Saving Seafood

MAINE: Experts say multiple factors contributing to recent shark sightings off Maine coast

August 15, 2025 — The state says there’s more than one reason behind the recent shark sightings off Maine’s coast, and climate change is one of them.

On Monday, drone video captured a shark, believed to be a great white that was 10 to 12 feet long, near Richmond Island, Higgins Beach, and Scarborough Beach.

It was spotted again near Pine Point Beach on Tuesday.

Matt Davis, a scientist with the Maine Department of Marine Resources, says shark sightings are becoming more common because people are more on the lookout and warming waters in Maine are something sharks are “warming up to.”

Read the full article at WGME

Atlantic bluefin tuna diets are shifting in a changing Gulf of Maine

August 11, 2025 — Maine’s coastal communities have been hooked on the Atlantic bluefin tuna since at least the late 1880s—first as bycatch, until the 1930s when the fish became a prized target in fishing tournaments. Through the subsequent decades, bluefin tuna have and continue to support working waterfronts in Maine and beyond.

Despite a decline in prices, a single bluefin tuna can land over $10,000, and in 2024 alone, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that commercial and recreational landings exceeded 3.5 million pounds, fueling a range of economic activities from food markets to boat building and gear sales.

Sammi Nadeau (’18, ’21G), the lab manager at UMaine’s Pelagic Fisheries Lab, conducted a study recently published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series that illustrated a shift in the tuna’s diet and described the role of foraging in the tuna’s lifecycle.

“You can imagine that those migrations from across the ocean and things like reproduction are extremely energetically demanding,” said Nadeau, “So being able to get a really good meal, fill back up and get ready to go back across the ocean is important to fulfill their life history.”

Read the full article at the PHYS.org

MAINE: As farming innovation collides with fishing tradition, Harpswell brings both sides to the table

August 7, 2025 — Last year, Harpswell oyster farmer Samantha Bohan learned the town was considering a one-year moratorium on new aquaculture leases because of concerns about their impact on traditional fishing.

Bohan had just started her own farm a year earlier and was worried she wouldn’t be able to renew her two small, annual leases. Instead, Harpswell created a working group to study the issue, and Bohan volunteered to serve on it.

“It’s kind of funny. I always told my husband I don’t ever want to get into politics,” she said in an interview. “And he said, ‘The moment you got an oyster farm, you signed up for politics.’”

Created in May 2024, the town’s Aquaculture Working Group set out to examine how Maine’s aquaculture licensing process works, assess its impact on Harpswell and gather public feedback on the growing number of seafood farms in local waters.

The group’s efforts culminated in the creation of a new map of local commercial fishing areas, which it urged state officials to use when evaluating applications for aquaculture leases to help avoid conflicts with fishermen. Its final meeting was on June 11.

Read the full article at the Harpswell Anchor 

Comparing the effectiveness of common Atlantic sea scallop farming methods

August 6, 2025 — Much of the scallop farming techniques used in the U.S. derive from practices in Japan, where scallops have long been a part of the country’s seafood industry. Researchers from the University of Maine are working to test and adapt those practices to help grow the industry in the Gulf of Maine, where oyster farming is currently the most well-known form of aquaculture in Maine’s blue economy.

Building off a four-year study published in the spring, which compared the effectiveness of two different Atlantic sea scallop farming techniques, UMaine researchers further analyzed the economic advantages and disadvantages of the same two methods of scallop aquaculture. Lead researcher Damian Brady, professor of marine sciences at UMaine, and co-author Chris Noren, a postdoctoral researcher, used their results to develop a user-friendly application that helps interested parties compare the different costs and possibilities associated with building their own scallop farms.

“Now new farmers can make educated decisions on what option is going to be most viable for them, taking into account their location, timeframe, budget and all the other pieces that go into scallop farming,” Brady said. “Ultimately, our goal is to help Maine grow this industry to its fullest potential and preserve Maine’s working waterfronts—an integral part of the state’s culture and history.”

Published in the journal Aquaculture, the study looked at two of the most common options for scallop farming: lantern net and ear-hanging. Previously, lantern net methods were thought to be more cost-effective, but this study shows the ways in which the ear-hanging method can be more cost-efficient over a longer period of time.

Read the full article at PHYS.org

MAINE: As farming innovation collides with fishing tradition, Harpswell brings both sides to the table

August 4, 2025 — This story is part of “Cultivating the Coast,” a special report that explores Harpswell’s rapidly growing aquaculture industry.

Last year, Harpswell oyster farmer Samantha Bohan learned the town was considering a one-year moratorium on new aquaculture leases because of concerns about their impact on traditional fishing.

Bohan had just started her own farm a year earlier and was worried she wouldn’t be able to renew her two small, annual leases. Instead, Harpswell created a working group to study the issue, and Bohan volunteered to serve on it.

“It’s kind of funny. I always told my husband I don’t ever want to get into politics,” she said in an interview. “And he said, ‘The moment you got an oyster farm, you signed up for politics.’”

Created in May 2024, the town’s Aquaculture Working Group set out to examine how Maine’s aquaculture licensing process works, assess its impact on Harpswell, and gather public feedback on the growing number of seafood farms in local waters.

The group’s efforts culminated in the creation of a new map of local commercial fishing areas, which it urged state officials to use when evaluating applications for aquaculture leases to help avoid conflicts with fishermen. Its final meeting was on June 11.

Read the full article at Harpswell Anchor 

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

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