Saving Seafood

$30M for right whale research could also help lobster industry

January 21, 2026 — A congressional funding bill contains $30 million for research and monitoring related to the North Atlantic right whale, an endangered species closely tied to the regulation of the lobster industry in Maine and other New England states.

The money is designated for the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which oversees state-regulated fisheries.

North Atlantic right whales are one of the world’s most at-risk species, approaching extinction. Threats include entanglement in fishing gear, vessel strikes and climate change.

The money is part of the fiscal year 2026 Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations bill that passed the U.S. Senate last week, previously approved by the House of Representatives and now heading to President Donald Trump’s desk to be signed into law.

“This funding will support Maine’s lobster industry by improving the incomplete and imprecise science and research upon which the federal government relies,” said U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, chair of the appropriations committee.

Read the full article at Mainebiz

Maine Sea Grant receives $2M in new NOAA awards to support innovative American lobster research, outreach

January 21, 2026 — The Maine Sea Grant Program at the University of Maine has received $2 million in funding.

$1.4 million of the funding comes from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), awarded to support research and outreach activities of the NOAA Sea Grant-funded American Lobster Initiative. Another $600,000 has been provided in second-year support for four 2025-26 American lobster research awards.

With this new four-year NOAA award, Maine Sea Grant and its regional partners will support collaborative research to address complex challenges facing the American lobster fishery, according to UMaine News, in a news release. The initiative will also synthesize research findings so they are accessible and actionable for fishermen, policymakers and the public, and support place-based technical assistance within the Gulf of Maine, Georges Bank and Southern New England region.

The American lobster (Homarus americanus) is among the nation’s most valuable fisheries, with approximately 113 million pounds landed in 2024, valued at $715 million. The industry supports thousands of Maine families across the fishing and seafood supply chain and faces growing uncertainty driven by environmental and market change.

“This underscores the need for collaborative research to understand how lobsters are responding to changing conditions and how best to sustain the fishery,” said UMaine, in the release.

Read the full article at Penobscot Bay Pilot

Maine Sea Grant and University of Maine Announce $2 million in new NOAA awards to support innovative American lobster research and outreach

January 20, 2026 — The Maine Sea Grant Program at the University of Maine is pleased to announce its receipt of $1.4 million from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), awarded to support research and outreach activities of the NOAA Sea Grant-funded American Lobster Initiative.

With this new four-year award, Maine Sea Grant and its regional partners will support collaborative research to address complex challenges facing the American lobster fishery. The initiative will also synthesize research findings so they are accessible and actionable for fishermen, policymakers and the public, and support place-based technical assistance within the Gulf of Maine, Georges Bank and Southern New England region.

The full $2 million in NOAA funding also includes $600,000 in second-year support for four 2025-26 American lobster research awards.

The American lobster (Homarus americanus) is among the nation’s most valuable fisheries, with approximately 113 million pounds landed in 2024, valued at $715 million. The industry supports thousands of Maine families across the fishing and seafood supply chain and faces growing uncertainty driven by environmental and market change. This underscores the need for collaborative research to understand how lobsters are responding to changing conditions and how best to sustain the fishery.

Since 2019, Sea Grant’s NOAA-funded American Lobster Initiative (ALI) has worked to close critical knowledge gaps about this iconic species, strengthening the fishery’s resilience to biological, economic and social impacts of ecosystem change. The program has funded 40 projects to date and supports a national research competition alongside a regionally coordinated extension network to ensure that communities across the region benefit from these investments.

“This new federal investment in lobster research is terrific news for Maine’s fishermen, marine researchers, and coastal communities, and it underscores why I advocated so strongly for the restoration of Maine Sea Grant’s funding last year. The research efforts led by Maine Sea Grant help inform policy makers and support our working waterfronts, strengthening Maine’s blue economy and helping to ensure that our state’s fisheries remain sustainable and competitive for generations to come,” said U.S. Sen. Susan Collins.

With the new $1.4 million award, Maine Sea Grant will begin to administer the initiative’s competitive research competition, which was previously administered by the NOAA National Sea Grant Program.

Read the full article at the University of Maine

Bill to Support Maine’s Lobster Industry Heads to President’s Desk

January 16, 2026 — U.S. Senator Susan Collins, Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, secured significant funding and legislative language to support Maine’s lobster industry in the Fiscal Year (FY) 2026 Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies (CJS) Appropriations bill that passed the Senate today. The bill, which was approved by the House of Representatives last week, now heads to the President’s desk to be signed into law.

“This funding will support Maine’s lobster industry by improving the incomplete and imprecise science and research upon which the federal government relies. The flawed data being used to inform regulations has created unnecessary, burdensome requirements for Maine lobstermen and women,” said Senator Susan Collins, Chair of the Appropriations Committee. “As Chair of the Appropriations Committee, I worked hard to ensure this funding was included in the final funding bill.”

Funding and legislative language advanced by Senator Collins includes:

North Atlantic Right Whale: $30 million for the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission for Right Whale related research and monitoring.

  • Language is also included directing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to work with Canada to develop risk reduction measures that are comparable in effectiveness to U.S. measures.

National Sea Grant Program: $80 million for the National Sea Grant Program. Last year, the Department of Commerce announced that Maine Sea Grant was being defunded. At the urging of Senator Collins, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick directed NOAA to renegotiate the terms and conditions of the work to be performed by Maine Sea Grant to ensure that it focuses on advancing Maine’s coastal economies, working waterfronts, and sustainable fisheries.

American Lobster Research: $2 million for Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank American lobster research through Maine Sea Grant.

