November 26, 2024 — A federal judge is throwing out a lawsuit from Maine lobstermen over a rule that went into effect more than a year ago.
The rule requires lobstermen with federal fishing permits to put monitors on their boats, which tracks their location on the water.
Five lobstermen had argued that the monitors violate their constitutional rights to privacy, equal protection and due process.
November 22, 2024 — A federal judge has ruled against a group of five lobstermen that sued the state in attempt to stop electronic boat tracking requirements that went effect almost one year ago.
The rules require lobstermen with federal fishing permits to install monitors on their boats that track their location on the water.
The lobstermen argued that the tracking is a violation of their constitutional rights to privacy, equal protection and due process.
A federal judge in Bangor dismissed the case Thursday, in part, because of jurisdictional issues. Though the Maine Department of Marine Resources promulgated the rules, the policy to begin monitoring came from the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. The commission said it’s seeking more data from multiple states about fishing trends and potential interactions with critically endangered right whales and other species.
Judge John Woodcock said he was also swayed by DMR’s arguments that the monitoring is not overly intrusive of lobstermen privacy, as the industry is subject to tougher standards and conservation measures that are meant to protect the fishery.
November 13, 2024 — Andrew Goode grew up lobstering with his father in Boothbay, Maine, a coastal town whose economy and culture have long been defined by the fishing industry.
Goode: “It’s essentially what built the town.”
Today, as a researcher at the University of Maine Darling Marine Center, Goode studies how the warming climate is affecting lobster in his region.
November 1, 2024 — Fishermen in Maine say they’re dealing with a new setback: a nearly 90 percent cut in how much herring they can bring in to bait lobster.
Congressman Jared Golden says he’s opposed to the limit, which would reduce the herring catch by 89 percent over three years.
Fishermen in Maine say they question how regulators came to that catch limit, saying the fish are out there.
October 23, 2024 — Fishing regulators are delaying a plan for stricter fishing rules amid concerns about a decline in baby lobsters in the warming waters off New England.
The regulators are looking to institute a new rule that fishermen need to abide by a larger minimum size for the lobsters they trap. The change is only 1/16th of an inch or 1.6 millimeters, but regulators have said it will help preserve the population of the valuable crustaceans, as many small lobsters will need to be tossed back to the ocean.
Some fishermen have argued the change is unnecessary and will be disruptive to one of the country’s most lucrative seafood industries when it is already stressed by warming waters, surging expenses and new rules to protect whales. They’ve argued for the new rules to be delayed or scrapped.
The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission has said the minimum size must be changed because of a recent decline of more than 35% of the young lobster stock in the Gulf of Maine, a key fishing ground. But the commission voted Monday to push back the implementation of the change from Jan. 1 to July 1, 2025.
October 22, 2024 — Fisheries regulators have given the lobster industry a brief reprieve by delaying new size limits for six months.
The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission said increasing the minimum lobster size by fractions of an inch will help rebuild stocks affected by troubling declines in young lobsters.
The commission’s lobster board argue increasing the minimum catch size will let younger lobsters live longer and reproduce more. Board members voted overwhelmingly Monday to delay the rules during the commission’s annual meeting.
Under the new rule, the minimum carapace measurement for a legal lobster will increase in July 2025, from 3 and 1/4 inches to 3 and 5/16 inches, and increase again a year and a half later.
October 21, 2024 — Damian Brady spends a lot of his time in lobster boats, scooping up, counting, and measuring baby lobsters in the Gulf of Maine. Along with counts from scuba dives and fishing hauls, Brady’s data goes into the comprehensive Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System that helps managers regulate the fishery. Brady also looks at “lobster settlement” — under what water conditions do these baby lobsters decide to settle in? He has studied decades of lobster booms and busts, refining the models in search of a “crystal ball,” as he calls it, on lobster futures.
Climate change has course-adjusted the Gulf Stream northward, warming the waters of southern New England, and driving a northward movement of lobster populations. It feels like history repeating: Science suggests warming waters caused the Rhode Island lobster industry to collapse earlier, going from 22 million pounds in 1997 to just over 3 million pounds in 2013.
But in Maine, lobsters are still a vital industry. On a good year, 100 million pounds of lobster may cross the state’s docks, bringing in more than $400 million. Maine’s boon from the northward lobster migration was a record-breaking lobster haul in 2016. But then lobster counts began to decline consistently, year after year into 2023. The fishery’s worst fear echoed across the docks: A Rhode Island-style collapse was heading toward Maine.
But Brady, after years of careful study, is not seeing that future. What many announced as the beginning of the end, he calls a “regime shift.”
The shift drove a downsize in the Maine lobster fleet, particularly from southern Maine towns such as Portland.
“The center of lobstering has moved [north], from the center of Maine to Downeast Maine,” Brady said.
Above Portland on a map, “Downeast” is where Maine juts into the Atlantic Ocean by way of many small islands. There, the island fishing town of Stonington brings in the largest lobster catches. Its boats are able to reach the deep, federal-permit waters far offshore where lobsters are now settling.
“There was a particular boom in deep water settlement,” Brady said, reporting the most recent surveys, “places we haven’t really looked before, or looked at much.” To scientists, new habitats call for more data.
October 21, 2024 — A new study finds that lobsters are relocating to new habitats in the Gulf of Maine.
The findings could have implications for how the lobster stock is measured and how the fishery is eventually managed.
Lobsters have typically favored rocky boulders and used those habitats as shelter. But a research team with the University of Maine found that the use of those habitats dropped by 60% over the last 25 years or so.
October 21, 2024 — It was a blessedly calm day as Scott Landry’s team set out in their inflatable boat to scan the glistening waters of Great South Channel between Rhode Island and Massachusetts for an endangered whale affectionately known as Wart. They were on a mission to save her life.
The group, from the nonprofit Center for Coastal Studies located in nearby Provincetown, had spent the better part of three years monitoring Wart after an aerial team spotted the North Atlantic right whale with a large piece of rope lodged in her mouth.
Instead of coming loose on its own, the fishing rope slowly tangled itself deeper into Wart’s baleens, hindering her ability to eat and reproduce. Finally, Landry’s team decided to take a more hands-on approach—a dangerous but necessary last resort.
“The first thing that people need to realize is that the animals do not know that we’re trying to help them out,” said Landry, the director of the center’s Marine Animal Entanglement Response Program. “These are just wild animals that we are approaching at a moment in their life that is quite horrible.”
October 4, 2024 — NOAA investigators have for the first time confirmed a link between the death of a critically endangered North Atlantic right whale and the Maine lobster industry.
The whale, right whale #5120, was found dead off the coast of Massachusetts in January 2024, and a necropsy in February found it was entangled in gear with markings that NOAA said were consistent with rope used in Maine state water trap/pot buoy lines used for lobster fishing.