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Tag: Lobsters

  • Oysters, crab and $400,000 worth of lobster meat stolen in New England

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    CONCORD, N.H. — Imagine the buffet.

    Forty-thousand oysters, lobster worth $400,000 and a cache of crabmeat all were stolen in separate incidents within weeks of each other in New England.

    The first seafood vanished on Nov. 22 in Falmouth, Maine, where authorities suspect someone stole 14 cages full of oysters from an aquaculture site in Casco Bay. Many of the oysters were full-grown and ready for sale, and together with the cages were worth $20,000, according to the Maine Marine Patrol.

    “This is a devastating situation for a small businessman,” said Marine Patrol Sgt. Matthew Sinclair.

    The other two thefts happened in Taunton, Massachusetts, about 160 miles (255 kilometers) away. First, a load of crab disappeared after leaving the Lineage Logistics warehouse on Dec. 2. Then, on Dec. 12, lobster meat destined for Costco stores in Illinois and Minnesota was stolen by a fraudulent trucking company, according to the broker who arranged the pickup.

    “The carrier we hired impersonated a real carrier,” Dylan Rexing, CEO of Rexing Companies, said Tuesday. “They had a spoofed email address. They changed the name on the side of the truck. The made a fake certified driver’s license. It’s a very sophisticated crime.”

    Lineage Logistics, Costco and Taunton Police did not respond to requests for comment, but Rexing said police told him about the crab theft from the same warehouse.

    That kind of cargo theft has been a problem for over a decade, he said, but has gotten worse in recent years.

    “It happens every day, multiple times a day,” he said.

    Freight theft generally falls into two categories, said Chris Burroughs, president and CEO of Transportation Intermediaries Association, a trade organization for the freight brokerage industry. The lobster heist fits in the first type, which involves someone impersonating a legitimate trucking company. The second type, known as strategic theft, often involves using phishing emails to gain access to computer systems and get paid without actually stealing the product.

    “This is a massive growing problem that needs to get addressed,” he said.

    Given its short shelf life, the stolen lobster likely ended up restaurants, both said. And while he’s seen plenty of quips about stealing butter to go with the lobster, Rexing said such thefts ultimately harm consumers.

    “Whether you eat seafood or not, they’re stealing other items. They’re stealing items to build your cars. They’re stealing items that go into computers,” he said. “Ultimately, that cost gets thrown to the consumer.”

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  • Lobster population falls off New England, leading regulators to declare overfishing

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    PORTLAND, Maine — A new report says America’s lobsters, which have been in decline since 2018, are now being overfished off New England.

    The stock has declined by 34% since that year in its most important fishing grounds, the regulatory Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission said Thursday. The commission said it now considers overfishing of the species to be occurring, and that could bring new management measures that restrict fishermen from catching them in the future.

    Lobsters are among America’s most lucrative seafood species, and they were worth more than $700 million at the docks last year. The industry caught record high numbers of the crustaceans in the 2010s.

    But the lobster population has shown “rapid declines in abundance in recent years,” the commission said in a statement.

    The assessment said the decline and overfishing were taking place in fishing areas off Maine and Massachusetts where most lobster fishing takes place. The assessment also considered the southern New England lobster stock, which it said has been depleted for years and remains so.

    Regulators have attempted to enforce new rules on lobster fishermen to try to stem the decline in recent years, but they have been met with resistance. They had planned to increase the minimal harvest size for lobsters in key fishing grounds this summer. That would have required fishermen to throw back lobsters that previously could have been sold.

    The commission backed off the rules earlier this year after months of protest from lobster fishermen who found the new rules unnecessary and threatening to their livelihoods. Fishermen in the industry are also contending with challenges from potential new rules to protect rare whales, warming oceans and volatile trade markets.

    “Even as the resource adjusts from record highs, lobstermen remain deeply committed to stewardship, sustainable practices, and to protecting the fishery that sustains thousands of Maine families,” said Patrice McCarron, executive director of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association.

    The American lobster fishery is based mostly in Maine. Carl Wilson, commissioner of the Maine Department of Marine Resources, said the state “will continue to engage industry in discussions about the stock assessment and the future of the fishery” and he is “confident in the commitment of this industry to conservation of this resource.”

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  • Just how rare is a rare-colored lobster? Scientists say answer could be under the shell

    Just how rare is a rare-colored lobster? Scientists say answer could be under the shell

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    BIDDEFORD, Maine — Orange, blue, calico, two-toned and … cotton-candy colored?

