Saving Seafood

Red Lobster’s latest turnaround initiatives include new seafood boil flavors, cocktails

November 13, 2025 — Restaurant chain Red Lobster, which has implemented several initiatives intended to turn around sales after emerging from bankruptcy last year, has released new flavors for its seafood boils, as well as cocktails and new entrées, to further boost sales.

The Orlando, Florida, U.S.A.-based operator of more than 500 restaurants globally first launched seafood boils as part of its Crabfest promotion this summer. At that time, it debuted the Mariner’s Boil, which includes a Maine lobster tail, a dozen shrimp, snow crab legs, corn, and red potatoes, and the Sailor’s Boil, which features shrimp, smoked sausage, corn, and red potatoes.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Why Maine lobstermen need an extended pause on new right whale rules

August 1, 2025 — Jared Golden of Lewiston represents Maine’s 2nd Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.

This piece was originally published on July 31 in “Dear Mainer,” Golden’s Substack. It is reposted here in its entirety, with permission.

I had a few goals when I successfully pushed to get a seat on the House Natural Resources Committee, but chief among them was using the position to advocate for the men and women who work on Maine’s waters.

It was only three years ago that Maine’s lobster industry was on the verge of shutting down because of a regulatory process that was based on flawed interpretation of federal law and biased modeling that relied heavily on hypothetical threats that fisheries posed to the North Atlantic right whale.

That is why one of my proudest accomplishments in Congress was the successful effort in 2022 — working with the entire Maine delegation and our governor on a bipartisan basis — to enact a moratorium on these regulations until 2028, coupled with additional funding to support right whale research.

However, based on developments in the last few years and my conversations with fishermen, I believe more time is needed to incorporate the research and data collected during the pause into future right whale regulations.

Read the full article at Bangor Daily News

Feeding the Limitless Maine Lobster Roll Boom, Seafloor to Summer Table

July 31, 2025 — “We’ll start with six lobster rolls,” the man in sunglasses and madras shorts said when he reached the front of the line at McLoons Lobster Shack on the tip of Sprucehead Island in Maine.

That was only his opening bid. By the time everyone in his family had weighed in, his lobster roll count was up to nine.

There are other things on the menu at McLoons — chowders and burgers and grilled littleneck clams — but the lobster roll outsells them all by far.

On the Sunday in July I spent at McLoons, in South Thomaston, Me., the place never got truly mobbed. The sky was the color of a fishing sinker and everyone knew an afternoon thunderstorm was on the way. But still they came, the locals and the visitors, almost all of them with the same thing in mind. As Mariah Watkinson, who was working the order window, put it, “There’s usually a lobster roll in every order.”

In 2012, McLoons Lobster Shack’s first season, its manager, Bree Birns, worked almost completely alone and sold about 40 lobster rolls a day. Now, on a busy summer day, the shack will make 500 of them, and she needs 10 full-time workers and 16 part-timers to keep up.

In the intervening 13 years, the demand for lobster rolls has been pushed higher and higher by forces that are often external to Maine. Entrepreneurs in New York City and Los Angeles, taking advantage of deflated lobster prices and the ascent of trucks, stalls and windows devoted to affordable, portable treats, helped build a vast, urban audience for the sandwich. One of these businesses, Luke’s Lobster, now sells about a million lobster rolls a year at its shacks in 12 states, Singapore and Japan.

Read the full article at The New York Times

Just how rare is a rare-colored lobster? Scientists say answer could be under the shell

September 9, 2024 — Orange, blue, calico, two-toned and … cotton-candy colored?

Those are all the hues of lobsters that have showed up in fishers’ traps, supermarket seafood tanks and scientists’ laboratories over the last year. The funky-colored crustaceans inspire headlines that trumpet their rarity, with particularly uncommon baby blue-tinted critters described by some as “cotton-candy colored” often estimated at 1 in 100 million.

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A recent wave of these curious colored lobsters in Maine, New York, Colorado and beyond has scientists asking just how atypical the discolored arthropods really are. As is often the case in science, it’s complicated.

Lobsters’ color can vary due to genetic and dietary differences, and estimates about how rare certain colors are should be taken with a grain of salt, said Andrew Goode, lead administrative scientist for the American Lobster Settlement Index at the University of Maine. There is also no definitive source on the occurrence of lobster coloration abnormalities, scientists said.

“Anecdotally, they don’t taste any different either,” Goode said.

In the wild, lobsters typically have a mottled brown appearance, and they turn an orange-red color after they are boiled for eating. Lobsters can have color abnormalities due to mutation of genes that affect the proteins that bind to their shell pigments, Goode said.

Read the full article at wbur

Lobsters versus right whales: The latest chapter in a long quest to make fishing more sustainable

January 13, 2023 — Maine lobster fishermen received a Christmas gift from Congress at the end of 2022: A six-year delay on new federal regulations designed to protect critically endangered North Atlantic right whales.

