January 24, 2018 — Lobster conservation techniques pioneered by Maine fishermen helped drive a population boom that’s led to record landings this century. That’s the conclusion of new, peer-reviewed research published today.
The paper also finds that lobstermen in southern New England could have used the same techniques to prevent or at least slow the collapse of their fisheries — even in the face of climate change — but they didn’t.
Cape Elizabeth lobsterman Curt Brown has been hauling traps since he was a kid. He says he quickly learned that when he pulled up a female lobster, covered in eggs, he was looking at the fishery’s future.
Maine lobstermen throw back lobsters like these, which produce eggs at a high rate, but other lobstermen do not
“You get used to seeing lobsters and then you see a lobster with eggs and it’s whole new animal,” he says. The underside of the tail is just covered with eggs.”
Since 1917, Maine lobstermen like Brown have used a technique known as “V-notching”: when they found an egg-bearing female in their traps, they would clip a “V” into the end of its tail, and throw it back. The next time it turns up in someone’s trap, even if it’s not showing eggs, the harvester knows it’s a fertile female, and throws it back. Later, the lobstermen also pushed the Legislature to impose limits on the size of the lobster they can keep — because the biggest ones produce the most eggs.
“I use my measure right here, right on the measure, at the end of the measure, is a little tool in the shape of a ‘V,'” Brown says. “So you just grab the lobster underside of the tail just like that and it cuts a V-notch right in the tail. Quick, painless, throw her back in and let her do more of her job.”
And those fertile females have been doing that job very well in Maine. Since the 1980s, lobster abundance here has grown by more than 500 percent, with landings shooting up from fewer than 20 million pounds in 1985, to more than 120 million pounds in 2015 with a value of more than a half billion dollars.