A deep sense of unease pervades the waterfronts of Maine’s 145 lobster villages scattered between York Harbor and Eastport. During the past four years lobstermen have been squeezed by continuously declining harvests and declining prices – not how the laws of supply and demand are supposed to work-while also trying to adapt their businesses to fuel prices that have doubled and bait prices that have almost tripled. If this were not unsettling enough, negotiations with the Humane Society and Oceana over the right whale entanglement lawsuit will require an expensive replacement of miles of lobster line and potentially undermining the lobster industry’s efforts to brand itself as a sustainably harvested seafood. Those with even bigger problems are coastal banks that have financed new lobster boats with enormous diesel engines during the earlier era of record harvests and record prices. It is fortunate that banks do not want to own boats, because they would otherwise have lots of them in their parking lots.
Although the problems facing Maine’s lobster industry are deep and systemic, there is more to the story. Between 1996 and 2001, the Island Institute coordinated an unusual $5 million research collaboration between lobstermen and lobster scientists to advance knowledge of lobster ecology. Lobstermen took young researchers aboard their boats to record the number of juvenile, V-notched and egg-bearing females and over-sized brood stock they returned to the water in order to improve population models. Other scientists trolled fine mesh nets through surface waters of the eastern and western Maine coastal currents to determine the distribution of floating lobster larvae, while other scientists dove to the rocky bottoms along the edges of the archipelago to locate lobster nursery grounds and sample the number of new setters. It was a remarkable collaboration that redefined how cooperative research could work in Maine.
At the end of the five-year program in 2001 a key take-home message was that lobster populations were robust and that additional cut backs in the number of traps lobstermen could fish would not be required. That was not the only story, although it was the only part of the story that most lobstermen heard.
The rest of the story, announced at the end of the project, was a startling prediction of future lobster declines by the leading lobster scientists-Bob Steneck from the University of Maine, and Rick Wahle and Lew Incze from Bigelow Laboratories (Incze has since moved to the University of Southern Maine and the Gulf of Maine Research Institute). On the basis of their five years of research during the project and earlier work, they hypothesized that a “settlement index” could be developed to predict future lobster populations.
They demonstrated that when floating lobster larvae settle to suitable bottom habitats-gravelly and bouldery bottoms along the edges of islands and coastal shorelines-the protection they find among innumerable crevices and hidey holes reduces their mortality to near zero for the next seven to eight years until lobsters reach the size where they are legally harvestable. Thus by identifying key sites along the coast where detailed records are kept on lobster settlement, a year-to-year index could provide a clear window into future lobster harvests.
They also suggested that the settlement data they and other lobster researchers had collected over many years revealed a pattern of largely inexplicable ups and downs in lobster settlement. A poor settlement year, or even a few poor years of settlement would not necessarily affect future populations because there is enough redundancy in lobster egg production to smooth over temporary lapses. However, they would expect a decline in future harvests if settlement were poor for four or five years or more in a row. Then they went even further.
They pointed out that during the early part of the study, settlement from places as diverse as Canada, Rhode Island, the intake pipes at the Seabrook facility in New Hampshire and Damariscove Island off of Boothbay Harbor had all shown lobster settlement declines from the mid 1990s to the late 1990s before the number of larvae reaching the bottom started to tick up again. If their hypothesis were correct, they announced at the press conference at the end of the project, the declines in lobster settlement observed from the mid 1990s would start to affect harvests by about 2003.
It is now generally acknowledged that the peak lobster landings in Maine occurred in 2003, after which harvests began declining. Call them lucky, but the lobster scientists got it just about right. If their hypothesis continues to hold up, we might expect lobster landings to be reduced until 2008 or 2009, when they might start to tick up again. Marine science is rarely exact because Mother Nature, especially in her oceanic moods, is notoriously unpredictable. But it makes you hope that the Department of Marine Resources has a handle on lobster larval settlement, which offers a promising tool for helping to manage Maine’s most valuable species.
Even if lobster harvests begin ticking up this year (and the preliminary landings suggest this is occurring), the lobster industry still faces huge challenges. Lobstermen will need to adapt their business model of the past 20 years to reduce their fuel consumption and carbon footprint dramatically unless they believe that $150/barrel of oil is a temporary aberration and consumers don’t care how much fuel it takes to catch a lobster. Lobstermen will also need to adapt to a market place that demands not only convenience -notwithstanding the thrill of picking lobster juice out of your hair when you crack a claw-but sustainably caught seafood that is certified by a reputable third party. And they will need access to reliable sources of herring -a food fish for third world countries, if no longer for us-that is also sustainably caught, and that lobstermen begin to use more conservatively. And while they are at it, lobstermen might question whether it makes good economic sense to build a large part of their businesses around harvesting shedders that are a glut on the market and expensive to maintain because so many expire en-route to sun burned tourists at the lobster shack.
Big challenges for Maine’s premier branded product, but hopefully not beyond the reach of Maine lobstermen who, like the rest of us on Maine’s working waterfronts, have a lot at stake in how they respond.
Philip Conkling is the president of the Island Institute.