perhaps unnecessary.”

Regina Asmutis-Silva, executive director of Whale and Dolphin Conservation, said that, based on President Trump’s previous administration, her organization does not expect “a lot of focus on right whale conservation” in the future.

Asmutis-Silva and Fuller both said that action to protect the right whale population is needed as soon as possible. “We’ve never had so few breeding females,” Fuller said, adding that “they just aren’t having enough calves. We really are at a tipping point for this species.”

Palacios agreed. “At this point, we need to do anything we can to protect them,” he said.