Maine fishermen have landed less than 50 million pounds of lobster as of the end of September, according to the Maine Department of Marine Resources. While that figure represents a 40 percent decrease from the landings observed by September 2018, industry experts aren’t worried that the “sky is falling” for the lucrative sector.
Maine Department of Marine Resources Commissioner Pat Keliher shared the latest landings data with the American Lobster Management Board on Monday, 28 October, positing that the year-to-date decline could have been caused, in part, by lobsters molting later in 2019.
“Maine lobster landings are down significantly, below 50 million pounds to date,” Keliher said to the board, according to a report from the Portland Press Herald. “Our landings are way off. Now that doesn’t mean the sky is falling. That means we certainly had a very big delay in the shed.”
Typically, shed happens sometime in early July, Keliher said. A late shed in 2019 means that Maine lobstermen may still be in the midst of their peak fishing season, the Press Herald noted.
A late shed and the current landings figures tell just a snippet of the developing story of Maine’s 2019 lobster season, Maine Lobster Dealers’ Association Executive Director Annie Tselikis told SeafoodSource. Temperature, for one, is factoring strongly into the season’s narrative, she said – but not in the way one might expect.
“One of the things that’s frustrating for a lot of us in the industry is the narratives that exist right now around what we’re experiencing this season. There seems to be a lot of emphasis on climate change and warming waters – that is actually the opposite of what we have experienced this year. The bottom temperate this year has been quite cold, colder than usual, colder in August than a lot of fishermen had ever experienced before,” Tselikis said. “Lobsters are motivated by temperature, so whether it’s molting or mating or feeding or moving, those cold bottom temperatures, a lot of people are anecdotally thinking, have had a real impact on what we have seen so far this season.”
Landing and catch rates have gone up in the last few weeks, she added.
“It’s still anyone’s guess as to how this season is going to finish out, but I think that temperature is a huge part of the story that’s here and a lot of fishermen that I’ve talked to have said the same thing," Tselikis said.
The coming days offer a lot of promise, she said, as fall and early winter “can still be really good times for landings.” Opportunity seems to also be in the cards for the industry regarding the years ahead, especially when considering the volumes of juveniles tallied recently in Maine.
“People are very quick to look at landings data as the be-all, end-all of telling the story about what’s going with lobster in the Gulf of Maine. Landings are a fishery-dependent data set that is heavily influenced by weather, temperature, lobster molt timing, etcetera - all the things we’re experiencing this year. But we also look at other life stages of lobster, and our juvenile abundances remain very high, which is very good for the future of the fishery in a couple of years,” Tselikis said.
Maine lobster fishers and companies have been faced with a fair share of challenges leading up to the season. Fishermen hunkered down for a potential bait shortage when federal regulators cut herring quotas earlier this year. Tselikis said that bait shortage will likely continue to be an issue through 2020.
“It’s definitely been a mixed bag for lobstermen this year,” said Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, to the Press Herald. “While landings have been slow everywhere, stronger prices have helped to offset some of the loss of volume for many fishermen. And the slow pace of landings has lightened demand for bait so we seem to have dodged the worst of the anticipated bait crisis. There have been reports of a few good runs of lobster along the coast this fall, so we are hoping for a strong finish to the season.”
Regarding the 2019 season, Tselikis said it’s still too early to predict that overall landings will be down.
“2007 was a big year, at the time. 2012 was a big year, at the time. And we didn’t anticipate those landings at the time that they happened,” she said. “The important thing to note is that this industry is incredibly resilient both on the water and in the supply chain, and we’re good at being in the lobster business. And we’ve dealt with different circumstances and different situations before, whether biological or economic or market based, because we have to be good at all of those things.”
While a single-season anomaly does not necessarily portend a larger trend, a recent study conducted by the Institute for Fisheries Resources, the University of Maine, and the Gulf of Maine Research Institute and published in the scientific journal Ecological Applications predicts that the recent surge in Maine's lobster catch could be peaking. Rising water temperatures in the Gulf of Maine are pointed to as the lead culprit by regional scientists, who said the historic lobster boom in the state could come to an end in as soon as five years.
“The sky is not falling, but we are returning to normal, to the levels of the late 1990's and early 2000's,” Noah Oppenheim of the Institute for Fisheries Resources and the leader of the study, told the Press Herald. “Fish buyers, fishermen, fish processors, and policymakers can start thinking about where this is going to be impacting people the most.”
Maine’s lobster industry may soon have to venture out to new depths, Tselikis added, highlighting initial reports of deeper settlements for the state’s prized crustaceans.
“Only recently have we started to look at deeper-water settlement sites, and that data is looking very interesting and we are seeing some initial reports that lobsters are settling in deeper water than 30 feet,” she said.
Carl Wilson, a lobster biologist who directs the Department of Marine Resources’ Bureau of Marine Science, said a lull in the state’s lobster boom doesn’t have to spell doom – and it’s not an unexpected scenario.
“I believe there’s broad acknowledgment that the last 10 years have been just extraordinary for lobster and that people don’t have the same expectations for the same increases in the future,” Wilson told the Portland Press Herald. “It’s OK to come out of the stratosphere, but it’s been so long, we’ve kind of forgotten what normal used to be like.”
Photo courtesy of Tom Nettleton/Shutterstock
