US lobstermen embrace catch limits

New rules, which go into effect for much of the East Coast next June, will allow the biggest lobsters to keep spawning.

By Bina Venkataraman | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the July 25, 2007 edition

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Fishermen from Massachusetts to North Carolina are trying to keep lobster from becoming another fish story – the kind that ends up with stocks collapsing.

Borrowing a page from the thriving lobster industry in Maine, they've pushed through new rules that limit the size of the lobsters they catch. The idea is to protect the breeding stock for new generations of the shellfish. It is also a test of whether such industry efforts can protect lobster fisheries from outside threats ranging from hurricanes to illness to global warming.

Problems with lobster stocks in southern New England are a "warning sign" for lobster everywhere, says Michael Tlusty, director of research at the New England Aquarium in Boston. "It took five years for shell disease to march up the coast of Massachusetts, and now Maine has this disease right on their doorstep."

The Gulf of Maine provides 85 percent of the nation's lobster, but until a decade ago, fishermen farther south were bringing in a rising number of the shellfish. Lobster landings in southern New England almost quadrupled between 1982 and 1997. Then in the late 1990s, shell disease, hurricanes, and pesticide runoff devastated the stocks – and the catch plummeted to levels barely above those of the early '80s.

So lobster fisheries off Rhode Island and New York's Long Island Sound began pushing for catch limits that have been used for decades in Maine, says Toni Kerns, fisheries management coordinator for the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission in Washington. In May, the commission approved the new rules, which take effect next June and apply to waters from southern Massachusetts to North Carolina.

The new rules will force lobstermen to throw back big lobsters – those with an abdomen more than 5-1/4 inches long – and keep only the small ones. Those limits apply to waters up to 40 miles from shore. Beyond that, the rules allow slightly bigger specimens to be caught, but the limits get tightened each year through 2010.

The reason: big lobsters are the most prolific at reproducing.

"These big lobsters are worth their weight in gold in terms of egg production," says Richard Wahle, a senior research scientist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in West Boothbay Harbor, Maine. He calls the new regulation an "insurance mechanism."

A five- to six-pound female lobster produces an average of 100,000 eggs per set – up to 20 times that of a one-pound lobster, says Robert Bayer, executive director of the University of Maine's Lobster Institute in Orono.

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