Saving Seafood

Gauge increase, a top concern for lobstermen, is delayed to July 2025

October 24, 2024 — Implementing a change in the legal size of lobsters caught in the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank was pushed back six months, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission announced this week, after determining that postponing implementation “would reduce negative impacts to the U.S. and Canadian lobster industries in 2025 and allow Canada more time to consider implementing complementary management measures.”

The ASMFC, the regulatory agency that oversees the fishing industry, voted Monday to delay the resolution from Jan. 1, 2025 to July 1, 2025.

This second postponement of the gauge change — it originally was meant to take effect this year — will at least temporarily assuage lobstermen, many who attended October union meetings held along the coast from Rockland to Ellsworth and Jonesport, where the gauge change was a top concern.

“[Lobstermen] are worrying that that’s going to price them out of a business that is precariously turning a profit,” said Virginia Olsen, Maine Lobstering Union Local 207’s executive liaison and political director. “For instance, my husband was going through some landing receipts from 1992 to today [and] there’s a 50 cents difference [more paid per pound]. But a trap that costs $70 now costs $200. Bait that was so inexpensive is now one of our biggest expenses. That margin of how much profit you have is shrinking for us every year.”

Read the full article at the Mount Desert Islander

Electronic tracking considered for offshore lobster fishery 

August 10, 2021 — The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is considering requiring electronic tracking for the lobstermen who fish in federal waters.

The commission’s American Lobster Management Board initiated a draft addendum last week with the goal of collecting spatial and effort data from lobster and Jonah crab fishermen.

“In my opinion, this is the single most important thing the American Lobster Board can do to ensure the viability of the American lobster fishery,” said Dan McKiernan, the board’s chairman. “Through the proposed action, the Board seeks to significantly improve our understanding of stock status, identify areas where lobster fishing effort might present a risk to endangered North Atlantic right whales, and provide important information to help reduce spatial conflicts with other ocean uses, such as wind energy development and aquaculture.”

The management board has expressed interest in implementing these types of requirements over the last few years and has supported efforts to look into the systems and technology that would be needed to collect the data.

Read the full story at the Mount Desert Islander

ASMFC Lobster Board Initiates Draft Addendum to Consider Electronic Tracking for Lobster, Jonah Crab

August 6, 2021 — The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC)’s American Lobster Board initiated Draft Addendum XXIX to Amendment 3 to the Interstate Fishery Management Plan for American Lobster.

This Draft Addendum considers the implementation of electronic tracking requirements for federally permitted vessels in the American lobster and Jonah crab fishery. The potential new tracking will aim to collect “high resolution spatial and temporal effort data.

Read the full story at Seafood News

Atlantic Lobster Board Moves Toward Reducing Rope In Effort To Save Right Whales

February 6, 2019 — A consortium of Atlantic states fisheries managers is calling for broad changes to the gear lobstermen use, in an effort to reduce risks posed to the endangered North Atlantic right whale and to ward off potential federal action that could be even more challenging for the industry.

There are roughly 410 right whales left in the world, and they are at risk of potentially fatal entanglements with vertical rope lines lobstermen and other marine harvesters use to position and haul their traps. At a meeting of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Council in Virginia, its lobster board voted unanimously to set in motion the process that could lead to major changes in the East Coast’s lobster industry.

“I don’t want NOAA making decisions on what this lobster fishery is going to look like in the future,” says Patrick Keliher, commissioner of the Department of Marine Resources for Maine, home to the country’s dominant lobster fishery, which landed some 110 million pounds of lobster in 2017 worth more than $450 million at the dock.

Keliher says that the National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration is developing a “biological opinion” that could include a formal “jeopardy” finding for the right whales, which under the federal Endangered Species Act could lead to severe restrictions on the state’s harvest.

Read and listen to the full story at Maine Public