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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 36 Number 1
September 2008
2008 lobster stock assessment underway
HALLOWELL, ME – The American lobster fishery, the mainstay and economic engine for so many coastal communities in New England, is on the cusp of tumultuous change.
Exorbitant fuel and bait prices are rocking the industry, forcing even the most driven fishermen to reassess trap soak times and the number of days they can run the boat to haul gear.
Those who used to haul six days a week – without excuse – are now cutting back to five or even less, baiting a bit more heavily, hoping to save a few precious dozen gallons of fuel here and there, all in an effort to reduce operating expenses to catch a product that’s getting at least a dollar a pound less than last summer – sometimes far less.
As Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR) Commissioner George Lapointe put it, “These indeed are very sobering times. We all know communities are hurting.”
In the midst of the day-to-day realities that are consuming lobstermen – less cash flow, ongoing boat payments, house mortgages, health care issues, and kids in school – one more thing is on the horizon. A new lobster stock assessment is underway.
The last stock assessment, conducted by a subcommittee of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s (ASMFC) American Lobster Technical Committee, was done in 2005.
The results of that assessment indicated the Gulf of Maine stock was in pretty good shape except for the area off Massachusetts known as Statistical Reporting Area 514.
Minus Area 514, the rest of the Gulf of Maine stock was deemed to be in “good condition” with “relatively high” abundance.
But that was three years ago, and many fear the tide has turned.
Maine lobsterman and ASMFC Commissioner Pat White said, “It’s premature to try to second guess what’s going to come out of the assessment, but we’ve had a significant drop in landings in Maine – a very significant drop.”
Landings decline
For lobstermen up and down the Maine coast, their own books tell the story. Many report huge drops in personal landings, often by tens of thousands of pounds, just over the past couple of years.
According to Carl Wilson, DMR’s head lobster biologist and a member of the stock assessment subcommittee, it’s now clear that Maine lobster landings in the late 1990s and early 2000s were underreported.
In 2004, mandatory reporting by all lobster dealers went into effect and, as a result, landings seemed to jump significantly.
But once pre-2004 landings were “adjusted” to account for dealers who hadn’t reported in the past or underreported, the picture changed dramatically.
“The adjusted values suggest that the state of Maine peaked in 2003 at about 90 million pounds,” said Wilson.
Preliminary data for 2007 indicate that landings totaled roughly 63 million pounds, representing a 30% reduction from the peak.
The steepness of the decline has shaken many in the state, which alone accounts for roughly 80% of all lobster landings in the Northeast.
“To go from 90 million pounds to 60 million? I don’t think that’s a positive sign,” said lobsterman David Cousens, president of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association (MLA).
Cousens has noticed many small lobsters coming up in traps, “And that’s a good thing,” he said.
But the sharp drop in recent landings has led him to worry about the stock’s overall status.
Some perspective
Commissioner Lapointe, too, expressed concern but attempted to put things in perspective about what the decline might mean – or translate into – for the next stock assessment.
“We need to make sure people have realistic expectations about what will come out of the assessment,” said Lapointe. “The stock is not crashing but, given that we’re coming off record landings, it’s not realistic either to expect there won’t be an adjustment.”
Wilson has reviewed eight years worth of data from the Maine/New Hampshire inshore trawl survey to look for trends related to lobsters.
“The survey still shows a resource that is strong but not at its peak,” he said. “Things are changing.”
Effort high
The Maine industry clearly is in a conundrum. Many active lobstermen insist that effort is too high, but others staunchly question whether a reduction is needed.
Cousens is one of those convinced that something needs to give. His position is this: Expenses are unsustainably high; lobstermen sell most of their product at the wrong time of year – during the molt when lobsters are soft, yielding the lowest price; and the number of fishermen and traps keeps escalating, “so the pie is sliced up thinner and thinner and thinner.”
Speaking both as an individual and as MLA president, he said flatly, “We desperately need to cut effort.”
