Saving Seafood

Patrice McCarron: Lobstermen’s conservation efforts an investment in the future

February 14, 2018 — KENNEBUNK, Maine — How many of you keep money in the bank? Savings accounts, money market accounts, certificates of deposit or investments – we all use different methods to ensure that we have something set aside for the future. Maine lobstermen have been doing just that for the past century, making sure that there will be lobsters in the Gulf of Maine for their children and grandchildren to harvest. In doing so, they have earned a worldwide reputation as leaders in stewardship of marine resources.

Their conservation practices certainly have paid off, according to a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Maine’s lobstermen have built one of the world’s most sustainable fisheries by implementing common-sense conservation measures aimed at ensuring that lobsters are able to reproduce before being caught.

It started more than 100 years ago, long before the establishment of extensive government survey programs or sophisticated computer models. Lobstermen began marking female lobsters that were carrying eggs with a notch in their tails, a practice now known as “v-notching.” It was a simple method that let any lobsterman who might catch that female later, without eggs, know to not harvest her order to allow the lobster to spawn again. Since that time, lobstermen have rallied behind other important conservation measures, such as protecting large lobsters, because the bigger the lobster, the more young they can produce. Lobster traps are equipped with vents to allow smaller lobsters to escape and grow to legal size. Only lobster traps, rather than nets, can be used to catch lobsters, a passive gear that ensures that under- or oversized lobsters can be returned to the sea alive.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

 

Study: Warming Gulf of Maine endangering lobster stock

January 24, 2018 — Is the lobster boom on the decline in the Gulf of Maine because of warming waters? A newly released study by a Maine-based marine research group suggests that is the case.

The study, released Monday by the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, touched on many of the same climate issues that have left researchers and lobster stakeholders anxious about the future.

“In the Gulf of Maine, the lobster fishery is vulnerable to future temperature increases,” GMRI said in the statement released with the study. “The researchers’ population projections suggest that lobster productivity will decrease as temperatures continue to warm, but continued conservation efforts can mitigate the impacts of future warming.”

The study, compiled with the University of Maine and NOAA Fisheries, said the anticipated decline highlights the need for vigilant conservation within the Gulf of Maine lobster fishery, especially since scientists say the gulf’s waters are warming faster than 99 percent of the rest of the world’s oceans.

Researchers said they expect the lobster population to decline from recent highs — GMRI pegs the peak year at 2010, when it estimated the Gulf of Maine lobster stock contained 518 million lobsters — to levels more in keeping with traditional lobstering years.

It estimates the population could shrink to about 261 million lobsters in 2050.

“The 30-year outlook for the Gulf of Maine fishery looks positive if conservation practices continue,” GMRI said. “In their 30-year projection, the researchers anticipate average populations similar to those in the early 2000s.”

Beth Casoni, executive director of the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association, said lobster stock assessments in the Gulf of Maine have shown the annual settlement of young lobsters — when they transition from floating in open waters as plankton to settling on the bottom to begin the seven- to eight-year stretch it requires to mature — has declined from previous assessments.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

 

Research Concludes Maine Conservation Technique Helped Drive Lobster Population Boom

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.

Read the full story at WNPR

 

Gulf of Maine lobster population past its peak, study says, and a big drop is due

January 23, 2018 — The Gulf of Maine lobster population will shrink 40 to 62 percent over the next 30 years because of rising ocean temperatures, according to a study published Monday.

As the water temperature rises – the northwest Atlantic ocean is warming at three times the global average rate – the number of lobster eggs that survive their first year of life will decrease, and the number of small-bodied lobster predators that eat those that remain will increase. Those effects will cause the lobster population to fall through 2050, according to a study by researchers at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, the University of Maine and the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration.

Looking ahead 30 years, the researchers predict a lobster population “rewind” to the harvests documented in the early 2000s. In 2002, 6,800 license holders landed 63 million pounds of lobster valued at $210.9 million. By comparison, 5,660 license holders harvested 131 million pounds valued at $533.1 million in 2016.

“In our model, the Gulf of Maine started to cross over the optimal water temperature for lobster sometime in 2010, and the lobster population peaked three or four years ago,” said Andrew Pershing, GMRI’s chief scientific officer and one of the authors of the study. “We’ve seen this huge increase in landings, a huge economic boom, but we are coming off of that peak now, returning to a more traditional fishery.”

Industry leaders have been girding themselves for a decline in landings ever since the recent boom began. While not everybody believes the decline will happen that fast or fall so much, most lobstermen admit the impact that warming water has had on their fishery, said Dave Cousens, the president of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association. It drove up landings by pushing lobsters into the Gulf of Maine, and over time it will drive lobsters out to colder offshore waters or the Canadian Maritimes, he said.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

 

The lobster catch has crashed in southern New England, but not in Maine. Here’s why.

January 23, 2018 — Scientists who study the warming of the ocean say in a new study that conservation practices have allowed northern New England’s lobster industry to thrive in the face of environmental changes.

The lobster fishery is the backbone of Maine’s economy, and business has been booming in recent years. Southern New England fishermen’s lobster catch, meanwhile, has plummeted. Ocean temperatures have risen in both areas, to levels that scientists have said is favorable for lobsters off northern New England and Canada but inhospitable for them in southern New England.

Scientists led by researchers at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland say differences in conservation practices have contributed to record hauls off Maine and population collapse just a few hundred miles south. Their findings were published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A key difference is that Maine lobstermen worked together decades ago to create a strategy to protect older, larger lobsters and egg-carrying females, said Andy Pershing, a scientist with Gulf of Maine Research Institute and one of the study authors.

Maine lobstermen return big lobsters to the sea, and mark a “v notch” on the tail of an egg-carrying lobster before throwing it back. The notching technique, used in Maine for about a century, provides a sign to other fishermen to leave the fertile lobsters alone. Fishermen in other states use the notch, too, but some got on board only recently; Connecticut established its program in the mid-2000s.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Boston Globe