Saving Seafood

Changes to lobster fishery to help whales might arrive 2021

June 28, 2019 — Changes to the Maine lobster fishery designed to help a critically endangered species of whale might arrive in 2021 after a lengthy rulemaking process.

A team assembled by the federal government has called for the removal of half the vertical trap lines from the Gulf of Maine to reduce risk to North Atlantic right whales. The Maine Department of Marine Resources has been meeting with lobstermen around the state to begin the process of crafting rules to achieve that goal.

The state held the last of several meetings with lobstermen about the new rules on Thursday in Freeport. Hundreds of members of the state’s lifeblood industry have attended the meetings.

Maine hopes to present a plan to the federal government by September, department spokesman Jeff Nichols said before the meeting. The industry is getting ready to grapple with the task of getting so much gear out of the water, said Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association.

“There’s definitely concern among lobstermen because they will be changing how they fish,” she said. “It’s not a simple task, but once guys are thinking it through and making changes, there seems to be viable strategies for each person.”

Read the full story at the Associated Press

New England council calls for further curbs on herring catches

June 12, 2019 — Recommendations made by the New England Fishery Management Council (NEFMC) will further reduce Maine lobster harvesters’ access to herring as a baitfish.

According to the Associated Press, the council has recommended that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration cut herring catch levels to 25 million pounds (11,400t) for 2020, down from 15,875t this year. Five years ago, herring catch limits were set at 90,718t, the news service said.

“Maine lobstermen will continue to identify new bait sources to further diversify our bait supply and develop efficiencies in our bait use,” Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, told the news service.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Lobster industry faces another deep cut in bait

June 12, 2019 — Lobster fishermen will likely have to contend with another deep cut to the availability of bait next year due to a Tuesday recommendation by a fishery management board.

Federal regulators have slashed the catch limits for Atlantic herring, which is an important source of bait for America’s lucrative lobster fishery, over the past year. The New England Fishery Management Council voted Tuesday to again reduce the catch limits, this time to a little more than 25 million pounds in 2020.

The cut would reduce the Atlantic herring catch to its lowest level in decades, and less than a quarter of the 2017 total. The reduction comes on the heels of an earlier cutback that reduced this year’s quota to less than 35 million pounds when the catch had been more than 200 million pounds just five years ago.

It remains to be seen how much of an impact the cut in bait supply will have on the lobster industry and consumers of lobster, but another reduction is “certainly not the news we want to hear,” said Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association.

“Maine lobstermen will continue to identify new bait sources to further diversify our bait supply and develop efficiencies in our bait use,” McCarron said.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Gloucester Daily Times

BANGOR DAILY NEWS: Better information needed as Maine lobstermen take on challenge of protecting right whales

May 21, 2019 — In the early 2000s, the news appeared good for endangered North Atlantic right whales. Their population grew significantly, due to both rising numbers of births and fewer deaths from ship strikes and entanglements in fishing gear.

That good news has come to an end. Twenty of the rare whales died in just two years — 2017 and 2018, according to the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium. For the first time in nearly four decades of monitoring, it appears no right whale calves were born last year.

The consortium estimates there are only 411 right whales off the Atlantic coast.

Given these dire numbers, U.S. fisheries regulators have proposed dramatic declines in the amount of fishing lines in waters where the whales are believed to congregate and pass through.

Last month, a team devoted to reducing right whale deaths told Maine officials that the state must reduce the risk it poses to right whales by 60 percent.

The team recommended that Maine’s lobster fishery cut the number of vertical lines in the water by half. Vertical lines run between traps and buoys on the surface of the water to mark their location. The recommendations will be turned into proposed federal rules, which will be subject to public comments. The process could take up to two years.

Read the full opinion piece at the Bangor Daily News

Whale woes: Maine lobster reps agree to 50 percent cut in vertical lines

May 1, 2019 — After months of speculation and hand-wringing, Northeast lobstermen got a clear message from NMFS at the federal Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team meeting last week: Make drastic changes, or we’ll do it for you.

“On day three of the TRT meeting, NMFS Deputy Assistant Administrator Sam Rauch… did not mince words in stating that the TRT’s job is to identify measures to reduce right whale serious injury and mortality from lobster gear by 60-80 percent,” said Maine Lobstermen’s Association Executive Director Patrice McCarron in an April 29 letter to members. “He was clear that the TRT meeting gave the fishing industry its opportunity to shape how that reduction is achieved. If we failed that task, NMFS would begin rulemaking without our advice and decide for us.”

The 64-member team — established in 1996 under the Marine Mammal Protection Act — includes East Coast fishermen and associations representing fixed-gear fisheries, fishery managers, environmental organizations and scientists. Maine’s lobster industry holds four seats on the team, including McCarron’s.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Proposal to license more lobstermen put off to next year

April 5, 2019 — A proposal to let dozens of new lobstermen into Maine’s signature fishery is going to be put off until at least 2020.

