June 26, 2018 — It’s 7 a.m. on the Pull n’ Pray. The lobster boat rocks over large swells as the water sparkles in the June morning sun. The grating whirr of the hydraulic winch drowns out the hum of the boat’s motor as it lifts the first lobster trap of the day out of the water. Justin Papkee swings the trap up onto the side of his boat and quickly opens the latch. Suddenly there are lobsters flying through the air.
Mr. Papkee’s blue rubber gloved hand is nearly a blur as he reaches again and again into the open trap, tossing the lobsters back into the water rapid-fire before pulling in the next trap.
Splash. Splash. Splash.
Occasionally he pauses to measure a lobster, or check for a notch or dense clusters of eggs on its tail. After Papkee and his sternman, Jim Ranaghan, have hauled up and sorted through all 16 traps on this line, just one keeper sits in a milk crate on the deck. Then, it’s onto the next set of traps.
This is a worse than average day for the lobsterman, but even on the absolute best days Papkee throws back about half of the lobsters he catches. On those days, he says, it feels like he’s keeping them all by comparison.
Papkee had traveled about 10 miles offshore from Portland to check his traps. It took more than an hour to get to the first of his red and blue buoys. But as he tosses lobster after lobster back into the ocean, Papkee seems unfazed.
“This is just how it’s done,” he says.
Maine has particularly strict rules about which lobsters can be kept. But lobstermen generally don’t resent those laws. In fact, they’re the ones that came up with most of them.
The conservation of natural resources is often portrayed as being in opposition to economic interests, placing the good of the globe over individual livelihoods. But most Maine lobstermen don’t see it that way. They have what has been called a “conservation ethic” that dates back more than a century and has yielded a long list of sustainability rules.
“When you think about this at first glance, it seems crazy. They caught them, why would they want to throw them back?” says Matt Jacobson, executive director of the Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative. “[The lobstermen] are very mindful of the notion that they are the protectors of the resource.”
This has made Maine lobster one of the world’s most sustainable fisheries. In 2016, the region earned certification from the international Marine Stewardship Council for its “rigorous sustainability requirements,” which have also contributed to a boom the industry is currently experiencing. And with climate change presenting a new challenge for Maine’s iconic lobsters, some researchers say, this commitment to conservation may be more important than ever before.
The duty to protect the resource was ingrained in lobsterman Sonny Beal at just five years old. His father taught him to prioritize the health of the fishery over the weight of his hauls, just like generations before him. He learned to measure lobsters, to check if they were reproductive females, and to notch the tails of any egg-bearing females before throwing them back. Now a lobsterman and father himself, Mr. Beal is teaching his two sons the same.
“I think that we’ve got something really great here and will have something really great for a long time to come because we do take care of it every day,” Beal says. Lobstermen have been passing the tradition of conservation down through generations of sons (and more recently daughters as well) for decades.
Read the full story Christian Science Monitor