Lobster traps, whales, and the enforcement of informal property rights

 An experiment to protect whales from becoming entangled in the long ropes that connect lobster traps on the sea floor to buoys on the surface might also change some equilibria among lobster fisherman.

The WSJ has this story:

Endangered Whales Get Lifeline From High-Tech Lobster Traps. Lobstermen are testing equipment designed to help North American right whales avoid deadly entanglements   By Eric Niiler

"Lobstermen have long used buoys to mark the location of their traps. The ropeless systems are designed to limit whales’ risk of entanglement by keeping the buoys and their ropes stowed underwater on the traps until it is time to check the traps. 

...

"Another challenge that could stand in the way of broad use of ropeless gear involves alerting other fishermen to the presence of lobster traps—whose location, in the absence of buoys, can be harder to identify. Conflict between lobstermen with fixed gear and fishermen who drag nets along the seafloor has long been a problem along the New England coast, federal officials said.

"Computer scientists at the Allen Institute for AI—a Seattle-based nonprofit research organization founded by late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen—are developing an app to share the location of ropeless gear with other fishermen and regulators, according to Henry Milliken, supervisory research fishery biologist at NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole."

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Earlier, on a different aspect of the lobstering equilibrium:

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Policing the lobster commons

"Lobsters are caught in traps that sit on the sea floor, marked by (and recovered via) buoys that float above, connected to the trap by a rope. Lobstermen in Maine are known for policing who sets traps where by cutting the lines (or threatening to cut the lines) of lobstermen who set traps outside of their territory. From time to time there's a question about whether the state should limit certain areas to local lobstermen. Now is such a time..."

Lin Ostrom coauthored a paper on this:

Schlager, Edella, and Elinor Ostrom. "Property-rights regimes and natural resources: a conceptual analysis." Land economics (1992): 249-262.

"The enforcement of the de facto proprietor rights was borne entirely by the lobstermen of each village. The sanction that  they used against anyone who violated communal rules was gear destruction. ...The easiest means of destroying traps is to cut the rope by which the traps are attached to buoys."