April 2, 2020 — The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than 99% of the world’s oceans. And the trend may be having an impact on Maine’s most valuable commercial fishery, if temperature affects lobster larvae and their success in growing to adulthood, scientists say.
The University of New England in Biddeford, Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay, the Maine Department of Marine Resources and Hood College in Frederick, Md., have received an $860,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study that impact.
“We’ll be studying how temperature influences how larvae settle, where they settle and how successfully they settle,” Markus Frederich, a UNE marine science professor helping to lead the project, said in a news release Tuesday. “The findings of this project will help us make more specific predictions of how many lobsters there will be in the Gulf of Maine in the future.”
Maine’s lobster catch was valued at $485.4 million last year, when Maine lobster harvesters landed 100.7 million pounds. It was a 17% decline compared with 2018, but landings still topped the 100-million-pound mark for the ninth year in a row.