April 1, 2026 — When Bob Hersey Jr., a Maine lobsterman, pulls up his traps, he gets more than tasty crustaceans. He’s collecting vital details about the changing ocean environment.
Mr. Hersey, who also dives for sea urchins, is among nearly 150 fishermen who have installed temperature sensors on their traps or trawl nets from Maine to North Carolina as part of a program run by a nonprofit organization with help from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The soda-can-size sensors are dragged along the seafloor, giving fishermen and scientists a three-dimensional map of the ocean rather than just conditions on the surface, which can be checked using satellites or thermometers on boats. The data is continuously collected and fed into regional weather and climate models.
“The fishing industry can collect data that nobody else can get to,” said George Maynard, a marine resource management specialist at the National Marine Fisheries Service, a branch of NOAA. “It’s a cheap way to collect a lot of oceanographic data to improve those models.”
The sensors record water temperature and oxygen levels and soon they will also record salinity, an important indicator of large-scale changes in ocean currents that influence weather patterns.
While the data is valuable to researchers, it’s also helping Mr. Hersey and others decide the best places to fish.
“I’m trying to figure out how to be more efficient,” said Mr. Hersey, 55, who has deployed four sensors on his 600 lobster traps and has been studying the temperature changes in relation to the size of his catches. “I’m trying to establish a pattern of where they are with a certain temperature.”