Saving Seafood

Lobstermen fear 2019 bait crisis due to herring quota cuts

October 1, 2018 — Herring and lobster fishermen alike expressed concern that quota cuts and vessel restrictions in the herring fishery approved this week by the New England Fishery Management Council will hurt Maine’s lobster fishery next season.

Maine Public reported the regulatory agency approved a quota of around 15,000 tons for next year, down from 55,000 this year. It also established a 12-mile buffer zone for large fishing boats called mid-water trawlers that will prevent them from fishing close to shore.

Ryan Raber, co-owner of Portland bait business New England Fish Co., told Maine Public he’d likely have to lay off some crew and staff. Patrice McCarron, the executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, predicted acute bait shortages in the lobster fishery.

Earlier this summer, the prospect of a shortage of herring bait for Maine’s lobster fishing fleet drove price increases for bait fish and fueled concern about the long-term availability of bait in future years.

The herring fishery is overseen by the New England Fishery Management Council. The quota is driven by a 2018 benchmark stock assessment, conducted by the Atlantic Herring Stock Assessment Working Group. The assessment indicated that recruitment — incoming year classes of newly born fish — has been poor for several years. The working group said that four of the six lowest estimates of herring recruitment occurred in 2013, 2015, 2016 and 2017.

Read the full story at MaineBiz

 

Cut bait: Regulators move to slash Atlantic herring catch

September 28, 2018 — The New England Fishery Management Council voted this week to approve a new management approach to the region’s Atlantic herring fishery that will significantly scale back catch limits for the species over the next three years.

Based on the council’s latest stock assessment, recruitment numbers were lower than the previous low point in the 1970s when record catches essentially wiped out the fishing. Assessments show that recruitment numbers have been well below average for the species since 2013.

The regulation change, called Amendment 8, has been in the works for several years. The herring committee created nine alternatives for the management plan, ranging from taking no action on the previous management plan to a 50-nautical-mile prohibition on all midwater trawling gear.

The council decided to approve an allowable biological catch control rule, a revised version of Alternative 4B, which will slash the total allowable catch of herring from 49,900 tons to 21,266 tons in 2019. The 2018 total of 49,900 tons was already slashed from the year’s original ACL of 110,500 tons of Atlantic herring. A shortage in herring landings also means a shortage of lobster bait throughout New England.

“There’s no one that has more at stake,” said Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association. “The lobster industry has already been dealing with issues related to bait, and the latest decision by the council will likely cause those problems to be even worse.”

The Gulf of Maine herring fishery was shut down by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission for much of September as the fleet neared its catch limit.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Maine lobstermen say move to avert collapse of herring fishery will have dire consequences

September 26, 2018 — Regulators are taking drastic steps to avert a collapse of the herring fishery, adopting trawling bans and proposing rock-bottom quotas.

While environmental groups and those who fish species that rely on herring for food, like striped bass and tuna, cheered the action, the Maine lobster industry was left wondering how it will survive without its favorite bait. Patrice McCarron, the executive director of the Maine Lobstermen Association, predicted it will force some lobstermen off the water.

“It is going to be really devastating,” McCarron told the New England Fisheries Management Council on Tuesday. “People aren’t going to be able to fish. There’s just not going to be enough bait. If you do get bait, you’re going to be on rations. The price of bait is going to skyrocket. … A lot of people are going to go out of business.”

About 70 percent of all herring landed in the U.S. ends up as bait, mostly for the lobster industry. In the last five years, as lobster hauls increased, the demand for herring went up, too, just as herring landings began to fall, McCarron said. That has driven up the bait price. In 2013, Maine lobstermen were paying $30 a bushel. Now, a bushel costs $45 on the coast, or $60 on the islands.

McCarron expects the price of bait to double next year, which would be a disaster for Maine lobstermen, she said. Her organization has been meeting with Maine bait dealers to talk about their storage capability, which she said was limited, and herring alternatives such as pogeys and redfish, whose prices likely will rise as lobstermen are forced to abandon herring as bait.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Maine lobster industry facing many challenges, changes

February 21, 2018 — Maine’s lobster industry is pushing back against new rules that they say are costly and put onerous requirements on them to record data.

Maine does not have the funds to pay for the new reporting requirements mandated by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, according to Patrice McCarron, the executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association. McCarron said the new rule, which requires 100 percent of Maine lobstermen to report certain catch data over the next five years, is cost-prohibitive.

“We have more than 4,000 lobstermen, so we have no way to collect trip-level data from all of them,” she told SeafoodSource.

Currently, data is collected from only 10 percent of the state’s lobstermen. The MLA opposed the ASMFC’s proposal on the reporting requirement, explaining that the state does not have the funds for data collection and that its current data system has a 95 to 98 percent confidence interval level.

“The question for Maine is how do we pay for it. We need electronic reporting technology that would make it simple and fast,” McCarron said.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association lobster analyst Peter Burns said the more thorough reporting requirements are necessary to give scientists a fuller picture of how the fishery is performing.

