Robust agricultural harvests of delicious fruits and vegetables dazzle every summer menu, but, in New England, seafood wears the crown and the premier gem is the lobster. Like everything on planet earth however, rising temperatures threaten the abundance of these resources, just as lobstering season is a couple of weeks away from switching into full gear.
An ever-warming planet is playing havoc with the intricately interconnected web of marine life. The Copernicus Climate Change Service whose climate research is supported by the European Union reports this month that “ocean temperatures have now been at unprecedented warm levels for over 12 months” and that for the month of March, the average temperature for the surface of oceans globally had hit a historic high of 21.07 degrees Centigrade, or 69.92 degrees Fahrenheit.
Just as climate has long stressed human populations and driven migration, marine populations are stressed and in search of survivable climates too. In New England, scientists and lobstermen alike are studying and living the impacts. The wide focus is on the Gulf of Maine, an area that extends from Cape Cod in Massachusetts to Nova Scotia in Maine. David Reidmiller, Director of the Climate Center at the Gulf of Maine Research Center in Portland, Maine, has found that the rates of ocean warming in the Gulf of Maine are three times the global average, “faster than 95% of the world’s oceans.” In 2021, for the first time, the Gulf of Maine experienced a marine heat wave for the entire calendar year.
The Maine Department of Marine Resources reports that in 2023, Maine’s lobster catch weighed in at 93.7 million pounds, the lowest registered since 2009 and more than 5% less than in 2022. Compare that 2023 figure to the most recent peak in Maine’s lobster catch of 132.6 in million pounds, in 2016, and you can see how it matters a lot in the state of Maine.
Robert Steneck is a Professor of Marine Ecology and Biology at the University of Maine’s School of Marine Sciences. He says a day of reckoning for the state’s lobster catch is worth worrying about. “75% to 80% of the total fishing value extracted from Maine waters is lobsters. It’s easy to fall into a ‘gilded trap’ like this,” says Steneck. “Fisheries managers and society feel very comfortable with a high value fishery without properly weighing the risks involved when you’re dealing with a lucrative monoculture. So if anything happens to this one species, we really don’t have a plan B of any value!” Oysters, scallops and clams are after lobsters in economic value to the state, but quite far behind lobsters.
Compounding the anxieties of a warming ocean, rising tides, and intense storms, which just this winter ravaged docks along the coast: the environmental imperative of looking out for another species also on the move: the endangered right whale. Joshua Reed, a Ph.D. biologist and right whale specialist writes that before the advent of large scale whaling in the 18th and 19th centuries, there may have been as many as 10,000 North Atlantic right whales. Fewer than 360 are known to exist today. And, for Reed, fishing line entanglement, the trauma of injuries, infections from fishing line-inflicted skin gashes, and the injurious drag of fishing equipment pulled along by these massive marine mammals, are tied directly to this significant loss.
Steneck, though, has been looking at what the right whales eat and what the lobsters eat and how warming waters are affecting that food source. That, he believes, is a broader and more significant influence. He has zeroed in on zooplankton and a group of small crustaceans, or copepods called calanus finmarchicus, rich in lipids and a robust source of nutrition for right whales, especially helpful in strengthening females for breeding. Warming water temperatures have made these copepods less plentiful in the Gulf of Maine, says Steneck. And accentuating the impacts of global warming, he says, is the change in two significant air streams.
The Labrador Current and the Gulf Stream collide right off the coastline of Maine. “The Gulf stream,” says Steneck, “is warm and salty and, critically, nutrient poor and has been increasing in the Gulf of Maine. It’s certainly been warming the Gulf of Maine but it’s also been starving the Gulf of Maine of critical nutrients that feed this once-burgeoning eco-system. And just as the Gulf Stream’s influence is increasing, the Labrador Current’s influence is weakening. And what we’re seeing is the Labrador Current is being deflected to the east, toward Europe, rather than coming down and wrapping around to the Gulf of Maine.”
But the pressure has been on for lobstermen to switch up their gear, change their lines to materials that migrating whales can easily break through without snare or entanglement. And that’s what the lobstermen surrounding the Gulf of Maine are facing as they move toward what they hope will be a financially survivable season.
Tim Alley has been lobstering in Maine’s coastal waters for 40 years. “There’s been a trend in recent years related to temperatures,” he says. “Those lobsters typically would migrate into shore and then migrate back out in the Fall and there doesn’t seem to be the migration in that there once was. It’s because they can find types of bottom and temperatures of bottom at depth that are hospitable to them to breed and grow.”
Alley is steeped in the traditions of his home state’s biggest industry and recently dusted off a short film from 1972 in which he starred at age 12, “Alone in My Lobster Boat,” filmed in South Bristol and New Harbor, Maine. Like most lobstermen, he would call himself an environmentalist: they live on the water, they live from the water, they thrive on the water. But they reject the notion that a species – the right whale – is failing because of them. Over 40 years, he says, he has seen exactly one right whale. New England lobstermen insist not enough is said about ship strikes and lines from other types of fishing.
The changes in regulations, Alley says, are expensive and time consuming. “We used to use floating line between traps so the lines would not get caught on the bottom, as you fish two, three, four or more traps together. Every gear has to be marked with a zone specific color, so if a rope does get entangled, they can determine where it came from.”
“Asking fishermen to be a solution to a problem that they are not part of is the hardest pill to swallow,” says Alley. “If there was proof that we were causing harm to these whales, I guarantee you that most fishermen would be on board with doing anything that we could, because all of us love to see them! It’s a cool thing! That’s part of the reason we love fishing, to see this stuff.”
Steneck understands the frustrations. In his view, “if you got rid of every single lobster trap in the Gulf of Maine is wouldn’t fundamentally change the demography of right whales. Because so much of it is driven by nutrition and right whales could be 60 years old so some time in the last 60 years they rubbed up against lobster gear. But the number of observations of entangled right whales is relatively few.”
Like other lobstermen Alley tries to stay positive about lobster supply. But looking out the window of Steneck’s waterfront home in South Bristol, Maine, Alley says “There’s no question about it. I’m looking out here at the Damariscotta River right now. 17 years ago, I had a lot of gear up there. I haven’t fished a trap in there since because the migration of the lobster has shifted, and I’ve shifted with it.”
