If Lobster Landings Fall, Will Industry Be Ready?
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Lobster fishermen raised questions about latent licenses, V-notching and mandatory landings reports as a way to get a better grasp on latent effort. Maintaining the status quo of 75-80 percent notching will likely maintain a very high population. Laurie Schreiber photo
In 2012, fishermen hauled 127,225,275 pounds.
From 2012 to 2013, the per-pound value increased by 20 cents, from $2.69 to $2.89.
“While an increase in price per pound is a good sign, it is still the second lowest since 1995,” said DMR commissioner Patrick Keliher.
The preliminary report indicates that the total landed value for Maine lobster in 2013 was $364 million, a $22 million increase over 2012 and $30 million over 2011. There were 4,239 active commercial lobster harvesters. At the recent Maine Fishermen’s Forum, DMR lobster guru Carl Wilson said it’s hard to tell if these unprecedented levels of harvest represent a new normal, or if there is a lower average level that the industry should expect at some unknown point in the future. In 2003, landings were about 70 million pounds. Average landings in 1994 were about 35 million pounds.
“The lobster fishery is in a place we never would have thought we’d be in,” Wilson said. In 2000, for example, Zone A landed 4.5 million pounds. In 2013, the zone landed over 28 million pounds.
“As a state, we are again over 120 million pounds in 2013. These are beyond the wildest dreams of anybody who’s fished,” Wilson said. “To say we’re in extraordinary times is an understatement. This is uncharted territory, as far as a fishery that’s been prosecuted as hard as it has for as long as it has, to now go through this exponential growth.”
But the fishery is seeing ominous signs in recent patterns of larval settlement, Wilson said. A 2013 survey that shows declining levels of larval settlement might indicate the resource is heading toward a decline.
Still, he added, “Right now, our assessment process is not going to pull that fire alarm until we’re a long way away from where we are now, in terms of population….If we were to go back down to 35 millions pounds after having a fishery that’s geared up to catch 125 million pounds repeatedly…it would put some serious hardship on the coast of Maine.”
The settlement survey is a first look at young lobsters. It is the only time in a lobster’s life history that scientists can determine a known age for lobsters; once they reach the bottom and start growing, other factors, such as water temperature, meld different years together.
Settlement surveys started in the early 2000s; the rate of settlement for a given year can be projected forwarded to indicate what landings will be in the future. Projecting forward from the latest settlement survey, the lobster population could return to levels of a decade ago, said Wilson – “still really good, but not 120 million pounds.”
Wilson and other industry leaders noted that the abundance of lobsters seems to be leading to a decline in V-notching. For decades, lobster fishermen have cut small notches in the tails of egg-bearing female lobsters, and tossed them back into the sea, in order to identify them and protect reproduction. Given the latest larval settlement results, Wilson and others said this is not the time for fishermen to stop the practice.
“Things are changing with the resource,” Wilson said. “The one buffer that, in theory, we have along the coast of Maine is that, by V-notching, we are going to allow the population to make it through several years of bad recruitment, that we’re not going to be dependent on any one year of egg production….At a time that we have uncertainty with settlement, this pattern of declining participation in V-notching is not what we want to see. We want to see people continue to participate….It’s one of the key reasons why the fishery is able to continue the way it is.”
Wilson called V-notching a unique and tangible management measure: “Fishermen can V-notch, and when they haul their traps the next day, they might see that lobster or another lobster that someone else has V-notched. That is unique, as far as a management measure. I believe one reason V-notching has held on very strongly in Maine is because it’s something fishermen can participate in. As they go along, they see lobsters that have eggs and an old V-notch, so it’s proof of concept.”The number of eggs on a 90-millimeter lobster is about 10,000. The number of eggs by the time it molts is about 50,000.
The DMR’s next lobster assessment will be conducted this fall. Part of the discussion is around declining rates of V-notching and what that might mean for the resource in the future. Maintaining the status quo of 75-80 percent notching will likely maintain a very high population, Wilson said. If the notching rate goes down by half, the population could crash from today’s level within 30 years. If there’s no notching at all, it crashes more.
“Right now, the model agrees with what people were asserting 15 or 20 years ago, which is that V-notching is important,” he said. “There’s a lot of debate around V-notching – the definition, the enforcement, the scientific merits. But as I see it, over the last 15 years, it brings us back to the belief that we’re going to sacrifice a little today for a longer-term payoff that we might not be able to exactly measure. As long as the Maine fishery continues to have that choice, and they’re still choosing to throw back a whole bunch of lobsters – it could be up to 30 percent of the legal-size catch being thrown back every day – we’ve got an inherent buffer in that system, that will help us weather some bad times. We may be having some lean years coming, based on settlement.”
Wilson continued, “The thing that makes me think we’re notching less is because the numbers show it. The fishery has changed quite a bit. It’s become much more of a volume business, especially in eastern Maine. Guys are dealing with so many lobsters that they can’t give the individual full accounting that they once did. I also think some people are performing their own stock assessments: ‘There are so many god-damn lobsters, I’m not going to V-notch.’ I can’t say that’s a bad thing, but I can’t say it’s a good thing.”
All such management and science discussions will be part of fishery management planning sessions, to begin this summer, said DMR commissioner Patrick Keliher. The DMR will convene a team, including members of the lobster industry, to develop a lobster management plan.
“Because of the size of our state and the size of our fishery, we have an opportunity to find our own destiny,” Keliher said.
The team will consider what a long-term fishery might look like, given changes in environmental conditions and a potential decline of the resource, Keliher said.
“I don’t know how, with the current model of 125 million pounds, you would be able to shift and survive over time,” Keliher said. “Those are things we need to consider. It doesn’t mean we have to make changes in the regulations today or tomorrow, but we need to be prepared.”