More than 200 people are waiting for a state license to harvest lobster, and the annual haul has grown in volume and value this decade. Earlier this year, state Rep. Joyce McCreight, a Democrat of Harpswell, proposed bringing people into the fishery if they’ve been waiting for 10 or more years.

McCreight said she’s going to withdraw the bill from the current legislative session and consider bringing it back in the next session, which starts in January. The lobster industry is facing too much uncertainty to bring more than 50 new fishermen in at once, she said.

Lobstermen have had several productive years in a row, but this year the business is facing a bait shortage and potential new fishing rules to protect rare whales.

“We’re going to soon have info about whales and bait. Let’s see what we get,” McCreight said. “I’d like to have a bill — let’s not kill it.”

Many members of the lobstering industry were skeptical of McCreight’s proposal from the beginning and some said holding it over until the next session is a good idea. Bringing new fishermen into the business could have also hurt the state in ongoing discussions with regulators about new whale protection rules, said Kristan Porter, president of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

Bait crisis could take the steam out of lobster this summer

April 1, 2019 — The boom times for the U.S. lobster industry are imperiled this year because of a shortage of a little fish that has been luring the crustaceans into traps for hundreds of years.

Members of the lobster business fear a looming bait crisis could disrupt the industry during a time when lobsters are as plentiful, valuable and in demand as ever. America’s lobster catch has climbed this decade, especially in Maine, but the fishery is dependent on herring — a schooling fish other fishermen seek in the Atlantic Ocean.

Federal regulators are imposing a steep cut in the herring fishery this year, and some areas of the East Coast are already restricted to fishing, months before the lobster season gets rolling. East Coast herring fishermen brought more than 200 million pounds of the fish to docks as recently as 2014, but this year’s catch will be limited to less than a fifth of that total.

The cut is leaving lobstermen, who have baited traps with herring for generations in Maine, scrambling for new bait sources and concerned about their ability to get lobster to customers who have come to expect easy availability in recent years.

“If you don’t have bait, you’re not going to fish. If the price of bait goes up, you’re not going to fish,” said Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association. “We have to take the big picture, and make sure our communities continue to have viable fisheries.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at Boston.com

Impending whale protections worry fishermen

March 5, 2019 — With the majority of American lobsters caught in Maine, the state’s lobster fishermen could bear the brunt of changes in federal fishery regulations to save the endangered right whale.

At the March 1 Fisherman’s Forum update on the threat of extinction for the North Atlantic right whale, it became clear regulators believe changes to fishing gear will be announced sometime this year.

Much of the presentation focused on changes to the vertical lines that attach buoys floating on top of the water to the lobster traps down on the ocean floor. The colored buoys identify the owner of the traps and their location, and the line is used to haul the heavy traps out of the water

In 2009, a whale protection regulation required fishermen to eliminate the floating rope they used to connect strings of lobster traps, and replace it with rope that lies on the ocean floor. That process took five years and a rope buyback program to accomplish, according to Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, who was in the audience. Switching out vertical lines cannot be done in one year, she said.

Read the full story at The Camden Herald

Maine Lobstermen Share Anxieties Over New Regulations In The Industry At Annual Forum

March 4, 2019 — At Maine’s annual Fishermen’s Forum in Rockport Friday, a historic $600 million harvest season coincided with a slight increase in lobster landings and lingering concerns over potential changes to gear rules around protecting endangered right whales. But looming over the forum are major cutbacks in the quota of crucial herring bait fish — which could ripple across the industry.

Patrice McCarron is executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association (MLA). She is worried about the severity of herring restrictions imposed by the federal government after the species failed to reproduce in sustainable numbers last year.

“It’s about as bad as we can imagine, but we don’t yet know what it’s going to translate to for the fishermen,” McCaroon says.

McCarron says that Maine fishermen face a shortage of some 50-million pounds of bait in the coming season.

Fisherman are used to catching the traditional lobster baitfish in Maine’s coastal herring fishery all summer and into the fall, but McCarron says that will change under the new quotas.

Read the full story at Maine Public

Maine’s lobster catch, value grew last year, officials say

March 1, 2019 — Maine lobstermen brought more than 119 million pounds (54 million kilograms) of the state’s signature seafood ashore last year, an increase that helped to propel the total value of Maine’s seafood to the second-highest value on record, state officials said Friday.

The value of the 2018 lobster catch was more than $484.5 million, and the total value for all Maine seafood was more than $637.1 million, according to the Maine Department of Marine Resources.

The state is by far the biggest lobster producer in the United States, and the industry is in the midst of a multiyear boom. However, the catch and its value have fluctuated wildly in recent years.

According to updated department numbers, the 2017 lobster haul was a little less than 112 million pounds (51 million kilograms) and was valued at more than $438 million. That was a drop from the previous year.

Preliminary data from 2018 show that trend reversed, for the year at least. The productive year by lobstermen coincided with high demand from consumers and strong retail prices.

“The demand for lobsters will always stay strong,” Kristan Porter, president of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, said Friday to a packed audience at the Maine Fishermen’s Forum, a trade show taking place in Rockport this week.

Read the full story at the Associated Press