    Those are all the hues of lobsters that have showed up in fishers’ traps, supermarket seafood tanks and scientists’ laboratories over the last year. The funky-colored crustaceans inspire headlines that trumpet their rarity, with particularly uncommon baby blue-tinted critters described by some as “cotton-candy colored” often estimated at 1 in 100 million.

    A recent wave of these curious colored lobsters in Maine, New York, Colorado and beyond has scientists asking just how atypical the discolored arthropods really are. As is often the case in science, it’s complicated.

    Lobsters’ color can vary due to genetic and dietary differences, and estimates about how rare certain colors are should be taken with a grain of salt, said Andrew Goode, lead administrative scientist for the American Lobster Settlement Index at the University of Maine. There is also no definitive source on the occurrence of lobster coloration abnormalities, scientists said.

    “Anecdotally, they don’t taste any different either,” Goode said.

    In the wild, lobsters typically have a mottled brown appearance, and they turn an orange-red color after they are boiled for eating. Lobsters can have color abnormalities due to mutation of genes that affect the proteins that bind to their shell pigments, Goode said.

    The best available estimates about lobster coloration abnormalities are based on data from fisheries sources, said marine sciences professor Markus Frederich of the University of New England in Maine. However, he said, “no one really tracks them.”

    Frederich and other scientists said that commonly cited estimates such as 1 in 1 million for blue lobsters and 1 in 30 million for orange lobsters should not be treated as rock-solid figures. However, he and his students are working to change that.

    Frederich is working on noninvasive ways to extract genetic samples from lobsters to try to better understand the molecular basis for rare shell coloration. Frederich maintains a collection of strange-colored lobsters at the university’s labs and has been documenting the progress of the offspring of an orange lobster named Peaches who is housed at the university.

    Peaches had thousands of offspring this year, which is typical for lobsters. About half were orange, which is not, Frederich said. Of the baby lobsters that survived, a slight majority were regular colored ones, Frederich said.

    Studying the DNA of atypically colored lobsters will give scientists a better understanding of their underlying genetics, Frederich said.

    “Lobsters are those iconic animals here in Maine, and I find them beautiful. Especially when you see those rare ones, which are just looking spectacular. And then the scientist in me simply says I want to know how that works. What’s the mechanism?” Frederich said.

    He does eat lobster but “never any of those colorful ones,” he said.

    One of Frederich’s lobsters, Tamarind, is the typical color on one side and orange on the other. That is because two lobster eggs fused and grew as one animal, Frederich said. He said that’s thought to be as rare as 1 in 50 million.

    Rare lobsters have been in the news lately, with an orange lobster turning up in a Long Island, New York, Stop & Shop last month, and another appearing in a shipment being delivered to a Red Lobster in Colorado in July.

    The odd-looking lobsters will likely continue to come to shore because of the size of the U.S. lobster fishery, said Richard Wahle, a longtime University of Maine lobster researcher who is now retired. U.S. fishers have brought more than 90 million pounds (40,820 metric tons) of lobster to the docks in every year since 2009 after only previously reaching that volume twice, according to federal records that go back to 1950.

    “In an annual catch consisting of hundreds of millions of lobster, it shouldn’t be surprising that we see a few of the weird ones every year, even if they are 1 in a million or 1 in 30 million,” Wahle said.

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  • Waters off New England had 2nd warmest year on record in ’22

    Waters off New England had 2nd warmest year on record in ’22

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    PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — The waters off New England, which are home to rare whales and most of the American lobster fishing industry, logged the second-warmest year on record last year.

    The Gulf of Maine, a body of water about the size of Indiana that touches Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Canada, is warming faster than the vast majority of the world’s oceans. Last year fell short of setting a new high mark for hottest year by less than half a degree Fahrenheit, said scientists with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, a science center in Portland.

    The average sea surface temperature was 53.66 degrees (12 degrees Celsius), more than 3.7 degrees above the 40-year average, the scientists said. The accelerated warming is changing an ecosystem that’s host to numerous important commercial fishing industries, especially for lobsters, they said.

    One implication is that the warming is driving species more associated with southern waters into the Gulf of Maine and altering its food chain, said Janet Duffy-Anderson, chief scientific officer with the institute. That includes species such as black sea bass, which prey on lobsters.

    “Who will be the emergent species and who will be the species that decline is, in large part, a function of those interactions,” said Duffy-Anderson. “At the moment, we’re not in a period of stability.”

