After two years of unusually high catches of lobster off the Maine coast, commercial landings of the iconic crustacean may be falling back a little in 2014.
People in the lobster industry say that might not be such a bad thing.
Lobsters may have started appearing in traps later this past summer than in 2012 and 2013, but demand for lobster has been good, which helped keep prices at a relatively high level of above $3 for the past several months. The most recent time lobstermen on average earned that much for their catch over the course of an entire calendar year was in 2011, when cumulatively they were paid $3.19 for every pound of lobster they caught.
Trying to parse out why lobster behavior and catches vary from one year to the next often leads to head-scratching, but one cause seems to stand out when trying to make sense of the past few years: water temperature. Scientists, fishermen and data buoys all point to cooler temperatures this summer in the Gulf of Maine as the main reason why the statewide catch may be slacking off a little after the record catches of the past two years.
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