October 7, 2022 — Maine lobsters may not be as sustainable as we think.
In September, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program downgraded the American lobster to its red list. The designation advises consumers to avoid eating them as “they’re caught or farmed in ways that harm other marine life or the environment.” The organization monitors the environmental impact of wild-caught and farmed seafood commonly found in US stores (pdf).
The organization says that the fishery poses a risk (pdf) to endangered North Atlantic right whales, with concerns that entanglement in fishing gear is the leading cause of serious injury and death to these marine mammals. The group recommends avoiding lobster caught by traps from the Gulf of Maine and other areas of New England and Canada.
American lobsters—also known as Maine lobsters—have a history of being sustainably harvested to help maintain a healthy lobster population. The bulk of lobsters are caught between June and December. Maine has established trap limits, size limits, and, to protect pregnant lobsters, if lobstermen or women find a lobster with eggs, they are expected to cut a V shape into one the tail before returning it to the ocean to let others know not to harvest it.
But lobster harvesting affects the right whale population, illustrating how sustainability is about more than just the depletion of a given species, but also about the entire ecosystem. “Sustainability has a bunch of different ways to look at it… The lobsters themselves are doing fairly well,” said Gib Brogan, the fisheries campaign manager at Oceana, a nonprofit ocean conservation organization. “The other side of sustainability is looking at the effect of the fishery on the oceans.”