    The gulf is the nerve center of the lobster fishing business, which has recorded heavy catches over the past 10 years. However, lobster fisheries in more southern waters have collapsed, and scientists have placed the blame on warming temperatures.

    The Gulf of Maine is also a key area for marine mammals such as the North Atlantic right whale, which numbers only about 340, and sea birds such as Atlantic puffins. Those species and many others are threatened by disruptions in their food supply due to warming waters.

    The environmental factors accompanying high temperatures in the Gulf of Maine include persistent, intense heatwaves, according to a report released by Gulf of Maine Research Institute on Wednesday.

    The warming is also coming at a time when the world’s oceans are heating up. Last year was the third-warmest year for global sea surface temperature, the report said.

    “What is being observed in the Gulf of Maine (and elsewhere around the world), however, is a loss of that balance: larger fractions of recent years are experiencing above average temperatures and cold spells are becoming vanishingly rare,” the report said.

    The hottest year in the Gulf of Maine was 2021, according to records that go back to 1982, the institute said. That year, the average annual sea surface temperature was slightly more than 54 degrees (12.2 degrees Celsius). Last year was a fraction of a percent warmer than the third warmest year, which was 2012.

    Those three years are the only ones in recorded history in which the gulf’s average temperature exceeded 53 degrees (11.7 degrees Celsius).

    The report states that other data also paint a picture of the Gulf of Maine as the site of prolonged warming. In nine of the year’s 12 months, the average monthly sea surface temperature was within the top three warmest among all years on record, the report said. November and December both set new records for highest monthly average sea surface temperature in the gulf, it said.

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  • Endangered whale’s decline slows, but population falls again

    Endangered whale’s decline slows, but population falls again

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    PORTLAND, Maine — The decline of an endangered species of whale slowed last year, as it lost about 2% of its population, but scientists warn the animal still faces existential threats and is losing breeding females too fast.

    The North Atlantic right whale’s population was more than 480 in 2010 and fell by more than 25% over the following decade. The North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium, a group of scientists, government officials and industry members, said Monday that the population fell to an estimated 340 last year.

    That is a decline of eight animals from the previous year, when the population was initially thought to be even fewer. The whales are vulnerable to ship collisions and entanglement in commercial fishing gear, and they have suffered from poor reproduction and high mortality in recent years.

    “The reality is we are still seeing unsustainable levels of human impacts on the species,” said Heather Pettis, research scientist in the New England Aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life and executive administrator of the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium. “We’re still injuring these animals to a point where it’s not just about survival. It’s about health, it’s about reproduction.”

    The right whales live off the East Coast and migrate every year from calving grounds off Georgia and Florida to feeding grounds off New England and Canada. They were once abundant but were decimated during the commercial whaling era, when they were hunted for their oil and meat.

    The whales have been listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act more than 50 years but have been slow to recover. The population was even lower in 1990, when it was 264, Pettis said. One of the biggest challenges facing the right whales today is that the number of female whales that are capable of breeding appears to be falling.

    An article that appeared this month in the scientific journal Frontiers in Marine Science reported that the estimated population of female right whales fell from 185 in 2014 to 142 in 2018. The largest decline was seen in breeding females, and only 72 were estimated to be alive at the beginning of 2018, the article said.

    The whales appear to be getting smaller, and that is hurting their ability to reproduce, Peter Corkeron, chair of the Kraus Marine Mammal Conservation Program at the Cabot Center and one of the authors of the article.

    “The world needs more fat whales,” Corkeron said.

    The plight of the right whale has emerged as a major issue for commercial fisheries in the U.S., especially the American lobster industry, which is based mostly in Maine. The whales are particularly vulnerable to becoming entangled in the kind of fixed vertical underwater lines used to fish for lobsters and crabs.

    The federal government has crafted new restrictions on lobster fishing in an effort to save the right whale, and fishermen have argued that the rules could put them out of business. A group of lobster fishermen sued to stop the rules, and their case is pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

    Warming oceans are also a concern. The whales are aided by a network of protected zones designed to allow them to eat the tiny organisms they feed on without danger of entanglements and collisions. However, warming waters have caused their food to move, and they have followed it into unprotected areas where they are more vulnerable, scientists have said.

    Conservation groups have advocated for vessel speed restrictions and stricter fishing regulations to save the whales.

    “These latest population numbers confirm that the species continues to teeter on the verge of functional extinction, and current measures to save it are falling short,” said Sarah Sharp, a veterinarian with International Fund for Animal Welfare. “Nevertheless, there is hope on the horizon. Solutions do indeed exist.”

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