January 3, 2024 — Five lobstermen are suing the Maine Department of Marine Resources in an effort to stop new electronic boat monitoring requirements.
Under new rules that went into effect last month, lobstermen with federal fishing permits must install monitors on their boats that track their location each minute.
Attorney Thimi Mina said the lobstermen believe that the tracking is a violation of their constitutional right to privacy, equal protection and due process.
January 2, 2023 — Scientists and officials in New England hope to collect better data about a vanishing whale species, improve fishing gear to avoid harming the animals, and make other changes as Maine and Massachusetts receive more than $27 million in public funding.
The money is intended to aid the North Atlantic right whale, which is jeopardized by entanglement in commercial fishing gear and collisions with large ships. The population of the giant whales fell by about 25% from 2010 to 2020, and now numbers less than 360.
The largest chunk of the money is $17.2 million the Maine Department of Marine Resources has received from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to improve data collection about the whales, officials said Tuesday. The money will allow Maine to expand its right whale research and improve the assessment of risk to the whales posed by lobster fishing, which is a key industry in the state, Maine officials said.
Read the full article at the Associated Press
December 28, 2023 — Some Maine lobstermen say that new electronic monitoring requirements are violating their constitutional right to privacy.
As of Dec. 15, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission requires that lobstermen with federal permits install a monitor tracking their boat’s location each minute that it’s moving.
But the Sustainable Maine Fishing Foundation — a nonprofit arm of the Maine Lobstering Union — is now asking the state to delay the requirements until the next fishing season. The foundation outlined its concerns in a letter sent to the Maine Department of Marine Resources earlier this month.
December 21, 2023 — Monkfish stew will be featured on the menu of Mid Coast Hunger Prevention Program’s annual holiday supper Saturday, Dec. 23. This is the third year running that Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association, a Brunswick-based nonprofit, will donate 50-60 servings worth to feed the community.
Monkfish, a groundfish whose appearance has earned it the nicknames “frogfish” and “sea-devil,” wouldn’t be most people’s first choice off the menu. Not unexpectedly, they’re hard for fishermen to sell. That has been changing over the past few years, thanks in large part to the fishermen’s association.
In 2020, the association started a program called Fishermen Feeding Mainers to buy local fishermen’s catch of groundfish such as hake, flounder, cod, haddock, pollock and monkfish, and donate it to food pantries, schools and community organizations. Groundfish, or fish that spend the majority of their lives on the ocean floor, can be caught using gillnets, a method that avoids damaging the seabed and reduces bycatch.
Over the past three years, Fishermen Feeding Mainers has put $1.2 million into the fishing industry, funded by a mixture of grants, donation and foundation support, and COVID relief funds — yielding 650,000 pounds of groundfish that MCFA has then brought to local tables.
“Some of the feedback we got when we first started donating fish was that it was tricky to know how to prepare monkfish,” said Susan Olcott, operations director at Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association. “It’s a little bit different in its texture than some of the flaky white fish people are more familiar with, like cod or haddock. So, we decided to make something easy to serve to introduce people to monkfish — and that led to the stew.”
MCFA now sells thousands of packages of monkfish stew every year, made with Maine monkfish by Hurricane Premium Soups and Chowders in Greene, with proceeds benefitting the Fishermen Feeding Mainers program.
December 19, 2023 — Most experts agree, the decline of Maine’s lobster industry is inevitable. It’s not a matter of if, they say, but when.
Exactly what that decline might look like, however – how quickly it will arrive, how severe the drop off will be, or how it might alter the makeup of Maine’s fleet of fishing vessels – remains, if not a point of contention, an unnerving uncertainty.
Researchers at a variety of Maine institutions are working hard to provide some clarity, but while scientists have more information about the life cycle, movements and distribution of Maine’s lobster population, very little is known about how changes to the lobster fishing industry are impacting Maine’s lobstermen.
“My takeaway from the last two years of doing this work is there remains a huge amount of uncertainty about what’s happening,” said Joshua Stoll, an assistant professor in the School of Marine Sciences at the University of Maine.
