Lobster Archives - Saving Seafood

First Circuit likely to save the whales despite lobstermen’s complaints

December 3, 2024 — An epic sea battle unfolded at the First Circuit Tuesday as Massachusetts fishermen tried to harpoon federal regulations that protect the North Atlantic right whale. But it appeared the judges were on the whales’ side and, as in “Moby Dick,” the fishermen may end up shipwrecked.

At issue is a federal rule that limits lobster and Jonah crab fisheries’ use of buoy lines, which can entangle and kill whales.

The fishermen’s lawyer, Daniel Cragg, told the judges that the rule resulted from Congress making a “drafting failure,” but the judges seemed incredulous.

“As between ‘Congress didn’t know what it was doing’ and ‘Congress did something that makes sense,’ it seems like making sense is the better option,” U.S. Circuit Judge Seth Aframe commented dryly during oral arguments.

For centuries right whales, which average 50 feet long and 50 to 75 tons, were targeted by whalers due to their docile nature and high blubber content. By 1937, when hunting them was banned worldwide, there were only about 100 left. The species rebounded a little, but in 1970 they were listed as endangered and the population today is estimated to be around 350.

Read the full story at Courthouse News Service

US restaurant chains launch lobster, shrimp, cod specials as Lent kicks off

February 14, 2024 — Coinciding with the start of Lent on 14 February, numerous U.S. restaurant chains are rolling limited-time offers featuring lobster, shrimp, and cod.

One of the biggest U.S. seafood restaurant chains, Orlando, Florida, U.S.A.-based Red Lobster, is bringing back its popular Lobsterfest promotion and adding several new shrimp and lobster dishes to its menu, including Lobster Lover’s Dream featuring twin North American lobster tails and linguine with lobster sourced from Maine.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

MA lobstermen want to invent a better lobster trap

December 7, 2023 — Patrick Flanary: For years, right whale advocates and engineers have been trying to develop new lobster fishing gear designed to prevent whales from entanglements. But most local lobstermen say they’re against this so-called “on demand” fishing gear that’s been created. Now, as CAI’s Eve Zuckoff reports, lobstermen have decided to come up with their own technology. Eve, you were the first to report this, thanks for being here this morning.

Eve Zuckoff: Thanks for having me.

Patrick Flanary: So the Massachusetts lobstermen’s association has just been awarded a $1.2 million grant to develop new fishing gear. What’s their proposal?

Eve Zuckoff: Over the next year they’ll be working with an engineer to develop a “pinger” inside a lobster trap that sends satellite signals to show where traps are on the seafloor. So whenever a lobsterman is ready to collect his catch, he or she will go wherever the pinger says, throw a grapple — these metal hooks — down into the water, and haul up the traps.

All of this eliminates the need for a traditional buoy marking where their gear is, and an extra rope called an “end line” that’s known to entangle whales.

But to be clear: lobstermen don’t want to use this gear year round — just during closures — specifically an upcoming 3-month-long period where they have to be out of local waters to protect the whales.

Patrick Flanary: What would this pinger/grappling system replace exactly?

Eve Zuckoff: In recent years, engineers have developed “on demand gear,” sometimes called “ropeless gear.” Here’s how that works: when lobstermen set their traps, there is an inflatable bag and compressed air tank — or something similar — inside one of them. And when a lobsterman is ready to haul up their gear, they hit a button on an app, which triggers the bag to inflate, and the bag floats up to the surface where the lobsterman can haul it all in. But Beth Casoni, head of the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s association said her group is not a fan.

“The current systems are cost prohibitive,” she said. “Even if the government was to buy them, which would be ludicrous, the price tag would be insane for the entire lobster fishery.”

So the on-demand technology is similar to the pinger and grappling hook in that there’s no more buoy and stagnant rope just waiting in the water, ready entangle a passing whale, but the pinger eliminates the need for a costly inflatable bag, air tank, and other tech.

Patrick Flanary: So cost is obviously a factor. Are the pingers cheaper?

Eve Zuckoff: Ding, ding, ding! For now, as Casoni said, on demand gear is being subsidized by the federal government, but at some point, the cost could fall in fishermen to the tune of $3,000-7,500 for one line of traps. And lobstermen typically fish many lines of traps. The Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association hopes pingers will cost just $300-$400 per line of traps.

