Saving Seafood

Federal regulators eliminate Gulf of Maine wind power zone

July 31, 2025 — The Trump administration has erased all wind energy areas in federal waters, including two million acres in the Gulf of Maine.

The zones were developed by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to offer wind power leases to energy developers.

Amber Hewett director of offshore wind energy at the National Wildlife Foundation said removing the areas is a follow up to the administration’s earlier order to stop all wind power lease sales.

“The change here is that now, when a new administration comes in, those areas won’t be ready and waiting. They have been deleted, and the process will need to start again at the beginning,” Hewett said.

Establishing the areas took years of consultation with fisheries, coastal communities, shipping companies, tribes, environmental groups and other interests.

Through those discussions regulators set aside areas that were the least disruptive, Hewett said.

Read the full article at Maine Public

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

First Circuit unbothered by Maine’s lobster boat snooping

July 29, 2025 — Maine’s plan to install GPS tracking devices on all lobster boats and monitor their exact location at all times went before the First Circuit Monday, but the court seemed unconcerned that this could be an invasion of the fishermen’s privacy.

“It makes sense to me,” U.S. Circuit Judge Seth Aframe said at oral argument.

The devices are required on all commercial lobster boats and record the boats’ location every minute at sea and every six hours on shore. They can’t be turned off, and they record all activity, even if the boat is being used for recreational or other non-commercial purposes. They’re Bluetooth-compatible and can collect audio information, although the state denies that it’s secretly recording anyone’s conversations.

Five lobstermen challenged the rule in court, claiming it was an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment. A trial judge upheld the Maine rule under existing precedent for administrative searches but found the issue so disturbing that he took the unusual step of recommending an appeal to the First Circuit.

The mariners immediately ran into choppy seas before the three-judge panel, however, as the judges credited the state’s claim that it needed to track lobster stocks and protect against interference with whales.

“The lobster stock is changing dramatically,” explained Sean Donahue of Donahue, Goldberg & Herzog in Washington, D.C., representing the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. “In New York, the catch is 3% of what it was 20 years earlier. In Maine, there’s a clear movement toward colder waters. The data require careful assessment, and this is critical.”

Read the full article at the Courthouse News Service

Fishing groups push to postpone protections for endangered right whale to 2035

July 28, 2025 — A Maine congressman and several commercial fishing groups are getting behind a push to delay rules designed to protect a vanishing species of whale for 10 years.

The North Atlantic right whale numbers only about 370 and has declined over the last 15 years. They have been the subject of proposed federal fishing laws that are backed by conservation groups because the whales are threatened by lethal entanglement in commercial fishing gear.

The federal government is in the midst of a pause on federal right whale rules until 2028. Democratic Rep. Jared Golden of Maine and a coalition of fishing organizations said in letters to congressional officials that they want to extend that moratorium out to 2035.

Golden, who played a role in the initial moratorium, said extending the pause would give the government the time it needs to craft regulations that reflect science. He also said it would protect Maine’s lifesblood lobster fishing industry, which is one of the fishing sectors that would have to comply with rules intended to protect right whales.

Read the full article at the Associated Press

PETA sues to stop Maine Lobster Festival

July 28, 2025 — Animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has sued the Maine Lobster Festival and the City of Rockland, asking a court to declare the event a public nuisance and ban the steaming of live lobsters on public property.

Filed in Knox County Superior Court, the lawsuit claims the multi-week festivities of the Maine Lobster Festival deprives local PETA members from accessing Harbor Park “without being forced to witness extreme animal suffering as approximately 16,000 live lobsters are illegally tormented and killed at the festival each year.”

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

MAINE: Maine community gathers to honor fishermen lost at sea

July 25, 2025 — Dozens of fishermen, family members, and friends gathered on the Lubec, Maine, waterfront on Monday to honor the lives of commercial fishermen lost at sea.

The ceremony, held at the Lost Fishermen’s Memorial overlooking the working harbor, served as a solemn tribute to those who never returned home — their names etched in stone on the memorial itself.

Organized by Green and White Hope Inc. founder Liz Michaud, the event also served to announce Gov. Janet Mills’ proclamation of July 21, 2025, as Maine Commercial Fishing Remembrance Day.

