These are strange days in the lobster fisheries. Depending on where you are on the US East Coast, lobster fishing either is in trouble or is booming. Even where thing are going well, there are serious concerns about the future.
Earlier this year, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission proposed a five year ban on commercial and recreational lobster fishing from Cape Cod to Virginia, due to depleted lobster stocks.
Lobster ban urged for south of Cape
The number of lobsters in southern New England now stands at about 15 million, down from a peak of about 35 million over a decade ago, according to the report produced by a committee of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. It states that a moratorium on lobster fishing poses the “maximum likelihood’’ for the stock to recover and support the industry in the future.
After a protest from fisherman the proposed ban was withdrawn while more studies being done. A bit farther north, however, in the Gulf of Maine, the lobster business is booming wildly, which may not be good news either. Lobster catches have risen by almost a factor of five since 1985. There is growing concern that the economic dependence on a single fishery could be economically disastrous if the unprecedented growth in the lobster population should be impacted by disease or some other factor.
Lobsters Find Utopia Where Biologists See Trouble
For lobstermen working the Gulf of Maine, this is a golden age. Maine lobsters, prized for their succulence and briny sweetness, are so abundant, and so lucrative, that they support fishing communities up and down the coast.
And that is just the problem, says Robert S. Steneck, a marine biologist at the University of Maine.
In a paper in the current issue of Conservation Biology, he and a team of researchers say the lobstermen, their communities and the state economy are caught in “a gilded trap,” in which short-term profit outweighs long-term social and environmental risks.
Where once a number of food species thrived in the gulf, lobsters now provide 80 percent of Maine’s seafood income. Inflation-adjusted revenue from lobstering has quadrupled since 1985, the scientists write.
In an interview, Dr. Steneck said the coast had grown so dependent on lobster abundance that if anything damages the species — as has happened in recent years in nearby waters — “we are stuffed.”
The researchers call for new steps to restore diversity in the gulf, and with it the economic diversity of coastal communities — even if the steps reduce lobster catches somewhat. But in a gilded trap, they write, “large financial gain creates a strong reinforcing feedback that deepens the trap.”