Lobsters Moving On

New England’s commercial fisheries are dealing with the results of climate change as the warming North Atlantic results in the migration of fish and lobsters from the encroaching warmer waters.  Cod fishermen in Maine are feeling the impact of global warming.

One of America’s oldest commercial industries, fishing along the coast of the Northeast still employs hundreds. But every month, those numbers fall. After centuries of overfishing, pollution, foreign competition and increasing government regulation, the latest challenge is the one that’s doing them in: climate change.

Though no waters are immune to the ravages of climate change, the Gulf of Maine, a dent in the coastline from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia, best illustrates the problem. The gulf, where fishermen have for centuries sought lobster, cod and other species that thrived in its cold waters, is now warming faster than 99 percent of the world’s oceans, scientists have said.

As cod move north depriving commercial fisheries of their most lucrative catch, lobsters are moving north from the warming waters south of Cape Cod.

Lobster catches in Maine are booming as the species creeps north, but as the warming continues, that’s a good thing that’s bound to end. A federal report from 2009 said that half of 36 fish stocks studied in the northwest Atlantic Ocean have been shifting north over the past 40 years, and that the trend is likely to continue.

However, as the ocean continues to warm, soon the lobster will move further north or that fishery will collapse completely as rising temperatures and predation by fish species following the warmer waters such as black sea bass decimate the population.

The number of adult lobsters in New England south of Cape Cod slid to about 10 million in 2013, according to a report issued last year by an interstate regulatory board. It was about 50 million in the late 1990s. The lobster catch in the region sank to about 3.3 million pounds in 2013, from a peak of about 22 million in 1997.

Unfortunately for the communities that for generations have been sustained by this industry there are no simple solutions.  Regulations and species protection also play a role in reducing the available catch.  But, often those are remedies put in place to help off-set the damage being done as warmer water results in the movement of game species and decreases in their populations.