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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 35 Number 12
August 2008
New lobster die-offs raise LI Sound fears
GUILFORD, CT – “Call it what you want,” said Nick Crismale. “We’ve seen new evidence of lobsters dying since last fall, and nobody’s catching anything.”
According to Crismale, president of the Connecticut Commercial Lobstermen’s Association, there have been reports of pockets of dead lobsters in the Thames River down the coast to Darien since last September, raising fears of a repeat of the devastating 1999 die-off that nearly decimated the Long Island Sound lobster fishery.
“Again, there isn’t any one thing that is killing the lobsters,” he said. “During the 1999 die-off, many scientists attributed the sudden deaths of millions of lobsters to warming water temperatures. Others said it was the newly introduced pesticides and larvicides. I believe it was a little of both combined with other factors.”
Many lobstermen and scientists agree.
Crismale has been lobstering on Long Island Sound for well over three decades. He has seen the lobster population at its peak in the early 1990s as well as at its lowest point following the die-off.
During the good years, he didn’t even think about doing anything else for a living. Now, he has decided this is his last year. Like many lobstermen in his area, Crismale said he can’t afford to go on.
According to the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, commercial lobster licenses issued in the state plunged from 440 in 1998 to 252 last year.
Crismale said he doubts that the fleet numbers more than 40 boats now, and most of those are for sale.
V-notch program
On June 19, Gov. Jodi Rell announced that $90,000 from the previous year’s state budget would be carried over to support Connecticut’s v-notching program. The $1 million in funding originally committed to the program was scheduled to lapse on June 30.
The v-notch program is a conservation effort approved by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (see CFN July 2007 and October 2007 for details). Lobster fishermen are paid current market value for every mature female lobster they return to the water with a v-shaped notch cut in the tail flipper.
Participating fishermen are accompanied by students from three Connecticut schools – Bridgeport Regional Vocational Aquaculture School, The Sound School Regional Vocational Aquaculture Center, and the Ella T. Grasso Technical High School in Groton – to witness and verify the notching.
Connecticut lobstermen were pleasantly surprised that the notching program was resurrected since they had been prepared for the worst.
Too late?
Crismale had said in an earlier interview that the v-notch program was the industry’s last hope. However, following the announcement of the carryover money, he worried that the help might be too late.
“Now, I don’t know how effective (the program) will be,” he said. “Nobody’s going out. The cost of fuel is so high and the price and demand for lobsters is so low that we can’t make a profit.”
Crismale pointed out another factor that may be responsible for the dwindling lobster population –– striped bass, which are at record–high levels, and fuel costs that have deterred sport fishermen from going out and catching them, leaving the stripers in the water to feed on baby lobsters.
Energy proposal
There also is a new proposal by a company called Broadwater Energy to contend with. The company wants to build a natural gas storage facility that is eight stories tall, 1,200' long, and 180' wide. It plans to float the structure in the sound about 10 miles off eastern Long Island.
Broadwater also plans to surround the facility with a no-trespassing zone of more than a square mile. According to Crismale, that would put 30%-40% of his fishing grounds off-limits to his traps.
“I understand Long Island and New York need energy, but do they have to put me out of business?” he asked rhetorically.
Dozens of environmental and civic groups have joined together to oppose the Broadwater project. They contend that the structure would be both an eyesore and susceptible to spills, explosions, and leaks. The project also would include some 22 miles of undersea pipeline that could potentially adversely impact the ocean floor.
Plastic, shell disease
The lobstermen view it as just another nail in the coffin for the beleaguered Connecticut lobster industry.
In addition to allegations of rising water temperatures, pollutants such as pesticides and larvicides, and an overabundance of predator fish, plastic bottles may be having a serious impact on the lobster population and marine life in general.
Hans Laufer, professor emeritus of molecular and cell biology at the University of Connecticut, has been sounding an alarm for several years about the link between the plastic byproducts, called alkyphenols, and shell disease.
The disease is widespread in Long Island Sound, affecting up to 70% of some lobster populations at its peak.
“There seems to be a direct relationship between plastic compound breakdown and shell disease,” Laufer said.
He theorizes that the alkyphenols are acting as endocrine disruptors when they are absorbed into the lobster’s bloodstream and inhibit the natural chemicals in the animals that keep the shell hard. This makes them more susceptible to bacteria and other infections that eat away at the shell.
“The lobsters try to molt out of the old shell,” Laufer said in a recent interview with the Canadian daily newspaper New Brunswick Telegraph Journal. “If it’s just mild enough, they recover. If it’s serious, of course, it kills them.”
Although plastics can eventually disintegrate in water, they aren’t truly biodegradable because the chemicals remain in the water and are eaten or absorbed by marine species.
Laufer adds that lobsters probably aren’t the only creatures harmed by the compounds.
“There is evidence that some of these compounds get into fish and they will reverse the sex of the fish. You can sometimes find fish populations that are maybe 5% male,” Laufer said. “I think it’s kind of scary.”
Relief falls short
In April of 2006, Long Island lobstermen got a little relief when they received $12.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit with Cheminova, the maker of a pesticide called Fyfanon, based in Wayne, NJ. The company paid to compensate the lobstermen for their losses during the 1999 die-off without admitting wrongdoing.
Two manufacturers of a different pesticide that were also named in the suit settled with the lobstermen in December 2004, paying a total of $3.75 million.
Although the money helped many lobstermen stay afloat, the annual value of the New York and Connecticut lobster industry fell from $42 million to $8 million in the course of one year. And it did not restore the resource.
“Most of these guys are hanging on by a thread,” said Crismale. “I don’t know that the resource will ever recover. I don’t know that it can recover.”
Sam Bari
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