Stoll is one of a growing number of researchers who think the key to anticipating the trajectory of the lobster fishery might lie not exclusively in the biological data, but also in a variety of shifting socioeconomic indicators, like changes in the sizes of boats being bought and built or slight adjustments in the risk calculations of lobster fishermen.
December 12, 2023 — With more than $17 million in hand, Maine has a new plan to search for the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale.
State officials hope to the use the newly gathered data to advocate for Maine’s fishing industry.
Specifically, state scientists will place 26 new passive acoustic monitors around the Gulf of Maine, in addition to the eight others that have been in the water for the last three years, to listen for right whales.
And soon an outside company hired by the Department of Marine Resources will fly small planes over the Gulf in attempt to spot them.
“Spring in particular, when whales are leaving Mass Bay and coming up along the coast,” said DMR Commissioner Patrick Keliher. “Certainly we would want to do some additional flying in the fall, around some areas around Jeffreys [Ledge] and the existing closed areas.”
December 4, 2023 — New England’s long-shuttered shrimp business, which fell victim to warming waters, will remain in a fishing moratorium indefinitely, fishery regulators ruled on Friday.
The shrimping business was based mostly in Maine and produced small, pink shrimp that were a winter delicacy in New England and across the country. The industry has been in a moratorium since 2013 in large part because environmental conditions off New England are unfavorable for the cold water-loving shrimp.
That moratorium will remain in effect with no firm end date, a board of the regulatory Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission voted Friday. The board stopped short of calling the move a permanent moratorium because it included a provision to continue monitoring the shrimp population and consider reopening the fishery if the crustaceans approach a healthy level.
But it was clear board members saw little chance of a future for a fishery that once provided a beloved seafood item that appeared on restaurant menus and in seafood markets every year around Christmas.
November 29, 2023 — Maine lobstermen are signaling their hesitation to participate in a multimillion-dollar program the state is launching to test new ropeless technology that the federal government soon may require to protect the endangered North Atlantic right whale.
The Maine Department of Marine Resources has been awarded $5.1 million from the federal government and a national nonprofit to research alternatives to the traditional trap-and-buoy lobster gear that requires vertical lines that can entangle the whales. But amid criticism and cynicism from many in the lobster industry, the department and its partnering organizations may face challenges recruiting lobstermen to play a key role in the evaluations.
“There’s no sense of wasting a lot of time and effort on our part into something that is not going to work,” said Colin Grierson, a longtime lobsterman in Midcoast Maine, “It’s going to take time away from when you’re normally fishing in a more traditional method when the end (conclusion) is not going to be ‘this is going to work great.’ It’s not.”
The $5.1 million award comes from the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the nonprofit National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, which are facilitating an $18.3 million grant program across New England. The 18 awards are intended to advance the development of “innovative fishing gear” as an alternative to vertical fishing lines, or ropes dangling in the ocean, that federal regulators contend are severely harming the right whale populations.
November 28, 2023 — Maine has received more than $5 million from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to expand the testing of alternative lobster fishing gear.
State officials see the work as a way to get more Maine feedback into the hands of federal regulators, who are looking for ways to further reduce the risk of entanglement and injury to critically endangered North Atlantic right whales.
The Maine Department of Marine Resources said the funds will support the research and testing of two kinds of emerging technology — gear that retrieves lobster traps from the ocean floor without the use of vertical lines and acoustic geolocation devices that identify traps without surface buoys.
The federal government may eventually require the use of this gear as it drafts new right whale management regulations over the next five years.
Much of the $5 million will directly cover a training and outreach program with a variety of coastal organizations, which include the Maine Sea Grant, the Island Institute Institute and the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association, among others.
November 23, 2023 — Starting in a few weeks, Maine lobstermen who fish in federal waters will be required to activate a tracking device on their boat.
The devices, which were sent to nearly 1,100 lobstermen in the state, comply with a new regulation set by the Atlantic State Marine Fisheries Commission.