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Claws for alarm By Rachel Ellner
Friday, March 19, 2004
If only the December storm that devastated lobster traps were local lobstermen's only problem.
As of 2001, about 1,500 hold licenses to commercially catch lobsters and actually use them. A few hundred more pay the commonwealth $260 a year for the license and don't set traps, they say. There are about 10,0000 more who hold $60 non-commercial licenses. Most catch their lobsters by grabbing them in scuba gear.
The unusual number of washed-ashore lobster traps actually was an indication that things haven't been picture perfect. Any one spot along the Massachusetts seacoast was what Bill Adler, lobsterman and executive director of the Massachusetts Lobstermen's Association, calls a "microcosm of the type of destruction the storm brought, whether in Rockport, Marblehead, Boston Harbor or the South Shore."
But it was especially tough for North Shore lobstermen. Eighty percent of lobster caught in Massachusetts comes from what commonwealth officials call the Cape Cod Bay north, the North Shore. "It's the group that got hit the hardest," says Adler.
It couldn't have been a worse time. Although prime lobster season is generally from August through November, this year - going by the accounts of lobstermen, government scientists and state environmental patrolmen - lobstermen were fishing longer. "It had been a bad year for lobster most of the season and all of a sudden at the end of November and December it started getting real good," says lobsterman Bill Withum Jr. of Marblehead.
The reliance of late-season fishing indicates how exhaustive the efforts to catch lobster can be: December through February normally account for only slightly more than 10 percent of the overall lobster catch in all of Massachusetts, according to state reports. To compound the problem, many lobstermen were fishing only 60 to 80 feet out from shore, closer than usual. Their gear was thus particularly exposed to rough wave action.
Commonwealth statistics on lobster catch bounce up and down, but the trend has been downward over the past six or seven years. There is some thought that due to diminished lobster stocks in Massachusetts, lobstermen have found it necessary to fish past the prime lobster season and fish more traps.
"The reason they have to fish longer into the season is that there are fewer lobsters available," says Robert Glenn, senior marine fisheries biologist for the state of Massachusetts. "Lobster are highly migratory. The lobstermen fish where the lobster are and they are very good at finding them."
Lobster shed their hard shells, or "molt" annually to grow. One indication that a greater scramble for lobster is occurring is that 90 percent of lobster caught in the Gulf of Maine (from Cape Cod to the Canadian boarder) are caught within one molt of the minimum 3.25-inch legal tail size.
What is troubling for scientists about the grab for young lobsters is that the practice contributes to a long-term decline of stocks. "A wide distribution of sizes of lobsters are important," says Glenn, "so that the population is distributed across many age classes." It's assurance that if one year's class "poops out" he says, the others provide a buffer.
One step that the commonwealth has taken to decrease the catch is to discourage the issuing of new licenses. Nonetheless, the latest data from the state's Commercial Lobster Catch Report for 2001 shows a 9.75 percent increase of lobster caught from the previous year.
It's an odd occurrence since commercial lobstermen were using on average only 325 of an allowed 800 traps a year in 2001, the last year from which official statistics are available. Many in the business put the total number of traps higher today, however.
Blaming divers for the decline in lobster stocks is ridiculous. You don't see commercial fisherman blaming sport fisherman for reducing their catch, but it's a very common for the lobsterman to do that. One lobster boat working out of Rockport for the Summer probably catches more lobster that all the recreational divers on Cape Ann combined.
They look for everything and anything to blame. I once spoke with a commercial lobsterman that was furious because he learned that we were v-knotching females, because that means he can't take them for another couple of years.
The only thing he v-knotches is the bugs that are 5" or bigger, so that the "f**kers on the backside of the cape can't get the bugs that I had to throw back".
So he v-knotches oversized bugs [regardless of sex], but he doesn't v-knotch eggers.
The lobstermen are they're own worst enemies. I wish I had saved it, but I recently read a story where the Coast Guard(or some other maritime LE agency) stopped an inbound lobster boat in local waters. After a search of the rusty tub, they located numerous violations including shorts and females that had the egggs scraped off them. Seized the entire boat and catch and rightly so. How many present and future lobsters did these unscrupulous lobstermen kill? Far more than any group of divers could.
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