  • $300,000 to support a cooperative research program to collect biological, fishery, and environmental data for American lobster and Jonah crab using modern technology on commercial fishing vessels.
  • Language is also included that directs this research to be carried out through a partnership of state agencies, academia, and industry with a focus on “stock resilience in the face of environmental changes” and “topics necessary to respond to newly implemented or future modifications to the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Plan.”

Gray Zone: Report language directing NOAA to work with Canadian and state fisheries officials to develop a cooperative fisheries management plan in the Gray Zone.

In addition, Senator Collins secured more than $73 million for Congressionally Directed Spending projects in Maine through the CJS Appropriations bill. Of these projects, $1 million is included to expand the American Lobster Settlement Index collector survey at the University of Maine.

Read the full article at Senator Susan Collins

Lobstermen’s knowledge offers critical insight into the Gulf of Maine

January 14, 2026 — Maine’s lobster fishery brought in more than half a billion dollars in revenue last year, but the long-term health of the fishery remains under pressure as warming waters reshape the Gulf of Maine ecosystem, according to reporting from Northeastern Global News.

As ocean temperatures rise, invasive and southern species are moving into traditional lobster habitat, competing for resources and preying on native lobsters. Understanding how those changes play out on the water may depend heavily on the people who spend the time there: lobstermen themselves.

Jonathan Grabowski, a professor of marine and environmental sciences at Northeastern University, led a study examining lobstermen’s ecological knowledge in Maine and Massachusetts. Through detailed surveys and in-depth interviews, Grabowski and his team documented how fishermen understand food-web relationships and species interactions across different habitats.

Read the full article at National Fisherman

$400K worth of stolen Costco lobster meat being investigated in connection to other New England seafood thefts

December 31, 2025 — Imagine the buffet.

Forty-thousand oysters, lobster worth $400,000 and a cache of crabmeat all were stolen in separate incidents within weeks of each other in New England.

The first seafood vanished on Nov. 22 in Falmouth, Maine, where authorities suspect someone stole 14 cages full of oysters from an aquaculture site in Casco Bay. Many of the oysters were full-grown and ready for sale, and together with the cages were worth $20,000, according to the Maine Marine Patrol.

“This is a devastating situation for a small businessman,” said Marine Patrol Sgt. Matthew Sinclair.

The other two thefts happened in Taunton, Massachusetts, about 160 miles (255 kilometers) away. First, a load of crab disappeared after leaving the Lineage Logistics warehouse on Dec. 2. Then, on Dec. 12, lobster meat destined for Costco stores in Illinois and Minnesota was stolen by a fraudulent trucking company, according to the broker who arranged the pickup.

Read the full article at The New York Post

How lobstermen could help save our coastal habitats

December 11, 2025 — In Maine, lobstermen last year took home over a half-billion dollars in revenue.

However, that fishery remains under threat as warming waters drive invasive species into lobsters’ habitats, species that both compete for resources and hunt the native lobsters. Working lobstermen’s ecological knowledge can be key in untangling these complicated dynamics, according to a Northeastern University professor of marine and environmental sciences.

Using an in-depth survey and interview process of lobstermen in Maine and Massachusetts, Northeastern University professor of marine and environmental sciences Jonathan Grabowski and his intercollegiate team studied the innate knowledge that lobster fishermen have of complex food-web relationships and animal interactions within and across different habitats. Their findings demonstrate that the insights of lobstermen, and local fishermen more broadly, provide an invaluable understanding of changing ecosystems as fishery management practices struggle to keep up.

Life as a lobsterman

Grabowski, who is also affiliated with Northeastern’s Coastal Sustainability Institute, and his team study how marine ecosystems function and change, but also how management practices impact fisheries. Coastal waters, their paper notes, are warming at a speed faster than management strategies can keep up with.

Cue the lobstermen, which, Grabowski notes, is the term the industry prefers for lobster fishermen of any gender. Most of those interviewed have decades of fishing experience. “More often than not, it’s north of 25 years,” Grabowski says, and it’s common to encounter lobstermen with over 50 years of experience.

Read the full article at the Northeastern Global News

MAINE: Maine Department of Marine Resources seeks pogey harvesters’ input

November 26, 2025 — Maine’s Department of Marine Resources has scheduled an online meeting to solicit input from commercial menhaden harvesters for the 2026 season. The DMR is seeking the input from pogey fishermen as it develops management measures for the upcoming season.

The state’s preliminary allocation for the coming season is 19,571,649 pounds, with an Episodic Set Aside of 4,119,117 pounds. The ESA amounts to 1 percent of the total East Coast allocation and is shared among the states.

The ESA can be accessed by individual states once they have used their individual allocation, but large schools of menhaden are still available within their territory.

Atlantic menhaden—pogies—are the principal bait used by Maine lobstermen and a valuable part of the state’s fisheries economy.

Read the full article at Penobscot Bay Press

Lobster boats must keep using tracking devices for government observation, court rules

November 21, 2025 — The U.S. government can continue requiring America’s lobster fishing boats to use electronic tracking devices to collect data, a federal appeals court has ruled, denying claims by some in the industry that the monitoring amounts to unreasonable search and seizure.

Fishing regulators began requiring federally permitted lobstermen to install electronic tracking devices that transmit location data in late 2023. The data improves understanding of the lobster population and can inform future rules, authorities said.

The tracking devices transmit lobster boat locations using an onboard global positioning system and must be used whenever a vessel is in the water, including when it’s docked or being operated for personal use, court records state.

A group of lobster fishermen sued, claiming the tracking requirements are unconstitutional, but a federal district court rejected that claim and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston upheld the ruling Tuesday.

Read the full article at the Associated Press