August 2, 2017 — PORTLAND, Maine — An interstate panel that manages fisheries voted on Tuesday against a plan to try to preserve the declining southern New England lobster population with new fishing restrictions.
August 2, 2017 — PORTLAND, Maine — An interstate panel that manages fisheries voted on Tuesday against a plan to try to preserve the declining southern New England lobster population with new fishing restrictions.
The New England lobster fishery is based largely in Maine, where the catch has soared to new heights in recent years. But the population has collapsed off Connecticut, Rhode Island, southern Massachusetts and New York’s Long Island as waters have warmed in those areas.
An arm of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission considered a host of new restrictions about lobster fishing in southern New England on Tuesday and chose to shoot the plan down.
Restrictions could have included changes to legal harvesting size, reductions in the number of traps fishermen can use and closures to areas where lobsters are harvested. But members of the commission’s lobster board said they feared the proposed restrictions wouldn’t do enough to stem the loss of lobsters.
Board members agreed to try to figure out a new strategy to try to help the crustaceans, which have risen in value in recent years as Asian markets have opened up.
Read the full story from the Associated Press at the San Francisco Chronicle