“We have a big black hole of reporting somewhere in the Gulf of Maine and into Georges Bank,” Burns told the commission, according to the Portland Press Herald.

As a compromise, ASMFC is phasing in the more stringent reporting requirements over five years, which it said would give Maine time to implement an electronic reporting requirement that may reduce the burden placed on fishermen to comply with the rules.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

 

Study: Maine’s lobster population will drop but fishery ‘not doomed’

January 26, 2018 — The lobster population in the Gulf of Maine could decline by nearly two-thirds by 2050, according to a scientific study released this week.

As bad as that sounds, scientists and industry representatives say the demise of the most valuable single-species fishery in the country is unlikely.

“It doesn’t mean Maine’s lobster fishery is doomed,” said Andrew Pershing, chief scientific officer at Gulf of Maine Research Institute and a co-author of the study.

The predicted decline was included in the results of a study conducted by GMRI and other research groups about the effect of conservation measures on lobster fisheries in the Gulf of Maine and off the southern New England coast.

The lobster population could decline between 40 percent and 62 percent over the next 32 years, depending on how much waters continue to warm in the Gulf of Maine, researchers found. The total stock of lobster for the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank is in the neighborhood of 300 million lobsters, according to the most recent stock assessment by Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

The study found that lobster conservation measures in Maine aimed at protecting reproductive females and oversize adult lobsters in general, which date back to the early 20th century, have helped amplify the temporary benefit of warming seas to the lobster population in the gulf, which is warming more quickly than 99.9 percent of the world’s oceans.

In comparison, the lack of similar measures in southern New England hurt the lobster population south of Cape Cod now that waters there have become too warm to help support the growth of juvenile lobsters.

“Maintaining measures to preserve large reproductive females can mitigate negative impacts of warming on the Gulf of Maine lobster fishery in future decades,” researchers wrote in the study, which was published Jan. 22 in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

If the gulf’s lobster population does drop by 40 or even 60 percent over the next 32 years, the decline will be more gradual than the boom that preceded it. At that decrease, the gulf’s average lobster populations would be “similar to those in the early 2000s,” GMRI officials said.

From 1997 through 2008, Maine’s annual harvests fluctuated between 47 million and 75 million pounds. It is only within the past 10 years, since Maine lobstermen harvested 64 million pounds in 2007, that statewide landings have doubled.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

 

Research Concludes Maine Conservation Technique Helped Drive Lobster Population Boom

January 24, 2018 — Lobster conservation techniques pioneered by Maine fishermen helped drive a population boom that’s led to record landings this century. That’s the conclusion of new, peer-reviewed research published today.

The paper also finds that lobstermen in southern New England could have used the same techniques to prevent or at least slow the collapse of their fisheries — even in the face of climate change — but they didn’t.

Cape Elizabeth lobsterman Curt Brown has been hauling traps since he was a kid. He says he quickly learned that when he pulled up a female lobster, covered in eggs, he was looking at the fishery’s future.

Maine lobstermen throw back lobsters like these, which produce eggs at a high rate, but other lobstermen do not

“You get used to seeing lobsters and then you see a lobster with eggs and it’s whole new animal,” he says. The underside of the tail is just covered with eggs.”

Since 1917, Maine lobstermen like Brown have used a technique known as “V-notching”: when they found an egg-bearing female in their traps, they would clip a “V” into the end of its tail, and throw it back. The next time it turns up in someone’s trap, even if it’s not showing eggs, the harvester knows it’s a fertile female, and throws it back. Later, the lobstermen also pushed the Legislature to impose limits on the size of the lobster they can keep — because the biggest ones produce the most eggs.

“I use my measure right here, right on the measure, at the end of the measure, is a little tool in the shape of a ‘V,'” Brown says. “So you just grab the lobster underside of the tail just like that and it cuts a V-notch right in the tail. Quick, painless, throw her back in and let her do more of her job.”

And those fertile females have been doing that job very well in Maine. Since the 1980s, lobster abundance here has grown by more than 500 percent, with landings shooting up from fewer than 20 million pounds in 1985, to more than 120 million pounds in 2015 with a value of more than a half billion dollars.

Read the full story at WNPR

 

First half of Maine’s lobstering season ‘painfully slow’ for fishermen

Dock prices are also down amid reports of light catches, leaving the industry worried but hoping for a rebound in the next few months.

October 4, 2017 — A cold spring, high bait prices and a stormy summer are adding up to a slow lobstering season in Maine.

Every fisherman and every lobstering port along Maine’s 3,500-mile coastline is different. But as of Oct. 1, the midpoint in the industry’s peak season, most Maine lobstermen and the dealers who buy from them agree the catch is down. They disagree on whether the industry will be able to land enough lobster to recover and keep up with the last few years of record harvests.

Brooklin lobsterman David Tarr, who serves on the state Lobster Advisory Council, predicts his catch will be down about 20 percent this season unless he can pull off a “great finish.” The light catch, coupled with a boat price that was 10 percent off for most of the summer, adds up to a substantial loss, he said. But the 48-year-old fisherman isn’t exactly surprised.