The rules would have required lobstermen to create new seasonal nonfishing zones and further reduce their use of vertical ropes to retrieve lobster traps from the seafloor. Entanglement in fishing gear and collisions with many types of ships are the leading causes of right whale deaths.

Maine’s congressional delegation amended a federal spending bill to delay the new regulations until 2028 and called for more research on whale entanglements and ropeless fishing gear. Conservationists argue that the delay could drive North Atlantic right whales, which number about 340 today, to extinction.

This is the latest chapter in an ongoing and sometimes fraught debate over fishing gear and bycatch—unintentionally caught species that fishermen don’t want and can’t sell. My research as a maritime historian, focusing on disputes tied to industrial fishing, shows the profound impacts that particular fishing gear can have on marine species.

Disputes over  and bycatch have involved consumers, commercial fishermen, recreational anglers and environmentalists. With conservation pitted against economic livelihoods, emotions often run high. And these controversies aren’t resolved quickly, which bodes poorly for species on the brink.

Read the full article at phys.org

U of Maine Lobster Study Aims to Protect State’s Vital Fishing Industry

December 28, 2022 — Researchers at the University of Maine are studying how warming Arctic waters flowing into the Gulf of Maine are affecting the region’s lobster population, in an effort to protect both the famous shellfish and the communities that depend on it.

Already, scientists say warming ecosystems have caused a decline in the survival rates of larval lobster and forced some lobster populations to move to colder areas further north.

Richard Wahle, director of the University of Maine Lobster Institute, said what happens in the Arctic unfortunately doesn’t stay there.

“Lobsters are now the elephant in the room,” Wahle emphasized. “And if things turn down for lobster, it’s going to have some really important consequences.”

Read the full article at Public News Service

 

How Maine lobstermen turned a ‘slap in the face’ from the White House into a policy victory

December 23, 2022 — Maine lobstermen who are fighting a federal regulation that threatens to eliminate their state’s lobstering heritage scored a policy victory in the $1.7 trillion spending bill after a White House state dinner put the controversy in the spotlight.

After a push from Maine lawmakers, Congress inserted a provision into the 2023 omnibus spending bill that will temporarily pause a federal rule aimed at protecting the endangered North Atlantic right whale, but that lobstermen said threatened to put family-owned lobster fisheries out of business.

The regulatory battle had been hard fought for several months, but with little national attention. But when President Biden served 200 Maine lobsters at a White House state dinner with French President Emmanuel Macron, that put a spotlight on the controversy that opened the door for Biden’s crippling policy to be curbed, at least for now.

“As a commercial fisherman, I’m glad to see lobster on the menu at the White House,” Dustin Delano, vice president of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association (MLA) told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview after the White House dinner.

“But as a commercial fisherman, I’m also a bit set back,” Delano said. “It almost seems like a slap in the face like… our industry is not worth saving.”

Just a few weeks after Biden and his VIP guests dined on the New England delicacy, a delegation of Maine lawmakers successfully added a rider into next year’s spending bill that Congress was rushing to pass this week. That language will pause the regulation for six years, giving Congress time to work up a new solution that doesn’t put the lobstermen out of business.

Read the full article at Fox News

Lobster legislation a ‘Christmas miracle’ for Maine’s industry – if it passes

December 22, 2022 — Maine’s congressional delegation has perhaps never been so united as it was in adding a provision to the massive government spending bill that they believe could save the lobster industry from economic ruin.

Lawmakers in Washington are working feverishly this week to pass the omnibus appropriations bill that would fund federal agencies through the next fiscal year. The current stopgap spending measure expires Friday. Maine’s delegation succeeded in adding a rider to the bill that would protect Maine lobstermen for six years from federal regulations they claim could decimate the state’s iconic industry and coastal economy. Environmental groups, however, contend the provision announced Tuesday could wipe out the endangered North Atlantic right whales.

The rider would essentially reverse a federal court decision this summer on new lobstering regulations by preventing them from taking effect until Dec. 31, 2028.

This would not only bring the fishery back into compliance with environmental laws but would also give fishery officials and researchers time to study potential new types of lobster gear less likely to entangle the whales, and to learn more about them and how much they frequent Maine waters.

Read the full article at the Press Herald

Maine lawmakers use spending bill to delay lobster restrictions

December 21, 2022 — Maine’s congressional delegation slipped an amendment into the $1.7 trillion federal spending bill that would delay for six years new protections for endangered whales to protect Maine’s lobster industry.

The amendment would leave existing lobster fishing regulations in place for the time being, thwarting new restrictions aimed at protecting North Atlantic right whales, which are vulnerable to entanglement in fishing gear. A federal judge previously delayed the new rules until 2024 to give the government time to craft them.

Read the full article at wbur