Read the full story at NHPR

Diving—and Dying—for Red Gold: The Human Cost of Honduran Lobster

December 6, 2023 — Próspero Bendles Marcelino was 15 when he began diving for spiny lobster in the Caribbean waters between Honduras and Nicaragua. That was in 1965, and if he caught an average of 10 pounds of lobster, he earned the equivalent of $30 in today’s terms. A member of the Indigenous Miskito community, he was born in rural Ahuás, Honduras, 29 miles from Puerto Lempira, the capital of the Gracias a Dios region, in the most remote and biodiverse part of the country.

Since childhood, during the eight-month lobster season from July to February, Marcelino would wake at dawn with 20 Miskito divers, slip out of his tomb-like bunk on a 40-foot dive boat, and gather the diving equipment: rusty air tanks, cracked fins and goggles, hammers, and the metal rods with hooks used to pry lobsters from their lairs. He would hand the equipment to a friend, who waited in a cayuco, a canoe carved out of a tree trunk. The cayucero, usually a family member or friend, paddled the cayuco with the diver and gear and waited for Marcelino to surface between dives to throw the lobsters into the dive boat. All around it, cayuceros paddled in a constellation of effort, positioning divers to descend to lobster lairs.

The sea, a deep blue from above, was darker 70 to 130 feet below where the lobsters hid in lairs. Marcelino navigated swift, cold currents and poor visibility to reach them. They used their sharp spikes to anchor themselves in their lairs. He pulled them out with a hook, putting them into a bag. Hooking the lobsters by their tails was easier, but dive boat captains discouraged divers from leaving marks on the lobster that would indicate how it was caught. This allowed captains to sell their lobster as if it were trap-caught and for that lie to be told all the way through the supply chain, until it was comingled at processing facilities.

Honduran spiny lobster is a $46.7 million industry, exported almost entirely to U.S. markets. While some of the lobster is trap-caught, it is cheaper to rely on divers. But dive boats and the processors that buy their catch do not invest in training or equipping divers. In the remote region with few jobs, the owners of the lobster boats save money at the cost of the divers, paying poverty wages, offering no protective gear, demanding an unsafe number of dives per day, and sometimes offering divers drugs to increase their tolerance for pain and weariness. When divers are injured, most dive boat owners do not want to pay for their care.

Read the full story at Civil Eats

MAINE: First National Bank donates $300k to aid Maine lobstermen

November 10, 2022 — A local bank has pledged $300,000 to support Maine lobstermen in their legal battle against the National Marine Fisheries Service.

First National Bank announced a $150,000 donation to the Maine Lobstermen’s Association’s “Save Maine Lobstermen” campaign, and an additional $150,000 in long-term support.

Read the full article at WABI

Maine Lobstering Union drops part of lawsuit against NOAA Fisheries

August 25, 2022 — The Maine Lobstering Union is agreeing to drop part of its lawsuit against the National Marine Fisheries Services, where the federal agency is closing a 960-square-mile section of the Gulf of Maine to lobster fishers.

Federal regulators said this section of ocean is prime habitat for North Atlantic right whales and argued blocking that part of the ocean off from buoy lines from Oct. 18 to Jan. 31, 2023, would help reduce the risk posed to entanglements between lobster gear and whales.

Alfred C Frawley with McCloskey, Mina, Cunniff, and Frawley, LLC, said in an email the move was made as federal agencies add more regulations against the lobster industry.

“The MLU has taken the procedural step of agreeing to dismiss its case in Maine, which was largely mooted by the DC Court’s recent decision, in order to focus its resources on the ongoing litigation in DC and on ensuring that NMFS issues a new rule that both protects the North Atlantic right whale and ensures the sustainability of Maine’s lobster fishery,” Frawley said in an email to NEWS CENTER Maine.

Read the full story at News Center Maine

MAINE: Fundraiser for Maine Lobstermen’s Association raises over $50K

August 10, 2022 — With donations still rolling in, organizers of the fundraiser for the Maine Lobstermen’s Association held at Brady’s restaurant in Boothbay Harbor on Sunday, Aug. 7 report that over $50,000 has been raised.