“We have been over the average for many years, so I’m not really shocked by it,” Tarr said. “It makes it harder, for sure.”

SLOWDOWN AFTER SERIES OF RECORD YEARS

Maine has enjoyed a run of record-setting lobster harvests over the past few years. According to data from 2016, the most recent figures available, Maine fishermen landed more than 130 million pounds of lobster valued at $533.1 million, breaking records for annual catch and industry value. Lobster is the most valuable, and through last year at least, the fastest-growing of all the state’s commercial fisheries.

Lobstermen will remain busy through November, depending on which region they fish, so it’s too early to tell whether the perceived decline will be reflected in the official 2017 harvest numbers that the state releases in February.

Even so, the Maine Lobstermen’s Association called it a “painfully slow start” and said the slow pace of landings and the prices that were well below last year’s had left lobstermen feeling angry, disappointed and worried.

“Fortunately, we still have a lot of good fishing months left this year,” association director Patrice McCarron wrote in her September report.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Trump’s proposed cuts to NOAA alarm Maine’s marine community

March 7, 2017 — A Trump administration proposal to slash funding for the federal government’s principal marine agency and eliminate the national Sea Grant program is prompting alarm in Maine’s marine sector because it depends on services provided by both.

President Trump wants to slash the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – the agency responsible for fisheries management, weather forecasting, nautical surveys and assisting marine industries – by 17 percent, The Washington Post reported Friday. And he wants to eliminate NOAA’s Sea Grant program, the marine equivalent of the federal agricultural extension and research service, in the fiscal 2018 budget, which begins Oct. 1.

“There was a lot of concern when the news broke, and a flurry of messages went out to our congressional delegation from fishermen and aquaculturists who understand how they benefit from Sea Grant,” said Paul Anderson, director of Maine Sea Grant at the University of Maine in Orono, one of 33 Sea Grant universities in the country. “I don’t now if on October 1st we will all of a sudden not exist.”

The news has sent reverberations across Maine’s marine community, which has long benefited from the partnership between UMaine and the federal government. Sea Grant researchers created the Fishermen’s Forum – the industry’s premier event – in 1976, and also helped found the Portland Fish Exchange and the university’s Lobster Institute, which researches issues of concern to the industry.

Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, said the cuts to NOAA would be terrible for fishermen. “The industry relies pretty heavily on their forecast reports on the wind and the wave heights and make decisions day to day if they are going to go out, so those satellites are really important,” she said. “And nobody loves (the National Marine Fisheries Service), but keeping them fully funded and their research going is essential to manage our fisheries.”

She noted that recent cuts to the agency’s right-whale monitoring program had hurt fishermen because if scientists didn’t have time to find the whales, they had to assume they weren’t there, increasing the regulatory burden on lobstermen, whose gear the whales sometimes get entangled in.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

What’s on a real roll? Demand for the Maine lobster

November 25, 2016 — ELLSWORTH, Maine — The demand for lobster is on a roll — often literally. And that is helping to keep the price that Maine lobstermen are getting for their catch near historic highs.

The annual per-pound price first rose above $4 in 2004 and stayed there through 2007, then fell sharply during the recession. In 2015, annual price paid to Maine lobstermen reached $4.09 a pound, the first time it had topped the $4 mark since 2007.

This year, dockside prices for lobster have been close to or above the $4 level throughout the summer and fall, when most lobster is caught and prices usually dip to reflect the ample supply.

The demand for lobster has been buoyed, in part, by the number of casual restaurants that now include it on their menus and by the growing popularity of lobster rolls sold from roadside food trucks, according lobster industry officials.

“No question, more people are offering lobster up and down the [restaurant] hierarchy,” Matt Jacobson, head of the Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative, said. “More awareness and more vendors is great, and drives demand.”

Among the eateries boosting demand for lobster rolls are the Luke’s Lobster chain of restaurants, franchised food trucks, such as Cousins Maine Lobster, and even McDonald’s, which has served lobster rolls at its New England locations the past two summers.

Jim Dow of Bar Harbor, vice president of Maine Lobstermen’s Association, said that, despite the mild weather last winter and warmer-than-usual water in the Gulf of Maine this past spring, there was not a repeat of the glut of new-shell lobster that in 2012 sent prices plummeting to their lowest point in decades.

“We did not get a big burst when the shedders first started” in early summer, Dow said. “They came in, but it was short-lived.”

Dow, who fishes out of Bass Harbor on Mount Desert Island, said that while fisherman in that area have been getting around $4 to $4.50 per pound this fall, the price of bait has been much higher than last year. This year he is paying $45 to $50 per bushel of herring, compared with $25 a year ago.

“Our bait price doubled,” Dow said, adding that fuel prices have stayed relatively low.

Patrice McCarron, executive director of Maine Lobstermen’s Association, said recently that the increase in bait costs could mean that many lobsterman earn less money this year even if their gross revenues rise.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News