Saving Seafood

MAINE: Lobsters remain plentiful in Maine, but outside forces cast uncertainty on industry

September 1, 2026 — There was a time when lobsters were so abundant along the Maine coast that they could be plucked by hand from shallow water. Those days are long gone, but for most people — whose interactions with lobsters happen on plates and rolls — it might be hard to say how lobsters and the lobster industry are doing. Lobster rolls might cost more, like everything else, but they’re still available.

Lobstermen are at the mercy of a range of outside forces: economic, ecological, regulatory. Trends in the lobster harvest and its value suggest lobstering is in a healthy position right now. But zooming out to include factors such as global trade and climate change show there is much uncertainty.

In the long view, the number of lobsters coming across wharfs is way up. From 1950 until the end of the 1980s, Maine lobstermen were landing around 20 million pounds of lobster each year. Some years the amount deviated, as low as 16 million and as high as 24 million, but the catch looks pretty consistent through those four decades.

Read the full article at Harpswell Anchour

Maine’s lobster business is booming despite record catches

July 19, 2017 — The lobster business is booming in Maine.

Lobstermen are hauling in record catches, while prices are near all-time highs. That’s because the industry is also seeing record demand.

U.S. lobstermen have seen their yearly haul quintuple over the last 30 years. They brought in 131 million pounds of the crustacean in 2016, more than 80 percent of that was caught in Maine.

“Compared to 20 years ago, I’m getting twice as much,” said Jack Thomas, who has been lobstering for almost 50 years. He works traps off the coast of Freeport, Maine. “Last year, the last couple of years have been record years for me.”

But increased catches haven’t always been good news. In 2012, an historic lobster harvest sent prices plummeting, when demand didn’t keep up.

“Everybody points to this year as a year that was a big learning experience for all of us in the industry and it certainly was,” said Annie Tselikis, marketing manager at Maine Coast, a distributor in Portland, Maine. “What that did was give us a wake-up call to invest in infrastructure, to really invest in marketing, our business relationships. And in that one year, we changed the entire game.”

The industry made a huge push to increase demand, both domestically and around the globe. And they’ve had great success, especially in China, where distributors are marketing Maine lobster as a clean source of quality protein. It also helps that the Chinese word for lobster is similar to the word for dragon, it resembles the mythical creature and when cooked, it turns the lucky color red.

China accounted for just third-of-a-percent of all U.S. lobster exports in 2010. By 2016, that jumped to 13 percent, according to WISERTrade.

Read the full story at CNBC

Annie Tselikis runs the Maine Lobster Dealers’ Association

October 24th, 2016 — Annie Tselikis (it’s pronounced Sill-eek-us) is the executive director of the Maine Lobster Dealers’ Association. That’s her part-time gig; her full-time work is as the marketing director for Maine Coast, a York-based wholesaler of lobster and seafood. We called the Cape Elizabeth native up to talk about Maine’s largest fishery, just as the European Union announced that it would reject Sweden’s request to ban Maine lobster from sale. (Phew.) Our conversation moved swiftly to about a dozen other topics; Tselikis is only 34 but she has packed a great deal into her career already. Starting with her deckhand days.

TALL ORDER: We reached Tselikis by cell phone as she was driving to Boston for a meeting about Tall Ships Boston, scheduled for summer of 2017. What do lobster dealers care about such things? “The tall ships are tying up on the Boston Fish Pier.” That’s where Maine Coast, as well as a lot of other dealers, have offices. “There are trucks on and off that pier from 3 a.m. to 9 p.m. every night.” It’s going to be a shipping nightmare, but obviously, a beautiful spectacle, so Tselikis is plotting a reception for her Maine Coast customers. “This will be the biggest Tall Ships festival ever,” she said. “Then on top of that, I am going to make things worse for our Boston facility. Those guys are going to hate me.”

RESUME: When Tselikis was a student at Connecticut College, she studied photography and documentary and spent the fall of her junior year at Maine’s SALT Institute. Fisheries hadn’t entered her mind. Maine never left it though, and she decided after college to join friends who were working for Casco Bay Lines as deckhands. She ended up staying two years. Her parents might not have been thrilled, but the economy wasn’t great in 2004 and money was steady on the ferry. Also, fun. “There were days in the summer time where it sort of felt like camp for grownups,” she said.

FISH TALK: That’s where she started to get a sense of the complex world of Maine’s fisheries. “I would hear fishermen talking about what was going in the industry,” she said. “Until that point, it just didn’t register with me that natural resource management was a thing.” That’s how most people are, she says. “They just see boats, they go to Harbor Fish and they buy lobster,” without a sense of the many moving parts involved (a partial list: buyers on the wharf, dealers with the trucks, holding tanks, processors, transportation everywhere from Portland to Hong Kong).

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald