Where Are the Lobsters?

You have to start with bait. Otherwise, you’re just throwing a brick of wire down to the bottom of the ocean. So reach into the bucket of frozen fish, thawing as rapidly as the fog burning off on the horizon. You can try to not breathe in through your mouth to help with the smell, but I find you get used to it. And after enough early mornings on the water, that metallic concoction of scales and blood-red ice starts smelling more and more like potential. Because when you stash two of those frozen fish into the bait cage of a lobster trap and huck the whole thing off the side of the boat, magic happens. There’s an initial splash and you watch it sink as the rope slithers through your hands till it runs out and you toss the float out too, which bobs up and down on the water’s surface, a beacon whose specific color and pattern announce the location of your trap in action some 50 murky feet below.

Hand over hand, the rope accumulates on deck as you haul up your trap. On the other end of the line, the trap is heavier than when you deployed it. What is weighing it down, you can’t be quite sure. It could be lobsters, crabs, a flounder that’s found its way in. It could just be home-grown Maine mud. But it’s certainly data. As your back grows sore, you feel like the Sisyphus of never-ending rope but then there it is, your trap, alive with the clicking sounds of lobster claws snapping and the scuttling of crab legs across the frame.

Repeat this process some 20 times every couple days for 3 years and you get a glimpse of an understanding of what’s happening with the populations. Where are the lobsters and crabs going as Maine’s waters get warmer? This is the question I was working on, the question I pondered and answered as I hauled up traps.

And it turns out to be a complicated story. The Gulf of Maine is warming rapidly but not linearly. As temperatures rise, the lobsters move north, out of the ranges of the lobstermen who depend on their harvest for the most valuable single-species fishery in the country. Without lobsters, these people have empty traps and empty pockets. Generational fishing traditions run dry as the days get longer and the landings get lighter. More than profit, these big red arthropods, affectionately called “bugs” by those who love and rely on them, have worked their way into the identity of this state. The red claws fill the rolls that tourists fly and drive miles to line up for, they adorn sweaters and hitch a ride on car bumpers and license plates. As lobsters escape the warming waters, they head up into contested international fishing grounds and ultimately into Canada and out of reach.

In their absence, invasive green crabs boom. Brought over in the ballasts of ships in the 1800s, these crabs have been a scuttling affliction for seagrass beds. As they chop up the seagrass blades, the crabs undercut the ecosystem’s functions: cleaning the water, holding down sediment, providing a nursery for scallops and young fish.

And there’s a new arrival in this new warmed ocean. The iconic blue crab of Maryland and Old Bay fame is headed north. Ordinarily not seen north of Cape Cod, constrained by the cold water, blue crabs started to be found in abundance in Maine’s coasts and estuaries, lining traps all the way up to Mount Desert Island in Acadia National Park. These crabs are bigger and more aggressive than any native crab or even the old invasive green crab. They pose a huge uncertainty to the existing ecosystems and fisheries. The blue crab could prey on juvenile lobsters or pry open the shells of wild and farmed oysters. On the more hopeful side of uncertainty, the blue crab could tamp down the green crabs and their seagrass-tearing tendencies as they have done in the Chesapeake Bay. The blue crab, once its population establishes, could even be a profitable harvest to replace the evacuating lobsters, restoring income to the thousands of lobstermen losing their catch to climate.

This is the trend we were seeing in the data, lobsters moving north out of Maine and blue crabs trickling in in their stead. Or at least, that was the trend while temperatures were climbing. In a temporary switch of the wind and current regime, we then got two cold winters and a return to more typical conditions. The crustacean scheme shifted with the environmental one, with lobsters staying and blue crabs clearing out, evacuating some estuaries entirely. This return to normalcy is not a permanent change but instead representative of a fluctuation within a larger trend of ocean warming. The hot years gave us a glimpse into our climate future, one that trades lobsters for uncertainty, and the temporary cooling-off shows that that drastic climate migrations can sometimes be reversible. With the story of the data having been told, the task now is dampening the curve of warming so that we can keep our waters habitable for the creatures we depend upon.

A friend of mine who’s a lobsterman son of a lobsterman son of a lobsterman told me once that “up here, lobsters are everything.” In order to save our everything, we each must do something. Consume intentionally, waste less, remember the fisherman on the other end of your food, and remember the ecosystem on the other end of the line.

*Photo and Cyanotypes by Ava Kocher

RCC Presidential National Environment Leadership Fellow – Ava Kocher

Ava Kocher is a student at Duke University studying the natural world through biology and science communication. She is a Rachel Carson Council Presidential National Environmental Leadership Fellow. She grew up amongst the woods of New England but delights in exploring new ecosystems, learning how they function, and where they need protection. This piece was inspired by a pilgrimage to the Utah National Parks: Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Bryce, and Zion.