November 19, 2014 — If you depend on fishing for a living, you’ve noticed a rapidly changing ocean ecosystem in the Gulf of Maine in recent years — the effects of climate change and the consequences of decades, if not centuries, of overfishing.
The effects are devastating for fishermen who rely on traditional, cold-water Gulf of Maine species such as cod and shrimp. Shrimp are off limits for the second year in a row as stocks fail to recover to healthy levels. And regulators on Tuesday slashed cod catch limits 75 percent from last year’s levels, a week after they closed off large swaths of the Gulf of Maine to cod fishing.
Maine’s prize crustacean is plentiful, but where lobstermen are landing their catch is changing as lobsters seek cooler waters up the coast and baby lobsters’ natural predators disappear. Lobstermen in Washington County hauled in 18.8 percent of the state’s lobster landings in 2013, according to the Maine Department of Marine Resources. That’s double the figure from 1998, when Washington County accounted for 9.3 percent of the catch.
Knox and Waldo counties, by contrast, accounted for more than 35 percent in 1998, but their share was down to 27.2 percent in 2013. Farther south, the lobster fisheries in Connecticut and Rhode Island have collapsed over the past 15 years.
Meanwhile, Gulf of Maine fishermen are increasingly noticing species that traditionally sought out warmer waters, including Maryland blue crab, red hake, turbot, squid, black sea bass, dogfish and others. Some prey on shrimp, partially explaining that crustacean’s decline.
The shock of shutting down a fishery is real, but the Gulf of Maine’s fishing history has been building up to this moment of uncertainty over the future of Maine’s fishing economy.
Read the full opinion from Bangor Daily News