Following a formal presentation of the colors by the Maine Marine Patrol Honor Guard, the event featured a lineup of speakers with deep ties to Maine’s fishing industry and maritime safety, including Bill Case, founding member of the Lost Fishermen’s Memorial Committee; John Roberts of Fishing Partnership Support Services; and Carl Wilson, Commissioner of the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR).

“We should never forget those who gave their lives to this calling… Some names are etched here in stone. Others live on only in stories, in photographs, and in the memories of those who loved them,” said Wilson. “Their loss is felt deeply, not only by their families, but by the entire Maine fishing community — because in towns like Lubec and others on our coast, when one fisherman is lost, we all grieve.”

Wilson noted that the DMR’s Commercial Fishing Safety Council will continue to guide efforts to improve safety training, education, and outreach for Maine commercial fishermen.

Read the full article at National Fisherman

MAINE: Lost fishermen denied a place on Maine memorial

July 25, 2025 — The Lubec Fishermen’s Memorial Committee has caused an uproar in Lubec, Maine, after failing to include the names of two fishermen, Chester “Chet” Barrett and his son Aaron — who drowned off Trecott, Maine, on January 18 — to those being engraved into the memorial.

According to the exact wording of the committee’s criteria, fishermen must be “actively fishing” when lost in order have their names added to the stone sculpture near the town’s harbor. The Barretts were in transit between scallop grounds with gear on board, but were left off the list due to committee members’ unfamiliarity with fishing. According to Committee president, Barbara Sellitto, the committee was scattered, and she was traveling at the time the tentative decision was made.

While Sellitto maintained that no final decision had been made, the absence of the Barretts on the list cast a shadow on a wreath-laying ceremony held at the Lost Fisherman’s Memorial on July 21.

Liz Michaud, who founded the non-profit Green and White Hope after her nephew was lost lobstering, had announced that “Maine Governor Janet Mills has proclaimed July 21, 2025, as Maine Commercial Fishing Remembrance Day. The day will be dedicated to honoring the losses within the commercial fishing community, especially given that Maine has lost four fishermen so far in 2025.”

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

MAINE: Golden, lobstermen call on Congress to extend right whale regulatory moratorium until 2035

July 24, 2025 — A coalition of Maine lobster fishing groups, along with Democratic Rep. Jared Golden, are calling on Congress to extend a right whale regulatory moratorium for another ten years.

The moratorium, championed by Maine’s entire congressional delegation and slipped into a last-minute budget bill during the final days of 2022, prohibited the federal government from implementing new restrictions on the lobster fishery that are intended to protect North Atlantic right whales.

The regulatory pause is set to lift at the end of 2028. But Golden, who represents Maine’s second congressional district, said Tuesday he believes the moratorium should be extended until 2035.

Last summer, the state of Maine started conducting its own research to study the presence of right whales in the Gulf of Maine. State officials have said they want their data, which takes some time to put together, to inform the federal government’s new regulations.

Read the full article at Maine Public

MAINE: Maine OKs plans for state’s largest scallop farm

July 24, 2025 — A Maine company growing scallops in Penobscot Bay that wanted to expand its operations  nearly tenfold got a slightly reduced version of those plans approved by the state on Tuesday, more than three years after starting the process.

Vertical Bay is one of a handful of small Maine aquaculture companies growing scallops, a multi-year process using long vertical lines underneath the water. Its owner-operators, Belfast couple Andrew and Samantha Peters, applied for a 20-year, state-issued lease to increase their operation in the waters west of Hog Island from about four acres to roughly 41.

Scaling up would provide a model for other people interested in growing scallops in Maine and demonstrate how it can be profitable, Andrew Peters previously told the Bangor Daily News.

Peters didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Read the full article at Bangor Daily News

MAINE: Maine Sea Grant students helping state conserve endangered Atlantic salmon

July 22, 2025 — Atlantic Salmon have been on the brink of extinction for more than two decades, but through conservation efforts researchers in Maine are working to improve the species growth while also building the next generation of marine scientists.

From fish stocking to lab work, students are diving into efforts to help conserve the endangered Atlantic salmon along the Gulf of Maine this summer though a program offered by Maine Sea Grant and NOAA Fisheries.

“We take genetic samples and scale samples and all kinds of stuff, so we can continue to have data on them into the future,” said Maine Sea Grant Intern Wade Hill.

Read the full article at Fox 22