Keliher said the plan should aim to maintain the diversity of the lobster fleet. “I personally don’t believe that should be lost. And that is a major consideration for understanding how that fishery management plan should be looked at. Last year, when we talked about doing something short-term to deal with the glut, we heard that this industry is not able to withstand a one-size-fits-all approach.”
A big part of the conversation is latent effort, he said. Latent effort comprises trap tags purchased but not fished, tags that can be purchased but are not, or licenses purchased but have little or no landings.
Late in 2012, the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI) produced “An Independent Evaluation of the Maine Limited Entry System for Lobster and Crab.” The report said that, in 2011, 1,107 license holders – 22 percent of fishermen who held lobster licenses – had zero landings; 308 – 7 percent – landed less than 1,000 pounds; and 989 – 19 percent – landed less than 10,000 pounds.
GMRI estimated that 391,142 trap tags already issued could be activated right away, and another 845,444 new traps could be issued immediately to eligible fishermen.
“This indicates that a combined total of 1,236,586 additional traps could enter the state’s waters, if all license-holders purchased tags for, and fished, their maximum number of traps. That represents a potential 39 percent increase in existing effort,” the report said.
“I haven’t seen any reactivation yet,” said Keliher. “Could it happen? Yes.”
Waiting to see if a problem materializes, he said, could result in major headaches.
“There’s a risk of doing something versus the risk of doing nothing,” he said. “Doing nothing is a choice that has ramifications for the future….A lot of people have told me, ‘Just leave it alone. Don’t keep talking about it. It’s a waste of time.’ I don’t think it is. My goal is to make sure we have a good understanding of what latency is and how it affects this industry.”
The fishery management plan process is a prime place to discuss the matter with the industry, he said. Latency tends to become active due to personal circumstances, Keliher said. For example, changes in other fisheries can drive people to fish for lobsters.
“When groundfish started to collapse, a lot of people switched from groundfish to lobster,” he said.
The issue of transferability also complicates the latency conversation, he said:
“A lot of people want nothing to do with transferability in this fishery, but a lot of people do. So we said let’s have transferability for people on the waiting list. You can’t allow that to happen unless you get rid of latent effort, or if you make a decision to only allow active tags or licenses to be the ones transferred.” Otherwise, “if you say ‘transferability,’ the first licenses to be transferred are the ones not being used.”
Said Spruce Head lobster fisherman Bob Baines, a member of the DMR’s Lobster Advisory Council, “It’s a complex issue. A number of us have been talking about it for years. I think it’s the first thing that needs to be addressed as we move forward. Our fishery is changing and we need to change with it. And in the future, dealing with latency first and foremost will allow us to the make the changes necessary. This is going to be a tough one. But we can’t keep kicking the can down the road.”
One man asked Keliher if he’d considered mandatory landings reports as a way to get a better grasp on latent effort. We thought about it a lot,” said Keliher. “The one thing we have developed recently for our landings program is a swipe card system. If we show it’s successful this year with the elver fishery, we hope we can transfer it into some smaller fisheries, making sure we test it and it works.”
The DMR also invested in a new business software, called PEGA, to improve data management for the DMR’s licensing and landings programs, he said.
“One of the things I directed the landings program to do, when they were building it, was make it as user-friendly as possible,” Keliher said: The goal is to make it easy for harvesters and dealers to punch in daily information. “It doesn’t go into the detail of the 10 percent reporting we do now, but it starts to get us there.”
The broadening use of smartphones could also, in the future, make it easy for folks to enter their landings data, which would help inform future management discussions.
“So we’re giving thought to how this is user-friendly and isn’t complicated or tying up additional time; 100 percent reporting across-the-board would be incredibly beneficial to deal with a lot of the questions we have regarding latency,” Keliher said.
One man wanted to know how many pounds might be considered an optimal fishery.
“I don’t know,” said Keliher. “From a science perspective, I think it’s going to have to be one of the bigger parts of the conversation as we go through the planning process: What are the trigger thresholds going to be and how does the trigger mechanism work? I certainly don’t think a reduction of 90 million pounds is the threshold we want to use.”
Said Wilson, “If we did have a number – and I don’t have a number – all I know is the average abundance that takes us back to ’93, ’94 levels was created in very different conditions than we have today. So whether we like it or not, we’re in a different world than we were in the 1990s….If someone were able to choose a number that they wanted to maintain or not go below, that implies that we have the ability to engineer our way around that number with the tools in our toolbox right now. We do not have the ability to engineer a change in the trajectory of the stock.” However, Wilson said, the industry does have tools to deal with latent effort.
Changing environmental conditions could be the cause for a proliferation of shell disease in the Gulf of Maine. Last spring, we saw a spike,” said Wilson.
Shell disease is particularly picking up in western Maine, he said. In general, the disease is picking up among larger lobsters that hold on to their shells for longer periods of time, in particular egg-producing females, which hold their shells for three years.
“They seem to become more susceptible to shell disease the longer they hold onto their shells,” Wilson said.
The bacteria that cause shell disease are found on every lobster in the Gulf of Maine; oceanographic conditions appear to be responsible for allowing the bacteria to take hold, Wilson said. The bacterium causing the disease is not fully understood, he said. For the most part, unless they’re really riddled with it, stricken lobsters molt out of their pocked shells just fine.
In Rhode Island, 30-40 percent of lobsters show shell disease; that level of incidence appears to have stabilized, Wilson said.
There are also reports from Grand Manan Channel fishermen who observed “what we’re calling ‘half-moon lesions’” at the tail end of the carapace.
Wilson described the lesion’s appearance: “It’s as though there’s been trauma. It’s soft. It’s not presenting itself like a typical shell disease. Shell disease is like a burn mark.”
Wilson asked fishermen to keep an eye out for the condition, and report back to the DMR if they see it.