The fundraiser included twin lobsters, (a non-lobster entree was available), clams or mussels, corn, blueberry pie, a live auction and silent auction, entertainment by Maine humorist Tim Sample and guest appearances by former Governor Paul LePage, NewsCenter co-host Sharon Rose who served as emcee, District 89 candidates, Rep. Holly Stover and Tricia Warren, among others.

Read the full article at Penobscot Bay Pilot

VESL: one app to make lobster harvest reporting easier

July 27, 2022 — Lobstermen in Maine will have to comply with a new reporting requirement, which will be implemented in 2023, but a free app, VESL, will help fishermen meet their reporting obligations with ease.

Currently only 10 percent of state licensed lobster harvesters in Maine must report their harvest, according to the Department of Marine Resources. However, as part of an update to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission fishery management plan for lobster, 100 percent of state licensed commercial lobstermen will have to report their harvest information, including location of fishing activity and pounds landed, in 2023.

The common notion among the public is that reporting to the government is complicated and time consuming, but it doesn’t have to be so, and that’s where BlueFin Data comes in. The company developed, under a contract with the Maine Department of Marine Resources, the app, called VESL, so lobstermen can meet their reporting obligations with ease. VESL represents the solution to the required increase in the percentage of lobster harvesters who must submit reports.

VESL, which is available for iOS and Android devices and can be downloaded free Apple App Store and Google Play Store, is a hub for collecting quality data with the least amount of effort all in one place, and report it to the government.

Read the full article at National Fishermen

Drops in lobster price another pressure on strained industry, symptom of wider trends

July 15, 2022 — After over a year of historically high prices that netted the lobster industry national attention – and articles questioning whether consumers could stomach USD 34.00 (EUR 33.78) for a lobster roll – the wharf price for the species has reportedly dropped all the way back down to “normal” levels and even beyond.

The price lobstermen were getting at the dock in 2021 was historically high, with fishermen in Maine getting roughly USD 8.00 (EUR 7.94) per pound and Canadian lobstermen in Newfoundland getting as much as USD 10.14 (EUR 10.07) per pound, according to the Fish Food and Allied Workers Union.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

Changes in Gulf of Maine may endanger lucrative fish stocks, experts say

July 8 2022 — Scientists have known the Gulf of Maine is warming rapidly, but new research suggests it’s also getting saltier, more acidic and increasingly stratified — raising concerns for its fish stocks.

The dramatic shifts in the gulf’s biochemistry are raising questions about the future of a region that has historically produced some of the world’s richest fish stocks — from cod to lobsters — and has built billion-dollar industries around them.

“We found that primary productivity, the rate at which the phytoplankton is fixing carbon in the ocean, has dropped to about a third of what it was in the early 2000s,” Barney Balch, a biological oceanographer and senior researcher at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, told UPI. “That really raised alarm bells with us.”

According to Balch, decreases in primary productivity — the carbon fixing — may affect life in the gulf from phytoplankton all the way up the food chain, including fish that humans eat.

For more than 20 years, Balch and his research partners have been helping NASA calibrate and validate ocean surface temperature data collected by the agency’s polar-orbit satellites.

Many researchers have pointed to the Gulf of Maine as one of the world’s most rapidly warming bodies of water, but Balch’s paper, published this month in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, is one of first to showcase the full scope of the gulf’s regime change.

While it’s not yet clear how these changes will impact the region’s ecosystems, data collected by Balch’s team suggest the base of the marine food web in the gulf is in the midst of a transformation.

Over the last 30 years, warming has mostly proven a boon to lobsters in the Gulf of Maine, especially in places, like the Penobscot Bay and the Bay of Fundy, that were historically on the chillier side of a lobster’s comfort zone.

And though Balch isn’t privy to the data being collected by Wahle and his research partners, he says it’s not a stretch to hypothesize that declines in diatoms, a primary source of nutrients for copepods, are likely to have ripple effects up the food chain — ripple effects that will ultimately impact the lobsters and some number of other fisheries.

Read the full story at UPI