But what that means varies widely among individual lobstermen.
Pat White doesn’t think the sky is falling, but he, too, is concerned about the amount of effort in the Maine lobster fishery.
“We still have resource out there,” he said. “But I think we’re taking money out of our savings account now.”
And he worries that if the stock truly is declining, then Maine’s troubles might grow.
“With the effort we have right now, the decline will be steeper,” he said.
Good data needed
Given the changing fishery in Maine and the industry’s current economic problems that center around lower catches and higher expenses for everything from fuel to whale-safe rope, lobstermen probably will want to follow the progress of the ongoing 2008 lobster stock assessment fairly closely, even though the final results won’t be made public until sometime during the first half of 2009.
Interestingly, many people in the scientific community are excited about the assessment for two major reasons.
For starters, said Toni Kerns, ASMFC’s lobster plan coordinator, the 2008 assessment will include much more data.
“In the 2005 assessment, the data only went through 2003. In the 2008 assessment, we’ll use all the data through 2007,” she said.
Furthermore, scientists are looking forward to – for the first time – using a brand new assessment model developed by Yong Chen and his lab at the University of Maine. The model is loosely referred to as the “size-structured” model.
According to Kerns, the model is “data hungry,” meaning it needs a lot of information, but it’s also “finer tuned” and so will expand the scope of the assessment.
“This model allows us to take into account the complexities of lobster biology,” she said.
Carl Wilson is a strong advocate of the new model because it accepts a wider breadth of information, including data from the Maine/New Hampshire and Massachusetts inshore trawl surveys, as well as federal trawl surveys.
He called the model “very modern and sophisticated,” emphasizing that it will bring much more flexibility into the assessment process and results.
Model peer reviewed
Several assessment scientists had hoped to use the new model during the 2005 assessment, but it was still under peer review by independent scientists.
The peer reviewers, however, found the Yong Chen model to be sound and worthy of usage in the next assessment.
In their final report, they said, “The size-structured model is on par with similar state-of-the-science models worldwide and in the US to provide quantitative management advice for valuable fisheries.”
They said the model’s major advantages include the ability for scientists to:
• “Obtain information from size composition data and from multiple surveys simultaneously;
• “Match the seasonality of the fishery and of the lobster life history;
• “Provide completely comparable estimates of fishing mortality;
• “Estimate parameters that are equivalent to the troublesome pre-recruit to recruit catchability ratio in the Collie-Sissenwine model (that was the primary model used in the 2005 assessment and will be run once again in 2008 for comparison); and
• “Provide confidence intervals that include nearly all major sources of variability.”
Busy fall and winter
So, with a thumbs-up from independent reviewers, the lobster assessment subcommittee has begun preparations to use the new model.
Scientists will be working – in all likelihood – through the holiday season to crank out the new assessment. Among those heavily involved is Genny Nesslage, ASMFC’s stock assessment specialist. Kim McKown of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation is the stock assessment subcommittee chair.
When the assessment is done, the results will be handed over to a new panel of peer review experts from around the world. The reviewers will scrutinize the findings and submit their verdict, along with the assessment results, to ASMFC’s American Lobster Management Board.
The assessment will include findings for all three major stock areas – the Gulf of Maine, Georges Bank, and Southern New England.
Bracing for change
No one is prejudging the outcome yet. But, for the Gulf of Maine, Lapointe said, “All of the information we have right now suggests it might not be as rosy as last time.”
However, he added, “We’ll wait to get the numbers. Then we’ll figure out how we need to react to them.”
Maine will have a defined process for how to deal with the findings.
“We’ll share the results with people and discuss how we move forward both with ASMFC and in Maine,” said Lapointe.
And when the time comes, the Maine commissioner is hoping for some very frank and open discussions, recognizing that a lot of things are out of everyone’s control.
“We best serve the resource and the industry by having an eyes-wide-open attitude and addressing our problems head-on,” he said. “That’s when we’re at our very best.”
Janice M. Plante
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