Fighting Shrinkage

by Sandra Dinsmore

Twenty years ago, according to Hancock poundkeeper Herb Hodgkins, a past president of the Maine Lobster Pound Association, Maine had at least 60 tidal lobster pounds owned by 50 poundkeepers. Ask any poundkeeper why the association folded three years ago and invariably you'll hear, “shrinkage,” an industry euphemism for dead lobster.

One of those 50 poundkeepers lost 50 percent of the lobster he’d fed and cared for while waiting for the owner to take them out for the holidays or when the price rose as it usually does in winter when fresh caught product becomes scarce. “Thirty percent wasn’t too uncommon,” Hodgkins recalled, noting that the problem started, “Probably close to 20 years ago.” He said, “We have been trying to figure this out ever since. We were so discouraged,” he recalled, “so many got right out of the pounding business.”

In the last 20 years canneries, processors, coldwater storage and tube houses have used the over 5 million lbs. of lobster that Hodgkins estimates used to go into Maine and Canadian tidal lobster pounds.

Over those last 20 years, the number of Maine pound owners actively pounding lobster has dropped from 50 to 21, according to Beal’s Island poundkeeper Albert Carver. And despite all efforts to curb shrinkage, Carver reported in April that those who pounded this past season (2010-2011) still had a dispiritingly high average shrinkage rate of 15 to 20 percent.

The Lobster Institute at the University of Maine and scientists at the University of Maine Animal Health Laboratory [UMAHL] have been working on the causes of the shrinkage problem—what is killing impounded lobster—since 2006. In 2008 laboratory manager Deborah Bouchard and graduate student and former veterinarian David Basti began studying lobster stressors at the lab. He (with others) published three papers on the results of their study (see Fishermen’s Voice August 2008) and for the last three years Hodgkins, Robert Bayer, Ph.D., and a Maine poundkeeper have had some success in reducing shrinkage and building on Basti’s results. As Bayer said, “Bouchard and Basti described the problem and Hodgkins has attempted to solve it.”

The bacterium Basti has identified as the culprit, Photobacterium indicum, is sensitive to the same antibiotic, Terramycin, that poundkeepers have been using for years to eliminate red tail disease. (Terramycin is Pfizer’s brand name for Oxytetraclycline.) It should be noted, though, that in Basti and Bouchard’s paper on lobster stressors, they wrote: “The ecological role of P. indicum is not fully defined at this time. However, it may be an emerging opportunistic pathogen of stressed lobsters. Judicious preemptive antibiotic therapy may be necessary to reduce mortality in susceptible lobsters destined for high-density holding facilities.”

The trick is in the timing of administering the antibiotic. Hodgkins explained, “The lobsters that do die seem to die within 5 to 10 days,” whereas, “with red tail disease, when the lobster gets the bacteria in it, it takes about 20 days for it to die, so medicating like we do for red tail; it’s just too darn late.” Bayer, Hodgkins, and the poundkeeper, are working on ways to get the feed into the lobster immediately and then a second time.

A year ago Bayer tested tagged lobsters with bands that he and Hodgkins expected would have high mortality. Half were treated with an oral does of medication and half were not treated. “Floating bands found on shore indicated that over 20 percent of the untreated lobsters had died,” Bayer said, adding that they found no bands from the treated lobsters.

Last September, the poundkeeper and Hodgkins tried a fenced-in system at the pound. They set a 50- x 50-foot net pen seven or eight feet deep in the Poundkeeper’s tidal pound, put the lobsters being tested in the pen, and fed them the medicated feed immediately. The poundkeeper said, “We monitored the feed to see whether they were eating or not by putting a feed tray down on the bottom and then taking it up after six hours to see if there was any food left.” He said after six hours Hodgkins took some lobsters out of the pen and tested them to see if they had eaten. “Most of them had ingested that feed within the six-hour period.” After they’d been tested, he said, “We’d release the lobsters into the pound and do it all over again with the next batch we put in.”

Hodgkins did two more tests with similar results. He said Trenton poundkeeper Warren Pettigrow brought some lobsters for testing that had been hauled as directed by Bayer. Hodgkins said, “We did some of his twice: once with positive results the other, only one lobster died.” Because no one from the team had been on the boat, Hodgkins could not say with certainty that the lobsters were hauled from the same depth or speed. He said Bayer had told the fisherman what he wanted, but they couldn’t be sure. Hodgkins did say, though that two of the tests they did with test crates (regular lobster crates with solid bottoms to hold the medicated feed) had results very similar to Bouchard and Basti’s. Following this one-two punch of the antibiotic, the poundkeeper said he was able to lower his shrinkage rate to 8.7 percent.

“It’s the immediate feeding of it that we’re working with,” said Hodgkins. Poundkeepers have not solved how to feed antibiotics immediately and then again to the thousands of lbs. of lobster going into pounds daily. “When this medicated feed is used,” Bayer advised, “the lobster must be held—it cannot be sold—for 30 days to eliminate all medication left in the lobster.”

Keeping those lobsters alive and healthy haunts poundkeepers. With the shrinkage situation still iffy and with much research still ahead, that not all poundkeepers plan to pound next season comes as no surprise. Milbridge poundkeeper Chad Dorr cited, “High shrinkage rates, lack of price and market when taking out, the capital it takes to store the lobster vs the risk/reward,” Instead of pounding, Dorr figures that if he can build his customer base, he will need more product, which will ultimately lead him to use his own pounds to store his own inventory for the markets he has created. Dorr stated, “I feel that in order to make a lobster pound work nowadays, you have to be reliant on your own market, not [on] what the lobster markets are doing around you, or selling to other dealers so they can sell to their markets.”

On the other hand, a downeast fisherman who took Bouchard and Basti's scientists on his boat and helped with some experiments agrees that hauling traps fast, “Is a factor in the stress level.” He stated, “But I’m not convinced that that’s where the biggest mortality rate or the high numbers of shrinkage is coming from. I think a lot of it is just from the handling of them. At the end of the day,” he said, “that’s a major factor in why we’re having so much shrinkage.”

The fisherman said his father taught him: “You don’t throw them. You don’t drop them. They're like eggs.” He thinks if dealers paid more for good product handled well and kept in tanks of re-circulating water, it might begin to make a difference.

But until science finds a way to lower the shrinkage rate and people learn to handle lobster properly, the situation is not going to change. People will probably not treat, haul, and handle lobsters like eggs unless money enters the picture. If buyers pay fishermen something extra for handling lobster with care they may begin to see that long looked-for change in shrinkage rates and shippability of impounded as well as live product.