July 20, 2012 – Maine lobstermen don’t have to look very far to see what their industry will look like as the warming trend continues. As lobster populations have boomed in the colder, more northern waters of the Gulf of Maine—protected from the Gulf Stream’s warming by the outstretched arm of Cape Cod—they have crashed in the once lobster-rich areas of Long Island and Block Island Sounds.
It’s a good time to be a tourist in Maine. While the rest of the country is being ravaged by wildfires, sweltering away setting record numbers of record-high temperatures, or withering in the grasp of a drought that rivals the 1930s Dust Bowl, northern New England’s temperate climes are a welcome relief. And the cherry on top of that cool, soothing sundae is that the state’s signature seafood, lobster, is selling at rock-bottom prices—as little as $3.99 per pound in Portland.
The downside, of course, is that while epicures can sample their favorite crustaceans for less than they typically pay for bologna, most lobstermen are struggling to just break even at per-pound prices as low as $2—about half what they typically receive for their catch. This level is far below the break-even point Maine’s 5,000 commercial lobstermen need to cover expenses of fuel, bait, and wages.
The cause? It’s somewhat hard to pin down, but a major contributor is global climate change. And the lobster fishery isn’t the only one feeling the heat.
Lobsters, like all crustaceans, molt as they grow. Dust the cobwebs off your ninth-grade biology textbook, and you may recall the term “exoskeleton”—the external shell possessed by lobsters, crabs, and most insects. Lobsters typically shed theirs in the late spring and early summer, and for a period of time they are effectively snails without shells—the limpest of which lobstermen refer to as “rags” because it best describes their consistency.
This year, rags started showing up early in traps, and many in the industry, including Bob Bayer who heads the Maine Lobster Institute, trace this to warming ocean temperatures. As Andrew Pershing of the University of Maine and the Gulf of Maine Research Institute asserted at a House Natural Resources Committee hearing yesterday, ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Maine in June were equivalent to average July temperatures. It’s no coincidence then that lobstermen are seeing rags a month early.
When it comes to the price crash, climate may not be the sole cause, but soft-shell lobsters contain less meat than their hard-shelled brethren and can’t be transported as far—you’ll never eat a rag in the Midwest—so their market is limited, and their value is lower.
Read the full story at the Center for American Progress.