Background on the Lobster Fishery

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the government agency with primary responsibility for the conservation of the lobster fishery, explains the "unique dilemma for fishery managers and fishermen" as follows:

The lobster fishery is the most valuable fishery on the Atlantic coast of both the United States and Canada. U.S. landings climbed to approximately 80 million pounds at the turn of the 21st Century, and have now started to decline. The dockside value reached almost $300 million US dollars.

Lobsters have been fished commercially since the middle of the 19th Century. By the late 1800s, lobsters were so scarce in nearshore waters that the federal Fish Commission established a Committee to Study the Extinction of the Lobster and Soft Shell Clam Fisheries. Conservation measures were established at that time, and the fishery remained relatively stable at around 20 million pounds through the mid-1900s. Over the past 20 years, lobster landings have increased dramatically, as has lobster-fishing effort. There is considerable concern about whether the lobster resource can sustain the extraordinarily high catches of recent years.

The primary conservation regulations in the lobster fishery have been a minimum legal size, a prohibition on taking egg-bearing females, and, in Maine, a maximum size limit and a prohibition on taking female lobsters that have marked with a "v-notch" on their tale to indicate that they are proven breeders, having been marked when they were bearing eggs. As yet, there is no quota, or limit on the numbers of lobsters that can be harvested commercially. In recent years, the Atlantic Coast states and the federal government have established limits on the number of traps that each fisherman can have in the water.

The current debate over lobster conservation has focused on whether the egg production from the female population is sufficient to maintain the stocks. While this issue of "recruitment overfishing" is critical to the future of the fishery, there is also an issue of "growth overfishing." Growth overfishing occurs when the average animal is harvested at a size that is smaller than its potential. Growth overfishing reduces the yield from the fishery in both pounds and in dollars. A solution to the problem of growth overfishing may be economically beneficial to the lobster industry while providing increased protection against recruitment overfishing as well.

A major problem with fishery conservation, including the lobster fishery, is that setting limits on either fishing effort (traps) or catches (a quota) requires the fishery management system to decide who is going to get the limited amount of effort or catch that is available. Fishery management has therefore become much more of an economic exercise than a biological one, if one accepts the classic definition of economics as the study of the allocation of scarce resources.

Because most professional fishery managers have a background in biology, not economics, many fishery management programs have performed poorly from an economic standpoint, and often from a biological standpoint as well. The lobster fishery is currently in a period of transition from an era of open access to the fishery to a period of limited access. The choice of fishery management measures being made during this transition will determine both the biological and the economic success of the fishery management system and of the fishery.

The public has an interest in successful fishery management because the management of the fishery determines the benefits that the public obtains from these public resources. Fishery benefits include a food supply, jobs and additional economic benefits, and recreation. Although there is an increasing tendency to give the fishing industry greater responsibility for the management of fisheries, there is also a recognition that fishery management is a complex multi-disciplinary field in its own right.

The American lobster, Homarus americanus, is a bottom-dwelling marine crustacean that is widely distributed over the continental shelf of the Western North Atlantic from Virginia to Labrador. Lobsters range from the shallow intertidal waters of the coast to waters as deep as 2,000 feet along the edge of the continental shelf.

Lobsters are encased in a hard external skeleton that provides protection and body support. The exoskeleton, or shell, is cast off periodically in a process called molting or shedding. Molting allows the lobster to grow and to mate. Mating occurs soon after molting when the female's shell is soft. Each female can lay from 5,000 to 100,000 eggs depending on body size. The female carries the eggs within her shell for up to one year, and attached to the underside of her tail for another 9-11 months.

Newly-hatched lobsters go through a free-swimming or pelagic larval stage during the first four molts, or for about 15-25 days, depending on water temperature. Young lobsters resemble the adults after the first four molts, and begin to seek shelter on the bottom. Lobsters molt about ten times during their first year of life and the molting frequency decreases as they grow older. Lobsters molt approximately 20-25 times over the 5-8 years that it takes to reach sexual maturity. Many lobsters are caught before they reach the age of sexual maturity.

The legal minimum size (which varies among the management areas) refers to the length of the hard back-shell or carapace. Lobsters at the legal minimum size weigh approximately one pound. Scientists have not discovered any method to determine the age of a lobster, but lobsters have been known to grow to a weight of over 50 pounds. It is impossible to tell the age of a lobster because all of the hard parts of the body are lost when the lobster molts. Most lobsters are caught within one year from the time that they reach the legal minimum size, at a size of less than 1 1/2 pounds.

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