Saving Seafood

A New Device Tracks Lobsters as They Move Through the Supply Chain

January 11, 2021 — Lobsters are big business in Maine. In 2019 alone, the state netted almost US $500-million from this popular crustacean. Profits would likely be even higher, though, if the seafood industry could reduce “shrink”—the number of lobsters that die on their way through the supply chain. Every one percent in shrink means almost $5-million in unrealized income, says Eric Thunberg, an economist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. “Those aren’t small losses.”

“There’s a lot of interest in reducing shrink,” says Rick Wahle, a zoologist at the University of Maine. “Unfortunately,” he says, “there’s very little hard data to work with.”

“In most cases, it’s not going to be rocket science to mitigate these problems,” says Wahle. “It may just be shorter handling times, reducing time between the dock and the holding tank, dropping more aerators in the water, or lowering storage density.” The question is where along the supply chain those changes should be applied.

A new project, led by Wahle and supported by NOAA, is now tackling that question with two purpose-designed technologies to record the health and environment conditions of lobsters as they move from trap to distributor. One sensor package, called MockLobster, measures temperature and acceleration of a crate of lobsters as it’s moved around. The team wants to add other sensors for dissolved oxygen and acidity, but these features are still being prototyped.

Read the full story at Smithsonian Magazine

Baby lobster numbers spell trouble for shellfish population

July 1, 2019 — Baby lobsters are continuing to appear in high numbers off some parts of Canada while tailing off in New England, raising questions about what the valuable shellfish’s population will look like in several years.

University of Maine scientist Rick Wahle has documented trends in baby lobster density for years, and released new data for 2018 this month. The new data reinforce recent trends about lobsters that show upticks off sites in Atlantic Canada, such as some areas in Nova Scotia, Wahle said. Meanwhile, the Gulf of Maine reported below average numbers from Bar Harbor to Cape Cod, he said.

Young lobsters settle into the ocean bottom, where they take shelter as they grow. Wahle tracks where lobsters are settling in 23 areas from Rhode Island to Prince Edward Island, Canada. This year’s data showed high totals in Canadian locations such as St. Mary’s Bay, Nova Scotia, and the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence, but low numbers in Maine fishing areas such as the Midcoast region and Casco Bay.

American fishermen compete with Canada for the same species of lobster, which anchors one of the most lucrative fisheries in either country. Some scientists have said the shellfish appear to be moving north as waters warm.

“It’s as if this wave that has crested in Maine is now increasing in Atlantic Canada,” Wahle said.

New England’s commercial harvest of lobster has been strong in recent years, but it’s dependent on young lobsters growing to maturity. Some New England sites, such as those off Rhode Island, show few baby lobsters at all.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Washington Post

MAINE: Two seafood companies team up to fund UMaine lobster research

June 4, 2019 — A $75,000 gift from two seafood companies will fund a fourth field season for a University of Maine deep-water lobster settlement monitoring program.

The deep-water research is an extension of the American Lobster Settlement Index, which was initiated in 1989 by Rick Wahle, a research professor in the School of Marine Sciences who was named director of the Lobster Institute last fall. The index includes collaborators and monitoring sites from Rhode Island to Newfoundland.

The original surveys were conducted by divers, which confined data collection to shallower waters. In 2016, Wahle expanded monitoring to include greater depths with a novel collector deployed from fishing vessels. The addition of this data helps scientists evaluate how temperature affects the nursery potential of seabed for larval lobsters, and subsequent bottom movements by older juveniles.

Maine Sea Grant sponsored the first two years of deep-water monitoring in collaboration with Ready Seafood Co. of Portland and the Maine Department of Marine Resources. When the Maine Sea Grant project ended, Ready Seafood stepped in with a $75,000 gift to support a third research field season in 2018.

Read the full story at MaineBiz

Sen. King tells researchers that data is the key to protecting lobster industry

June 6, 2017 — Calling proposed cuts in federal science funding “unacceptable,” U.S. Sen. Angus King told lobster researchers Monday that data is the key to protecting Maine’s most valuable fishery.

Maine’s independent senator asked the 250 biologists, oceanographers and fishery managers at a global conference on lobster biology in Portland this week to give him data on the impact of the changing sea environment on lobster, including temperature, salinity and acidification, and whether that is prompting a migration of Maine’s $533.1 million a year fishery to Canada.

“If lobsters are moving toward Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, that’s a serious practical issue that will get the attention of politicians,” he said. “It’s when you start seeing jobs go away that politicians start saying ‘Gee, we’d better do something about this.’ Are they moving, if they are why, and if they are, what’s the timing? Is it five years? Twenty years? A hundred years?”

But federal funding for scientific research is under fire. President Trump’s budget calls for a 17 percent cut to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the national fisheries programs and funded almost a fifth of Maine Department of Marine Resources’ annual budget. It would eliminate the Sea Grant program, which funds research by the University of Maine’s Rick Wahle, conference co-chairman, among others.

“The lobster industry in New England is valued at close to $500 million and yet we know very little about how ocean acidification may affect this species,” Libby Jewett, NOAA’s ocean acidification director, said last fall when awarding Wahle’s team a $200,000 grant for lobster research. “These projects should help move the needle forward in our understanding and, as a result, enable broader resilience in the region.”

King said it is unlikely that Trump’s budget, containing what he considers drastic cuts in scientific funding, will pass Congress.

“The last thing we should be doing on a federal level is cutting research funding,” King said. “That is one of the most important functions of the federal government, whether it is climate change or cancer. It’s how we solve problems. To cut research, and particularly to cut research when you get the feeling that the motivation is that we don’t want to know, is unacceptable. … Congress understands this.”

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

3 theories on why lobster babies are disappearing and what they mean for the industry

October 13, 2015 — Where are all the baby lobsters? And if Maine’s baby lobsters are disappearing, does that mean there won’t be any adults in a couple years?

The publication Quartz earlier this month released a long-form research piece on Maine’s lobster boom, which reached another record haul last year with 124 million pounds, a pile of crustaceans worth $456 million and one six times bigger than the state’s lobstermen caught in 1984.

This explosion of lobster over the last couple decades has been well-documented and thoroughly covered.

The adult lobster population off the coast of Maine has skyrocketed as the state’s lobstermen have employed a range of practices to sustain the fishery (see the video above). Lobstermen throw back female lobsters bearing eggs and larger males — the ideal fathers — as part of a multifaceted plan to encourage future generations of lobsters.

By all accounts, this is not a case of lobstermen irresponsibly taking advantage of a freak boom and setting their industry up for future failure.

Read the full story and watch the video from the Bangor Daily News